Toby Haynes

I think that the bad language filter should probably not be filtering out "---" all the time . Given that I tend to send messages like "Artillery assault in 30 secs on enemy flag" and "Enemy tanks massing south of base" both of which get butchered: "Enemy tanks m---ing south of base" is probably funnier than I intended. And to those of you considering a purchase - go for it. This is already a great game. Given what can potentially be done with it, it should give years of play. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Is there a dial-home-on-crash facility built into DropTeam? I seem to remember a comment in the forums somewhere to that effect. As an "early adopter" I want to make sure that these crashes get nailed as fast as possible. If you need extra information about crashes, what should we be providing? Or is it all automated and we don't have to worry about the nitty gritty. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Is there a screenshot key? Occasionally I see graphical glitches that I might want to point out. I'm also writing a review of DropTeam and it would help if I could capture some screenshots too I did find the manual - for some reason it was not installed along with the rest of the game and was left behind in the DropTeamSetup directory. Is that a bug or an oversight? Cheers, Toby Haynes

When I ran ./runUpdate.sh to upgrade from 1.0.0 to 1.0.1, the new version of the Update executable lost it's "executable" permission. A quick chmod +x ./Update fixed the issue but that might spook a less Linux-knowledgable user. As poesel71 pointed out, and you followed up, I had to run the runUpdate.sh twice to complete the upgrade. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I've never seen this. On "Treachery", I reached the dropships ~10 minutes to spare, the score went to 1000-something, dropped back to 0 in jumps of 250, went back to 1000 etc until the time ran out. Then the game crashed. I've never seen a "victory" message, even on the first level when I finished it. </font>

Mark should be pleased with Ubuntu - it's an absolute pleasure to use and administrate. I say that as a long-time Linux user who works and plays on the platform and who has used several distributions. Maybe more importantly, he's managed to culture a community who looks out for each other on technical issues and that may be his greatest acheivement. Long may it continue. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Playing a level like House-to-house can result in the bot tanks wasting their ammo very easily (ie. shrike vs tank under laser tower == useless). It would help enormously if bots would broadcast when they ran out of ammo so that I can call in the refills for them. If they repeated that call every two minutes, that might also be good. Broadcasting a simple message like: Horus has low AMMO: Currently has AP 0 HEAT 3 HE 10 would be a great help. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Maybe all this is in the manual which will be winging its way to me at some point but right now I'm manual-free so I'm asking away... Or maybe these are potential enhancements in which case I'm on my knees begging From the tactical screen I can select multiple tanks by clicking-and-dragging the rectangle over the ones I'm interested in. However, I don't appear to be able to give orders to a group - clicking on the "Orders>>" button doesn't bring up the menu. It would be nice to be able to name or tag a group of tanks for future commands. This would allow me to hold a group of tanks in a safe area and then bring then in to attack my target (for example) without having to switch out to the tactical screen. Formations are incredibly useful, especially when I happen to be the formation leader It would be nice to be able to see some visual indicator on the tactical screen to show which tanks are following which leaders - a simple line would help enormously. However, when I specify the formation leader for a tank, I want that tank to be formation leader - not that player/bot. When I'm leading a group of tanks and choose to take control of another tank (say a cutter as it moves in close to a takeover) the formation tries to link up with my new tank. That isn't clever, especially if they will have to plough through the enemy lines to get to me. Cheers, Toby Haynes

