Toby Haynes

Okay - another new page in the Wiki has appeared at http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/Wish_List

I'll still try and turn up for Sunday 15th. Just give me a time Sunday 22nd is currently still free for me - I'll try and keep it that way.

Finding people online is pretty easy around 8pm EST (That's 00:00hrs GMT). I've often found 4-6 players on the Delta Pavonis server around then most weekdays. Stability of the game has significantly improved with version 1.1.8. I've had one crash while deploying sensor jammers in about 20 hours of play.

Can I point at the wiki - that might be the best place to write up a wish-list.

I'll try and play Thursday night around 8pm EST onward, so hopefully I can chat with Junglist and any others who can make it.

I enjoy playing DT a lot. The game play is deep and takes ages to master. One area where I think a little more polish would make a big difference is some small graphical extras: </font> reflective water - at the moment, water simply reflects the skybox. If it reflected the units and the landscape, it would look superb.</font>volumetric fog - this has two possible uses. The first is as an addition to the existing smoke billboards and would help add a more suffocating feel to the dust and smoke. Secondly it could be added to the scenarios as a static addition - low level areas could be misty, for example.</font>Stronger lighting on the objects - many of the buildings look a little flat when compared with the depth of shadow around them. This is one of those areas where a little tweaking might make a big difference.</font>Proper (or better) shadows for trees - trees seem to have next to no shadow on most maps. In my travels through scenario creation, I know that the trees place a greenish texture on the landscape beneath. If that "texture splat" could be darker and placed appropriately for the light position, it would help a lot.</font>Scorch marks/stain maps - HE shells should leave smoke stains on the area where they detonate. Maybe AP/HEAT rounds should too. This would also help identify precisely where a previous hit occurred.</font>Self-shadowing models - the turret of the tank should shade the chassis, for example.</font> I think that will do for starters Don't get me wrong - I like the way the terrain renders, the HDR effects in the sky really work well and the vegetation looks good. If all the future coding concentrated on gameplay enhancements, I wouldn't complain. I do think that there is some room for minor tweaks to the graphics engine to tie some of the visuals together better (water->land, shadow->lighting, etc. and provide a more immersive view. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I'll add my welcome to the list too. If you have any questions, fire away (either in game or on the forums). We don't bite ... much I'm Nexus6 in game. You can also bug me if you want to do some level designing.

Firstly, October 15th is fine for me. So that's good. I'm happy to play at strategy! But I agree - no dedicated commander. If we are all communicating and working as a team, there is no reason to have only one player who can set bot actions, etc. I also think that we should meet up at some point before to discuss strategy. In game is fine, especially if we all have voice comms (hint! hint!) as it will also allows us to do a little tuning to make sure we can hear each other clearly.

Lead a team into battle against the developers? That might be interesting. Even if we get wiped off the face of the planet, we could view it as a tactics masterclass Curling season is almost upon me, so I'm not going to have quite as many nights available for play. That does sadly rule out most Fridays. Saturdays could however be arranged.

Ah. I'm not an expert on MoinMoin wikis. I do know that file uploads are disabled by default. I believe you can set permissions per logged in user, so you should be able to give upload permissions to a pre-selected list of users. That should stop the wiki being DOS'd by J. Random Idiot. I'll try and dig out the configs required. I'm away from home right now so I don't have all my references to hand.

The tactical screen has been redesigned recently (1.1.6?). I don't think you can switch to the older design. The new design is better but it does take a bit of getting used to. Try rightclicking on units to give orders and left clicking on the drop down menus at the top. I could make a request for the currently selected tanks to appear in a column on the left hand side, along with operational status info (damage, ammo). That would help when searching for damaged bots who are tempted to suicide... Cheers

I don't know how many people are watching the Wiki over at http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/FrontPage I have started (and there are some screenshots to add some interest) to put together a walkthrough for my method for creating scenarios. This is a work in progress - both for writing the wiki entries and actually creating the scenario I'm working on. It's part Blog, part tutorial. http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/The_Nexus_6_approach While you are over at the wiki, I note that Poesel has been busy on http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/Designing_3D_Elements If someone can give me (and I suspect Poesel would like it to) permission to upload images directly to the wiki, that would be great. At the moment, my images are crosslinked to my googlepages site. Or, if that is already enabled, let me know how to do it! Cheers, Toby Haynes

Hurricane, meet my EWV The Hurricane is fun, especially as it can fire below the AA sensor level and hit targets under AA protection. I just wish those Plasma mortars had a little more penetrating kick to make them a little more dangerous. I'd also like to see the option to remote detonate the plasma mortar in the air for massive troop removal. Given the ground tends to shield much of the blast, an air burst might make this weapon more effective against ground emplacements. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Oh hell yes! You just weren't patient enough to let my heavy arty land on your head Fear is an illusion. That doesn't mean it should be ignored ... RUN FOR THE HILLS!! Cheers, Toby Haynes

Does <!-- some comment here --> work? That's fairly standard for XML.

