Hot off the presses!!

[Neuralize]

Minispring ranges worked perfectly for me. Only two things left to make it perfect would be fixing the line building flaw, and scaling the particles/laser/smoke down a little.

Edit note: I've discovered how to use the terrain types on my own with experimentation, pretty cool stuff.

[Neuralize]

Double post, hurray. Anyways, I miss my hotly pressed versions of Spring. Buggi, where are you? >.> <.<

[FLOZi]

Minispring ranges worked perfectly for me. Only two things left to make it perfect would be fixing the line building flaw, and scaling the particles/laser/smoke down a little.

Edit note: I've discovered how to use the terrain types on my own with experimentation, pretty cool stuff.

I still say they are wrong! (and testing several weapons confirms it)
Although there are now similar behavioural problems in Spring, did you put your code changes in your build of Spring as well as miniSpring, Buggi?

Yes, particles do seem huge.

I have to say I preffered the old-style smoke, too.

BTW: does anyone happen to have buggi build 4 stashed away?

[Buggi]

LMAO!!!

My old builds becoming hot commidites now? @_@;;

I'm here all. Working hard to pay bills as always. I'm not sure what's going on with weapons. Odd side effect. Not much has changed with the SY code to warrant a new build as of yet. The last build destroyed map compatibility which really pissed me off.

There's no clear purpose or direction with SY, no set goals or timeline with their work. It's near impossible to work around a non-existant schedule. Custom unit format? Coming, but who knows when. New map format? Here, but is it final? Why is it they are working on such huge items when there are so many smaller items to attend to and optimize before moving on?

FULL COB support, FULL FBI support, better texture support, PNG unitpics to FINALLY rid ourselves of the TA Palette. Weapon damage support, etc.

Then move on to mod support as mods are useless without the above features. Then maps, then optimize what we have, then move on to huge items. Now instead of working on a unit-editor pipeline I have to hammer out the new map format support for SharpMap. ARGH!!

*twitches*

-Buggi

[AF]

If they change the small things, those changes may then be thrown out as the big things rewrite the entire code. They are dealing with the code as they see fit, and I am sure that the final structure of the TASpring code at version 0.99 will be very different from that which we see today.

Also a number of people go on holiday this time of year.....

[Gnomre]

Buggi: How possible would it be to take the bmp loading code from elsewhere in the game (cursors and textures, off the top of my head) and apply it to unitpics as well? Or would that be too resource intensive in game, which is why you want PNG?

[Buggi]

I would assume possible. But why use BMP? I suppose you could...

For code, not sure. They display in the GUI code, not the engine, so there's a whole new mess of code to sift through in order for it to be fully implimented. I'm just one d00d, I can't work on the map maker, unit editor, minispring AND work on the core features.

Why couldn't SY just use the opensource Ogre engine and apply TA specific stuff to it? All questions for the next Oracle I see.

I'm working on SharpMap right now, no word on its ETA right now.

-Buggi

[Yeha]

I added the option to have a "BuildPic=file" tag in the fbi file so the buildpic can be any of the suported formats (pcx, bmp, jpg and dds for now).

[Gnomre]

Buggi: I just said bmp because the engine obviously already can handle them. But it looks like Yeha's already got that area covered, so no worries :)

[Buggi]

Go Yeha! Is that checked in? <.<

Now in working with the Map Conversion routines it seems to me it won't save all that much space sharing tiles among maps. The IO hit on pulling tiles from different files will be pretty huge compared to loading the tiles from one file when loaded. Plus the tiles are so small, it'll hardly make a difference.

Where it WILL make a difference is in the situation where someone releases a series of maps of the same type. The best example would be the flood of metal maps. Now I can see these using a few hundred different tiles, these can be shared among many metal maps using the same style with different sizes and heights.

Not sure how much it'll save on unique maps or special maps. Because you have to have all other shared tile files before you will see the map properly. Imagine downloading a map that needs 5 other maps' files before it'll work.

-Buggi

[FLOZi]

Don't let it get to you buggi, so long as progress is being made somewhere atleast we aren't going backwards.

Only I wouldnt mind it as minispring build 4 worked very much to myliking

What COB and FBI support is missing?

