Messages

1351

AI War / Re: IGF Finalists are in (no AI War)

« on: January 04, 2010, 05:44:28 PM »

The IGF is irrelevant ever since Braid won the awards, 2 years before it was released.  

But then again, i am just a grumpy hardcore gamer,   .. That AI War isn't ranked is the best compliment possible

Also, the only thing IGF Awards care about are Smups and Platformers 

1352

AI War Technical Support / Re: Screen resolution

« on: January 03, 2010, 11:17:06 PM »

This is a ATI Driver bug involving steam or a monitor driver / resolution list bug.. but it is a very rare ATI Driver bug under Vista (given that google produces.. very useless results for your problem..) but i have heard of similar thing happening to some people

I would advise you to radically uninstall all drivers of your graphics card/ati related/Monitor/screen , run driver cleaner over it and reinstall them from scratch. Also manually install direct x 9 (yes, as in 9) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2DA43D38-DB71-4C1B-BC6A-9B6652CD92A3&displaylang=en

Besides that, what mainboard chipset do you have? Have you installed the latest drivers for it?

The thing is, there is no way AI War can change your screen resolution it doesn't even claim focus, its a fake fullscreen , at heart AI War is a window that fills your screen, it is not a fullscreen like thing (ie, like starting Half-Life 2 ;p)

But before you do this all, download AI war from the arcengames website and install it, use your serial from steam to reg it and see if it still happens....

But that said my bet is on driver problem

Edit: Just to be clear, i am guessing here ;p

Edit 2: And to explain what i read the problem as

1) Start a game
2) Screen Resolution switches to 640x480 but GAME RESOLUTION is still the same as desktop (1280x1024 (for example))

Now you only see the top left corner of the screen meaning you only see 640x480 on your screen of that 1280x1024 game window - Exiting reverts everything back to normal

1353

AI War / Re: Suggestion: Track number of kills for a ship

« on: December 30, 2009, 07:47:39 PM »

Very well i shall proclaim my support for this as well (veterancy + stat affecting and kill stat display ,p)

But yeah, its been suggested like, the 50th time here 

1354

Off Topic / I am giving away a Team Fortress 2 Guest pass

« on: December 30, 2009, 02:04:26 PM »

First one to send me a msg with email or steam nick, gets it, its valid till 28.01.2010 so hurry ,9

Since nobody wanted it on my DA page i am giving it away here, if noone takes it it would just go to waste, all my friends already have TF2 i was like, the last ~.~

This allows you to play TF2 till that date as if you'd own the full version

Steam account is required

1355

AI War / Re: Prerelease/Expans 2.001ZG (Control Nodes, Co-Op Adjustments, Bugfixes)

« on: December 30, 2009, 01:54:25 PM »

afaik ta allowed you to specify an "over" value on the resource bars, if your storage was filled beyond a certain point your ENTIRE continuous resource rate surplus would go to the ally, if he needs it (ie if his resources are not in the positive and filled to his "over" value.

The thing is, this only works well if you can specify to whom , and in what priority order you give resources to (if you have more than 2 players..)

1356

AI War / Re: Prerelease/Expans 2.001ZG (Control Nodes, Co-Op Adjustments, Bugfixes)

« on: December 30, 2009, 01:38:10 PM »

Shared Resources where someone is equal?  

So instead of you get yours, and i get mine, we average income and both get the SAME .. average ? You do realize that when someone now looses income due to a raid, income goes down massively for both and thus a raid attack by the AI on one homeworld can cripple production for all players without warning.

And worse, when more than 2 players play gaining massive production can, in worst case only increase your actual income by 25% (4players) when it could have been 50% (2 players) or 100% (1 player)

Thus, Resource Sharing promotes playing with less people, it only works when you have not that many players in 1 team... preferable only 2


on the other hand, if done right (ie, not a average!) this could promote team play so my lengthy post is not against the idea, just against an flat average ^^

1357

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 29, 2009, 07:22:25 PM »

Well when you find out how, be sure to write a Tutorial and share it, because the Macro function of Photoshop is a mystery to me 

1358

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 29, 2009, 10:42:47 AM »

Ah, i too agree that we need some ambient drone, ambient wind, ambient creeky noises stuff

For an idea on that, play dead space, and just stand still - listen to the ship, every noise tells a story every panel thats active does something, any rumbling is asteroids pounding the hull.. thats the kind of atmosphere a good audio sphere produces

As for the grey border, unless you know way to automate it in photoshop this be impossible to fix for all the sprites.. theres a lot of sprites.... I too explained why this happens before but lack of macro knowledge stopped me from redoing ALL the sprites.. that grey border is impossible to get rid off without modifying every png.. so that sucks. While i can do basic things with macros, how do you duplicate a layer, and use gaussian blur on a LOWER layer - set that to 10% opacity and merge visible and save? Heck, it sounds easy saying it but its a bummer doing this 1600 times.. or more and this only fixes the grey border, not the aliasing issues

Originally the only reason i replaced the colony ships and transport ships was to get rid of the ugly grey border on that so yeah...

