Messages

661

AI War Technical Support / Re: Turrents not returning fire

« on: January 31, 2011, 12:15:24 PM »

There's also the tank/bomber groups partway from their guard posts to your ships that keep juggling back and forth.  That's them wanting to go after your stuff but being "leashed" back towards the guard post because they aren't allowed to get much further away than that.

I've noticed that a few times recently, too, and it definitely at least looks buggy, because pretty much every time I've seen that kind of dancing movement without making up their minds one way or another in any other game, it's always been because of some kind of bug.

Even if it's a result of them doing what they're supposed to do, it still looks kind of ridiculous to have them diligently patrolling a tiny patch of space in the middle of nowhere instead of obviously guarding something or attacking you.  If they were a bit less spastic about it, they'd at least seem like they're swarming menacingly and trying to cut off your route to something important, but they come across more like they have extreme ADD with a 1.5 second attention span or something.  Heh.

Not exactly a major issue if it's mostly cosmetic, though.

662

AI War Technical Support / Re: Master volume slider broken?

« on: January 31, 2011, 12:03:10 PM »

I'm pretty sure I remember seeing somewhere (maybe even in the game, but possibly in release notes at some point) that it specifically controls all non-music sound, and the music is intentionally separate.  Or something.  Can't remember what the reason behind it was, though.

663

AI War / Re: Check Out Our New Look!

« on: January 28, 2011, 01:53:19 AM »

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

It loads massively faster for me now, so that seems to have pretty much fixed it.  Probably still makes the three people out there still on dialup sad, but the load/display time is negligible now on my (also fairly sad) 1.5 Mbps DSL.

Sweet!  Yeah, I figure that folks who have trouble on our site (via being on DSL) are likely having trouble on most every game-related site out there these days, honestly.

For general use, it's actually not bad at all, even for game-related stuff (with the exception of some of the really crappy sites that are done entirely as a single 15 MB Flash file).  The two things that really kill it are video, which will make everything screech to a halt if it's any higher res than 360p, and large downloads, obviously.  Installing The Force Unleashed after I picked it up on sale on Steam was an adventure in patience, because some genius decided to include separate copies of every single pre-rendered 720p cutscene for each of the ~8 languages the game supported, bloating it to nearly 30 GB.  Hilarity ensued.  Ok, maybe not.  More like an entire week of leaving it downloading overnight.  Heh.

One of these days I'm getting FIOS, though, which should be enough of an improvement to be worth putting up with redoing my entire home network yet again...

664

AI War / Re: Check Out Our New Look!

« on: January 27, 2011, 10:38:52 PM »

At any rate, by doing that as well as shrinking the images in the header scroll down to JPEGs, the total download size went down from 3MB to about 480KB.  And it's GZip compressed now, too.

It loads massively faster for me now, so that seems to have pretty much fixed it.  Probably still makes the three people out there still on dialup sad, but the load/display time is negligible now on my (also fairly sad) 1.5 Mbps DSL.

665

AI War / Re: Check Out Our New Look!

« on: January 27, 2011, 04:17:24 AM »

Notice anything different?  The site has gone through a major overhaul.

I apparently noticed it just before this post went up, because I was looking for something about it and didn't find it.  Unlike everyone else, apparently, I'm not really a huge fan, but I'll probably get used to it after a bit and not really mind/care.  It's slicker-looking, but it feels a bit less usable in a couple ways.

It loads really slowly compared to the old one, though, presumably because of the big images or something (or maybe scripts that run on load or something like that, but I didn't look into it at all), and it was nice not having a hugegantic header before so a good chunk of the most recent post was visible without having to scroll down on my dinky little laptop screen when I'm not on my desktop's big monitor, instead of just the first line now.  The large, bold links look a little out of place, too, but maybe that's just me.

Ok, ok.  I'll stop complaining already and do something more fun, like look at the new AVWW stuff.  Heh.

666

AI War / Re: Multiplayer via internet?

« on: January 27, 2011, 03:53:59 AM »

or do i need for the connecting comp to be located on a diff network?

Unfortunately, that's the case.  You can't test if your router is letting people outside your network connect to you without trying to connect from somewhere outside your network.  If you have a laptop and can get on someone else's wireless network (like a neighbor's or something, since a lot of people leave them open...), that's an easy way to check, or if you can tether to your phone, that's another option.

There's also a tool on portforward.com that'll check for you.  I haven't used it myself, but that might be the easiest way, depending on your situation.

667

Off Topic / Re: Indie game pricing - interesting blog article

« on: January 26, 2011, 09:33:31 PM »

Long term though, there's got be a danger that this continuous stream of deep discount sales of 75% and 90%-off is eroding the market of people who might ever be prepared to pay a full price of say $15 or $20 for an indie game? Is it ultimately just driving down list prices across the market?

I'm a bit late seeing this, but for me that "long term" outcome already occurred at least a couple years ago.  $20 for an indie game?  I'm rarely willing to buy a big-budget AAA game for more than that much anymore, and I even wait for most of those to drop below that.  Actually, I can't even remember the last time I paid over $30 for a game, and I've only paid that much for maybe two or three of them in the past couple years.

I did the math at some point last year, and I think the average price I'd paid per game since ~2007 was about $6.  However, I had bought a couple hundred games in that period of time, including a massive number of indie games that were $2-5 each (or sometimes less in bundles), just because they sounded vaguely interesting, and there's not much risk when you're only out a couple bucks if you end up not liking something.  I spend about the same amount in total as I used to, but I get way more in return, so I'm not about to change my purchasing habits (although it has pretty much killed console gaming entirely for me; how many years is Nintendo going to make me wait for their big-name titles to even go below $40, much less down to $20?).  Sure, I'm usually a year or two behind on the latest games, but I have plenty of them to keep me busy, and they run better on cheaper hardware by that point, so that's another win.

