P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Moderators: Moderators, Content Developer
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Talk to us about it, you want criticism at the design stage not afterwards or youll just end up with wasted time and vast annoyance
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Seems pure is also in the moddb newsletter:)
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
It's all over the Internet, basically. Bluesnews, Gamershell, a lot of places that I can't read the language- Italy, some place in Japan, Portugal, Spain.
@AF: Suffice it to say that:
1. I'm going to consolidate everything down some, reducing the size by quite a bit. For example, since I can actually control the size of buttons, since most people won't want to screw around with that, I'm re-imagining that whole area of the interface. It'd be really nice, if I could figure out how to separate factory buttons from other commands, but I haven't gotten around to that. But in the short term, I'm planning to make all of the buttons square, and much smaller, so that they're taking up less screen real-estate and are not such a giant hog on the screen, especially at larger sizes.
2. Now that the "Units selected" string is no longer displayed (thanks, imbazcek), I can make the buttons be wherever I want, while having a convenient place to put the Help O' Matic dialog. I'll just dump the resource-sharing stuff, which was pretty useless anyhow, and put that stuff on the right, make the Tooltip area a bit smaller (although I have to be careful about readability at low rez), and I'll shrink Help O' Matic, from 256/512 to 256 / 256 at a screen rez of 1600/1200, while raising the size of the text (to improve readability at "tween" resolutions).
All of this should result in a much smaller total UI, consolidated down on the bottom of the screen. To further consolidate it, I think that I'll look at the number of commands available for units, and maybe pare it down a bit. I mean... why do we bother having a "Move" button, when that's something you can do with a mouse, either in the main play area or the Minimap?
I suspect that if I go through that stuff fairly ruthlessly, we'll find that there's a lot less wasted stuff in the buttons... which in turn means I can shrink it down, ideally, to maybe 4 / 4 buttons max, other than factories. It'd be darn nice if there was some simple method of making a "show available units" button that simply displayed the buttons for what can be built, ala Dawn of War, but I dunno a way to do that yet, without resorting to an all-custom UI.
And no, I don't want a THIS-style interface- it was going in the right direction, but didn't send standard commands, and thus was a very funky interface concept, imo, which I'm not interested in using- it has to act and feel like the Spring standard UI, in terms of the list of things that can be built, the commands that are issued to the building Unit, etc.
At any rate, all of the above is theoretical musing about a possible set of end-goals. Rome wasn't built in a day, and I don't really expect all of the pieces of this puzzle to arrive at the same time, either- the intermediate steps of cutting down the size of the UI a bit, swapping the relative positions of the buttons and Help O' Matic, etc., should be good enough for RC4.
@AF: Suffice it to say that:
1. I'm going to consolidate everything down some, reducing the size by quite a bit. For example, since I can actually control the size of buttons, since most people won't want to screw around with that, I'm re-imagining that whole area of the interface. It'd be really nice, if I could figure out how to separate factory buttons from other commands, but I haven't gotten around to that. But in the short term, I'm planning to make all of the buttons square, and much smaller, so that they're taking up less screen real-estate and are not such a giant hog on the screen, especially at larger sizes.
2. Now that the "Units selected" string is no longer displayed (thanks, imbazcek), I can make the buttons be wherever I want, while having a convenient place to put the Help O' Matic dialog. I'll just dump the resource-sharing stuff, which was pretty useless anyhow, and put that stuff on the right, make the Tooltip area a bit smaller (although I have to be careful about readability at low rez), and I'll shrink Help O' Matic, from 256/512 to 256 / 256 at a screen rez of 1600/1200, while raising the size of the text (to improve readability at "tween" resolutions).
All of this should result in a much smaller total UI, consolidated down on the bottom of the screen. To further consolidate it, I think that I'll look at the number of commands available for units, and maybe pare it down a bit. I mean... why do we bother having a "Move" button, when that's something you can do with a mouse, either in the main play area or the Minimap?
