Toby Haynes

No - I can't get it either. Iceman? Can you upload it again? Cheers, Toby Haynes

Maybe I'm missing something. I have the following file, as downloaded today, 11th September, from http://tbgsoftware.com/scenario.xsd This schema doesn't have DeploymentZone as a child of GameType. Take a look at HouseToHouse.scenario for an example of DeploymentZone and then try and validate that document against the scenario.xsd. It complains about an invalid child node for GameType. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Can I also put out a request for the updated scenario.xsd file? I've started validating my first mission and it does indeed throw errors because DeploymentZone is not a valid child node given the original schema.

Getting ideas for scenarios is not always easy. I keep making notes about scenarios I would like to see on scraps of paper that are scattered around me. Maybe one of these days I'll actually complete one... I get inspiration from all sorts of things, from playing with GoogleEarth to looking at levels for other games which use heightmaps, such as Scorched3d ( http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/ ) and TA Spring (Main site at http://taspring.clan-sy.com/ with extra maps at http://www.fileuniverse.com/?page=listing&ID=121 ). That said, not all levels are appropriate for all types of game and when playing with ideas for levels, keeping the type of game in mind is really key. One thing I have really begun to appreciate is undulating landscapes offer much of the best play when going one-on-one against another player. Dark and I had an elaborate dance twice last night between a Thor H and an Apollo H, manoevering to try and outflank each other using the terrain for stealth which finished 1-1. So large open flat fields should not comprise the majority of the map (nothing wrong with a few such areas though).

With my physicist hat on, I'd say that given the drop ships appear to have rear exhausts and jets mounted underneath, they probably aren't that maneouverable. That said, I like your ideas. These dropships are supposed to be injected into the atmosphere at high speeds and plummet groundward. It would be extremely cool if they left a vapour trail or even smoked when first appearing on the scene. They would then decelerate during descent, briefly touching down and then slamming the jets back on full to leave. It would mean that the Dropships would be slightly less vulnerable when first arriving because they would be moving more quickly and would force the 120mm folks to wait till it was about to land to get a decent chance at a kill. It would also be cool if there was a sonic boom to announce their arrival on the scene. A Dropship decelerating in the atmosphere should make a terrific noise. Interesting musings...

I know Dark_au was looking for some PNG wrappers for VB. This link might help. http://www.thevbzone.com/files/VisualBasic/LIBPNG_VB.zip And there is more information on http://www.thevbzone.com/d_DLL.htm From what I can see, it looks like these are Freeware DLLs under a BSD-like license, so they should be usable. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Dark - this looks really nice. Picking the right colour atmospheric fogging is probably important to make this look right in game. Maybe needs a little bit of blue light highlights on the ground to really get that realism right up there.

I've used Cinepaint (version 0.21 pre) to edit height maps as part of my ongoing map experiments. It does work and will maintain the 16bit PNGs correctly. I strongly suspect (but I don't have the right incantation here) that a program like ImageMagick can export a raw 16bit Little endian file when given a 16bit grayscale PNG file. If you are having grief with Geomorph or Cinepaint, I may be able to help. You can email me at thaynes <AT> sympatico.ca if you wish (that goes for any DropTeam player). Cheers, Toby Haynes

