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Drastic

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Posts posted by Drastic

  1. To wander in fashionably late:

    I put enough hours into BCM a couple years back that much of UC was familiar to me upon starting it up. A few things have shifted about here and there, either in the interface or in my memory--took me awhile to find where the option was to launch all fighters at once from the HUD, for instance.

    Down planetside definitely looks and handles better than I recall it being in BCM; it also seems to be the bit where my current computer's performance suffers the most during any activity, but upgrades are in my future anyway. I like the flocking wildlife; more options for them (toggling by type, for instance) would be well-received. They add a nice touch.

    The music didn't sit right at first, and mostly made me recall that I liked BCM's better--so what I ended up doing was digging into the games storage and reinstalling it just long enough to copy over its music for UC's use.

    Thus far, it's been much more stable out of the box than Millennium was--the only crashes I've had so far were because of a known reactor-upgrade-red-alert bug that's already being acted on.

    Dropped cargo pods seem to be much more lucrative than they were before, which is terrific starting out.

  2. ...which is sort of worrisome, the engineers being willing to jam naval missiles into the reactor core.

    The situation: Roam career, Ter/Mil commander, Megaron carrier. I've been nabbing cargo pods as they drop, and amongst the loot in one was five APN Exocets. I travel back to Galcom HQ, dock, tradcom, sell a bunch of stuff and have enough to upgrade my bare-bones reactor one level. Exit station, logistix, drill down to relevant deck of the CC, select for reactor upgrade. The Megatron (for the Megaron!) is lit up as an option, as I'd expected...but now, underneath the Trellis top-of-the-line, appears APN/Exocet. It lets me select it and allocate engineers to replace it--I didn't let them run through to completion.

    I saved that gamestate, and loaded up an earlier one I'd save-and-exited as I was approaching staiton with loot, pre-docking. The Exocet appears as a reactor upgrade in there as well.

    [ 02-16-2004, 02:01 PM: Message edited by: Drastic ]

  3. The pilots do have a "SHUT UP!" button--when you're in the bridge view, and they're out and about, click their little square and it's one of the options along with the individual orders menu. I've gotten pretty quick at activating it. (But leave it on if you're ever having them escort you up into orbit. All four screaming "spacebound spacebound!" at once is comedy.)

    Safe havens: The latest patch has made Earth remarkably safe, since it buffs stations, massively so. Even safer--the sub-regions from Saturn and Jupiter and (I assume--I've stuck homeward so far) similar multi-region planets-and-moons have. I park my CC in there, angle for the best solar soaking, halt, shut down reactor and shields, and just leave it sit for hours. Never touched (and it gets the AI climbing, too).

  4. I've been seeing a lot more blue dots around lately, and I'm glad of it.

    After a bit of confusion with Requisitions from HQ, I finally got that jetpack back, and had independent space mobility once more. (The crew had been all too happy to boot me out without one, I noticed.) I spent some time flying and walking around my remodeled and much-better-looking MK3, playing trust games with the crew (i.e., floating directly in front of the main guns--they did a good job staying Halted, I think I'll get them t-shirts "I Passed Up the Chance to Vaporize My Commander, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt"), and so on. While this was going on, some miscreants attempted an attack on Genesis, and were repelled quite handily. HQ must have seen I was busy, as they'd dispatched one of their other MK3's.

    I took stock of things after the explosions had died down, and noticed all those neutral castes flying about. A journalist here, returning to base, a tourist over this way, and a paramedic...targeted at a disabled and SOS'ing fighter. I watched it closely, as it hyperspaced over, collected the immobilized craft in tractor, and RTB'ed with it.

    Very neat.

  5. Tonight's lesson learned was the importance of situational awareness, and not missing some very important trees for the forest.

    I had taken orbit above a remote moon of Saturn, far off from shipping lanes, in order to put the crew through some paces. Interceptors escorting each other chasing waypoints, all four OC's on the surface running laps. Occasionally I'd beam down to the OC-racetrack, avoiding getting run over by the slightly-dumber-than-a-box-of-dumb-things marines driving, and breathing the hard vacuum secure in my SEP field. Meanwhile, the systems engineering team was hard at work putting in new top-of-the-line upgrades all around. The medics roamed, occasionally patching up the SE's when they did things like weld their feet to bulkheads.