I don't think we need to start whip cracking at the artist, we need to start whipping x4000 to make AI War modable

1359

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 29, 2009, 07:47:34 AM »

Well you ought to be thankful about whats there Up until recently arcengames was like.. 1 person and a artist. Personally when it comes to 2d, i am more of a effect guy (meaning i can do splosions n'stuff) but i also can do high resolution sprites (what GSB does for example, thats what i do in 50% of my commissions ,p) the thing is, some people are really good at mashups of existing sprites , some are really good at making entirely new 2d sprites, some are good at rendering 3d sprites (and designing!) explosions and stuff.

Of course - i am also a graphics whore , like any gfx artist the thing is, until x4000 focuses completely on fixing all the effects to max quality the game will remain as it is. I have given many suggestions for making the game look better (just imagine at 1004 there wasn't any additive blending for the effects!) but now that we have the blending the next step is to layer effects properly (smoke + glow sprite + effect sprite + spark sprites) and to do this well the entire thing would have to be non-hardcoded (its extremely bad to try to make things look nice when you have to recompile your code all the time).

The problem is that currently it seems there is no interesting in advancing the graphics to entirely new levels - ie, layered effects instead of 1shot animation sprites, dynamic particle system (explosion affect other particles) dust/cloud effects, and of course slight glow sprites for engines, engine trails, explosion overglow, afterglow etc. pp

Redoing the sprites isn't even so much a focus , imo the game could look vastly better with just improving all the other things, on-map environment, effects, particles and such...

1360

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 27, 2009, 08:56:00 AM »

Blah seriously, you make me want to do 3D Again ;( Your stuff is just plain awesome

Sadly i think they are TOO detailed, now the starships (capital ships) look out of place, lol

1361

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 24, 2009, 01:28:49 AM »

Mhh, Evochron is just a X³ wannabe And X³ is pretty much the space sim standard .. sadly its not really very RTS like, has no decent story, no decent gameplay at all besides shooting and trading (and juggling the UI)

I'll just play Homeworld 2 Complex 7.4 ...

1362

Off Topic / Re: Happy Holidays!

« on: December 24, 2009, 01:20:28 AM »

Merry xmas For us Germans the 24th is the date so yeah...

Actually i hate xmas.. 

1363

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 23, 2009, 11:38:19 PM »

Well tis true, but AI war only saturates my basic strategy urge, not my "Homeworld 3 (Style) with Total War aspect (Map) " urge, and as a 3d-artist of course my "grand space visuals" urge (which is the main reason i even do spaceships in space renderings ,p).

Or to put it bluntly, i grave for epic visuals or a Nexus 2 or Homeworld 3 release

1364

Mods & Modding / Re: GFX Mod: Alternate Fortress and Forcefield Generators

« on: December 23, 2009, 09:22:18 PM »

Yesh that looks much better indeed ;p

But you really put way too much effort in that one!  Reusing existing sprite parts.. i never thought of that...

Seeing that fortress reminds me that it'd be nice if the ships were 3D Models.. one could do so much more in terms of light/shadow and glow effects that way.. ah well ,p

Do you have any more replacement sprites? 

1365

AI War / Re: Prerelease/Expans 2.001ZE (Hive Golem, New Save Format, Train Population Nerf)

« on: December 23, 2009, 12:00:00 PM »

I was wondering if someone reading this might want to make a case for a proper Fortress rebalance effort, atm i think Fortresses are not worthwhile, their low damage per shot means they are very in-effective at range, which considering everything RUNS from them is a bit of a huge problem.

also they do not compare at all to MK3 missile turrets (shield breakers, no range penalty) or Laser Turrets (Super long range, high damage..)

The thing is i really don't want to start yet-another fortress rebalance topic. Ever since fortresses somehow got nerfed they remained nerfed and stand completely useless against Zenith ships now. Most of which all can out-gun and out-run fortresses.

For the player enemy fortresses are a case of "select all raid ships, attack" , and for the ai, a player fortress doesn't even exist, since they seem to focus on my resource extractors even when shielded more than on a fortress ;p

Their low cap in turn makes them even less useful, because they are slow, have low range, and low damage thus they aren't even good stationary attackers against tractor deadlocked ships.

Maybe fortresses can get multiple turrets? If they had different weaponry (so they would have Missiles/lasers and beams... and short range fire for the melee stuff) that would raise their value immensely.

Well yeah, wish you a happy xmas all ;p