I suspect that if I go through that stuff fairly ruthlessly, we'll find that there's a lot less wasted stuff in the buttons... which in turn means I can shrink it down, ideally, to maybe 4 / 4 buttons max, other than factories. It'd be darn nice if there was some simple method of making a "show available units" button that simply displayed the buttons for what can be built, ala Dawn of War, but I dunno a way to do that yet, without resorting to an all-custom UI.
And no, I don't want a THIS-style interface- it was going in the right direction, but didn't send standard commands, and thus was a very funky interface concept, imo, which I'm not interested in using- it has to act and feel like the Spring standard UI, in terms of the list of things that can be built, the commands that are issued to the building Unit, etc.
At any rate, all of the above is theoretical musing about a possible set of end-goals. Rome wasn't built in a day, and I don't really expect all of the pieces of this puzzle to arrive at the same time, either- the intermediate steps of cutting down the size of the UI a bit, swapping the relative positions of the buttons and Help O' Matic, etc., should be good enough for RC4.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
A quick sketch would be helpful but its sounding good, just remember GUI is all about feedback and designing them is the most feedback intensive part of game building, since no feedback means utter failure to deliver which has a knock on impact on every aspect of the game.
In the meantime heres a tidbit of gold dust:
Commands are positive integers, but construction commands are negative.
So say you want to build a mex which has a unitdef ID of 5, your command ID would be -5
In the meantime heres a tidbit of gold dust:
Commands are positive integers, but construction commands are negative.
So say you want to build a mex which has a unitdef ID of 5, your command ID would be -5
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Yes, that bit of "gold dust" might be very handy. Dunno yet, messing with the command buttons has, thus far, been annoyingly difficult.
Meanwhile, today I'm trying to work on the World Builder Editor. I'm working on a real-time heightmap editor function today, for storage / retrieval of changes to the heightmap. Won't really "compete" with that thing in the Mapping Forum, which looks very promising, because this is probably only going to be used for post-work- fixing small flaws, basically.
Meanwhile, today I'm trying to work on the World Builder Editor. I'm working on a real-time heightmap editor function today, for storage / retrieval of changes to the heightmap. Won't really "compete" with that thing in the Mapping Forum, which looks very promising, because this is probably only going to be used for post-work- fixing small flaws, basically.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
What happens when an AI reads the heightmap and does work in the initialisation then worldbuilder scripts modify the heightmap in the first frame?
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
A. It's not happening on the first frame, but during GameStart().
B. I don't anticipate people wanting to do major map modification this way. I think that the tools being developed for editing maps are a more appropriate environment (unless we someday have a fast way to do splatting via Lua- maybe I should go look at LUPS and talk to jK about that, it'd be interesting to have a SMF format map that had a one-color base and a lot of vertex-shader splats making the texture, imo, although I suspect it'd be too slow to be practical). I see this as a way to do minor final tweaking, basically, not as a full-fledged suite, but to correct minor problems.
B. I don't anticipate people wanting to do major map modification this way. I think that the tools being developed for editing maps are a more appropriate environment (unless we someday have a fast way to do splatting via Lua- maybe I should go look at LUPS and talk to jK about that, it'd be interesting to have a SMF format map that had a one-color base and a lot of vertex-shader splats making the texture, imo, although I suspect it'd be too slow to be practical). I see this as a way to do minor final tweaking, basically, not as a full-fledged suite, but to correct minor problems.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Just as an FYI, I got RC3 running under Spring 0.76b2 (the latest released version that is). For a number of reason I tried it that way and it actually was fully playable. I saved the extracted PURE.sdz (renamed into 'PURE RC3.sdz' to not overwrite the P.U.R.E 0.55 SDZ file) and the wordbuilder.sdz files under my mods directory and then just lanched it using the SpringLobby applicaion as usual.
I did not test it thoroughly (lack of time) but I managed to play once as Resistance and once as Overmind.
The overmind worked more or less exactly like in P.U.R.E 0.55 which was nice. Only thing I did notice was that the build towers had no repeat button, so either they will ALWAYS repeat their repair command (hope so) or NEVER repeat it (which would make them far less easy to abuse in creative ways
). Which way it is I have not had time to test, but eventually I will.