    The last scheduled upgrade, my BC Mk3's new Linear-Spec/IV shield system, went into place. The SE's went for a nap, I watched racing OC's for a time, then sent the shuttles back to retrieve them. My mining drones were soon to be full; my long-range plan was to return to Saturn, from there sweep through Mars, and thence back to Earth to collect minerals, sell, and restock.

    Engines online with a powerful thrum as the shuttles re-docked with OC's and marines safe and sound--and even a tiny little bit less stupid in a couple of the more abject cases. The interceptors jumped back and redocked, and I set FE's to work re-prepping them. I had a fully-upgraded ship, as powerful as it would ever be until such time in the distant future when my RE got more brains, a slightly-better trained group of pilots and marines, and a purpose. Hyperspace, and into Saturn we went.

    All was empty, and another jump took us to the Mars jump node, when the alarm klaxon sounded. An Insurgent vessel appeared, clear on the other side of the sector, and a Droidan Raider followed--they were clearly having a disagreement. Curious, I gave the order to halt, waiting to see who would survive that little tussle. Turned out to be the raider, who immediately set his sights on myself.

    I smirked and waited, engaged as he emerged from hyperspace by me, dispatched the woefully-outmatched fighter without a problem. More raider vessels appeared, and I focused on the nearest. PTA fire carved its shields steadily, and it began returning fire. Ha, with my new shield, it doesn't stand a chance before...

    thud. thud thud thud. Kendrick announcing a stream of things that all ended in "...damaged." The heck? The offending raider fighter went boom, and I looked over to the shield indicator...

    ...and realized it was off. I had never turned it back on before leaving that quiet little sub-region. I corrected that, dispatched the last couple raiders with a bit less speed--I must not be too badly messed up, got lucky, I thought. All was quiet again, so I decided to survey the damage. I'll just fire up logistix and...

    "Logistix computer is destroyed."

    Oh...kay. I'm not as lucky as that. Let's just jump to the nearest friendly station and...

    "Unable to engage hyperdrive." Fair enough, my top speed was halved, the engine was obviously in a bad place. I'll just get a marine back in a shuttle to tow me...

    "Tactical computer is destroyed."

    At this point, I nodded calmly, and engaged the autodestruct sequence, ignoring the crew's pleas for calling a commercial tow service.

    Moral of the story: never just assume your shields are up. They're rather important.

  6. Getting to the spot on the map where the OC was, wasn't the problem. Problem was, the OC simply plain wasn't there any more. It was gone from the zoom-to-support-craft menu; hovering the mouse over its TLM tab said it was right by its first waypoint, which I was looking directly at in a variety of zoomed-in settings. I swear I'm not making any of this up.

    Which makes it all the more head-scratching when today I find I can't reproduce that behavior, using the same exact steps, for the life of me. Transient miniature gremlins poking at my processor's circuits, apparently. Looks like a bizarre but non-issue, anyway, so no worries on my end.

  7. The Case of the Vanishing OC's (1.0.0.2RC9)

    What I did:

    Load Marine to pilot each shuttle. Pile the rest into the OC's. (I was going to have them drive around a clear area, for AI training purposes.)

    TacOps, observe the planet. (In my case, it was Dione in Saturn sub-region 2.) Assign each shuttle a waypoint to deploy their OC's. Each shuttle dropped off their vehicle and RTB'ed, no problem.

    This is where it gets interesting. Support/ZOOM-TO shows all 4 OC's, as normal. I zoom down to one of them, pull back. Go to the waypoint menu, add one.

    Click on setpos. The OC vanishes. Pop, right out of the TacOps view. It doesn't show up any longer in the Zoom-To/Support Craft menu. Doing the trick of zooming down to the surface and pitching/rotating the view (which shows the others' TTD's on the horizon) doesn't show its TTD.

    The instant of clicking setpos for waypoints for each of the others causes them to vanish into the ether as well.

    Sending shuttles back at waypoints with an extract order causes them to report back that no OC is in the area, and to return to base empty-holded. PerScan shows the 16 marines in the four missing OC's, alive and presumably happy. Their commander is scratching his head.

  8. In general, when/how do stations' inventories get replenished/rearranged? I'm especially leery of the iridium-trading approach, as HQ's stocks have (near's I can figure) remained unimpacted by anything other than my own actions, at least in game so far. Don't want to transfer all the things I'll need to be rebuying later to more expensive stations.

