HORDES OF TROOPS CRUSHING ONE ANOTHER!
HUGE Open BATTLES!
and NO resource system.
all on a TINY scale!
Some people argued it could not be done and it work right. Play it for yourself and see.
Little guys own joo MOD! Updated this morning.
Moderator: Moderators
Little guys own joo MOD! Updated this morning.
HORDES OF TROOPS CRUSHING ONE ANOTHER!
HUGE Open BATTLES!
and NO resource system.
all on a TINY scale!
Some people argued it could not be done and it work right. Play it for yourself and see.
Last edited by smoth on 05 Mar 2006, 22:17, edited 1 time in total.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
What happens when the lasers are fast and not consta-beam? What happens when they are at close range? What happens when a larger unit is trying to fire said lasers at these small units at any range?
Without having played, it probably screws up pretty badly. If you go play the release of SWTA now, you'll see exactly what I'm getting at: Try making stuff fire at droids. It'll often miss for some reason (most likely the laser beam passing through the sphere too fast), and sometimes it'll just aim off to the side of the droid, never hitting it or even correcting its aim until you tell it to move or the target moves. The droids have no special scripting; just normal walk and aim scripts. Stormtroopers do not have this problem and are marginally larger than the droids (and in one of your pics, you showed a stormie to be about Peewee sized).
Want to know how we solved this for the patch we'll be releasing sometime soon? At first Zsinj tried completely reformulating the balance scheme of the droids. This was marginally successful, but the problem still remained: Sometimes, stuff just would not hit. We considered a number of solutions, and we were going to resort to turning up the AOE on all weapons when, lo and behold, we found the solution...
The droids were too small.
Increasing their scale to 150% of their former size fixed every single problem. Under no circumstances can the problem be reproduced now. And all I did was blow them up to have a sphere the size of a stormtrooper's. No script changes, no weapon changes, nothing.. hell, their original numbers for the balance scheme play perfectly fine now that they can actually be defended against. All because of scale.
So, until you show conclusive proof of what causes these issues and how to solve them, I call BS. Feel free to use the droids in SWTA as an example, if you wish to rub it in. I welcome you to prove me wrong, I just don't believe it until I see it.
Without having played, it probably screws up pretty badly. If you go play the release of SWTA now, you'll see exactly what I'm getting at: Try making stuff fire at droids. It'll often miss for some reason (most likely the laser beam passing through the sphere too fast), and sometimes it'll just aim off to the side of the droid, never hitting it or even correcting its aim until you tell it to move or the target moves. The droids have no special scripting; just normal walk and aim scripts. Stormtroopers do not have this problem and are marginally larger than the droids (and in one of your pics, you showed a stormie to be about Peewee sized).
Want to know how we solved this for the patch we'll be releasing sometime soon? At first Zsinj tried completely reformulating the balance scheme of the droids. This was marginally successful, but the problem still remained: Sometimes, stuff just would not hit. We considered a number of solutions, and we were going to resort to turning up the AOE on all weapons when, lo and behold, we found the solution...
The droids were too small.
Increasing their scale to 150% of their former size fixed every single problem. Under no circumstances can the problem be reproduced now. And all I did was blow them up to have a sphere the size of a stormtrooper's. No script changes, no weapon changes, nothing.. hell, their original numbers for the balance scheme play perfectly fine now that they can actually be defended against. All because of scale.
So, until you show conclusive proof of what causes these issues and how to solve them, I call BS. Feel free to use the droids in SWTA as an example, if you wish to rub it in. I welcome you to prove me wrong, I just don't believe it until I see it.
You could have at least tried the godamn thing. At least try it it wouldn't have take you 5 minutes.
With the change you suggested:
Now bare in mind, That is with an occasional shot due to slow fire rate and NO radius to it. with a radius he hits.
*edited out of respect for swiftspear*
With the change you suggested:
they get hit and die.Gnome wrote:What happens when the lasers are fast and not consta-beam? ?
Right up on him he misses then again he cannot fire on them... medium range he nails them.. long range he misses infrequently.Gnome wrote:What happens when they are at close range? What happens when a larger unit is trying to fire said lasers at these small units at any range?