I liked the resistance, only thing I don't like is that the faction's starting unit cannot build metal extractors, one has to build a vehicle factory first. Then of course, I had to guess and explore some of that faction's capabilities. Did the faction have a air transport? I did not see any, hope that I'm mistaken on that one because if the Resistance have no way to transport units (especially constructors) by air, maps with islands or with terrain having "unreachable" flat areas would give the Overmind a huge advantage.
I really liked the Resistance bomber, it is quite a mighty piece. Also, I found the Resistance vehicle factory quite nice, it has enough armament for not being a trivial target to eliminate, effectively preventing quick "go for the throat" tactics vs the AI player where the AI player's first vehicle factory is destroyed before he manage to create any builder units after which he's toast (or at least in theory, the AI as Resistance were very slow on building ANYTHING on the 'Chocolate Hills' map)
Regarding guessing how things works: probably I have some problems due to the fact that I don't run the right version of Spring (0.76b2 is to old for P.U.R.E 0.8 RC3 to work properly I've been told in this thread) and one of those I suppose is the lack of documentation or unit information in the lower left of the GUI. When I click on a buildable unit button in a factory, I get no text info about what the thing is. But after some tinkering and experimentation, I got a hang of a few things. Then I can imagine there are some other problems caused by the old version of spring, problems I really cannot see due to too little time testing the game or too little knowledge of how the game should behave when working as expected.
Another thing I need to understand (but there are docs to read I suppose) are those funny rotating balls with yellow glowing lights in them, as well as those wierd rotating cubes. The latter reminds me of the movie 'Hellraiser'. And they are everywhere! Scary!
Also I managed to build that big, expensive, ominous-looking "flying globe with a big gun" kind of thing, but I never managed to make it fire a single shot. Perhaps it was not intended to attack ground targets (I really TRIED to make it attack the Resistance vehicle factory but it just circled around it's intended target from a safe distance, pointing it's gun to it... ah, got to read the docs....)
Overall, the little I had time to see was very impressive, so keep up the good work! Maybe this weekend I have time to play some against a human player.
Eventually, I'll find out how to have two instances of Spring installed on a machine, one being the latest release for "normal" play, and one instance is the one I build from SVN sources when I (try to) develop on the game. I'm convinced it is possible, I just don't have the time to invest in making that setup a reality right now.
PS. A sick thing I tried during these two tests games: when things heat up with some spectacular action, I bring down the game speed to 0.3 and view the massive destruction taking place in slow motion.
/DS.
PPS. Regarding screen resolution: as a Linux player, I prefer to play the game not in full screen but in a separate window on my desktop, so the window manager still have control over the Spring RTS window. Given that players might have that option (to avoid full screen) and thus run the game in a window smaller than the screens native resolution, one has yet another incentive to make the game run nicely on 1024x768.
I did not test it thoroughly (lack of time) but I managed to play once as Resistance and once as Overmind.
The overmind worked more or less exactly like in P.U.R.E 0.55 which was nice. Only thing I did notice was that the build towers had no repeat button, so either they will ALWAYS repeat their repair command (hope so) or NEVER repeat it (which would make them far less easy to abuse in creative ways
). Which way it is I have not had time to test, but eventually I will.I liked the resistance, only thing I don't like is that the faction's starting unit cannot build metal extractors, one has to build a vehicle factory first. Then of course, I had to guess and explore some of that faction's capabilities. Did the faction have a air transport? I did not see any, hope that I'm mistaken on that one because if the Resistance have no way to transport units (especially constructors) by air, maps with islands or with terrain having "unreachable" flat areas would give the Overmind a huge advantage.
I really liked the Resistance bomber, it is quite a mighty piece. Also, I found the Resistance vehicle factory quite nice, it has enough armament for not being a trivial target to eliminate, effectively preventing quick "go for the throat" tactics vs the AI player where the AI player's first vehicle factory is destroyed before he manage to create any builder units after which he's toast (or at least in theory, the AI as Resistance were very slow on building ANYTHING on the 'Chocolate Hills' map)
Regarding guessing how things works: probably I have some problems due to the fact that I don't run the right version of Spring (0.76b2 is to old for P.U.R.E 0.8 RC3 to work properly I've been told in this thread) and one of those I suppose is the lack of documentation or unit information in the lower left of the GUI. When I click on a buildable unit button in a factory, I get no text info about what the thing is. But after some tinkering and experimentation, I got a hang of a few things. Then I can imagine there are some other problems caused by the old version of spring, problems I really cannot see due to too little time testing the game or too little knowledge of how the game should behave when working as expected.
