Werewolf

Hey gimme a break, I just bought this shiny new spaceship. Now I'm broke and can't afford a nuke right away.

Alrighty, now we have OTS (Orbit to Surface) *and* STO (Surface to Orbit) Missiles. The manual explains how to use OTS's just nicely, except the part of how to get it without playing for a week So: Does anyone have suggestions as to how to aquire an OTS missile without paying an arm an a leg? Also, how do the STO's work? Are they totally automated or can they be controlled somehow? Are there any other neat tricks to try with these things?

By "warped" I don't mean the bobbing motion due to the sea. Just enter one of the little flyers and take off. You'll find yourself at the bottom of the ocean, still in your craft of course. Actually you're inside a building that's down there. And trying to fly out of it damages the craft badly.

I vaguely remember a thread where SC said that the speed at which you start your ingress is also the speed at which you'll be when the ingress is done. I noticed a similar thing with regular shuttles. However for me, the more annyoing thing is that the autopilot seems to deactivate during ingress. Or am I doing something wrong here?

quote: quote: x) Setting Windows Display properties to 120dpi Fonts appears to cause text overflowingCan't do anything about it. Don't change your display properties Roger, I just wanted to state that this was the reason why it happened. quote: quote:x) In FPS mode, the player's character has a tendency to steer towards 090 degrees.Its not a bug. Its the character's idle animation thats causing that I think. Whatever it is, it's annoying as hell. Quite often I find myself cursing because it throws off my aim - only to go "ah, it's the 090 degree thing again". And since it also happens while running and shooting, I highly doubt it's the idle animation. quote: quote:x) Scenario IA0110 (Naval Carrier Defense) Exit the craft you're currently in, then walk to a different one and try to take off. You'll find yourself warped to the bottom of the ocean.Approach it from another angle and it will work. Yes, but do you know that I *can* mount the vehicle and it stays on deck properly - but is warped the moment I try to take off? I thought I'd notify you in case your answer relates exclusively to the collision between player and vehicle.

I updated my profile and signature, but it doesn't show in my previous post. EDIT: Now it does

I have a spare windoze machine and a T1 connection, I'll check where to best place the hardware on Sunday and open up a 24/7 dedicated server.

I can positively confirm that there's a reproducable CTD related to entering vehicles. It may take some time to reproduce, but it's not that hard: Transport to random earth base enter a sam vehicle drive to a stagat sto enter sto drive around base deploy a marine via transporter to the planet surface send another marine to SC1 order SC1 to deploy OC at position of teleported marine drive to a SAM enter SAM CTD occurs exactly when pressing / Another scenario: Load up IA0014 (Instant Action, Tactical Intercept) Get into an armed flying vehicle, squash the enemy marines while NOT destroying the downed enemy gunship. Land, get into the enemy gunship. Fly back to your base, exit from the gunship, and enter another vehicle. CTD. In general, driving from one vehicle to another on one base and repeatedly entering and exiting seems to produce CTDs. While the above procedures don't always produce a CTD, I was able to CTD 10 missions in a row by just entering and exiting vehicles at leisure while doing some random shooting inbetween. After the 5th-10th vehicle I use, the CTD happens. The CTD *always* happens the moment I try to enter a vehicle Other bugs: x) Setting Windows Display properties to 120dpi Fonts appears to cause text overflowing the options menu, as well as the bar graph indicators for shields, solar power, etc. in the HUD to be placed at the wrong locations. This is regardless of the resolution the game runs in. Look here, this is the options screen with fonts set to 120 dpi: http://toumal.protgp.com/uc/01.png And this is the options screen after resetting to the default font size and rebooting windows: http://toumal.protgp.com/uc/02.png x) In FPS mode, the player's character has a tendency to steer towards 090 degrees. Reproducing this is easy: Just stand somewhere, and turn towards heading 110. Somewhere between 110 and 120 the player will start spinning towards 090 automatically at a slow speed. Same thing when you come from the other side. It's impossible to maintain a steady 080 or 100 degrees heading, as the player will always turn itself towards 090 and stay there. x) Mouseinvert setting is ignored in FPS mode. (Fixed in 1.00.02 as I just read) x) Mouseinvert flips the flight controls, but the control pipper is still moving in the same directions as if mouseinvert was off. This is not really a bug, but confusing. x) Bar graph indicators for shields, solar energy, etc. are positioned wrongly. AFAIK you're already aware of that though. x) Scenario IA0110 (Naval Carrier Defense) Exit the craft you're currently in, then walk to a different one and try to take off. You'll find yourself warped to the bottom of the ocean. Since I'm out in the woods using my laptop, here are it's specs: Inspiron 8600, Geforce FX 5650 128MB, 1Gig RAM, WinXP Home, latest Detonator drivers. [ 02-06-2004, 05:20 PM: Message edited by: Supreme Cmdr ]