Now bare in mind, That is with an occasional shot due to slow fire rate and NO radius to it. with a radius he hits.
You call bs without trying it. I hope you judge all books by their covers and I am sure you will go far in life.Gnome wrote:So, until you show conclusive proof of what causes these issues and how to solve them, I call BS.
*edited out of respect for swiftspear*
Last edited by smoth on 05 Mar 2006, 11:25, edited 2 times in total.
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
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Forboding Angel
- Evolution RTS Developer
- Posts: 14673
- Joined: 17 Nov 2005, 02:43
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
- Posts: 7287
- Joined: 12 Aug 2005, 09:29
People use 3do's because most of the mod projects around right now are ports from old TA (granted with lots of modifications) and old TA didn't use s3o's so the models don't exist currently. I'd have to totally remodel every unit in the mod I'm trying to port if I wanted them all in s3o. It's much easier to just work with 3do for what you already have and only use s3o for anything new you want to add in.Forboding Angel wrote:gnome, smoth is using s30. With s30 it works correctly. Everyone here uses 3do for some reason (probably becasue it's an easier route).
BTW, next time try playing it dude. THat's really weak that you didn't even try it out.
Nothing has any trouble hitting them.
Open mouth, insert foot much?
That being said, Gnome, forboding is right, collision spheres are handled differently with s3o's and 3do's, and also smoth has done more s3o work and collision sphere rechearch then any other moder out there right now. If any one is qualified to bughunt for this kind of project until it works it's smoth.
Actually, it was me who pointed out that 1X1 footprint-units work just fine in s3o... because of my own research into these areas 
That said, this is a cute, fun little mod
I can see stealing... erm, I mean, "borro-"... er... ok, "stealing" the lil' guys to make a quickie Rampage player-vs-AI mod when certain other experiments are finalized...
At any rate... no need for heated rhetoric, folks. 3DOs have obvious limitations of various kinds- but they're flexible and can be used to build content quickly, which is, no doubt, why they're still getting used so much. I'm a little jealous, really, watching people whip out huge amounts of content using the old format while I'm crawling along, and I have only the knowledge that my final mod will be of superior overall visual quality to really keep me from having serious 3DO envy
There's no need to be defensive about things, though, on either side- both formats have some advantages and disadvantages, and these are all well-known at this point, so there's zero point into dividing the community into the "old-skool" TA modders and the "newcomers"... of which, it can be said, there are really very few (and I'm not one of them, although I wasn't a big-time OTA modder, I'll be the first to say).
That said, this is a cute, fun little mod
I can see stealing... erm, I mean, "borro-"... er... ok, "stealing" the lil' guys to make a quickie Rampage player-vs-AI mod when certain other experiments are finalized...At any rate... no need for heated rhetoric, folks. 3DOs have obvious limitations of various kinds- but they're flexible and can be used to build content quickly, which is, no doubt, why they're still getting used so much. I'm a little jealous, really, watching people whip out huge amounts of content using the old format while I'm crawling along, and I have only the knowledge that my final mod will be of superior overall visual quality to really keep me from having serious 3DO envy
There's no need to be defensive about things, though, on either side- both formats have some advantages and disadvantages, and these are all well-known at this point, so there's zero point into dividing the community into the "old-skool" TA modders and the "newcomers"... of which, it can be said, there are really very few (and I'm not one of them, although I wasn't a big-time OTA modder, I'll be the first to say).
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SwiftSpear
- Classic Community Lead
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Arg, once you get a formula going you'll be whipping along as well. I know guys who can whip up a full high res model and texture for HL in a days work or less. Spring models tend to be even easier to build. Once you've got your system down the units will seem to just fly out way way quicker.
It's always hard to be breaking ground, you understimate how much more efficient you can make the process. 3dos just work up quicker because people have been using them forever and they are very used to how they work.
It's always hard to be breaking ground, you understimate how much more efficient you can make the process. 3dos just work up quicker because people have been using them forever and they are very used to how they work.
The reason that s3o works is because you can set the collision sphere, yes?
The problem with that is in order to make the spheres big enough for weapons to *not* miss, you end up getting weapon impacts rather far away from the actual model, which looks pretty strange.
