Messages

351

Mods / Cannot Locate Certain Mods

« on: 4 November 2012, 04:08:42 »

I did some forum and google searches and wiki searches, but people keep posting to sites with short hold times, so its almost impossible to find downloads for certain factions.

I've been digging through the mods section trying to find some factions with good quality models and a semi-compatible art style to magitech to flesh out my kingdom simulator demo. I'm pretty far behind code wise although I added and de bugged a shit load of features, but the file was supposed to go up thursday but some sneaky errors and lack of models delayed it.

Anyways I was wondering if anyone had these factions saved or if they actually exist:
Undead
Grey Elves
Orcs
Goblins

Also is there a version of the Elves faction with properly textured Sanctuary and Lore Hall and Ents and what not. Both files I found, 8.7 and 9.7 display as improperly textured in the G3D viewer.

Also is anyone aware of any other fantasy or fantasy related factions with quality models under a free license?

I currently have:
Imperial/Warlords
Solunar(Moon only)
Elves(buggy displays on many units)
Dwarves
Dark Magic
Magitech

Thanks for any help you can give me. I dug around for about 2 hours but I really have quite a bit of programming to do. I still have a couple behaviors to add to the AI and to debug a few things. I also have to dig around and create a faction setting to cancel the original AI, the new AI can currently only work in a scenario with two "player" factions. Disable AI cancels my AI for some reason and standard games the old AI currently overwrites the new agent/behavior based AI.

352

General discussion / Re: Skill/Command System, How Does It Really Work?

« on: 30 October 2012, 23:05:34 »

Well found another annoying issue. It totally makes sense in the context of a WarCraft clone but is hard to figure out and rewrite for games that are a little different. Essentially I had to dig through the guts of skills and find a way to make a skill trigger only once and then stop, since I want to calculate a new skill after one firing of the current one.

Well I had to dig through some fun errors of my own making but, I understand the skill and command code much better now.

Omg. Finally got the damn thing to work. I had a lot of wasted time over stupid errors but I got it to finish and now I can port the working code to other aspects of the AI.

Gonna hit the sack now, so tired of confusing shit, especially when I confuse myself :'(

353

General discussion / Re: Skill/Command System, How Does It Really Work?

« on: 30 October 2012, 22:48:52 »

Yes, currently a skill cycle has to be completed before the next can begin. And as you mentioned, a speed of 10 will take exactly 10 seconds (1 / [10 / 4000] = 400 world cycles at 40 cycles per second = 10 seconds), so a dude with a speed 10 skill is going to be sitting around for a long while. But if we try to interrupt these cycles, I'm sure loads of bad things will happen (and then there's the question as to whether or not the cycle was completed; since an attack could appear to be completed halfway through the cycle). A cooldown period would be a useful measure, but it'd have to be something other than a skill, as a skill would just mean that the unit would have to sit there for the entire cooldown period. So just an uncorrelated timer?

What I did was set all attack skills for units intended to be run under my new agent AI to 100 or 1 attack and one animation per second. Then I set up a timer and after selecting a command but before sending it, the related skill sets a cool down determined in the skill XML. The attack skill selecting function automatically passes over functions where the cool down current value is not equal to 0. During world::tick all units who are under the new AI have all the cool downs of their skills decremented by one, assuming they are higher than 0.

So if I understand what you mean by uncorrelated timer, yes, that is what I used.

354

General discussion / Re: Skill/Command System, How Does It Really Work?

« on: 30 October 2012, 21:11:02 »

Well I know it's fucked up, but I am trying to find out specifically how it is fucked up

It had been about 4 hours so I went ahead and implemented a cool down system for attack skills. I'll test it out as soon as it finishes compiling.

Basically I'm going to give all units 100 anim speed and 100 attack speed and then limit the frequency of the automated behavior with the cool downs. Based on my understanding the cool downs should tick even while the skill is animating. Otherwise given the 1 second duration of skills I can just cut 1 second off the cooldown to get the desired result.

It would still be nice to hear some GAE or MG devs opinions on exactly how the current skill system functions though.

355

General discussion / Skill/Command System, How Does It Really Work?

« on: 30 October 2012, 17:24:39 »

So currently based on my tests skills/commands don't have any sort of cool down. They all function as autoattacks, and choosing a new skill/command does not reset the timer.

So if I select a command/skill with an attack speed of 10 even if I switch to a new command/skill it would take 10 seconds of downtime before it switched to the new skill which would then proceed at its actual listed speed.

