Messages

1

Tidalis / Re: Quick Save, or something similar? Brainteaser annoyance

« on: February 05, 2011, 09:35:03 AM »

I know this is an old thread, but just in case you're considering further development on Tidalis now that AI War has hit 5.0, I've still got about half the puzzles left to solve that I was waiting for this functionality for. Or if you know that it's definitely never going to happen, that would be good to know too.

Alex

2

Off Topic / Re: Spectromancer

« on: October 14, 2010, 08:00:40 AM »

Played it a while back, and did enjoy it. Not quite enough to shell out for the expansion, though. There is certainly skill to it, and the AI at higher levels will generally stomp on you, so you don't *need* to find a human opponent to get a good game.

In the end, it turns out that deck building is one of the things I enjoy most about card games of this sort. Or of the sort that this game isn't, to be more accurate.

3

AI War / Re: AI War 4 Beta 3.702 Released.

« on: October 05, 2010, 10:20:04 AM »

But the .NET version loaded for you in 2.5 seconds?  Hmm, let me see...

Yep. To be fair, it's loading off an SSD, which does help. Further figures, which may or may not be of interest: Loading a reasonably large save game file (2MB) takes 5.8s on the old version, and 7.7s on Unity.

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AI War / Re: AI War 4 Beta 3.702 Released.

« on: October 05, 2010, 07:16:44 AM »

Just got round to trying the new Unity betas, it certainly looks much prettier. I'm a little concerned about the startup time, though - the .net version loads in 2.5s, compared to almost 8s for the Unity version. Is that something that's likely to improve in future betas?

5

AI War / Re: Prerelease 3.179 (Warheads+, Neinzul Silos, Transport II, Harvesters II and III)

« on: August 13, 2010, 03:48:53 AM »

We ought to have an achievement for actually winning the game with all of the planets having been nuked, come to think of it.  What do you think, Keith?

Absolutely.  Title?  "It's The Only Way To Be Sure."

That is, without question, the only proper thing to call this achievement.  

Agreed.

I've got to wonder, though, exactly what are Core ships made of that can withstand a ground-zero blast from a *galaxy-destroying* cataclysm? But can still be shot down by a determined bunch of Mark I fighters...

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AI War / Re: Prerelease 3.177 (Knowledge Changes, Civilians, 3 Home Planet Outposts)

« on: August 11, 2010, 04:00:54 AM »

Now any ships of radius 120 or higher are not translocatable, so that applies to many starships, all the regular fortresses, etc.

Forgive me if I'm being a bit dim, but what does this actually mean? What is transolcatability?

7

AI War / Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010

« on: August 09, 2010, 08:56:41 AM »

Not that I'm saying it's necessarily the right approach here, but for a similar requirement of mod-friendliness vs. load performance on a bit of software I worked on, we just checked the last modified stamp of the resources folder at startup. If it changed, then we ran a compilation step over all the small easily user-modifiable files to produce a single non-modifiable file, then loaded that. Every time the files in folder changed it would take a comparatively long time to launch, but after that was much quicker. Resources did not change often (unless you were working on a mod, of course!)

It wasn't for loading graphics files, though, so who knows whether it would have any beneficial effect with those. With web development there's a technique for loading a single large graphics file then clipping the smaller images out of it as needed, but whether that's helpful or not with Unity I've no idea.

When you get right down to it, though, if Tidalis has about 4x the resources to load, and is loading about 4x slower than AI-War, then that sounds about right to me.

8

AI War / Re: Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010

« on: August 07, 2010, 11:32:35 AM »

I've been playing Tidalis a bit now. They are completely different games, so this is probably a hugely unfair comparison, but is there anything to infer from the much longer load / startup time of Tidalis? I'm hoping it's just because it loads more (or bigger?) stuff than AI War, rather than being a limitation of Unity's resource loading...

For comparison, on my system time from launch to menu for AI War is ~2.2 seconds; for Tidalis is over 4x longer at ~9.5 seconds.

9

Tidalis / Re: Quick Save, or something similar? Brainteaser annoyance

« on: August 07, 2010, 11:20:25 AM »

Sure, when (if?) I beat puzzle series 2 I'll post my thoughts on them. I'd be quite surprised if I'm the first, though!

10

Tidalis / Re: Quick Save, or something similar? Brainteaser annoyance

« on: August 07, 2010, 01:40:09 AM »

That's great news! I look forward to trying it out and getting back into brainteasers when it's available.

11

Tidalis / Quick Save, or something similar? Brainteaser annoyance

« on: August 06, 2010, 10:55:32 AM »

I've been giving the Tidalis demo (1.000) a try. I was enjoying the brainteasers, but as they increased in complexity (at 5-3 now) I found it more and more irritating that it wasn't possible to tweak my previous solution, and would have to start from scratch each time.

Currently the best I can do is screenshot the solution before hitting the button, but that still means I have to painstakingly set everything back up again using that picture as a reference, before then making whatever tweak I want to try. After the 2nd or 3rd time this is no longer fun, and I'm now quite likely to just abandon it. It takes too long to try each idea.

I thought a quick save system would solve the problem, so you could save just before hitting the button, then reload if it didn't go as planned, but if there are other solutions I haven't considered then please let me know.

Thanks,

Alex

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AI War / Re: Prerelease 3.173 (Bugfixes, Children Of Neinzul Beta Opens!)

« on: August 06, 2010, 04:39:30 AM »

To make the Children of Neinzul expansion work, go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Arcen Games, LLC\AI War\Expansions\2\2" (obviously if you've installed it somewhere else, adjust to taste. Move all the files in that second "2" folder one level up into the first "2" folder. You should end up with "...Expansions\2\Version.txt" etc. instead of "...Expansions\2\2\Version.txt".

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AI War / Re: Referral poll

« on: June 20, 2010, 03:40:32 AM »

Another RockPaperShotgun reader here. Marked it down on my "to play" list after reading their (sadly aborted) let's play. It took a while to make it to the top of the list, though!

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Forcefields and sniper turrets

« on: June 08, 2010, 10:32:23 AM »

Ah, OK, that clears things up. Thanks. Might need to rethink some of my defensive structures, then. Although... with sufficient micro I might be able to strobe the shields for long reload turrets, or to allow repairs. :-)

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AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Forcefields and sniper turrets

« on: June 08, 2010, 10:01:40 AM »

3. When a ship has the force fields immunity [...] There is no power reduction on these shots whatsoever

So something like a sniper turret then, which is immune to force fields, can be placed under a force-field without incurring the 75% penalty, but still be protected from incoming enemy fire itself by the force field? And the relevant bit on the tooltip to look for would be "Forcefields" under the "Immunities" section?

Or did you just mean that when firing on an enemy forcefield they ignore it (and the power reduction from being under a friendly forcefield does still apply)?

Thanks for clearing this up for me!