I'm assuming that you are using this joystick under Windows? If you are a Linux user, you can run jstest /dev/js0 to see what the driver is relaying back to the system. I have come across joysticks where pairs of buttons act as 1-D hat switches - i.e. the pair of joysticks act like another joystick axis.

I've seen it on Linux too, dropping sensor jammers on Raid.

I've started to add some words on the way I create maps to the wiki. I can't for the life of me work out how to upload images to the wiki - is it disabled? Attachments appear to be greyed out in the menus.

Now I really wish I knew something about GUI programming. I'm guessing that this is tied to the Windows MDI interfaces? If it's a C#/.NET type thing I might be able to wrangle it together on a Mono installation, but if it's straight C++ and Windows API, it'll be a major pain to port. I'm hoping you built it using Gtk+

I've created the following page on the wiki. It's linked from the FrontPage, so hopefully people can find it easily. http://dropteam.johalla.de/moin.cgi/When_to_play

There are a fair number of us in the EST timezone (GMT -4 hours) who play around 7pm EST - that would be midnight in the UK. I know there are players in Germany. We should have a page in the Wiki where people can add their nicks to a table of Timezones and times.

I use a circular blur with a radius of 25 pixels. The road is about 7 to 9 pixels wide so the effect is that the road is essentially horizontal widthwise. Beware of sharp corners going steeply up hill where this doesn't apply. As long as the curve has a radius of 25 pixels or so, no one will ever notice. In a pixel editor, it is critical to cut the terrain out where the road is and put it into a seperate layer. This ensures that the rest of the terrain has alpha values of zero so that it does not affect the blur procedure. My tool just spits out a new PNG with the appropriate areas flattened out. Usually one application is all that is required. If certain areas must be absolutely horizontal (such as the port area in Sea Cliffs), just select that area in a pixel editor and flood fill with an appropriate grey shade. Then just rerun the flattening as before and it will smooth out any rough transitions.

The roads are a technique I worked out when I producing tracks for Trigger, a rally racing game that got somewhere around version 0.40. It's basically a masked blur of the underlying terrain. So ideally I would create a selection which was the roads for the landscape and copy the selection into a separate layer. In theory, any decent graphics package should allow you to blur the roads based entirely (and ONLY) on the pixels within the selection. In practice, most graphics packages that I've tried (Cinepaint, Pixel and Krita) screw it up. I believe that locked layers in Photoshop act correctly but that's not a package I have at my disposal. Interestingly, gimp-2.2 gets this wrong but gimp-2.3 gets it right. Sadly the GIMP is only 8bits per pixel so that isn't suitable here. The bug report below details the problem if my explanation isn't clear enough. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70335 So, in the absence of an appropriate filter on a graphics package, I wrote my own. I'm trying to tidy up the source code for all my tools so I can put a tarball up on my googlepages site - that hopefully will be done soon-ish. If you want an advanced copy of the routine I can send you some code. You'll need the PNG development header files, the libPNG libraries and a copy of SCONS for compilation. (If nobody else uses SCONS, I could be persuaded to write a Makefile). The road-making utility takes the input landscape as a 16bit grayscale PNG file (without any alpha channels or anything funny like that), a mask image (also 16bit grayscale PNG) where the flat areas are white, unaffected areas are black. Gray areas will be flattened proportionally. Output is a new PNG image with the flattened areas. Because the mask is just another image, you can use any paint tools you like to create the mask. I used Cinepaint and a graphics tablet to get nice smooth roads. The bases are just areas where I used larger brushes or worked over the area a little more.

I might refine this a little. Each Command track has an effective radius for jamming and detection. The presence of an enemy command track would remove all command track info from friendly tanks within that effective radius. A bit like a mobile sensor jammer, but for tank-to-tank comms. Or you could take this in a different direction. Command tracks can gather information from all tanks where the distance between the friendly command track is shorter than the distance to the enemy command track(s). I can rationalise the one-way comms based on better sensor arrays. However, I think it would make for better game play if the presence of the command track meant that a team would have better sensor support.

Thanks Aittam. In Objective mode, it's reall important for the defenders to spread out a bit and seize the good view points early so that they can cover the main attack directions. Also, because on Objective there is no covering AA tower, a Hermes and Bacchus combo is useful to restrict how close the enemy can land and minimize the threat of artillery. When I've play tested this on the attacking side, getting either Apollo-H or Thor-H tanks into positions where two or more such tanks can engage the defenders simultaneously is key. I ripped through the bots squad of Thor's in the first three minutes using this tactic. One of the things that is hard to get right as a map-developer is the actual playability. I can look at a landscape as I work on it and think about where the attackers might get overview of the objectives, or where defenders might hull down. Playing against the bots gives me some idea of how the battles might play out but it's not the same as having four or five human players engaging with better tactics. In many respects, having these levels included in the main DropTeam releases is fabulous because it allows me to finally see whether all those ideas really work. Anyway, I welcome comments and (constructive!) criticism about this or any other map I make.