EE version 0.173 Final (no more stuffs) - Page 20

EE version 0.173 Final (no more stuffs)

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Peet
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Post by Peet »

Yay for explosm.
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knorke
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Post by knorke »

whats the url of this other ee-forum again?
It should be in the startpost or something...
chlue
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Post by chlue »

the other forum is found @ xxx

EDIT URL removed
Last edited by chlue on 18 Feb 2007, 23:15, edited 1 time in total.
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Forboding Angel
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Post by Forboding Angel »

chlue, please edit out your post.

That is a private forum by invitation only.
j5mello
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Post by j5mello »

Forb its not invitation only...

...its more like an exclusive club that u can get into but can only stay if the owner (Smoth) lets you.

The main thing is if you've pissed off smoth in the past for one reason or another, chances are, u'll get axed the moment u join. However if u not an idiot and helpfully contribute to discussions you'll be welcomed to stay.
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knorke
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Post by knorke »

chlue, please edit out your post.
That is a private forum by invitation only.
wtf? :?
if thats true it tells alot about the mod team (or modder).
explains why nobody is listening to input or all the players who can not tell the units apart because the small details on the model+texture look like noise when zoomed out.

but the problem "omg all my powersuppy died in the same second, give builders e-storage!" is worth a long response.
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Forboding Angel
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Post by Forboding Angel »

if you had bothered to read any of the posts in the EE forum there you would find that many things get discussed, even the ideas we don't necessarily care for.

The simple truth is that it was a design decision from the very beginning not to give E storage to builders (exception the commander of course). But even though many of us didn't like the thought, it did go through some discussion.

Thing is, it helps make resource destruction a very worthwile proposition. You would have to be an idiot to pile all of your energy structures right next to each other. For the same reason you wouldn't put fusions next to one another in BA. It's just stupid and idiotic.

The thing is, if you ever bothered to read the EE storyline, you would realize that everything fits, including resource destruction.

Let me ask you this, by the same token should fang also give the builders.1 metal income so you can come back? Sorry to burst your bubble, but comebacks from near death are not a thing in EE. As in the storyline, when you lose you lost. Period.

EE gameplay moves MUCH faster than BA. No matter if you did try to come back you would be pummeled immediately. In EE, when you've lost, you've lost. Period.

TA has a completely different storyline and the gameplay adheres to that storyline. Is every other rts game supposed to adhere to that story as well?

As far as unit differentiation...
In EE you are supposed to control and command your units As a GROUP. There is no real need for you to know exactly what units you have selected. Assuming your build orders for the factory don't completely suck you shouldn't have a problem.

Here is a build order for URC and one for GD that will serve you well.

6 cannon tanks
1 ecm tank
6 missle tanks
2 laser tanks
1- 2 AA tanks
3 ion cannon tanks.

For URC:

6 plasma
1 ecm
6 rocket
2 flamers
1-2 sams


All those units together form a very good group, and will be able to take on nearly anything and have an answer for it.

If you're going to play EE you are going to have to accept that it is a completely different playing style from TA.

Geez, I'm getting tired of repeating myself...
chlue
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Post by chlue »

Forboding Angel wrote:chlue, please edit out your post.

That is a private forum by invitation only.
Ok I removed the link, but to be honest i don't thing this is the right way.
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knorke
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Post by knorke »

dude..where did I say I want builders to have storage/produce metal or make it even for damaged players to come back?
I just wondered why this was discussed so much while more important problems are ignored.
Lose economy = lose game is the same in every RTS. That is one reason why you expand in every RTS. Both is good gameplay.

I did not ask for help what to build and I know that EE is suppossed to focus more on macro than on micro. Like most players do I guess.
But there are often situations where it does make a difference if you have 5 lasertanks + 1 cannon or some random mix.

Its just annoying, every time someone says (for example) the units look too similiar the answer is "omg for the thousand times, make group of tanks. lol."
But as it seems, this is a huge problem to many players.

All those units together form a very good group, and will be able to take on nearly anything and have an answer for it.
So why not just replace all units with one unit that is useful for every task?
If you are just commanding blobs of units anyway, it will not matter...
And even if the units are more easily to tell apart, you could still group them, so no problem there.

I do not say that the units/buildings are ugly. Most look very nice.
But when you zoom out to a standard level (you want to see at least the range of your main-units onscreen, right?) the nice details and textures are transformed to..."random pixel noise."
URC has it a bit worse I think, maybe because of the little legs.
It is the same when you zoom in very close to some small picture with your favorite graphic software.

