poesel

Is there a special reason AT grenades are the only shot we can't see?

Look in the data directory for the .physicalobjectgroup files for the respective vehicle. The armour values are there.

Iceman - take a look at the Wiki and write the tutorial yourself. If you just write down what you did and what worked and what didn't, will help others in your tracks.

We would need to have different armour values depending on weapon type. Another question for Clay...

1) If I, for example, wanted to add some crew protection between the Apollons motor and the rest of the chassis, I had to add another object that would consist of a single mesh placed inside the chassis. Would that work? Does armour have an 'inner' and 'outer' side for penetration calculation? Would that be a hard performance hit? 2) What happens if another unit tries to move into the forcefield? Will they start to push each other or just pass through? Ideal would be a field that depends on the direction and length of the velocity vector. In game terms: vehicles and inf can pass in and out without harm or hindrance, bullets from the inside go through, from the outside have to penetrate. Can we configure the power reduction or is it simply a function of armour thickness? Could the field have a visual effect like the deployment zone has? 3) (yeah, you know: theres always more questions ) Spheres? Can we make anything round in this game? The roundest thing I've seen is a hexagon.

Whats also weird is that green has no reinforcment zone. If you run out of dropships the game is simply over. May be intentionally but the scenario doesn't end. Either sit it out or vote to end. Another thing which is not the fault of the scenario: if you kill all enemies and have only inf left (and a toppled over paladin and no dropship...) then you loose despite having three teams in the base. Killing turrets with 10mm seems very easy. The AT turret is very bad at short distances so you can just walk there and kill it (even without AT grenades).

Talking to myself here... Ok, small interludium from the Apollon. I'm trying to make a simple cube and get it into the game (its aptly named 'Bjorg'). I've got the complete model with six textures (1 to 6 as text) as .obj and I've got 6 .obj for each side without textures. Then I change Bjorg.physicalobjectgroup like: <ModelFile>Bjorg.obj</ModelFile> Now the collision model: <CollisionModel>BjorgFrontCollision.obj</CollisionModel> <CollisionModel>BjorgLeftCollision.obj</CollisionModel> ... Correct? What do I do with <CollisionBox> and <CollisionTriangle>? Can I just delete them?

Ok, the armour values thing has been answered already in the tank destroyer thread. I've put it in the Wiki: http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/Designing_3D_Elements?action=show Adzling, how did you get the complete model into sketchup? The tracks get really out of scale if I do that with blender.

I have two questions about how the game engine works. 1) if a shot penetrates its path is followed through the vehicle to see what it hits. Would the engine detect another layer of armour if its in its path? 2) can armour be invisible? I ask because if 1) and 2) are a yes, then we could make forcefields!

IMHO you forgot one main chaos creator: communication or lack thereof The game would profit immensly if players had more tools to communicate. A short list: - paint on tacmap - grid on tacmap - textbox for battle plans - after action chat - some info if a player is already online during deployment (=has clicked OK on the objective box) - a way to recall the objective text and the parameters of the planet - player profiles (self written) to shortly brief the others what you are up to. Ok, have to explain that last bit. The profile would be accesible from the player list and would look like, for example, for 'poesel06': Commander: no Bot wrangler: no Tanks: yes Artillery: no AFV: yes Infantry: yes (this is of course not complete) Dropship Deployment A fun thing would be if you had to fly the dropship yourself (or have some human do it). Else it will simply drop straight down. Would create some pedestrians. Or: as it is currently, you can drop from a rather great height with 'b' and just fall straight down without any damage upon hitting the ground. What if the DS would drop you from even greater heights on a simple (auto gyro) platform. The platform has thrusters which you have to operate. The thrusters are mainly vertical but allow a bit horizontal movement. Thus you can control the rate of your drop and the place you land (at least a bit). Bot wrangling Yes! (the link has a dot at the end) Defensive Tools Click modifying terrain would surely help. I loved Populous! Or give some presets (sensor hole, vehicle hull down, wall, ditch, ...) and limit their numbers. A wonderful thing would be to be able to save a setup. The setup would include terrain modifications, deployables, bot orders and waypoints. The commander could then load his setup in the deployment phase and then spend his time instructing his team.

Conquerable reinforcment zones - should get you points and be an award by itself. Conquer certain exit points for connected campaigns. Conquer a territory and get resources for it. That could be a one time cache or a self replenishing source which creates certain units over time or a combination of both. The cache thing probably needs a defender which then would be a third party hostile to both red and green.

I'm now trying to give the Apollon a test drive so I tried to fit the rest of the chassis. The trough (is that the word for it?) isn't anything special, isn't it? Just a covering for the underbelly? How do tracks work? How do they get animated? A _very_ useful thing would be to have a complete vehicle with all things in place. I'm using Sketchup as many here seem to do and it can't directly import .cob. So I go over Blender which seems to mess with the scaling. Additionally Apollo consists of four different parts and I don't know how their relative position is. A complete vehicle would give a very helpful example. So where should be the origin of the parts? And does someone know how to name faces in Sketchup to assign the armour values? Thanks

Thanks for the comments. I took a closer look at both the original and the N. To justify the bigger motor the Apollon needs a slightly higher bonnet than depicted above (still lower than the original though). The original has two glitches: the turret is sticking a bit inside the hull. Thus the turret is actually lower than shown above. The other glitch is that the barrel is moving THROUGH the motor if you aim as low as possible. The lower angel of the barrel should be more limited. The bonnet should have a downslope and the turret be higher. Hmm, that gets me thinking. I see and understand the reasons to have a higher turret for better hull down positions. But: I don't think it would be a great advantage for the Apollon. Staying in any position for long with the Apollo is certain death. Its armor is simply too thin. HEAT, mortar or ATGM will kill it from long range. And usually you end up in medium to close combat situations where there is simply no time or opportunity to go hull down. Its biggest asset is to be able to hide behind the motor. The motor is at the same time a major hindrance for the turret but you can't have the cake and eat it too. I see the Apollo as fast moving attack tank. Its survivabilty relies on speed, agility, a low profile and a big gun. So I will try to move the gun a bit forward and still being able to fire over the bonnet while keeping a low profile altogether. Yeah, I know. The higher turret is something for another tank with probably a central turret. The Mjolnir seems to be one of those I think. But you never know what the dropships come up with.

