Toby Haynes

Good thing that the Curling season has just finished then I'll try and work out why the Dragon's Teeth are invulnerable - could be that StructuralPoints thingy. I also think they should be about 60% of their current size, which means that the inventory would need to be doubled. And I will pull the Icarus off the shelf again and try to work out what I've screwed up...

I've just given it a spin and so far, it's a big thumbs up. Bot AI seems to be much improved - bots group together, using EWV to provide sensor cover. Similarly, bots now use all the weapons on a vehicle which gave me a real shock when I was strafed with 20mmAP by a Thor H. Bots also seem to adopt hull down positions with far more regularity - along with sensor cover, this makes them far more dangerous. I think the bots need to be more aggressive in attempting to take objectives but from what I see here, things should be a little more interesting. I watched a couple of Thor H's slug it out, switching between 120mm and 20mm to maximise fire rate, which was nice to see. The tacmap has been upgraded too. A couple of new features - hover the mouse over a unit to get a pop-up menu. In addition. the pop-up and team menus now show the amount of ammo left in the tank currently being examined which is a HUGE PLUS! Thank you! I gave the game a spin on Delta Pavonis and in standalone. It seems stable enough but only Bloody Sunday will tell for sure. I don't know if the suspension has been tweaked again - I've been playing too much Creature Zoo 4 to be certain - but it feels a little more solid. Could just be dreaming ... Anyway, nice to see a new release. Thanks Clay and all!

Yes - it reverts your base system shell to bash, which understands things like pushd (push directory onto stack). dash is a slimmer, faster shell but is strictly a minimal shell. Ideally, the Linux version of Dropteam should actually have #! /bin/bash in the top script but developers have got so used to /bin/sh == /bin/bash it's less painful to just link sh back to bash. Cheers, Toby Haynes

I actually wonder if it's due to the code added to stop the Galaxy weapons deploying on entry (until it lands).

Thats a change that was made for Ubuntu Edgy - the default shell is no longer bash - it's dash. You can change it back as superuser fairly easily (standard warnings about messing things up...). This will slow down your boot-up marginally, but will allow more things to work. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">cd /bin sudo mv sh sh-old sudo ln -s bash sh</pre>

Great stuff Poesel. On the Thor Hm's - I've used them for great effect, partly to disorient an attacking enemy. Against the faster light vehicles they can be devastating. Landing one on the top of a Thor turret is also sufficient to blow the turret. I seem to be one of the few people who deploys ICs - I like to use them in threes or fours, partly because they can be used as long-distance dropship killers. CZ only has 6-a-side which cramps the usage of IC a little as a result.

I'd say that the rifle is too powerful as it stands. Or to put it another way, I got sniped repeatedly in all sorts of vehicles by someone who shall remain nameless who was hiding amongst the trees. I'd say that the right balance is a rear-armour kill on the Apollo at 1km or less. Right now it feels like it rips my frontal Apollo armour apart too.

You're welcome. btw - Nexus6 is my handle Or maybe you meant to thank me twice Cheers, Toby Haynes

Try a downloader which guarantees to get the whole file. I use the command-line "wget" utility on Linux for large downloads - there is a Windows port at WGet for Windows There must be others out there too.

Now that is bizarre. I just downloaded it to check that it hadn't got truncated during upload. I can unpack it fine - I don't know if we can persuade someone else to try unpacking it to see if this is a wider problem.. In the meantime Bane, here's the file size on my system and the MD5 checksum for it. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">toby@nexus:~/Downloads$ ls -l TheDam-v1.1.1.zip -rw-r--r-- 1 toby toby 5911820 2007-03-24 17:14 TheDam-v1.1.1.zip toby@nexus:~/Downloads$ md5sum TheDam-v1.1.1.zip bbf6d35062efff2756451df766c1616e TheDam-v1.1.1.zip</pre>

Because you asked so nicely ... The Dam version 1.1.1 as a zipfile

OKay - I had the wrong end of the stick. I'd thought you were asking about generating the textures, whereas you are really after managing the textures from a DT perspective. I'm guessing here - I think it all boils down to prefixes - specifically Arctic, Woodland and Desert. If I peer into the data directory, I note that MBTChassis0.cob does NOT reference ArcticMBTChassis0.png - it simply references MBTChassis0.png. </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ grep MBTChassis0.png MBTChassis0.cob Binary file MBTChassis0.cob matches toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ grep ArcticMBTChassis0.png MBTChassis0.cob toby@nexus:/usr/local/games/DropTeam/data$ </pre>

Thanks Toby! Ill give it a shot. Although, I'm using Windoze XP right now, so I can't use .tar files. (Damn I miss my Ubuntu Linux!) can I get TheDam in .Zip form? What I mean is.,can I get it in Windoze format?

All my scenarios are available at Nexus scenarios Each one should be unpacked into the "data" directory inside your DropTeam install. That will give you the new scenarios. Note that some replace existing scenarios and weird stuff may happen if you aren't in sync with the server. I recommend only installing TheDam-v1.1.1.tar.gz, as that is not yet part of the main release. Creature_Zoo includes some extra .scenario files. These can be placed in the "data" directory as well for general use.

Yes - but you can have many materials. Just switch the material over for an object to another Camo texture and re-render to a fresh UV image.

I'll try and come up with something flat-ish and rubble-ish, so it can be driven over. Ah. No. Um. Definitely not. About the height of a Thor would be fine... I'll have a fiddle with the scale at some point - I'm away for much of the next two days so it will be next week before I get that sorted.

I've been using the basic camo images as a material in Blender. That material is then mapped onto the object and the resulting texture is baked out to the final UV texture map. The results are believably consistent with the original vehicles

Fabulous! Thank you so much, Clay! I'll have to study the various files and see what I can learn too.

Are you going to restrict access to upload attachments to certain people (like me? ) to avoid getting Spammed? Just a thought. Thanks for getting the image uploads arranged. I may start transferring my googlepages image set over to this wiki, just in case my beta account ceases to exist.

You could have an interplanetary or moon/planet near-miss event suck much of the atmosphere off a rocky planet surface. G around 1.4 and Atmos around 0.2 is probably physically reasonable. Of course, you could design the level to reflect a major asteroid collision.

Aha. Then may I recommend: Either give the runLinuxInstall script executable permissions: </font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">chmod +x ./runLinuxInstall ./runLinuxInstall</pre>

Clay - remember this? Did you ever get anywhere making this deployable?

Aha - spotted you the other day but didn't recognise your new persona Sneaky!

Welcome to the Ubuntu universe. It's a large friendly place - if you need some help, I may be able to offer some pointers, having run Ubuntu for the last couple of years.

You are absolutely right on our setup. The SE base is easy to fortify, not least because the rocks around the base allow turrets to be placed in critical positions. Another benefit is that the flag is in a gully, not on a hill, allowing it to be surrounded with turrets and mines which can't be seen until you are right on top of them. The most effective defence I've found for the NW flag is to dig it in with cutters during the deployment phase, slowing down the flying paladin and shrike drivers and allowing time for the bots (turrets and tanks) to pick them off. Mines can be used to channel vehicles into certain lanes, and SAM units can force the attacker to drop cutters at great distance from the flag, again allowing time for the bots to get them before they engage. If I was going to pick on one mistake the NW folks made, it was putting the mines too far out from the flag to be defended. I was able to sneak in with a cutter and remove five or six mine drops on the western flank, leaving a fast path for me to drive through at 80km/h straight to the flag pickup.