ClaytoniousRex

I mean useful roles that it could fulfill, besides direct combat, that players would be willing to undertake. You're right that its existing roles could be made less painful just by fixing some of the vehicle's quirks and this might already be enough.

OK, here's a primer on using Terragen to create your mask. For this example I'm using the Black Pearls scenario that I recently uploaded just because I have it handy. You might want to download that scenario and look at it while looking at this example. The idea is to use red, green, and blue to represent your 3 major terrain types. In Black Pearls, those correspond to rock, grass, and dirt, respectively (so rock is red, grass is green, and dirt is blue). Here's what the base texture looks like: and here's the Terragen surface to get that base texture: The sub surfaces called "lighter rock", etc. are all based on slopes, elevations, etc. as usual in Terragen. Once your surface that generates the base texture is all setup, you simply change it in order to create your "mask" material. Since rock is red for this scenario's mask, I went into the "gray rock" parent surface, and into both the "lighter rock" and "darker rock" child surfaces and made them bright red with ZERO bumpiness (and also ZERO for mimics terrain, because we don't want ANY bumps at all): By "bright red" I mean 255 for red, 0 for green, and 0 for blue. Then I went into the "dirt" subsurface and made it bright blue with ZERO bumpiness. Finally, bright green for the "rock plants" subsurface. Now go to the sunlight panel and make sure the sun is directly overhead, give it a very high strength like 350%, and turn OFF all shadow casting: In the sky/haze panel, be sure to turn off all haze and fog (you should do this when rendering your base texture, too, not just for the mask): Now you're ready to render the final mask image: Notice how the red, green, and blue correspond with the different terrain types (see some other scenarios like Haven for even more stark masks where it's easier to see the hills vs. flats). The 3 colors smoothly blend together when changing from one type to another which is exactly what you want. Hard transitions would be unnatural. Those places where you see, for example, yellow in the mask are places where the user will see both rock (red) and grass (green) mixed together - which is a good thing! Let me know if this makes sense or if you need any further clarification. EDIT: After you render the final mask image, be sure to take it into an image editor (I use The Gimp but photoshop or paintshop pro, etc. work fine) and reduce ALL colors so that the brightest colors in your mask are about 75 or so. If you don't do this then your mask will make all of your terrain type detail textures 100% opaque, meaning they will completely obscure the underlying base texture. You want your detail textures to be transparently overlaid with the base texture underneath. So here's how the FINAL mask for this example looks: [ August 14, 2006, 11:45 PM: Message edited by: ClaytoniousRex ]

We did a little of this during the public test, Alex, but never got to the level of a web service (or even very cleanly munged data) but it's a great idea that I hope we can make time to get back to soon.

Now, Aittam, there's no need to depict yourself as a bullseye. Yurch covered the main issues with field repair. To make it believable, it can't be some kind of instantaneous "powerup" kind of thing. And if it's not instant, then it doesn't hold a candle to extraction. However, the urge has always been there. A more direct support role for units like engineers would be a good thing. If you can think of some interesting ways to get past these hurdles it would be great to hear them.

Oh, Mace, you're just jealous. Here's one for you: MACE, COME HOME! Jeeze, you Australians are so sensitive.

At Dark's request, QuickFrac and Tiler have been removed so the links above won't work anymore. [ August 14, 2006, 10:21 PM: Message edited by: ClaytoniousRex ]

Go easy on Junior. At least he was playing!

Send it to support@tbgsoftware.com along with any details about what's happening (what you see on the screen, how far you get before the problem starts, etc.)

In 1.1.2, your only option here would have been to concentrate on clearing out one good drop zone. Tell all (or many) of your bots to drop in the same place, and you also drop there. A single AA turret won't be able to stop 3 or more dropships dropping together inside of its coverage. You will take losses on the way down, but you only need to get one set of treads on the ground in order to start clearing out the DZ. If your dropships dies but one of the bots manages to land, then immediately use the Take Control command and jump into that vehicle. Immediately start zapping AA turrets and moving - you might only have a few seconds to live. If you can take out a turret or 2, then the rest of the bots which are now still dropping in the DZ will have a better chance of making it down. Now you have several guns clearing an even wider DZ. If you get hit, take control of one of the healthy bots and continue working on enemy AA until you have a nice, wide area to drop in. By letting your entire team scatter their drops in widespread single drops, you're making it easy for their scattered AA turrets to take all of you down. By concentrating your drops onto the coverage area of a single AA turret, you're putting more dropships in one place than that single turret can take care of on its own. Starting with 1.1.3, you will also now have the option of using a Reinforcement Zone instead of dropping on most scenarios.