Another one to join the vehicle designing camp. I'm a great fan of the Apollo and spent quite some time in it. Still I feel it has some shortcomings which I will try to alleviate with the next generation - the Apollo N. Excerpts from an internal report of the liveship 'Hjemsted': <<< ... Analysis of recent battles found the Apollo more and more in close combat situations. Analysis of AARs and retrieved wrecks shows that over 90% of penetrations come from nearly horizontal shots. ... An unduly high percentage of Apollos were lost due to lateral rolling after drops or in heavy terrain. This has caused some hard feelings between the crews of dropships and tanks and has led to more than one brawl in the ships canteen. ... >>> Adressing these issues the following modifications were made to the Apollo chassis: - 20% more width for better lateral stability - a bigger motor with a different gearbox for higher acceleration - more armor sloping especially from the side A first draft is represented here (current Apollo left): A view from the front (current Apollo left): The design is currently in the reviewing process.

I agree with most of this thread. One thing though: I get the feeling from the messages that people feel that the cause of the problem is too many updates and that we are mere beta testers. I think not so. To have the opportunity to activly participate in the development of a commercial grade game is a great thing. Where else do you get the chance to express your wishes for a game and actually get them fullfilled? Yes we are beta testers but I like it. It means things are still in a flow and new things will happen. We should have even more updates but they should have smaller changes. This way we can find bugs faster. Apart from that, I'm quite happy with the way of things here.

How about having a simple grid on the tacmap? Maybe one line every 500m? The density of the grid would give you an instant feedback of the size of the map. Naming the axis (1,2,3..., A,B,C,..) would also help communication and coordination very much ('Hurrican in E5' is much easier and more precise than 'Hurrican SE hill'). A key to turn on and off the grid would be apreciated too.

Has anyone found a use for that? I tried shooting at inf with it: I had two bot inf groups together running over a street. I had to achieve a direct hit for a kill. No blast kill. Second try: I was more than halfway over the bridge at Dead Gulch and at the end was a stuck Hermes. My motor was out and I had only 76mm HE left. I think I gave him a shake but no other result until I got relieved by a 120mm... So please give the HE some blast radius or more punch or change that to HEAT or drop it altogether and give it more AP ammo. Oh and btw: the switch-to-bot-and-have-wrong-ammo bug is still there. Thats why I shot with HE at all.

Athlon XP1700+ 512MB Ti4200 20Gb HD cable modem seated facing east towards Essen What do you want to downgrade to my specs?

No I didn't try it with a 120mm Thor. As I said I used a Paladin. And against a moving Paladin the only artillery unit with some chance to survive is the Hurricane. The rest: drive close to them and shoot at leisure. The mortars give the survivability of a Thor some dent (on the turret especially ) and I agree with you that the bots shouldn't be that accurate. If the mortars can calculate your movement ahead, why don't we have that feature for the 120mm then? That wouldn't be fun gameplay wise and I doubt its a big problem for Clay to make the bots shoot worse.

Hmm I don't feel like bjarmson. The bots having and using mortars makes it more interesting. Camping is surly a thing of the past. And bot mortars are not much of a threat: they aim very good but they don't hide. They drive or drop it in the middle of the action and then they are cannon fodder for every 20mm out there. Its just that mortars never have played a big role before 1.1.4 because no human wanted to use them. We probably just have to get used to them. One thing I have to critisize though: at the beginning of the scenario (without human intervention) you now have six bots sitting in Thor mortars instead of the Thor 120mm. Either thing is a bit stupid but the mortar version even more. Get the 20mm Paladin and drive right in, killem all - no chance for them to do anything. It would be nice if the bots would use some variation in their setup. Currently it seems that they choose just the most valuable available vehicle that bots can drive. Bacchus: with its current speed its hard to outrun the bot mortars even at full blast! Without the Hermes you are simply cannon fodder for the artillery (and this - thinking about that fact and all the fuss and argument we had here - is quite ironic IMHO). A bit more agility is direly needed. But apart from that a good addition to the game. The server seems to crash always after the second map. One piece of information: you have to be commander to disallow the bots to drop. BUT: disallowing to drop also stops them from using the reenforcment zones which is a pity. Another button for the zones would be nice. I also don't feel very comfortable about the need to be commander. There has been a thread long ago but I don't think we came to a conclusion. As of now noone really needed the commander (I never experienced a vote). Maybe we should start that discussion again (in another thread )

Hmm: http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/ModDesign As always the Wiki needs some work. Feel free to add your experience.

markus@daisy:~/DropTeam/bin$ ./SpaceVikings -? ./SpaceVikings: error while loading shared libraries: libvorbisfile.so.3: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory Thats the headless server - no sound either (although I doubt that DT tried to READ the options to me ) But don't waste time on that, I can run it on the other box. Thanks.

How do I get the full list of server options from the command line under Linux? Theres a post from Marco long ago but 'DropTeam /?' doesn't work under Linux.

Tanki, updating sarge won't get you very far. It especially won't update your libc. To get a more current linux you have to switch to 'unstable' (which is not necessary unstable in a common sense - just by Debians standards )

I, too, didn't know that there was a loophole in this map.