AWells

All I have to say is that stuff that forms deep inside the minds of our elected officials is just scary sometimes. Really, I think a lobotomy should become part of the requirements to hold a seat in congress, since congressmen capable of complex thought have this nasty habit of devising the worst possible ideas and signing them into law.

quote:Actually darling, BCG will support multi slot assets, which is basically what you are talking about.Shush, you... don't get my hopes up LOL Actually from what I've read so far on multi slot assets it might not be quite the same thing. Players hitching a ride on multislot assets will basically just be observers. To have players be able to select another players ship as a launch base is a bit different in concept and execution. Though it's entirely possible you are correct and it'll be part of the whole multi-slot assets and asset switching code. Generally though, I don't like to assume anything that isn't specifically stated in official writing. It's usually better to keep expectations low and risk being surprised by awesome features you didn't think would be in a product, than to have high expectations and be disappointed when you find out something you were hoping for isn't in the game. After all the final deciding factor of what goes into any BC game isn't whether I think it would be cool, or how easy it would be to impliment, but whether it's something SC wants in the game (it is his game after all ). [ 09-23-2002, 04:05 AM: Message edited by: Litvyak ]

quote: And I read LitvyakÔÇÖs post (and how are you suppose to pronounce Litvyak anyway?) and I concur on every point. Very articulately stated, and very to the point. Haha... thanks Not sure on the actual Russian pronounciation of Litvyak, but I generally pronounce it Lit-vee-ack. It actually came from my flight sim days, and is taken from Lilya Vladimirovna Litvyak, a Russian fighter pilot who's story can be found here and here.

Ahhh... nothing like a good debate on religion. Actually, I've been following it, but haven't quite been willing to jump in, yet. My thought on religion is that it serves an important purpose in the lives of many people by being a catch all to explain everything the can't comprehend or are unwilling to face. It's also served many people well as a tool to manipulate and control others. Religion is typically used as a means to explain what happens when you die, an attempt to make it sound happy. And in some religions, where there's a concept of a place of punishment (such as hell), it's further used to help control the followers of that religion. "Do what I say or you'll go to hell," type of deal. I find many older people turn to religion for this reason. I think it's kind of the knowledge that they're going to die soon, and they want to believe their whole life wasn't meaningless. The human race is naturally self-centered, and has a hard time coping with the belief that we don't serve a purpose any grander than that of bacteria. I subscribe to the belief that when we die, we die. That's it. Game over. No eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What's left of you simply becomes food for worms. It might not be as pleasent as heaven or reincarnation or what have you, but it's what I believe. I don't believe there's any grand purpose behind why we are here. We exist to reproduce and occupy our place in the food chain until evolution does away with the human race and replaces us with something else. Life isn't some big and elaborate test to see if we're morally worthy for some higher fate. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that religious beliefs are pointless. On the contrary they make life easier to deal with for millions of people, they help make people like John Edwards rich, and they help everyone from Bin Laden to the Pope maintain armies of loyal sheep. Call me an athiest if you want, but really I think of myself as a realist.

quote: quote: How much oil we use do you think comes out of the Middle East? 25% Correct, and North America is the second largest oil producing region, contributing about 12% of the world's oil... though we use about 30% of it.

Tyrian is a PC game

I'm pretty sure he means FCs, SCs, and OCs when he says support craft. It's a band width issue, really. BCM Gold will support up to 32 players on a server. Each of those 32 players could potentially have a carrier, and each of those carriers could potentially launch 4 fighters at once, for a total of 128 fighters, plus the 32 carriers, or 160 total ships. Each of those 32 clients need to know where each and every one of those ships is multiple times a second, which means a ton of bandwidth. To my knowledge there's no model LOD on ridgid models in the current engine (I could be wrong, though), which brings up the second downfall. If a ship is an average of lets say 500 polys, that's potentially about 80k polys that might to be taken into account not including polys for planets, space stations, and other objects. Also, none of these figures are taking into account things like missiles (160 ships could put a ton missiles in the air that need to be tracked and rendered), laser blasts, or other vehicles like shuttles. It really gets out of control pretty quick when you start thinking about it. At a risk of bringing down SC's wrath by stating my opinion (::ducks:: hehe ), maybe something like letting players who select the EFP career be able to select player controled carriers as their base would be a nice alternitive. Of course I wouldn't expect to see anything like that until BCO... if ever. [ 09-22-2002, 06:26 PM: Message edited by: Litvyak ]