Furthermore attack speed relates only to energy cost being used, all the other aspects of the skill trigger on animation speed.

Do you guys consider this to be an accurate description of the current system?

As part of my Majesty-like work I had been trying to allow wizards to cast spells as they had done in that game, but I believe they used a cooldown system as opposed to what appears to be the Glest/GAE/MG system.

I can write in an optional cooldown for skills, but I don't want to mess with it unless my current understanding is accurate, otherwise I could get some nasty side effects.

356

Mandate Engine / Re: Mandate Update Thread (Majesty-like)

« on: 26 October 2012, 05:18:06 »

I was somewhat distracted last week due to my mother going through a lot of issue with her broken ankle/separated ankle bones and her series of 3, so far, casts, as well as the Cardinals in the NLCS, my home team, and the Tigers in the ALCS and World series, my father lived 40 years in Detroit, as well as some other issues.

As such I know I am somewhat behind my schedule for the release of my Majesty-like demo. I have managed to spend almost all day today and yesterday on it and I will be spending about 20 hours over the next two days as well. I was delayed somewhat while coding due to some idiosyncratic stuff in the GAE map/travel code which I have now resolved. I have almost got the exploring behavior finished and that experience will significantly speed up my work on the hunting and raiding behavior as well as the collecting and purchasing behavior.

I was forced to clear the map of all obstructions to clear up some obfuscating factors about the pathfinding/map code, and I think I will leave it that way in the foreseeable future since its actually true to traditional Majesty maps. This may change far down the road when the mainline new AI is done, but that's like 6 months minimum away.

Currently I have units moving around the map uncovering unexplored lands as well as various guild unit limits without requiring resource based limits and also the item system is functioning properly and post AI-Item integration, basically its only set up currently for player controlled item equips/unequips, it is ready for use as a unit based as opposed to unit type based enhancement.

I am introducing a few twists, for both creative and legal reasons, on the Majesty style game play, which further delays the release but makes the game more interesting, at least in my personal opinion.

In normal Majesty you create guilds with an increasing price per guild built, with no cap excepting that costs and gold totals are limited to 2million gold, with 4 units per guild. Guilds add spells to your spell book ai element, spells are global for temples and local for wizards, while various guilds have special abilities. You only need to upgrade one guild to get abilities.

I as part of my over all campaign to reduce urban sprawl in base builders and also be more realistic, have changed some of this. Guilds can be built, with more expensive base costs, but they get more upgrades. Size upgrades provide more heroes per guild, with the cap based on the hero type.

Each guild type has a mother house which determines the upgrades in capability that that guild can research. Mother house upgrades are quite expensive but they provide research capabilities to all guild branches. Mother houses are built from the faction menu, branches are built from the mother house. Mother houses contain research into new spells or production capabilities and you also need to equip them with facilities. Branch guilds require only facilities to produce anything researched at the mother house.

Guilds possess multiple kinds of mother houses, however branches are cheaper and more efficient to buy than new mother houses, a mother house represents a significant investment and which mother house you pick from each guild type determines your capabilities. It is possible to create multiple mother houses per guild type, however mother houses and their bonuses aren't cheap, and there may be a distance limit so you have to locate different mother houses far away from each other. Branch vs mother house costs mean you want to build many branches of a mother house, well like 3 or 4 to make the costs break even over the hero count, and also upgrade the habitation space of the mother house and each branch in order to make the investment in larger and more valuable mother houses worth it.

Also each guild has vastly different specialties like damage types and behaviors and support/buff skills, so you are better off in most cases going for a new mother house of a guild of an entirely different kind, rather than trying to get all the mother houses of the same guild type.

So having a priestly order, a warrior order, a mage order, and a ranger order is generally better than having 3 mage orders for versatility purposes.

In general there will be many more kinds of units, structures, and items than in the original Majesty. There are more hero types, plus you need to count the varied orders for each type, and possibly even tiers of units per order, for instance the high priestess or archmage may live in the mother house along with subordinates, whereas regular branches have only a high mage and then mages in the lower ranks.

You will also see various structures, an clothier for mages and priests, a tanner for rangers and rogues, and an armorer/blacksmith for warriors and paladins and knights. You will also have enchanters, crafters, alchemists, jewelers and other such things, which Majesty kept at the market, bazaar, and wizards guild.