Another thing I need to understand (but there are docs to read I suppose) are those funny rotating balls with yellow glowing lights in them, as well as those wierd rotating cubes. The latter reminds me of the movie 'Hellraiser'. And they are everywhere! Scary!
Also I managed to build that big, expensive, ominous-looking "flying globe with a big gun" kind of thing, but I never managed to make it fire a single shot. Perhaps it was not intended to attack ground targets (I really TRIED to make it attack the Resistance vehicle factory but it just circled around it's intended target from a safe distance, pointing it's gun to it... ah, got to read the docs....)Overall, the little I had time to see was very impressive, so keep up the good work! Maybe this weekend I have time to play some against a human player.
Eventually, I'll find out how to have two instances of Spring installed on a machine, one being the latest release for "normal" play, and one instance is the one I build from SVN sources when I (try to) develop on the game. I'm convinced it is possible, I just don't have the time to invest in making that setup a reality right now.
PS. A sick thing I tried during these two tests games: when things heat up with some spectacular action, I bring down the game speed to 0.3 and view the massive destruction taking place in slow motion.
/DS.
PPS. Regarding screen resolution: as a Linux player, I prefer to play the game not in full screen but in a separate window on my desktop, so the window manager still have control over the Spring RTS window. Given that players might have that option (to avoid full screen) and thus run the game in a window smaller than the screens native resolution, one has yet another incentive to make the game run nicely on 1024x768.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
First off, congrats on getting it working in Linux. Glad to know somebody has, who's not a Spring dev.
Secondly... it's pretty much a "duh" that you're missing a lot of major features, if you're not using 0.77b2. More than half of what makes Resistance "tick" is new stuff, same goes for the UI. And the UI helps explain what's going on- for example, those spooky objects are the Materials and Power producers for the Resistance- use your Engineering Teams to Hack them, and you'll have resources in no time.
I'm sorry to say that you're going to need to try and build 0.77b2 to see that stuff, and that means pretty major changes, in terms of what you'll need to do.
Sorry, I'm aware that's a huge amount of work, just to play a stinkin' video game, but there just doesn't seem to be any uniform way to deliver Linux to people as a precompiled installer of some kind, which really sucks.
As for the UI, rest assured, I'm trying to figure out clever ways to shrink everything down a bit without losing any functionality, or making it an unreadable mess. It's a tough challenge, but I think it's doable. Right now, the work on the World Builder Editor takes precedence... I'm planning on some pretty major gameplay changes in the future.
I've just gotten done testing in 0.77b2... and whatdoyaknow, everything still works. Pretty amazing, considering the amount of last-second stuff in the release build.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about using 0.77b2 as the engine build for RC4, given that it's obvious that a number of serious bugs are still being found and fixed, and there may even be a b3 pretty quickly.
On the one hand, I'd like to move P.U.R.E. players to the "mainstream", in terms of Lobby support, etc. On the other hand, I'm not terribly happy about being tied to a static build, when I can see that there are new things in the pipeline that I might want to take advantage of.
Secondly... it's pretty much a "duh" that you're missing a lot of major features, if you're not using 0.77b2. More than half of what makes Resistance "tick" is new stuff, same goes for the UI. And the UI helps explain what's going on- for example, those spooky objects are the Materials and Power producers for the Resistance- use your Engineering Teams to Hack them, and you'll have resources in no time.
I'm sorry to say that you're going to need to try and build 0.77b2 to see that stuff, and that means pretty major changes, in terms of what you'll need to do.
Sorry, I'm aware that's a huge amount of work, just to play a stinkin' video game, but there just doesn't seem to be any uniform way to deliver Linux to people as a precompiled installer of some kind, which really sucks.