A good source for old games is here It's an abandonware site, pretty much. It lists where to find some of the best games ever made for PC, and also offers some that are no longer available anywhere else for download. As a side note, it's one of the sites hosting the download of the free release of BC3000AD 2.09, I believe.

My own opinion is that Saddam needs to be taken out by force, and the US is one of the few nations that accomplish the feat. He should've been removed back in 1991, and letting him fester this long is already a mistake. Is Saddam close to having nuclear weapons at this time? Maybe he is, maybe he's not. Would you like to wait until he nukes your town before acting, just to make sure? Do you believe that somebody who has turned attack helicopter gunships on his own people will not use weapons of mass destruction freely when he has the capability? Do you believe he'd loose any sleep at night if he was to vaporize Washington D.C., Boston, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, or any other of dozens of major population centers in the United States? Do the people in Iraq that Saddam kills have any less right to live than you or your family? If somebody in your neighborhood was killing of his family members, would you be happy with simply just making sure that he didn't have any bigger weapons that could reach your house? Though I think that Israeli style assassination is the best weapon against terrorists, I don't think it is appropriate in the case of Saddam. Military action and a strong show of force is important to let the world know that we mean business. Yes, the thought of sending 200,000 American soldiers into Iraq is not pleasent. However, the American Soldier is not a draftee or a conscript, they're a professional volunteer that chose to serve in defense of our country through military service. It's their job, it's what they signed up for, and what they've been trained for. To question sending them in because they might be injured or killed is like questioning sending firemen to a fire because they might get burned.

quote: Yea, but they will be sluggish overweight cruisers with cloaking devices. Cloaking devices are fun Haha... true enough. My personal opinion is that I don't mind the lack of support craft deployment. Really, in a way it kind of defeats the point of multiplayer if everyone just sends waves of AI fighters to fight for them.

As of right now, the official word (though subject to change) is that there will be no troop, probe, support craft, or mining drone deployment in MP until BCG. There will also be no tractor beams until BCG, and no use of OTS weapons until BCM Gold. Complete details of what will be available in BC MP games up until BCG is available publicly on the newly opened battlecruiser.net site. You can find the FAQ here, complete with a table of projected features for each release in comparison to each other. So, yes, carriers in BCM and BCM Gold MP will be sluggish overweight cruisers for the most part.

Well, I think I'm going to be wary of any title published by Strategy First, since this wouldn't be the first title they've published before the development was done... CRS's wwiionline comes to mind.

Heh... I've been spending much of the past week helping out my friend with her homework, and she still has an Apple IIe tucked away that she plans to get set up again. I almost had to laugh when I saw thing... I haven't seen one since I was a kid. I can still remember having a C64 and almost all the games for it were in basic and a I had to type in the whole program before I could play. It's amazing how far technology has come... it makes me feel so old, really... damn it I'm only 24... I'm not suppose to feel old, yet! I found my copy of WC2 back in like January and after many tweaks to one of my 98 boxes I got it running, again. It was kind of disappointing, really, since when I first played that game I thought it was one of the best games ever made, and now it seems even more dated than I remember.

quote:"Big" goes well here too. Especially the wonderfully intimidating 76 page manual, which I skipped, and tried some quick action. Or rather, no action. Considering I had NO idea what I was doing, I was lucky I managed to get the ship moving, and had no idea what to do from there.I love that part... it just says, "I can't be bothered to read to the manual, and for some reason I have no idea what I'm doing." I can only guess that he must've thought that the manual was there for looks. Game companies just print those things up to kill trees and waste thier money. And what kinds of games does this guy play if 76 pages is huge and intimidating? Terminus wasn't half the game that BCM is and the manual is 195 pages or something like that. Jumpgate's manual was like 50 pages or so and you had to look online for most of the information besides the very basics in game play. But yes, it is rather humorous that he scores the graphics so high when it's probably the main thing that reviewers nit pick about. All in all, my review of this review is that guys needs to find a new line of work.