It is similiar with the build-pics.
If you do not know, it is IMPOSSIBLE to tell the difference of say, an antiair-intercepter helicopter and a groundattack helicopter.

I could learn to remember which picture belong to which unit as I do with the hotkeys for Broodwar or ZeroHour, but it is annoying to try all the pictures to finally find the right unit via the tooltip.
Problem: M = Marine, V = Science Vessel makes some sense.
Topleft corner = flak uhm, not really a system there.

Maybe that is a little exaggerated but I hope you get the idea. Is it really so hard to make some clear buildpics?
Someone wrote something like "omg TA buildpictures look all different, thats stupid even the background is stupid."
Well..buildicons are suppossed to be different. And to me different backgrounds make sense. (arty on a hill, amphistuff on a beach, antiair with sky visible)
Yes, "use repeat orders": I rarely use those and yet my factory is hardly idle.
I want to have controll over what I spend my ressources for.

Example of good buildicons: C&C Generals:
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/20 ... een013.jpg
Even if you do play Generals for the first time, if a friend tells you to "build some combat jeeps" you know will know where to click. With less than 1sec thinking about it.

blabla.
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Forboding Angel
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Post by Forboding Angel »

:roll:
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knorke
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Post by knorke »

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1v0ry_k1ng
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Post by 1v0ry_k1ng »

if your freind tells you to make combat jeeps he's a crappy freind. maek terrorist!
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Scikar
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Post by Scikar »

Forboding Angel wrote::roll:
You can roll your eyes all you like, that doesn't change the fact he has a very good point. At the end of the day, EE is not as widely played at it deserves to be. It looks much better than BA, it's often more fun to play, and it's also easier to learn the mechanics of it.

But it also has its problems. It's not made very clear that units are intended to be used in groups. There's no readme or anything included with the mod, and the wiki page makes no mention of it.

Just for one second ignore the fact that there's been a lot of hard work put into the models, textures and buildpics. They look absolutely fantastic, that much is certain. But they are not easy to pick up. Yelling and screaming "PLAY A BIT AND LEARN THE BUILDPICS" is pointless, you're barking up the wrong tree. I already know what the buildpics are now. But it took me longer to figure them out than it should have. I am patient. That is why I am still here. Most BA players are not even patient enough to wait for their early economy, so they play SpeedMetal. Hence, the EE population is very low.

I really, really enjoy this mod, and I want to be able to play it all the time. But it is very newbie unfriendly, and it shows. If you want to be elitist and keep it that way, fair enough. It's not my mod, and it's not my place to tell you how to run it. But I would still like to see it succeed, so I offer my opinion of what I perceive to be a large stumbling block in the way of new players.
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Zoombie
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Post by Zoombie »

Is it a bad sign that the first thing I thought was, "Then most of the BA player base are morons?"

No, really! It took me a single game with Forb to learn how to play EE. Maybe it's because I have an attention span of less than five seconds, maybe it's because I had Forb helping me, or maybe it's because I had half a brain...but I learned most of EE in a ten, twenty minutes tops, session. Most commercial video games have a half hour long tutorial with an annoying voice over.

Now, it's true that not everyone had Forb helping them, but there are some very helpful tooltips that appear at the bottom left corner of the screen. If someone can't puzzle out that a "Medium Shotgun Mech" is a medium strength mech equipped with a shot gun, then how have they figured out how to turn on and operate their own computer? If someone dosn't know that a "ECM Mech" projects radar interference, or that a "Plasma Mech" is a mech that fires plasma, or that an "Artillery mech" is a mech that is equipped with artillery...then they need help in more important than how to play a video game.


And if anyone needs help to learn the game, nothing is stopping them from asking someone. Anyone with [EE] in front of their names in the lobby would be glad to help you puzzle out anything about EE. But are you sure there isn't a unit guild in the wiki? If there isn't, I'll look into making one.
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Argh
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Post by Argh »

I doubt if a guide would help. What really needs to get done is that somebody should make a demo replay, with text, to familiarize people with the mod.

As for the whole visual-familiarity thing... I think that's a must. I don't know why Fang keeps resisting on this, just to vaguely keep the look of a game (the old Earth series) that involved very graphically-boring units that just had different graphically-boring parts slapped onto themselves. The gameplay of the Earth series was interesting, but the graphics... meh. Not worth copying. Even the later series is hardly inspired stuff.

IRL, there are lots of examples of very similar "units" that look almost the same. From 1000 feet in the air (typical Spring zoom distance) one APC looks very similar to another. That's why, IRL, the military often does very deliberate things to make units easy to identify. They've tried everything from infrared beacons to radio signals to distinctive paint schemes to deliberately un-functional cosmetic changes, to make vehicles more visually distinctive.