I do make occasional exceptions for stuff I really like and/or want to support, though.  I spend more than enough time with AI War to be happy buying expansions at full price, and I bought a copy for my friend, too, when he was undecided about whether or not to get it.  I also pimp the hell out of stuff I like, which hopefully at least sometimes makes up for my cheapness with a few extra sales.  Heh.

668

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Is this supposed to happen?

« on: January 26, 2011, 02:33:23 AM »

If you roll that die 2 billion times and it's always 6, you have a problem.

Nah, you're only just likely to have a problem

I'm pretty sure you definitely have a problem if you roll a die two billion times no matter what the result, or at least way too much free time.

Awesome!  Glad that's working out well, even though it is different, yllamana.  It's always tricky making a change like that, but you're exactly right that we did want to "get to the good part" a lot faster in the game lately.

Praise Jebus for that.  It's generally been fine previously in multiplayer, in my opinion, although that's probably helped by having my friends to talk to while building up, especially when we have someone new join us who's never played anything beyond the tutorial and needs to be taught how to play.

I've never been able to play by myself without getting really, really bored at some point, though.  Every time I get inspired to start a single-player game to try some stuff out, I end up getting bored waiting for something interesting to happen in the first hour or two, then give up and decide to just wait until our weekly game night.  I think it's at least partly because I'm spoiled by just how much more stuff you have available to you right from the start when you have four or five people playing.  I'm determined to go through all the LotS stuff myself after the final version is out, though (any day now...), so hopefully that'll work out better with the recent changes in the game and my ADD meds.  Heh.

669

AI War / Re: AI War is able to handle millions of ships. Really.

« on: January 26, 2011, 02:06:33 AM »

Unit Cap Scale: Low

That is hilarious to see next to the multiple six digit number ship counts.  If I were on my desktop, I'd so try that right now.  I think an i5 750 could handle it, but I suspect my poor MacBook would burst into flames.

670

AI War / Re: Multiplayer via internet?

« on: January 26, 2011, 01:27:18 AM »

wouldn't that prevent me from hosting other games too though? i can/have hosted other games on my steam account (borderlands, serious sam, L4D, sup com2)

Depends how each game handles it, but yeah, it does seem like it would probably affect at least some others.  I think they changed something about it at some point (I think they might've added the (IMO somewhat sketchy security-wise) automated UPnP port forwarding or something), but I know I had to forward ports for Borderlands when it was new.

671

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Problems with AI Raid starships

« on: January 26, 2011, 01:14:28 AM »

There's some difference. I don't know what it is, but I do know that one of my raid ships will die quickly by itself on an AI world but one of theirs can happily waltz through my defenses right up to my home command station and eat it. Maybe it's some difference in armor piercing or... I don't know what. So the problem may not be in the ships themselves, but instead in the speed that one team can kill it over the other.

It depends what you're sending them up against.  If the AI doesn't have anything that's strong against them, raid starships are brutally effective, because their high speed and decent damage lets them get in, pop a weak target (data center, warp gate, etc.), and get back out before getting hurt much.  They can be really useful for that reason, even against things that aren't shielded.  On the other hand, if the system is full of stuff like artillery guardians, your raid ships will get wrecked in no time flat.  It's as hopeless as trying to kill a wave of bombers with a fortress.

In older versions, they were much more universally useful in my experience, but these days there's a lot more variety in enemy systems that requires different approaches to them, and some things are much more situational now than they used to be (like raid starships).  It takes more work and more planning ahead, and it is more fun this way, but I do kind of miss my unstoppable raid fleet of doom sometimes...

Edit: Knew I was forgetting something.  Raid starships are one of the units that benefit most from micromanagement, at least out of the ones I use regularly.  They get massively more effective if you guide them by hand whenever they're anywhere threatening to them, because they're ridiculously maneuverable for something that powerful but aren't smart enough to take advantage of that on their own.

672

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: Problems with AI Raid starships

« on: January 25, 2011, 08:20:06 PM »

But a cheap little raid starship or two that just zips past all your defenses and ignores your forcefields so that it can piddle your home command station to death isn't a clever victory, it's just lame.

To be fair, it's no lamer than the ridiculous number of times I've abused the AI with my raid starship army of doom (which was even easier and cheesier pre-4.0; I could wipe every data center off the map without losing a single one in a 7/7 game, and without even having a friendly system within 10 jumps of many of them).

And of course you're going to reload your last save and micro the starship to death, because no one is going to admit defeat in that situation.

Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but when I die, I die, even to something stupid like that, and then I start over.  Which is kind of weird, now that I think about it, because I generally hate "hardcore" mode in almost every other game I've ever played and will happily reload saves over and over until I get it right.  Now I really wonder why I'm apparently ok with repeatedly losing in AI War.  Heh.

673

AI War / Re: Multiplayer via internet?

« on: January 25, 2011, 08:11:57 PM »

The port and stuff should be listed in the settings, and if you need to know specific instructions for your particular router, http://portforward.com/ is pretty handy.

674

AI War Strategy Discussion / Re: AI Eye grind

« on: January 25, 2011, 08:08:40 PM »

Also, it's also possible that the ships the Eye creates are immune to reclamation - the Eye never activated for me to check this.

The last time someone in my multiplayer group set one off, it looked like it had been changed at some point so that it spits out zombies now instead of normal ships, presumably for that very reason.

675

AI War / Re: Multiplayer via internet?

« on: January 25, 2011, 08:05:06 PM »

The person hosting the game may need to forward the port(s) the game uses on their router for other people to be able to connect to them.  I forget which off the top of my head, but it says what it uses in the in-game settings.