This game is good enough that my collection of games (which includes 9GB of mods for UT2k4, Quake 4, the extraordinary Darwinia, the Freespace 2 on steriods FS2Open project) has been gathering dust since the full version came out. I don't think I've touched anything else for more than a few minutes. It's also rejuvenated a set of landscape code that I was working on because now I have a goal to acheive with it - making decent landscapes for this game! DropTeam isn't perfect (yet!) but it's involving, complex, requires thinking and sound tactics and looks as though the modding capabilities will allow it to be pushed in interesting directions. It takes time to get into and I still do stupid things (like flip into a crater while trying to shoot something obliquely) and it will require practice and thought to win. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I know the feeling. I've been working on a new weathering system for landscapes to produce realistic water-eroded features (such as rivers with interlocking spurs, meanders, etc) for the last couple of months or so, a few minutes of work here and there. I've been disappointed with the standard gradient-based systems I've used so far and wanted something a little more interesting. A lot of the weathering routines out there end up favouring the eight compass directions - if you start with a hemispherical hill, you end up with an octagonal weathered hill. Actually, that's an artifact you can see in the Dropteam maps. It's slowly starting to take shape. The heightfield routines have been tweaked and I'm happy with them. Sub-pixel positioning is in. The particle dynamics that will drive all this are taking shape. The basic physics are in place. Erosion brushes are about to be implemented and that should give me the first real results. Eventually, it should be able to write out the weathered landscape, areas of erosion and areas of deposition as three separate images. Given those three, it might be possible to come up with some smart vegetation placement (i.e. most vegetation in areas of deposition, least in areas of erosion). There are ideas such as variable hardness of the surface, to allow simulation of real rock strata. Mapping the areas of most particle flow to provide for river placement might be possible. Some simple tweaking might allow for methods to produce realistic snow accumulation. Still - it's probably still a month away from seeing the light. I would be interested to see any shadow casting routines you have for the landscapes. I envisage this weathering library eventually being hooked up to GeoMorph if it works well enough but it could easily be tweaked to weather any input image and dump out a DropTeam map, complete with vegetation information. A little tweaking might then give a basic scenario. Now - do I play online to night or code some more ....? hmmmm.... Cheers, Toby Haynes

Before you dump vast resources into a new project, let me point you at two projects I've used in the past to create heightmaps for other games (such as scorched3d at www.scorched3d.co.uk). The first (and my normal choice) is GeoMorph - available from http://geomorph.sourceforge.net/. This allows generation and modification of landscapes by eroding, weathering and other distortions. It's pretty effective and has worked well for me. It's fairly easy to get up and running on a Linux box - whether there is a Windows version is another matter. It has some nice features such as dune modelling (for those desert maps) and the ability to superimpose two heightmaps together (useful for adding rockier outcrops to a desert map, for example). The second is Terraform ( http://terraform.sourceforge.net/ ). It supports many terrain generation routines, some editing and manipulation. Again this is fairly easy to get running on Linux and a Mac OS X version is apparently available (but I've not tried it). Cheers, Toby Haynes

Ah well - that depends on what environment the gunner has. Iain M. Banks (one of my favourite authors) "The Algebraist" has small ships that are filled with oxygen-rich gel and most controls and information are essentially neurally linked, although some are "manual". In a tank that has to function underwater, in atmospheres and in vacuum, such an arrangement would make sense for the driver and gunner in a tank. No need to mess around with keeping gasses under pressure - just ensure that the gel is repleat with the appropriate oxygen levels and that your nanotech is up to scratch. I think the crew would probably need a shower after such a road trip... Cheers, Toby Haynes

Nice one Yurch. My literary wheels aren't turning today so I can't reply in kind. Ah - that screenshot looks nice. Seeing those little fellas standing around makes me wince in anticipation ... ... of a drive-by Plasma Mortar shot sending these fellas into orbit for later collection by LiveShip... ahem. I'm just hoping that the 85% figure is a real-time projection and not a programmer-time projection (which is susceptible to the "the first 90% of the work takes half the time" ) Cheers, Toby Haynes

One thing I have noticed is that the water reflects the sky perfectly on Archipelago. Things aren't so good elsewhere - it looks like the enviroment map used for Archipelago's water is used everywhere and it's not a good match on most of the other maps. If you want examples, take a look at the Slugfest intro screen - the river reflects a much lighter sky than that seen in the actual sky. Unexpected Reserves Intro also shows the same issue. If I was going to point at an example of perfect water I'd have to pick this example from TA Spring: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/screenshots/screen88.jpg This monstrosity requires serious GPU horsepower and probably isn't usable for everyone here. A lighter alternative would be something like this: http://taspring.clan-sy.com/screenshots/screen91.jpg Anyway - using the right env map for the water would help a lot. If we could get one of these fancier water shaders in the future I'd be even happier. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I have a head set. I really ought to dig it out and try it - it would help for those moments when typing a message would put you over a cliff/in the river/on top of an enemy turret. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I'd side with Dan on this one - while it doesn't happen very often for me any more, there are times when I'm absolutely on the flat and the Dropship catches the front of my tank and flips me over backwards as it takes off. It happens if the Dropship starts travelling south after drop off. Dan - it's really key that the landing point is flat in an east-west direction. North-south isnt so critical - the tanks have a longer wheel base front-to-back and they always get dropped facing north. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I get killed a lot too - it only bothers me if the level depends on me staying alive If it's CTF, then I'll push the limits to get that flag from base to base. Best I've done on a single instance is four flags transfered Actually, now I think about it, I only got killed 4 or 5 times on that one, but it may have something to do with being in the air a lot Sensor jammers are a huge advantage against human players. The bots seem to have a better chance of spotting you however and will pick you off if you aren't careful/mobile. I've noticed more players trying to make advance drop points to sneak tanks in closer to the objectives undisturbed. That's a nice tactic (and was being used last night too A couple of times I got smoked by an enemy under sensor jammer protection right on the edge of my own base (you know who you are ) Cheers, Toby Haynes