quote: Originally posted by Ben Somerset: Support Craft: 4 Phantom 4 Shuttle MkI 2 ATV 2 HAV I like that one for some reason

If only somebody would give those guys real swords, the world would be a better place

Follow this link to tutorial you would have found if you searched before asking

I haven't checked on the status of SWG in a while. The last I did I read that Stormtroopers were out as a valid career option for PCs. I think that kind of turned me off to the game... I'd love to play the evil cannonfodder in white armor, but alas it doesn't look like that will be possible.

Aww.. man, I used to work in a amusement park... talk about fun. Nothing like telling the people who are pale white and gripping onto the side of thier Ferris Wheel car for dear life before the ride has even started, "Don't worry, nobody's fallen off all day." Or, "If you fall, could you please try to land on the other side... the last guy almost hit me." Then of course there was the time we had this... well... obese woman on the Ferris Wheel. Well, ok, obese is an understatement. When the car she was in (and she just barely fit in a car designed to hold four adults) was going up the wheel would slow down noticably and then after she cleared the top the wheel would speed up and turn faster than the tires that were driving it, letting out a horrid screeching sound. Of course everybody in line noticed this and one of them asked my coworker what was wrong. He immediately pointed at the woman and said loud enough for everybody in line to hear, "I can't help it... she's too %^$#ing fat!"

quote:The poly limit in BCM is 65536 per model.Scouring through my hard drive I think I have a character model that's just a couple hundred shy of that limit, actually Hehe... it was first character model ever, and it just goes to show how bloated things can get. I still keep it around as a reminder of what not to do. quote:Anyone can do high poly models, but it takes a lot of skill to come up with low poly models that don't look like ass.So true. On that note, though, I just want to ask who did the character models for BCM? Honestly, they may not be the prettiest models to ever grace a game, but they've got to be some of the most efficient that I've ever seen. I love those things

So, when will we be able to get toy Battlecruisers in our Happy Meals?

At 812 you may or may not have a problem. I've tried to shoot for a budget of 550 triangles when modeling ships for BCM. It was a number I derived from looking at the model stats of existing models in BCStudio. If you're using alot of cylinders and spheres you might want to try using ones with a smaller number of sides. Often times it can give a similiar effect for much less cost. It may or may not be an optimization that's appropriate for your model, however, it's kind of one of those things you have to judge for yourself. Of course, sometimes it's just impossible to get the polycount down when you're modeling from an existing source, and still be able to come up with a finished product that you're happy with. Really, that's why I have an unfinished SA-23E sitting on my hard drive... there's no way I can make it within 550 polys and still be happy with the way it looks.

Anyways, an updated version is up here A note... it requires some manual installation, refer to the README.txt file for where to stick everything. Changes: Geometry corrected on Phantom model Phantom now has it's own unique specs (documented in html format) Unique Icons added for both the Phantom and Nova Changes not documented in README.txt: Phantoms added to AI controlled BC MkIs Phantoms added to Earthstar

No, I just have a fast ship so I can go from Earth Station to Endrigo (or whatever that planet is called) and back twice in an hour bringing in about 30k credits each time (approximately 15k each way).

quote: Missiles costs too much, how did you get the money for them? It costs me about 400 credits to buy a stack of premade missiles and about half that to make my own which are superior to the store bought variety. I usually manufacture 20 stacks at a time, which is 1000 missiles, and I don't even notice a dent in my funds when I do so. I generally make about 60k credits an hour of trading. That's the beauty of being a trader... I played as an enforcer for a while and always used to try and scrounge for upgrades when they became available... as a trader I've never had to scrounge, and the cash is always on hand.