  9. They weren't anything remarkable. AI 18 or so, but I don't recall what his dogfight was at. Nothing that stood out at me, in any case.

    I deleted out that game, though, because I somehow managed to lose an ATV which was driving laps on Earth. The zoom-to-support-craft menu showed nothing, mouse-hovering over its TLM entry claimed it was right there by the waypoints I'd left it at. I think the marines buried it--and themselves.

  10. I don't know whether some bit of behavior got tweaked with RC9, or my pilots simply suddenly were touched by the hand of Shiva, but I like the results either way.

    About two minutes after first launching, Sol/Earth was suddenly awash with Fal military types and Val raiders--they entered initially fighting each other, then I think they made a quick truce when they saw me jumping towards them. My fighters were in standard dual-escort, which was set up much more quickly than before (the new support units targeting option is a good thing). I put them into it and forgot about them.

    A minute or two later, FC-1 had 3 kills and was working on more. FC-3 lagged a bit behind with only 2, and then took a nasty hit; I quickly reeled him back in with an RTB order, sent the slightly banged-up pilots to medibay. We don't have any medals on board, but I figure I'll autograph them each a nutripack. I hope they make this kind of showing a habit.

  11. Missiles work well. Too much is always better than not enough!

    I think it's a shame they can't be towed. Not so much because that would allow an alternate way of clearing up the sector after the dangerous things are gone (and I'd be amused to see what GalCom would pay for towed-and-delivered enemy marines. 1 credit?), but for the main benefit of being able to alt-E, order your own shuttle to tow you, and go vacuum-surfing.

  12. As luck would have it, in previous excursions, I very rarely saw any enemy of any magnitude. Not so on this maiden voyage of my brand-shiny-new bc mkIII. A simple shakedown cruise into Pluto; plotting shuttle waypoints to drop off mining drones when the klaxon sounded.

    Gammulan raiders were expressing an interest in me. They were in a Stormcarrier, already hyperjumping. With an enemy presence confirmed, I quickly shut down launch control, as a proactive measure against any intruders (wise, as it soon turned out--only the one, but he gave the marines a devil of a time). Gave the carrier a course directly at the approaching raiders' vector for a minute or so, then turned it right around to aim at the general area they were sure to emerge back into realspace at. At this point, my fighters, in standard double-escort formation, jumped into Pluto sector with me.

    The Gams slowly phased in, about 80 klicks from me, which I set about to closing at maximum speed. Their tactical positioning was...poor, and the sluggish behemoth was still trying to turn about as I reached IOD range and kept a steady volley. They had no time to launch their own fighters.

    Good. Sector secu...klaxon. A couple cruisers of various types and castes--red in any case. Then fighters, attacking Gazer station. I hyperjumped towards it, engaged a cruiser in a slow, determined dogfight as my interceptors tangled with their own targets. By the time that engagement was done, a couple pilots needed a gentle reminder to get back into formation with me...FC2 was not responding, nor moving. Pilot and copilot, dead.

    Around this time, marines inside had (finally) taken care of the intruder from sometime before; the roaming medics were doing their jobs more efficiently then the grunts. I routed four into shuttles, launched one on cargosweep to pick up several pods, launched another to tow-and-deliver a disabled enemy fighter. Now that the sector was secu...

    Klaxon. A Warmonger warped in, making a brave (but stupid) attack run on the ODS in the system. I closed and assisted several station fighters in killing it, although they took the kill-credit from me. Sector sec...I waited for the klaxon, then sighed in relief. Sector secure.

    Well, there were space marines floating about, but they weren't a threat to anything (here's hoping they get tweaked some more--I suspect they'll be in the sector for several hours at this pace of their engagement with each other). Juggled power around to get the cloning module online, and started reassembling the two lost pilots, tractored the stranded interceptor back into my bay. It was a mess, every system badly damaged. It'll keep the station engineers busy for awhile as I read a book.

    All in all, a successful shakedown flight.

  13. Heh. And just after I got RC4 applied.

    Incidentally, for me at least, the just-official Detonator 23.11 drivers kick butt. Combined with whatever optimizations were in the RC4 patch, my framerates with BCM have increased roughly 50%. Also, a couple minor graphical glitches (cloaking, hyperjumps) now work just fine.