/wall of text

357

Feature requests / Re: 3.7.0 beta1 translation - New Game - Host Game - yes/no

« on: 21 October 2012, 22:39:39 »

Why don't you just use on/off for Gaelic and everyone else will keep using yes/no? Not sure why that would be an issue.

358

Off topic / Re: Operating system

« on: 21 October 2012, 15:45:19 »

I use Windows 7 and I really like it. I get some problems if I go too long without restarting windows where the task bar freezes and some stuff stops working, but its fixed easily by a reboot or even just restarting windows explorer.

I agree about Linux gaming being terrible as well, I mostly surf the web and play video games so access to quality games is important. I have both steam and Impulse, well its not called Impulse anymore, and I don't think they work too well on Linux right now.

359

MegaGlest / Re: MegaGlest Game Trailer Animation

« on: 19 October 2012, 17:04:47 »

I support both engines, and as it stands, GAE is looking more or less dead, while MegaGlest has made huge strides in progress since its inception.

It's come a long way since, whereas GAE isn't even actively developed.

Somewhat off topic but I don't think its fair to say that GAE is "more or less dead" or "isn't even actively developed."

When I used to stay up later working and visited this forum more often at night I saw Ygg and Hail on almost every day and they respond to any bugs and issues and certainly provided me personally with help with bugs and other things.

The problem is that GAE caters to a tiny demographic, people who prefer single player games, and thus no one ever signs up to the forums to report bugs or ask for help and such, which for a developer, is very disheartening because you feel like no one cares about your work. I would posit that if there was more of a player base for GAE you would see a climb in activity to similar to softcoder activity levels as well as a larger push to get out new releases and new features.

Its also important to note that MG historically ported a lot of GAE features and iirc some open source blogosphere people were incorrectly attributing various features as being done by MG when really it was a port of a feature devved by the GAE team, which also is likely to cause bad feeling and loss of interest in pushing GAE further.

And of course posts talking about how dead GAE is are also unlikely to encourage devs to expend free time providing a free service to players. *glare at Omega here*

360

MegaGlest / Re: Recording Videos

« on: 18 October 2012, 21:18:38 »

Are you using windows or Linux?

which weirdly was more finicky than debug VS08 wise

since Taksi looks like it's Windows only, I'm going to presume you're using Windows

Clearly Omega is not a member of Web 3.0 where its common practice on forums and blogs to only read the OP before commenting.

Anyways, is anyone more familiar with GAE able to tell me why the debug version cannot be recorded on desktop recorder programs? Problems range from undefined enumerator errors pointing to assertGL() on line 531 of renderer.cpp to white or black screens based on which program is used. The release version records just fine.

361

MegaGlest / Re: Recording Videos

« on: 17 October 2012, 19:20:10 »

Okay so apparently Taksi and other recording programs do not like the debug version of GAE rendering code. However I compiled a release version and successfully created a video.

Of course it takes like an hour to put these things on youtube due to ridiculous 200mb file sizes even with low quality settings for recording.

Grab a video converter and convert them to the format of your choice first.

So much work... First I had to get Taksi, then I had to compile a release build, which weirdly was more finicky than debug VS08 wise, then I had to expand my youtube account storage, and now I have to convert file formats? God it was less trouble to do the programming...

I will spend some time digging into this, although it takes away hours I could spend programming.

362

Mandate Engine / Re: Mandate Update Thread

« on: 17 October 2012, 16:27:58 »

New video showing me equipping items to a  warrior. Items can be produced on a timer as well as with the command. They currently provide enhancements only but I am finishing up resistances/damagetypes, item/resource/unit creation on a timer and also cost and storage modifications.

I am a little behind schedule for Majesty because I spent a day fixing the video thing, had to change something so that the game wouldn't crash if you tried to end it, although quitting the whole program was fine, items took a bit longer to handle than I planned and also various real life distractions and a bit of ennui I had to beat.

I am finishing the getLongDesc() function for items, basically the same as the unit one describing all its properties in a tool tip, I am getting as I said before the rest of the item bonuses working, and that will take me probably till Friday morning or night.

Then I will be ready to institute the final part of the game logic for the demo, the Majesty like AI where units will operate at the agent level to do tasks like buy items, build structures, and fight enemies. Although I wasn't programming a lot this past week I did a lot of thinking and planning, so I know exactly how I want to set up the AI.

