P.U.R.E. 0.55

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 15:14

Where are the team color indicators!

What do you mean? The models all have teamcolors on the textures...

I like the explosions...but the buildings need a more of a FOOSH BOOM noise for when they land. Like in Dawn of War.

I'll see if I can't come up with something more... er... fooshy and boomy. What's in there now wasn't supposed to be the final effect anyhow. You're looking at my placeholder

No offense argh, I really respect you, probably more than all the other modders, but give the walkers to zpock plx.

The basic flaw is in the design itself. It's not a lack of animation skill

I have time to address this today, so, meh, I guess I'll have to take yet-another whack at this.

I noticed a sound issue. The stomp sounds clip off when they end. It's easy to fix, just fade out the silence at the end.

I'll look at this- you're probably right, I may not have corrected the tail end of the sound aggressively enough. I've never heard any popping on this end, though. Meh, easy enough to repair.

rattle · Post by **rattle** » 20 Dec 2007, 15:25

What do you mean? The models all have teamcolors on the textures...

Which you can't see at all. Can anyone tell the two players apart on this screenshot other than by what direction the unit faces to or what they shoot at.
Except the one on the far right, you can actually see it from this camera position.

Clear team color is the most important thing right after proper preshading to make your model look good at play distance. Even more important than high quality textures for accidental close up zooms

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 15:51

Ehm... that's a side shot. Moreover, it's half-scale- I play at 1600/1200. Bear that in mind.

I designed everything so that it's quite clear from OTA view:

There's a clip from actual rez- it's quite clear that this is the Blue Team, especially if you're looking at it next to Red Team or Green Team or whatever.

If you're asking for me to dump more teamcolor on the skins, especially to accommodate the small minority who uses side-views as their default, I'm not going to do that. I hated SupCom's "dump teamcolor everywhere" approach, and I'm not going there.

If players are too stupid to know where their units are, with all of the ways there are to keep track of them... I don't have a lot of sympathy. Most of the time, in a real game, I don't think this will be a real problem, tbh.

That said... if somebody would make the LUA Widget I was describing a few months ago, where it'd be like the Platters Widget up close (but slightly more clear, and ground-hugging- the clipping was ugly), then become an animated icon with distance... that'd be sexy, and totally take care of this issue, for this game and others.

Here's a really direct shot of this. Please tell me that you cannot instantly tell who's Red and who's Blue... and this is probably the most subtle of the units, in terms of teamcolor.

BlackLiger · Post by **BlackLiger** » 20 Dec 2007, 15:56

...

In real war, you can't see the team colour anyway

Unless it's the dude charging up the hill with the American flag, who usually gets shot. Then napalmed. Then nuked.

So meh

I like not seing the team colour. If I can't remember which forces are mine, I don't deserve em.

Erom · Post by **Erom** » 20 Dec 2007, 15:56

I agree that teamcolor is quite hard to see in this mod. I also agree that if you actually lose units because of this... well, pay better attention.

I think clearer teamcolor would be nice (either in the skin or with another method), but I don't see it as a significant thing that is holding back the mod.

And I def. second more FOOSH BANG when you drop in buildings. A bit of the old dust cloud might be nice too. Of course, we're sympathetic that your kind of hosed IRL right now - honestly if you walked away from this for a couple of months right now, I'd keep playing it. It's awesome.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:06

Anyhow... any other serious balance issues? Is the Assault nerfed enough for everybody, at this point, among other things? Or did I go too far? I think it's about right, now- just dangerous enough that forgetting to build any defenses or some early Shells or Tanks is bad news, but not uber enough to wipe out a whole base singlehandedly...

rattle · Post by **rattle** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:08

I can't see any team color, all I see is two shades of tan. I looked at it ingame some time ago and it didn't change at all, was hoping you'd fix that.

Quick solution:
- make the texture under the team color parts full black
- add the team color to the glow channel (~25-50%)

Only drawback is that you can't really see very dark colors which you can when it's transparent on the texture, however then the team color isn't natural which is a big issue as well. Glow shader will make it anything but the natural color unless the background is black.