And you didn't answer my question, did you implement the weapon changes in buggi build 7 spring.exe as well?

[Buggi]

What weapon changes are you specifically talking about?

I post what's changed with the build announcement.

*scurries back to coding*

-Buggi

[FLOZi]

The velocity/acceleration tweaks introduced in build 5 (though you only mentioned them in build 6 )

You know, the ones i perpetually moan about.

I'm a little unsure, particularly as you added the custom models but not the different smoke effects:

[Neuralize]

I'm here all. Working hard to pay bills as always. I'm not sure what's going on with weapons. Odd side effect. Not much has changed with the SY code to warrant a new build as of yet. The last build destroyed map compatibility which really pissed me off.

There's no clear purpose or direction with SY, no set goals or timeline with their work. It's near impossible to work around a non-existant schedule. Custom unit format? Coming, but who knows when. New map format? Here, but is it final? Why is it they are working on such huge items when there are so many smaller items to attend to and optimize before moving on?

Buggi, what exactly is your day job? :D (And do you have a paypal/amazon.com donations account?)

Anyway, I believe the new features that the new map format adds make it worth breaking all of the old maps, plus, it will force everyone to reduce file sizes with the sdz format. I've already used them to great effect in a few of my own maps.

However, I would much rather have a frontend than a new map format, or even a new unit format. I would go on to describe features of such a frontend, however, as I'm not going to code them myself, or even attempt due to having no clue how to get the code set up to compile correctly under 2005 .net.

And about the new hotly pressed version, I believe recent features, such as having the maps folder read by the file system's tree and other things like cob file modifications are worth having a new build compiled.

[Buggi]

The velocity/acceleration tweaks introduced in build 5 (though you only mentioned them in build 6 )

Let me be clear on the above. This formula was ALWAYS in the code. It was only when I halved the velocities of the weapons does it now have an effect on the range.

Also, it wasn't vel/acc, it was range/vel. Which had the weird effect of making missiles / projectiles fall out of the sky to early. I was already halving the range, so when I finally halved the velocity it balanced the equation to what it should be, but the range should be the Time-To-Live (TTL) anyway, not sure why they used division. As setting the TTL = range would also eliminate the issue of being able to "overfire" when in FPS mode. Or not, I'm rambling. @_@;;

-Buggi

[FLOZi]

You still didnt clarify on if you implemented the changes in spring.exe!

(And yes, I am still going to claim it didn't need altering.)

[Buggi]

You still didnt clarify on if you implemented the changes in spring.exe!

(And yes, I am still going to claim it didn't need altering.)

I don't alter spring.exe at all, only SY changes are in there.

So you half the sizes of the units, you half speed of units, you half the size of their projectiles but you don't think you should half the velocity at which they travel?

That's like saying a .22 bullet goes as fast and as far as a .50 calibre bullet.

-Buggi

[SJ]

If you half the speed of the projectiles you will cut their range to 1/4th unless you also halves the gravity ...

[Buggi]

Oy, I didn't think about gravity... I guess I could half gravity in MiniSpring... what other effects would that have... particles wouldn't act like the map-maker intended...

Oh, to all, I'm about 70% done with the SharpMap conversion to the new format and custom features are about 10% done. I'll release a new beta when the new format is in and continue working on features.

Geovents will be placed via the features placement function, this will be a good test of the system before I get them fully implimented. You will be able to save out the features into a custom file and load them if you need them again.

Not sure yet on converting existing maps to the new format, there's a lot in the old format that is heavily embeded in ways I can't imagine (tiles).

Anyway, back to work..

-Buggi

[munch]

If you half the speed of the projectiles you will cut their range to 1/4th unless you also halves the gravity ...

No that's not correct. Range is linearly depenent on muzzle velocity (assuming flat earth etc.). The correct thing to do is to reduce the muzzle velocity in the same proportion that the unit sizes have been reduced.

LOL except of course as we all know a lot of them are artificially limited to a set max range, instead of just following the laws of physics. (I'm assuming max range has already been reduced - I haven't read most of this thread apologies if this has already been stated)

I still don't get why we can't just set min and max barrel angles for ballistic units, instead of specifying an explicit max range - there doesn't seem much point in allowing map makers to specify gravity otherwise.

Just my tuppence.

Munch