First up, given that I don't have a supported configuration (*cough*) I got this working on an Ubuntu Dapper AMD64 box - it IS possible I also relocated the install to a directory outside my home directory. /home is a separate partition on this system and I can't have a game like this soaking up the disk space. My system is a AMD64 3400+ 1Gb RAM GeForce 6800GT 256Mb VRAM 64bit native Ubuntu 6.06 system with a motherboard soundcard. To get this working on a 64bit linux system requires four 32bit libraries to be added to the installed game lib directory. I've a 32bit system installed alongside my 64bit one so I've just linked up the four libraries using symlinks but copying them into the lib directory would also work. toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/lib$ ls -l | grep chroot lrwxrwxrwx 1 toby toby 26 2006-06-02 13:00 libaa.so.1 -> /chroot/usr/lib/libaa.so.1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 toby toby 27 2006-06-02 13:01 libgpm.so.1 -> /chroot/usr/lib/libgpm.so.1 lrwxrwxrwx 1 toby toby 27 2006-06-02 13:01 libncurses.so.5 -> /chroot/lib/libncurses.so.5 lrwxrwxrwx 1 toby toby 25 2006-06-02 13:01 libslang.so.2 -> /chroot/lib/libslang.so.2 Performance-wise, it runs nicely most of the time. I've been playing through the first few campaign levels (on Easy!) and I've reached "Treachery". The first few levels are fairly straightforward and the game introduces units a few at a time, which allows you to get a feel for each. I long for the manual so I can see precisely where the weak parts of each tank is It's nice to see that there's a fair amount of variety in the scenery. The water looks good although it would be nice to have a wake for tanks fording rivers or entering/exiting lakes. The changes in gravity and atmospheric density do force different choices for attacking and maneovering which is fun. I wish that levels with a clearly defined win point would exit when that win was acheived - for example on Forsaken, I'd killed all the enemy tanks, captured both towers. Being bored waiting for the level to finish I took my Apollo for a few jumps over the craters and smashed it up, only for my score to be wiped out back to 18 (it was some 36,018) which led to me failing the level that time. That wasn't nice especially as I'd acheived all that the briefing suggested I should acheive. On "Treachery", trying to position all the tanks to ensure the win caused a major headache. I had to lock each tanks brakes once I had it in position. For some reason, the Opposition mysteriously found 1000 points once I had occupied the base which I could only offset by getting all four of my tanks close to the target waypoint. That seemed a little weird given that I had destroyed every tank I had seen and that all four of my tanks were close to the Galaxy ships. At some points, the game stutters for about 3 seconds and then recovers fine. On the first level it continued at regular intervals until I finished off the last enemy tank. This can happen when a tank just comes into view or if I have a tank going nuts somewhere trying to follow my orders. I don't know if there is an issue with the AI soaking CPU time. I've had a number of crashes (including one right at the end of Treachery when I had wiped out all the enemy tanks without losing one of mine :-( ). Because the SDL parachute deploys, I don't have a lot of information about the crash. I can try and attach a debugger but is there a crash log I can send in? How should bug reports be handled? So - I've enjoyed this so far. The crashes are annoying and I'd like to see them fixed (and I'm happy to help track them down). I'd also prefer that levels with clear end points should end once those objectives are acheived rather than requiring the wait for the timeout. Cheers, Toby Haynes

Received the email about 10 minutes ago. Downloading as I type... I'm getting about 120kbytes/sec so it'll be a little while.

Now - would appear to be the case. Mine arrived while I was playing the demo... 9:49PM EST. Enjoy!

So far so good. The sticky input fix seems to be working nicely. Linux Ubuntu AMD64 Dapper Drake/NVidia GeForce 6800GT

My mail program will be worn out if I keep checking it this often for the announcement....

I don't think that the tree shadow has to accurately represent every leaf. A darker area under each tree at an appropiate point for the sun would help the current visuals a lot. I know that these shadows would then need to be adjusted if someone dropped a few trees with a Hurricane As cool breeze points out, some shadow is better than no shadow.

Maybe I've missed this in the Public test manual. Is there a way to select which direction the tank faces on deployment? It seems that the tank always faces North and that can be a significant problem if you have a bunch of enemy tanks to the south Cheers, Toby Haynes

I've been really getting into this game recently, having watched the Demeter engine for years waiting for someone to really use it The shadows from vehicles are a little bit texelated . Without increasing the resolution of the shadow bitmap, just applying that texture with some blur or filtering to smooth out the edges would make a huge difference to the realism of the shadows. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I'll add the bugs I've experienced (I've not played much prior to 0.9.91 though so these may be long standing issues) Bug 1: The Dropship sometimes flips the Mercury CMD over backwards immediately on drop off, causing immense annoyance... Bug 2: Trees don't have shadows (everything else does) Bug 3: Choose an indirect support vehicle. Start firing using the mini-map. Request retrieval while the mini-map is still up and leave the mini-map up while being collected. Drop a new indirect support vehicle and bring up the mini-map and discover that you can't fire. Switch the mini-map off and select a target in the line of sight and you can fire again. Firing via the minimap then works.