Look at CNC3 (yeah I keep bringing it up because they did it right), all of the team color is crystal clear and they use a shader similar to our glow shader.

The black background will most likely make it stand out better for people without shaders too.

Or use Lua magic to draw rings, squares, triangles, pentagons, pentagrams or what ever else as indicator. Just don't leave it like this.

Erom · Post by **Erom** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:15

Argh, I've been looking at the bottom Red v Blue shot for ~20 seconds, and I still have no idea who is who.

Again, I think you're busy enough that you don't need to fix this right now- and getting someone else to write a better platter widget might be the best solution anyway- but some change down the road would be nice.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:22

Meh, a fix to the textures to add some glow isn't much work. I could fix up the build pictures while I'm at it, and add a little more sex-appeal.

I don't have anything IRL keeping me busy today, which is both good and bad- good, because I've already set stuff in motion, bad because I'm not making any money yet

So, consider it fixed. I'm not splattering more teamcolor on the models, though, and that's final. Just making them glow should be enough.

Dunno whether I can do all of that stuff and rebuild the Overmind Commander, though. But I might as well take full advantage of any time I have left, before Monday, when I start initial consultations with recruiters, etc... from there on out, like earlier this week, I just won't have time to do anything else.

rattle · Post by **rattle** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:33

Cool, just remember to make the background black as it will turn any team color into the respective pastel color or white if it's too bright and I'd rather live with no dark team colors. Really, biiiiig issue. I'm not bitching at you but this is one of the major things which can ruin the first impression a game leaves.

One color too much.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 16:37

<shrugs> meh, it's cool, I don't want people's impressions to be bad, either, and it's easy enough to address...

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 17:05

Better? This seems to work just fine, even with darker colors, frankly.

Post by **Kloot** » 20 Dec 2007, 18:04

The current SVN version of KAIK (r5079) now supports PURE.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 19:27

Excellent! I will, of course, want to test this before noting it in my release announcement, but this is great news!

Now, if only NTAI worked, that's all the GPL AIs...

AF · Post by AF » 20 Dec 2007, 19:32

Can anyone give any indication as to what the issue with NTai is because I cannot reproduce it and all I know is that xyz claims it doesn't work.[/code]

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 19:37

Run P.U.R.E. in a test game with SVN Spring. Ramp up the timescale, play it out, you will see it crash, and hopefully you can catch it in your debugger. It looks like it's tied to Units taking damage, AF- I've caught it throwing Spring into a loop and hard-crashing exactly when a Unit took damage.

Smiff · Post by **Smiff** » 20 Dec 2007, 19:54

KAIK on PURE (SVN 5079)
just watched a few games

altair_crossing
builds 1 energy, then wanders around the map absorbing trees. does nothing else?
another game, it did build a factory but metal stalled really bad.

altored_divide
built 2 metals, 1 energy, then land factory. got itself stuck between the buildings and apparently doesnt know how to get out (reclaim one?).

plays this game even worse than me so far :p

arctic plains
did great here, started roughly how i would.

not sure if it's the map i have't repeated each enough times yet.
also, is it learning??

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 20:03

Try Comet Catcher Remake. That's the only map where I've seen it run really well with AAI, it may make a difference with PURE as well, due to the large amount of space in which to build. Short of that, I dunno- there isn't any way to feed KAIK any variables that I know of... it's even worse than AAI in that respect.

AF · Post by AF » 20 Dec 2007, 20:07

That's not possible, the code for unitdamage was heavily refactored, such that almost 90% of it was commented, out and of the remaining 10% 90% was rewritten into a finite state machine with no loops.

That and lurker keeps posting random vclib packages all over the place which as a result are lost after a few hours in a mound of new forum posts, so i cant compile atm anyway.

Argh · Post by **Argh** » 20 Dec 2007, 20:11

<shrugs> all I know is what I saw, AF. Not what the cause is. I can tell you for a fact, though, that NTAI cannot get through a game of PURE without locking up Spring at some point, and that it looks like it has something to do with damage. Maybe it's "emotion" code, to prepare retreat orders? Maybe it's threat-matrix stuff? I dunno.

Spring RTS Engine

P.U.R.E. 0.55