It would be pretty darn easy to do so in E&E. You could use Flare code to display, for example, a semi-transparent alpha-channel symbol that was easy to identify, but (unlike an icon) didn't obscure the unit. Or just change the icon parameters so that they show up at a lower level of zoom- it's very easy to do (I'm making heavy use of custom icons in my current project, after baby steps in NB).

But, since this is a fantasy, not a real-world scenario, there's very little excuse for not making unique and interesting designs for the units to make them visually distinctive. It's not all that hard- just change the upper torsos for the mechs (since that's what we're looking at), change the sillouette of the turrets of tanks, etc. There's really no reason not to do this kind of thing, when you're not really worrying about realism anyhow. E&E has always been trying to be more hardcore than XTA, which is kind've amusing since XTA is deliberately obtuse and hard to get into, but it could very well be a better mod than BA if it had a straightforward learning curve and placed more emphasis on serving players' needs above some arbitrary conceptual requirements. It's just not that hard to distort a few polygons on a .3DO unit and make it look quite a bit different- it's not like you're modeling a whole new thing and then skinning it. Take advantage of that flexibility, and quit yelling at your players- they've been giving you this feedback over and over again since the mod was released, and that's a pretty good sign that they're onto something, not that they're stupid and should go back to BA :roll:

OTA (and thus, BA), if nothing else, had a visually distinctive unit mix that really helped players see what was going on, and who was doing what, very easily and distinctively. They didn't do that to serve their fluff- OTA hardly had any fluff when it was released. So they were making things look visually distinct to serve gameplay, not some storyline. And it works. While I have a lot of aesthetic issues with the way the art for OTA was designed, it was extremely distinctive, and players could build a unit, play with it, and then go (mentally)- "Zipper. Fast guy. Thin. Dark." and have a mental association that brought everything together. E&E has stuff like Medium Shotgun Mechs that, in the overhead view that most of us use, look very much like every other Medium Mech. I have to actually think for a second to process what I'm looking at- and this eats up micro-time. It's all well and good that mixed-arms is key to victory, and great in theory that you can "just build some of everything, put in line, and you're fine"... but any decent player of RTS games knows that that simply isn't so. You're going to want to dance with your long-range stuff, micro your short-range heavies to increase the damage you're trading, etc.... and in a game that's as heavily fixated on slippery-slope as E&E is, the very first battles are almost certainly decisive, between players who know what they're doing. Not giving players visual representations that do not require conscious thought to manipulate during combat doesn't serve anybody very well- it was a crappy idea in Earth, and it doesn't get any better with repetition.
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Zoombie
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Post by Zoombie »

Aaaaaaand I've finished parts of the wiki for EE that were lacking. That is: I've written up Level 1 air and Level 1 ground as well as Level 2 ground for GD.

And I've added in some other fun tactical tips...hidden as back story and fluff. You can skip that and just read the unity things.

I'm going to start working on the rest of GD later. But my 'wikiskillz' are a bit...bad, so I only know the basics of editing. If someone could show me how to add in build pics, then provide build pics, then I'd be very greatfull!

And if you notice any annoying spelling/grammer errors, please fix them. I'm terrible with those.
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Fanger
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Post by Fanger »

Yeah Ill go mull this over..

@argh could you be a little less condesending.. I know you hate me and all think my work is hack job bullshit.. but you know..
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Zoombie
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Post by Zoombie »

Done with both Level 1 and Level 2 branches of the GD...


Shit! I forgot the navy. DAMN IT!


Oh well. I'm still going to sleep.

Wait, with the navy, I'll need to add in a third character to my EE story thingy...A navy character. Great.
tombom
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Post by tombom »

I think the best buildpics/models are the turrets because they make it obvious what weapon it has, which is pretty much all you need to know about a unit.

Also I have possibly the most important question that will ever be asked in this thread: who the hell added emmanuel as a beta tester on the wiki page? Actually, as it's been there since the start, why isn't he listed on the first page? >:(
SeanHeron
Engines Of War Developer
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Post by SeanHeron »

Too see how to link in images, just have a look at the main E&E pages source, theres some pics there :D. To upload files, theres a little line "upload file" under special pages at the very bottom right. I would have uploaded some buildpics, however the software asks if what I am uploading is compatible with the spring licence (i.e. has the copyright holder given me permission to upload his work), so I wanted to ask Fang if he´s OK with that first.
(You can get the ingame buildpics in the mod/unitpics :D)
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