DropTeam won't load .tif files. Make your texture a .png, a .jpg, a .bmp, or a .tga image and try it again. I'll post some info on how to make masks with Terragen in a couple of hours.

Not that much, really. What's saved is just the network messages, not raw data about the physical state of the world or some horrible thing. The overall concensus seems to be that gameplay itself should be made better before worrying about watching that gameplay. This is alarmingly reasonable coming from users! After another release or 2 (or 3, or...) feel free to come back to this thread and say "now I'm ready for this". For now, we'll keep it shelved while more important work is underway.

Fixed for 1.1.3.

Found and fixed for 1.1.3. Thanks, Tanki.

You're right, Black. Slug Fest is now fixed for the 1.1.3 update.

Compared with the various other feature requests already on the table, how much interest is there in a "replay" feature, whereby you would be able to download a replay of any game that has taken place on a public server with the past 24 or 48 hours. You could then watch the replay at any time with that downloaded file. (Yes, the file would be a big download.) I'm not saying this feature is coming or would be available at any certain time, just asking what level of interest there is in it.

Ja. Will post complete info when 1.1.3 is out.

Oooooh, nicely done, Poesel. And a nice start with some structure there, too, Alex! When 1.1.3 is out of the way, we will start unloading info into it with both barrels. In the meantime, scouring back through the history of this forum and doing a liberal amount of copy & paste would go a long way if anyone cares to start. (Be sure to give credit for people's posts, though).

This would be great fun. Until the player population grows, you will probably be better off making "open" challenges. "I need an opponent at 7:30pm Wednesday" instead of "I want to kill KONSTANTINE at 7:30pm Wednesday" along with whatever parameters you want for the game. What would make it really interesting, of course, would be to always return to the forum and post the results of the game in the thread where the challenge originated. I would say 1-on-1 games are perfectly fine for this, too. I personally enjoy them at least as much as a server full of humans (sometimes its fun to have obedient troops). Only admins can set the current scenario on a server right now. If you can't run your own server, then you might have to settle for whatever scenario is currently running (you could both wait for the next scenario to start at the closest time) and/or pick a time when one of us admins can be there to set the scenario and players up for you. Maybe Poesel or Hub or someone else with a server would be willing to run a "challenge" server, at least part time? Or, if you can get a handful of other regular players interested in this idea, several of you could pool together for a good $90/month dedicated server and you would ALL be admins and you could ALL set the scenario, teams, and anything else you want for every challenge.

It would sometimes help when in the gunner view, firing at close targets while on the move. Often you click to fire and nothing happens for a crucial moment or two and unless you're really seasoned you don't understand why your weapon won't fire. This is especially bad with an ion beam, for example. If you could see the "little pipper" moving into place you would now have an immediate visual explanation of why the weapon's not firing.

Invisible walls on bridges and invisible flipped vehicles are both fixed in 1.1.3.

That's a good idea and one we tried to implement a while back, but gave up due to time constraints. I will have to go digging back through version control to see how far along it was. bjarmson, that problem you're describing might now be fixed. We'll find out for sure while testing 1.1.3. If it's not already fixed, it should be by 1.1.4 at the latest.

Command squad is a great idea! The specialist in this squad might be equipped with a comms package instead of a heavy weapon. Giving the squad leader some perks makes great sense, too. Let's start with the low hanging fruit (more jets as you suggested or something along those lines). Target designation is a good idea but takes a little more work to implement, so we can do that a little later.

Those strips in Hammer's Slammers were also used as point defense against incoming HEAT rounds (usually against "buzzbombs" which were David Drake's version of the RPG). This is exactly what we've been moving toward for ATGM defense in DropTeam (in addition to being able to pop smoke/chaff to help prevent a lock in the first place). Their primary disadvantage is that they're consumed once used. Additional attacks from the same angle will eventually find an exhausted section where the strips have all been used up. I think they make great sense for both roles in DropTeam.

Updated version posted (1.3) from Hub. Use the original download link above to get it.

All would be very nice, indeed, but realistically will have to wait quite a while in line behind other features. Nevertheless, I've added them to the feature list.