Alexander SquidLord Williams

I will, once I wake the rest of the crew up lying scattered around my den after a late-night game of Let's Kill. Seriously. It's a card game. After D*C, I know I have two more DT sales lined up, possibly three. And I'll see who I can lure into being curious about the setting and game with mild geek-evangelism. Until then ...

I think this would help a lot. If we wanted to go all modern military, the grid would have two digits designating a given line, 100 units lone, and the main grid being a 1km x 1km space (so each dot would be 1/10th a klik, or about 100m). Coordinates would be two four digit numbers, line and offset beyond ... OK, so the military system is a little tweaky. But it does let you designate a location to a fairly fine point with just eight digits. "E5," though, its probably more effective on the fly. Especially given for anything more precise, we can use the waypoint system.

That's very much what I had in mind, actually. Might want to slide the turret slightly back, but I kind of like it.

Oh, yurch ... Having driven the Bacchus around the map a bit lately, I have to say, I really love the roof-mount gatling. It feels meaty and can hurl a big pile of ammo down field right fast-like. Figured you deserved kudoage for the idea.

I wonder how well it tears up the tires on Shrikes and Paladins? Though if its not giving squishies a hard time without direct hits, it may have an underpowered blast radius, which would be sad.

Hmmm. I hadn't noticed them firing on jammed targets. I know if you drop a Cobra then a Jammer, they'll sometimes seem to remember it, which bites in a big way. I hate to say it, in the aftermath of previous debate, but perhaps we need a new turret type, one that's purely PD, smaller, tighter range than the Hermes' gun, mostly useful for shielding turret farms from unsupported mortar fire. Minor MG fire should distract them fine from taking out inbound 120mm, ie. easily overwhelmed. Primarily for rear-area deployment, though a Merc dropping them on the front-line could provide some limited screening. I find PD interesting, and anything that encourages bringing out the ion beams in the midgame (when the turret-hunt first phase is over but not so late everyone's finally in lights) is probably a good thing.

I don't think it's X-ray, I think they're firing indirect at a sensor image, which works really well if you get lucky or can count the range. Of course, the best solution to that problem and one I'm getting into using vs bot armies is to break out the Hermes a little earlier than I might otherwise and park behind a low hill in turret-down. The mortar fire goes up, the gun hums, you got no more mortar. It'd be easier if we had an AoE for the Hermes' PD, but ... its doable.

The bots are now mortar-crazed, for some reason, and worse are just damn good with them. It makes a nice change from their Thor-120 madness, but ... man ... The pain if they land them just on you is brutal.

Absolutely. I'm just phrasing it terms of what's probably more functional in terms of process. Mind you, you can do it now, if you're adept with the tac or are playing with a human driver. Having a 20mm Pal ferry your 20mm HMG squad into position, then duck the hill and flank your target is immensely satisfying.

I saw the texture assets, but they're on this metallic grey bg rather than on a transparent one, far as I can tell. More work than it needs to be if we can get the properly layered toto after the fact. I can actually do pretty good UV unfolding in Wings3d, my evil of choice, but I have zero-point art skills beyond basic modelling, so texturing isn't high on my todo, I fear. I'd just like to tinker the overall textures.

I certainly wouldn't object, especially in the map rotations that go between maps of different scales. It can be challenging to know exactly how much area an Cobra Turret or even Sensor/Jammer is going to cover. The truly grognardy will likely say, "Its one of those things you learn," but I've never aspired to that level of hardcore.

My guess is it would probably be better to impliment this as a smarter form of bot management. Being able to give a bot orders from the in-game map is one of those things that've been bandied about a while. So, basically, you'd command your squad and give local commands to a bot. Move the Paladin over and walk up to the rear to get in. Switch the bot and infy, drive as appropriate, drop the grunts, and switch back. Give the bot a Move Here order, then move out yourself. Once engaged, if you need more firepower, give the bot in the Pal a "Hull Down" order targeted on the enemy; they'll engage. If you just need a lift, tell it "Move Here" and target the ground at your feet. Repeat as necessary. Not entirely unlike the way it gets done in the flesh, in some cases, and better integrated with the command system we have.

Yes, yes I'd say that looks pretty darn sweet. Even if its so huge its blasting the forum formatting.