Most of the item work is done, still need to finish unequip button functions. Got resource/unit/item gen and resource/item processes done. Still need to hook up stuff like resistances/damage bonuses.

I had to entirely rework the item system first because I needed pointers to make the aforementioned generation/process stuff to work properly with timers and then because pointers messed up other things, but its all back to working now.

Work on both the engine itself and my Majesty-like demo proceeds well. Next up, agent level AI and then some GUI polish so the average user can understand what all the new buttons/icons do.

Edit:
resistance and damage type modification by items is now working properly.
this will also help me i think in getting the old load bonus system to function properly.

363

MegaGlest / Re: Recording Videos

« on: 17 October 2012, 15:34:50 »

Okay so apparently Taksi and other recording programs do not like the debug version of GAE rendering code. However I compiled a release version and successfully created a video.

Of course it takes like an hour to put these things on youtube due to ridiculous 200mb file sizes even with low quality settings for recording.

364

MegaGlest / Re: Recording Videos

« on: 17 October 2012, 01:47:15 »

I have tried to record with CamStudio but it displays a white screen when I try to record the game. Everything else works fine and if the game is visible but say I alt tab so Camstudio is on top of it, then you can see stuff.

CamStudio will record Majesty and other games but it will also refuse to display graphics of MegaGlest. This time the screen is black instead of white though.

365

Tools / Re: scenario editor

« on: 14 October 2012, 13:15:08 »

It would probably make more sense to construct scenarios or campaigns in GAE since its designed for single player. Making a single player scenario and thusly a campaign containing many single player scenarios in MG makes about as much sense as playing multi player in GAE.

Of course I doubt people would like to have to download 2 separate games.

366

MegaGlest / Recording Videos

« on: 13 October 2012, 23:13:36 »

Does anyone know some good software that can record video of Glest derivatives?

I used Taksi for my only video so far but now it has started getting me an error from assertGL() and then it crashes the game. I'm not really up on the whole desktop recording software stuff.

367

MegaGlest / Re: cegui

« on: 8 October 2012, 21:52:31 »

@silnarm,
have you got any tips on where to hook the libRocket rendering into the GAE renderer? I haven't really touched the graphics code yet, the closest I got was the widgets and that's not very close.

@treba,
have you done any more work getting libRocket to run in megaglest?

I haven't spent any time on it because I promised some people I would get the Majesty demo working and i've been having to add a buttload of stuff to items to get that online.

368

MegaGlest / Re: MegaGlest 3.7.0 beta1 ready for testing

« on: 7 October 2012, 11:47:34 »

Wow, that's a lot of stuff. Nice.

369

MegaGlest / Re: MegaGlest 3.7.0 beta1 ready for testing

« on: 7 October 2012, 10:31:31 »

is there a list of changes over 3.6.0?

370

Feature requests / Re: unit entering area

« on: 6 October 2012, 12:22:37 »

how would you define a "region" ?

GAE has this feature, in it a region is defined as a group of cells. I think it only support square or rectangular regions though.

371

MegaGlest / Re: cegui

« on: 2 October 2012, 10:02:59 »

eh, its not a big deal. i have plenty of other work to do besides porting mega glest features.

372

MegaGlest / Re: cegui

« on: 2 October 2012, 09:27:42 »

Code: [Select]

svn co https://megaglest.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/megaglest/trunk megaglestshould work

wants a username and password.

373

MegaGlest / Re: cegui

« on: 2 October 2012, 08:51:47 »

not yet. i just build mg with its static libs.
will try in the comming days

I can initialize a context and I believe load a document, at least it doesn't crash when I load one but, I stopped then to do something more personally interesting. So I haven't actually gotten it to render something in game.

I decided to actually finish this new thing first before going back to libRocket, so if you get it to render something post how it went.

Also, how can I get access to the SVN version of MG? I can get the stable release source but not the new stuff. TortoiseGit/SVN says the remote is hanging up and such.

374

General discussion / Re: Explore Glest source

« on: 2 October 2012, 06:01:10 »

I'm too poor to afford the commercial versions, I suspect it doesn't matter much either way since the free one can do whatever needs to be done so both of those should work.

375

MegaGlest / Re: cegui

« on: 1 October 2012, 14:17:42 »

anything new here? i just also had a look on librocket and it seemed to be a nice solution (builds statically without any flaws for me, seems to intergate easily)

Have you been able to get it to interact with the engine? I took a break to work on something personally more interesting but I got reasonably far.