ClaytoniousRex

All good suggestions - we'll get to these along with other updates over the next few releases.

Voice chat is already there. Plug in your headset and hold down the P key to talk with your team. (P key is "push to talk" on the controls tab if you want to map it to something else).

It connects the umbilical to the closest friendly unit. To disengage just drive away from it. To prevent getting stuck on it in the first place, be sure to call it down nearby but not right on top of you. Then drive to within umbilical distance and stop before colliding with the Galaxy. There's no need to actually run into the thing. If you ram it, you can sometimes get wedged in beneath one of its struts and it's a very heavy object so it can be hard to pull free.

You're right. I should have said every fifth round (the burst size). Yes, it's 3 wads of 5 bullets each. Each wad impacts at the same time, so the individual rounds in each burst are simplified a little bit. But their damage modelling is entirely individual.

The burst size is 5 (see 20mmAP.physicalobjectgroup). You should be seeing 15 hit effects (if all of them hit). It's pretty hard to tell since they're all bunched up, but if you manage to get a screenshot or something you can count lots of them.

Yes, we have the basics in place for a game option called "OGRE" which puts one player on a team by himself against everyone else on the other team. The single player only has a single unit available: a massive, powerful Mu Arae tank. We weren't able to finish this feature in time for the intial 1.0.0 release, but it will be added shortly after infantry.

Poesel, here's a quick summary of how to create an actual mod from an earlier forum topic. Use this so you don't need to mess around with your base files (and also so people can see that your server is running a mod and/or install the mod on their client without messing up any of *their* base files): On the client side, you can now go to the "Mods" tab and select your new mod to make the client use the mod. Actually the 20mm fires 15 round bursts. Every third round is a visible tracer, but all 15 shots do individual damage to their targets. The number of rounds and the sound(s) for firing can be changed in the XML. The manual doesn't contain much information on this stuff, because we could never keep it up to date with changes in the core engine until the very last minute. So we decided, instead, to put all of the documentation for modding on the DropTeam website so it can be kept completely current. This online documentation will be available to you very soon. [ May 25, 2006, 11:25 AM: Message edited by: ClaytoniousRex ]

I'm testing the fix right now. So far, it looks solid. Will advise when it's ready to test.

It took a while to respond because your question sparked some internal discussions here, Pilgrim. The way it works right now, LAN and online play work exactly the same way: they require that each person who wants to play have his own licensed copy of DropTeam. Therefore you would need to buy 3 copies of DropTeam in order to play on your LAN with your 2 sons. We've been talking this over and we feel that this is too restrictive. Therefore, we're changing the way accounts work in DropTeam so that each licensed copy of DropTeam allows you to create TWO accounts instead of one. This means that if you buy one copy of DropTeam, then you and one of your sons can play together on the LAN or on the Internet. If all 3 of you want to play at the same time, you will need to buy 2 copies of DropTeam. Sorry that it took a while to respond - we were hashing all of this out on our end so I didn't want to post before we had a real answer for you.

Do you have a 800x600 mode line in your x config? If so, do you have a working hardware-accelerated OpenGL driver installed?

Have you changed any settings besides the resolution? For example, had you recently enabled HDR or shadows or anything else that was previously off when it was still working? Just be doubly sure, you can delete the file DropTeamSettings.dat from your home directory (under documents and settings if you're on Windows) to go back to defaults for all settings. Be sure to remember your username and password before doing this, though. If it still happens even on default settings, then please email me your DropTeam.log and I'll see if the problem is indicated in there. We haven't yet heard from anyone else that they're also having this problem. If anyone is, please chime in and maybe we can start to look at what you have in common with Over.

Sabre, have you run the updater to bring your public test up to date? You should be able to play just fine with it. Let us know if you're not able to update.

It probably was the authentication problem and nothing to do with your server. PAT is port address translation. Almost any client connecting through a modern router will be using PAT, so to a remote host his port looks like some crazy number even though internally it is the known 9968 port. This message is nothing to worry about. Yes, the account mentioned is purely local to that server. It used to be, and may someday again be, that when a client disconnects his unit(s) are not removed or changed. He could later reconnect and resume control right where he left off due to this local account on the server. The server alwaya tries to run at 30Hz. This is the rate that the game's main simulation loop is running at - it is the "time slice" of the world being updated (physics, visibility, etc.)

The Windows version of DropTeam uses eLicense for copy protection. Complete details on that system are here. Playing network games requires logging in against our account server, just as you've been doing all along on the public test. Playing standalone does not.

Yes, it was down, but is now back up again.

We're working on UB right now. I'll post an updated ETA when we know more.

Kana, you might try going to the Settings tab and turning OFF fullscreen. This way you will be in a window. Now try to create an account or refresh servers. If some other application is trying to open a dialog in the background (such as Zonealarm or even the Windows XP firewall) then you will now be able to see that other dialog in the background, focus that dialog, give DropTeam permission or whatever needs to be done, and then return to the game. Then you could go to the Settings tab and turn fullscreen back on again and continue playing without trouble. This usually isn't necessary, but since you're having problems it's worth a try. If this doesn't help, then post again with more details and we'll try to help. In general, you do not need to do any port forwarding in order to play. But of course you *do* need for any firewall services to stop blocking you as Rampage described above.

You need to do tail -f DropTeam.log to see what's happening on the server. And that is the best way to start looking into why the client had a problem. The log file might say something about why it was rejecting the client or otherwise not letting him play. When you say the client hung, do you mean a hard lock-up, or a "server not responding" message, or something else? There's no limitation on this for the public test - you can run your own dedicated server with it (but it's limited to those same 2 scenarios).

Which applet is it, Max? Maybe we can reproduce it here. Incidentally, I achieved a noticeable increase in performance in DropTeam when I created an X session just for the game - no Gnome, no KDE, not even a thin window manager - *just* DropTeam and nothing else. On average it ran ~20fps faster than the same machine on Windows XP. Gotta love the choice that Linux gives you...

You can install Mesa to get the required OpenGL libs onto the system. Mesa is quite ubiquitous so it should be available through apt-get, portage, RPM, or whatever your distro uses for packages. We run all of our headless Linux servers this way (they also don't have displays). If you want to give me a shell account on your server, I'll even do it for you.

"Dad + 0.5" actually. You can eLicense 2 copies, but you can only login for network play with the 1 account that corresponds to your product key. So, on your 2 licensed computers, 1 could play online while the other plays standalone, but they couldn't both play online at the same time.

When we get closer to having this feature finished, I'll post an ETA. As things stand, infantry are already up and running in a prototype - the real challenge is to make them usable on the lower end machines out there.

Right.

1 per client.

...is now available via Update. On Windows, use Start/Programs/Battlefront/DropTeam Public Test/Game Updater to get it. On Mac OS X, double click on the Update icon in /Applications. On Linux, use the runUpdate.sh script. This release fixes a frequent crash that was introduced in 0.9.90.