I figure its a pretty good chance that the DT boys have all the vehicle skins created using Photoshop or compatible, with the camo layer seperate from the detail layer, etc. Is there any chance we could get the layered UV maps packaged up and downloadable? Mainly for a couple reasons: </font> I have an idea for a map that occurs sub-aquatically (at least notionally; not literally underwater in the model-sense, but with appropriate colouration, short fog distance, etc). Obviously, none of the camo schemes currently available fit that, but if I could layer on new colours on the extant schemes underneath the details ...</font>It'd go a long way toward producing a set of cut-n-paste details that new modellers can use to drop onto their new vehicles. Vision blocks or grab-holds from the Paladin, etc.</font>Plus, darn it, you guys doing the skinning deserve some oohs and aahs, too!

Just saying that the front of the vehicle should slope forward and down, rather than forward and up. Seen from the side, the ideal armour would look like a wedge, the wide side lying on the ground. The ground, of course, doesn't fire on you (generally), so you can put the widest part of your armour toward it. Your current design has the wide-part, seen from the side, up, and exposed track on either side below it. Imagine a shot coming in from low in front; for a fairly large area in front, it hits and bounces down into your unarmoured track. Lot of mobility kills, that way. Bonxa has, I think, the right idea, focusing on that narrow descending lip of the front edge as the glacis rather than the underslope.

I like it, I do. But that recessed window just begs for me to put a 76mm round right between the uprights with any kind of front-shot off straight ahead. Your armour should generally not direct my fire directly into your crew compartment ... Other than that, its lower profile than the Paladin and that can only be a good thing. Not sure what a twin-14mm MG should mean, mechanically, but I like the idea.

I just tried it with one bot, and like you, it worked fine. I do notice that the bots seem to love to drop on that bit of inaccessible terrain to the northeast of the northeast edge, in an area it won't actually let me drop. In fact, its probably an area they shouldn't be able to drop in, so it very well may be a bug with the drop selection system in general. (Note this obsession with that area is true of both my bots and his, as I juggled them about a bit. I also noticed that, despite setting the number of my dropships avail to 30, I ended up being told I had none left after only having ... well, none, actually ... destroyed. I think it might be counting destroyed drop pods as dropships, which would be bad.

Would it be possible to do a run-once "no go" extract map from a given height file that was then saved in another for use by the bot pathfinding? There has to be something that can get offloaded from the poor little guys in precomputation. Though odds are good you're already doing what you can during that scenario load context.

Yep, just me, no problems at all. Quite a fun little map to run across in a Tempest, in fact. You can get some decent air if you catch one of the alluvial erosion hills just right.

I'll do that in mere moments. Easy enough test. (Yes, I'm awake in the daytime. Sign of the apocalypse, that is.)

So, right ... I've been wrestling with maps lately to try and get a few scenarios specced up, and a few things that cater to my own perverse sense of amusement in referencing ancient games of days gone by. Voila, Hunt the Wumpus, a maze of twisty turny passage, all nearly alike, and full of room enough to drive tanks down three abreast, but not much more than that! Unfortunately ... there seems to be a significant issue. Actually, there were a lot of significant issues, mainly due to needing to flip every bloody texture that went onto the thing by hand, for one reason or another, but that's neither here nor there. The significant issue: A few seconds after deployment and the bots all descend like vultures, the game begins to hitch and lag like an unruly mule. Frame rates drop to 1 per tens of seconds, though sound continues. It becomes, in short, unplayable. My guess is the bot pathfinding algorithm is getting a bit nuts when trying to plot courses through the maze to abstract destination points I can't see. Alternately, that they're mentally crashing and burning on trying to plot courses with lots of impassible terrain intervening that may involve convoluted pathing. That sound like I'm on the right course with my understanding, folks?

Might flatten that front armour to straight across and possibly dip the front end just a hair. You want the shells hitting and bouncing up and away from the tank, not across and up. More energy transfer the way you have it, though it is damn pretty and I'd be tempted to leave it as "unmodelled physics in this game" muttered under my breath.

You'll want that front glacis inverted, to slope back and possibly around the turret. Reflecting low-shots down into your tracks would probably be bad. If you don't mind limiting rotation, think of pushing its head down between the shoulders.

That'd make my life so much more useful. More useful would be if the system was smart enough to invert whatever images/maps needed to be flipped to actually work right without me having to go through the gyrations, but ... (I didn't expect the major Texture map'd need to be inverted if it were JPG, but it does. In fact ... pretty much everything needed to be inverted, except the root raw file. I considered just flipping it, but then N/S'd be off my intention.)

I'd settle for an integrated editor that took already-created heightmaps, texture maps, and a sub-texture map in some reasonable format, like JPG, and made sure everything turned out right-side up. And then let you apply objects and zones in an interactive manner. What, me having been wrestling with L3DT creating maps? Nooooo. Don't expect to see a vehicle designer anytime soon, though. That's quite a lot of integrated effort and difficulty, just by the nature of the beast.