  14. There is a slowdown, on Earth planetary zone only, that's reproducible on my system.

    1: Start new game

    2: Default settings--Roam mode, male commander, heavy cruiser bc mk3. In the game I first saw it in, I was in a bc mk2 though.

    3: Go to TacOps either when the craft is in the planet, or Observing from outside of it. Either way, TacOps for Earth.

    4: Use the jump-to-Mission Zone menus repeatedly. I haven't nailed down a specific number yet, if there is one. I.e., select the first mission zone on the list, first city/base in that zone, then click through to the second in that zone, till going to the next zone down the list, etc. It's also occurred just by jumping randomly from the zone entries.

    After that, there is intense slowdown on the planet, to the extent of it being unplayable on there. It runs as smoothly as ever outside of the planet, but going back to or Observing Earth planet zone even several hours later has the same intense slowdown.

    With that dated v-card I am surprised that you can even get BCM to run. A good card in its day but that was years ago.

    TTFN

    [ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: Drastic ]

    [ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: Gallion ]

  15. Just a brief tip on a minor headache I just figured out. With a healthier cashflow, I purchased several upgrades. The ship engineers installed the new hull and reactor without a problem.

    With those installed, I spent some more time in trading runs, and providing some extremely minor assistance against a small attack on Gazer station in Sol/Pluto (the station itself had chewed almost everything to pieces by the time I got there--arrived in time to kill a now-stranded fighter).

    Returned back to HQ for better prices, and purchased an engine upgrade. Launched, went to Logistix, Etc., and the upgrade button remained serenely, smugly, unlit.

    Scratched my head, doublechecked the inventory. New engine, sitting there, sure enough. Looked through the manual again, brow furrowed. Hmm. Well, the engine's running, perhaps that's the problem--so I shut it down. Upgrade not lit. I drummed my fingers, eyeing the CE. He looked back, calm and silent as a Buddha in deep meditation. Didn't even blink when I waved my hand in front of his eyes. None of the rest of the bridge crew would look at me.

    Finally, I remembered one difference between now, and the previous upgrades. I set the ship back on autopilot, escorting HQ. Crossed my fingers, and voila, upgrade button lit, and systems engineers happy to get to work.

    I think that the CC not being in AI mode was what was stopping the upgrade from being available--I have to confirm it. (I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I read right past a sentence in the manual that says exactly that, of course.) If that's the case, hopefully this will unstick people with similar problems.

  16. FedEx guy and I just missed each other yesterday. Instead, my system got very ill (brain to self: keep your virus checker more up-to-date. self: yeah, yeah. shut up or I'll stab you with a Q-tip) leading to a particularly painful bout of reformatting-and-reinstalling.

    But tonight I came home to the package resting against my door. I was worried at first because the box felt lighter than I'd expected--was thinking a heftier manual. Looks just fine, though. I'm just very fond of physically brick-like tomes; f'r'instance, Falcon 4.0 was a fully justified purchase to me because of its manual alone.

    Installed on my partially-back-to-okay system. Gaudy SafeDisc screen? Check.

    Main menu? Check. Interesting to see all the options actually selectable.

    Targetting by clicking on the dots in the bridgeview radar and NID--this is a fine and good thing. Discovering that led me to try to click on things in the actual views. Oh well.

    All four pilots chorusing "spacebound, spacebound!" at once when getting back into orbit is highly amusing.

    I like the music. The new tracks I heard were nice and soothing, brought The Orb to mind. (This is a good thing.)

    The particle contrail effects work much more nicely then they did for me in demo 2. In general, a first impression of a lot more general polish. Minor shame demo 3 was cancelled; one based on this code would likely move a few more boxes. But my box was moved, and that's what counts.

    To all a good night.

  17. The main thoughts I had when I read the review (the issue showed up in my mail yesterday), was that it read EXACTLY like a student trying to fake a book report from just reading the dust jacket, with perhaps a brief glance at the Cliffs Notes.

    It's hard to pin down. Some reviews simply feel like the author worked hard to trim them down in length. This one felt like he struggled to add enough filler--the first two paragraphs alone are almost a third of the article, and could have been cut out almost entirely. Lots of different vehicles--how do they handle, in comparison to each other? Barely a word. How's that first-person component work out? How about that interface? Range of commands? Good flavor-example-anecdotes of space and planetary operations? Sorry subscribers, not in this review.