This can be optimized to be as close as possible, of course, but it would still look strange for realism based mods.
Still, neat idea, good proof of concept. I'm not entirely swayed though - yeah, spring can handle tiny things in s3o, but with most mods (SWTA, AA, XTA, FF, AATA, WD...er, pretty much all of them except the upcoming NanoBlobs..) still working in 3do, you'd be alienating them entirely if you made feature sets based only on your new supertiny scale.
Edit: after a playtest, yeah, the little infantry work well with each other. Their weapon has a small AoE, so even if it misses it affects the target, and the hit sphere is placed slightly forward, so it matches the model pretty well.
One of the problems with the infantry scale became apparent pretty quickly when I made some tanks and started to use those. Half the time, their missiles just cruised right over the head of their target, until the target got pretty close.
The problem with that is in order to make the spheres big enough for weapons to *not* miss, you end up getting weapon impacts rather far away from the actual model, which looks pretty strange.
This can be optimized to be as close as possible, of course, but it would still look strange for realism based mods.
Still, neat idea, good proof of concept. I'm not entirely swayed though - yeah, spring can handle tiny things in s3o, but with most mods (SWTA, AA, XTA, FF, AATA, WD...er, pretty much all of them except the upcoming NanoBlobs..) still working in 3do, you'd be alienating them entirely if you made feature sets based only on your new supertiny scale.
Edit: after a playtest, yeah, the little infantry work well with each other. Their weapon has a small AoE, so even if it misses it affects the target, and the hit sphere is placed slightly forward, so it matches the model pretty well.
One of the problems with the infantry scale became apparent pretty quickly when I made some tanks and started to use those. Half the time, their missiles just cruised right over the head of their target, until the target got pretty close.
hey zoombie why aren't u posting in the Epic Forums. We have made some progress. ive tryed my hand at modeling and put out a decent looking Thunderbolt and GMN & Benito resolved the aiming issues of the tanks. Go check it out at http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=141.
Cause i didint know it exsisted! Away i go....j5mello wrote:hey zoombie why aren't u posting in the Epic Forums. We have made some progress. ive tryed my hand at modeling and put out a decent looking Thunderbolt and GMN & Benito resolved the aiming issues of the tanks. Go check it out at http://www.tauniverse.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=141.
Yeah, I was a bit rude. Sorry, no excuses.
Even with s3os, does it avoid the 'always miss' bug? Say you give an s3o a droid-sized sphere. Would it still happen? If not, why is it different? I understand that you give the models your own spheres in s3o. However, why is it handled differently than the 3do spheres which spring generates on the fly? There has to be some better reason to it.
I'm not trying to argue for 3do--we're going to eventually replace every model in SWTA with s3o--but I want to understand why there is a difference in code which should seemingly be handled exactly the same.
Also, for what it's worth:
<secure> Gnome: Oh, on an related note; I tested that lilguy mod smoth threw together and I can confirm that you can get them to miss eachother permanetly. At least with the version of it that is out at the moment
(I'm not sure what version he is referring to, however. Perhaps he'll post and clear that up, because I do see there's a newer version up now than there was at my last post.)
That's all the answer I needed--s3o makes the difference. But, that brings up another question:SwiftSpear wrote:That being said, Gnome, forboding is right, collision spheres are handled differently with s3o's and 3do's
Even with s3os, does it avoid the 'always miss' bug? Say you give an s3o a droid-sized sphere. Would it still happen? If not, why is it different? I understand that you give the models your own spheres in s3o. However, why is it handled differently than the 3do spheres which spring generates on the fly? There has to be some better reason to it.
I'm not trying to argue for 3do--we're going to eventually replace every model in SWTA with s3o--but I want to understand why there is a difference in code which should seemingly be handled exactly the same.
Also, for what it's worth:
<secure> Gnome: Oh, on an related note; I tested that lilguy mod smoth threw together and I can confirm that you can get them to miss eachother permanetly. At least with the version of it that is out at the moment
(I'm not sure what version he is referring to, however. Perhaps he'll post and clear that up, because I do see there's a newer version up now than there was at my last post.)