As for the UI, rest assured, I'm trying to figure out clever ways to shrink everything down a bit without losing any functionality, or making it an unreadable mess. It's a tough challenge, but I think it's doable. Right now, the work on the World Builder Editor takes precedence... I'm planning on some pretty major gameplay changes in the future.
I've just gotten done testing in 0.77b2... and whatdoyaknow, everything still works. Pretty amazing, considering the amount of last-second stuff in the release build.
I have somewhat mixed feelings about using 0.77b2 as the engine build for RC4, given that it's obvious that a number of serious bugs are still being found and fixed, and there may even be a b3 pretty quickly.
On the one hand, I'd like to move P.U.R.E. players to the "mainstream", in terms of Lobby support, etc. On the other hand, I'm not terribly happy about being tied to a static build, when I can see that there are new things in the pipeline that I might want to take advantage of.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Does that mean Applauncher will be removed for RC4?
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
No, Applauncher will stay. It's nice and it works, and it makes the game feel more professional, imo.
Pxtl, did you read that thing about that variable that's not working, though? It's the only real quibble I have with the .NET 1.X version...
Pxtl, did you read that thing about that variable that's not working, though? It's the only real quibble I have with the .NET 1.X version...
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Warlord Zsinj
- Imperial Winter Developer
- Posts: 3742
- Joined: 24 Aug 2004, 08:59
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Was listening to Frank Zappa's Shut Up n' Play Yer Guitar album, and came across a track that I thought suited PURE's style pretty well. It is called "Ship Ahoy", and is on disc2. I can't find a decent online recording, but you can see someone playing it reasonably well here: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=e2d4DSANHOk
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Spawn_Retard
- Posts: 1248
- Joined: 21 Dec 2006, 14:36
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
So now the new spring update is out, is there anyway we can download this mod without the installer?
What im getting at is that i want to try the mod out without having to download a painfully big download with such a weak internet.
What im getting at is that i want to try the mod out without having to download a painfully big download with such a weak internet.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
If your internets that weak you consider it painful then your going to have a lot of problems in the future if you haven't already.
Perhaps the ammunition button on the ion cannon floaty thing could be changed, since this appears to be a usability bug inherited from the spring engine, a custom button that was extra large that had the words CHARGE on it and then a little icon or globe representing a single shot next to it, and when a second shot is charged a second globe appears and they stack up so you can visually see.
Something like that but prettier
Perhaps the ammunition button on the ion cannon floaty thing could be changed, since this appears to be a usability bug inherited from the spring engine, a custom button that was extra large that had the words CHARGE on it and then a little icon or globe representing a single shot next to it, and when a second shot is charged a second globe appears and they stack up so you can visually see.
- Charging.JPG (12.29 KiB) Viewed 1302 times
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Spawn_Retard
- Posts: 1248
- Joined: 21 Dec 2006, 14:36
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
its only weak when i use the internet in public places. Still i'd like a file to test the new features. If i like it ill use the installer to download futher additions.AF wrote: Blah blah blah
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Downloading a 300MB+ file in a public place is arguably an abuse of TOS
Eitherway PURE.sdz is 170MB in the RC3 I have at work and its dependencies are just as bulky, removing spring engine and the installer stub will not make much of a noticeable difference to file size
Eitherway PURE.sdz is 170MB in the RC3 I have at work and its dependencies are just as bulky, removing spring engine and the installer stub will not make much of a noticeable difference to file size
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clericvash
- Posts: 1394
- Joined: 05 Oct 2004, 01:05
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Can you not just put the files up in a generic mod format so i can just download and shuv into right folders, i don't want the single player, launcher or anything like that.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
Whoops, missed it first time you posted it, Argh. I'll take a look at it at lunch today.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
You should get an RC4, make a little installer that checks if 0.77 is installed, if so it will download the files which need to be added, if not download everything.
Re: P.U.R.E. 0.8 RC3
applauncher, with fix for broken tags, and serializer cache dll for faster startup.
- Attachments
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- Pxtl.AppLauncher.zip
- (14.45 KiB) Downloaded 7 times