I normally play in the evening on week nights - sporadically before 7pm EDT/EST and maybe for an hour or so between 7:30pm and 9pm. Weekends are pot-luck though. You'll find me as Nexus6a. I'm sure I've blown some of you up (and been ATGM'd in return) already Cheers, Toby Haynes

When you say "unplayable" do you mean that the frame rate is too slow or that the game is too unstable? What sort of hardware are you running this on? CPU type and speed, amount of memory on the main system and the graphics card? I assume you are running 1.0.1? Did you try the demo first? Was that fine? Cheers, Toby Haynes

I've hit these issues. The details of how I fixed it are at this page: http://tjwhaynes.googlepages.com/dropteamreview-part5 which is part of a review of dropteam I'm writing. It needs some screenshots and updates for 1.0.1 so I haven't announced it yet. Basically, you need to put the 32bit versions of various libraries (such as libaa.so.1) into the lib directory.

That's another possible enhancement that I'd like to see: When there are multiple vehicles in range of the Galaxy drop ship, the closest one should get the refill first. Once it is fully loaded up, the Galaxy should switch to refill the next nearest. Rinse and repeat until all the tanks in range are completely reloaded. That would also help when trying to keep the bots ammo levels at something above 0. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I'm not a DropTeam developer but that error doesn't look like a video card issue to me. SIGILL suggests that the binary uses some feature (like SSE) that your CPU doesn't support - a bit like trying to run Pentium-targetted code on a 486 would normally blow. I'm guessing that BuildBuffer uses some optimised SSE code and your CPU doesn't support it. Hopefully some developer will be along shortly to tell me I'm wrong... Cheers, Toby Haynes

I've also seen this. This happened to me as soon as I had one of my tanks on the "third" island. I circumvented this by taking my tanks north on the second island and attacking the city in the north east that way, rather than committing to the eastern route across the bridges. Be nice if this issue were fixed. I'm also running on an AMD64 machine with Ubuntu 64bit (with 32bit compatibility libraries). I'd be interested to know if this was a linux-only issue or was more widespread. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Following up on this, there are two types of projectile that might make more sense under water. The first is a torpedo-style projectile with water-screw or water-jet propulsion, either with or without guidance. This could be fired along a barrel but would probably use a jet of water to get the speed up if already immersed or, if fired in air, would describe a parabola until it hit the water and then would kick in it's propulsion unit. The second unit is a form of depth charge. Fired like a normal projectile, it would effectively stop when it made contact with the water and would drop vertically through the water before exploding, possibly on contact with the base of the river/lake. How does that sound? It would not require any great changes to the existing units, just new ammo types and behaviour. As for Ion beams under water, I think they would quickly scatter and attenuate over distance, making them useless unless you were pressed up close to your target. I also suspect that they would boil the water along the line of sight but I'd have to sit down and think about the scattering process. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I'm happy to run a build without the parachute - I have various utilities to recover the X server at the right resolution and get a working mouse back, so I don't even have to cycle the xserver if things bomb. That might tell you that I have run a lot of pre-release software... If you need my email address, you might be able to extract it from my profile on this bulletin board or I can email you it. Just let me know where to get the special build I don't think it will fit in my Inbox if it is more than 3.5Mb compressed. Cheers, Toby Haynes