    Maybe I'm just cranky, but I maintain that even if that review wasn't written based solely on the back of the box, and maybe a quick skim of the manual, it sounds very, very much like it was. And that's pretty unfortunate--I generally expect a better crack at things from them.

    It's still set for the 29th, right?

  18. What's your impression/experience of framerate optimizations that have taken place since the second demo's beta code?

    Have there been any notable changes to ship/vehicle handling and general "feel" since the second demo's code-state? How so?

    And I was going to post this after a search, but before I saw this thread: thus far for me, the second demo's been, for lack of a better word, "twitchy" when I drop my own MP3s into the music directory. At times they'll play, and at other times they not only refuse to, but I was unable to alt+,. to other ones. And I'm pretty sure all the experimenting with that was what led me to having to un- and reinstall at one point after the demo just flat-out stopped working for me. (It's like losing a filling, you have to just keep poking at it even though it's better if you don't.) Are there filename length/encoding type/file size/number of user MP3s accepted/etc. limitations to using one's own files, at the point when all you testers were kicked out of the pool and the police caution tape labeled "GOLD" was hung up around it?

    What was your favorite bug? (Favorite as in, amusing results, absurdly convoluted way to reproduce it, most hair pulled out over, etc.)

  19. quote:

    Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr:

    You can. Check CONFIG/KEYS section I think

    Near as I can tell right now, there's a default keyboard roll/yaw setting that does toggle it for the keys--left/right and ins/del change functions--but the joystick operates the same on either setting.

    It seems that the ICs are either very effective, or very dead, without too much middle ground. My latest playthrough came to an abrupt end when a Gam/Mil carrier popped up and hurled itself through hyperspace towards my position, giving me plenty of time to scramble the fighters (the control option to give them all the same order and launch simultaneously is a welcome touch). On the first pass, the PTA carved its shields down quite far, and the ICs wiped it out. They then proceeded to die one right after the other from the fighters the carrier had launched. They proceeded to laugh at the PTA fire, and tore the cruiser to shreds. Object lesson in why an intact escort is a good thing.

    In another minor adventure, I transferred myself into a shuttle, launched and flew down to a remote spot on the planet below, landing on the shore. Actually, first attempt landed in water. Figured out how to transfer myself into the ATV from there and drive about. Gave it an RTB order and switched on the autopilot, and it turned and trundled towards the shuttle at a good clip, slowing as it neared, then, at a snail's crawl, drove into the shuttle, collided, drove into it again, and very very slowly drove directly through it. Amused me.

  20. It would be nice if the roll/yaw axis control could be swapped, simply very used to roll control being on the rudder rather than vice versa. Plus, with my Saitek X36 at least, the stick has some more precise control then the rudder control, which was mostly an issue on strafing runs in IA 3.

    IA 2 has also been quite difficult to survive in for me, far moreso than 3--at least by doing what I'm supposed to. I can turn tale and run and live quite well.

    Played around in the first IA for about an hour. Traveled over to Trion with fighters in escort, dropped into the planet, one kept pace with me, and the other was still a few hundred klicks from planetfall. Gave the pilots RTB orders and deliberately landed the battlecruiser, mostly just to mess with them; pretty much I was expecting IC 1 to lawn dart himself and die. Interestingly, what he did instead was sort of land on the terrain and commence sliding sideways.

    So I took off again and hovered some 20K feet up, thinking he'd get his butt off the ground. No such luck. I wound up sending some marines into a shuttle, launching said shuttle with Tow orders, then figured out I had better follow that up with Deliver To orders. And when all that was done, IC1 was back safe and sound.

    Left the planet again before IC2 caught up, and collected him in space, returned to Farstar and noted from the station shields that I missed some sort of battle. Made planetfall to attack a Ter/Ins base, hovered the cruiser some distance away while I figured out the waypoints system, sending all the fighters on SADs and SEADs, one got knocked pretty hard by enemy fighters (should have paid some attention to the air, I suppose), and died during RTB. Pulled the other three back, and wound up ditching the cruiser in the water in a strafing run.

    Entertaining in all, and worth the download.

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