Well, you're right, because widescreen is just a screen resolution, nothing else. Since you obviously programmed this in a generic way it works. Others enumerate the available modes and initialize the gfx in a mode chosen from a list with n entries, thus limiting what's available. Now if the Logistix and other computer screens would scale to the full resolution (like the main menu) I'd be totally happy

Here I was, bugging SC about the missing widescreen support in UC, only to find out that the games does widescreen resolutions just fine! Just stick "Resolution=1680x1050" into your ucconfig.ini DUH... The Hud is scaled, and hence is a little wider than normal, as expected. However, I'm quite sure SC doesn't want to hear about bug reports if you run in a screen resolution that isn't officially supported, so take care

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: btw, as a developer, what do you think overall about the game? Especially wrt Dreamcatcher's comment that they lowered the price because of its "quality"? 19 Bucks is the price of a budget game, something that has very limited play value, titles like LaserArena or inane arcade shooters. Neither UC's quality nor it's play value warrants such a classification. And the thought that halving the price will double sales could come straight from a dilbert comic. What if they slashed the price by a factor of 10, would that multiply sales by 10 too? If any game I write ever gets as complex as UC, I'll be glad to get it half as right as you. I'm glad I am able to use existing engines like the extraordinary Torque engine. I went through the whole "do it yourself" routine once, thank you, and I'm amazed that UC works as it does now. You almost certainly have to worry about things like float precision for such a big honkin' space sim, and that's something I don't wish my worst enemies

quote: quote:Things like the Logistix and Tactical computer could be merged into one screen.You have to understand and accept the fact that they are two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT systems. I didn't create two systems just to make more work for myself. Okiedokie. What do you think about my suggestion of getting rid of the "tunnel-view" dialogs? I mean reducing the amount of mouse clicks needed to get to SC1 loadout, for example. quote: quote: x) The options. There's no support beyond 1280x1024, and especially no widescreen support. Why should it support widescreen? Are you kidding me? The thought never even crossed my mind and it never was in my design to begin with. I see you don't have a widescreen notebook I, too, thought of such things as obsolete. But once I got my Dell Inspiron 8600, I immediately added widescreen resolution support to all the games I'm currently working on ("Illumina" + the opensource branch of "Enemy Engaged") Why? Because those black bars on either side don't have to be there quote: quote:The latter is excusable for some older opengl games, but under D3D there's no real reason.Really? How many games actually do support widescreen? Quite a few actually, especially new ones tend to include 1680x1050 and 1280x800. quote: quote:Sounds. They're mostly low quality, some are outright annoying, and almost all samples have been preprocessed with some reverb.They were sampled in order to process correctly under DirectSound positional and so that they still play correctly when mixed in with several simultaneously playing sounds. Hmm, I honestly can't see how adding a reverb makes a sound mix "better". I thought of this as a design decision (maybe as in: walking sounds different to yourself when you're wearing a protective suit with helmet) quote: quote:Trees.If they were any higher quality - given the scope of the planet, you'd never be able to run the game. They're only rendered within a certain radius of the camera's position. Does the planet size play any part in that? And as I said, it's good that they're there. Better than flat polygons. quote: quote:x) First person mode. yet the biggest gripe I have is the fact that the whole fps-episode just doesn't "feel right". Please explain. And remember, this is not - and never was - a dedicated fps. I know. That's why it doesn't bother me all that much. The game is so huge that polishing every edge is probably an infinite task. As to what bothers me, it's mostly related to collision detection (someone else mentioned the bounce-back). This is especially apparent when you walk on rather flat-angled surfaces of a building. There are some missile silos where parts are actually walkable - but that doesn't work very nice. quote: quote:The collision detection is shaky, and one never knows what units one can enter. Simple optical cues could tell you that, for example.I can't think of any game that gives you a visual cue to tell you what units you can/cannot enter. Im not saying the information is not anywhere in the manual (in fact it's in the manual addendum on the CD), I just proposed that showing you what unit is controllable would make the game much more intuitive. As for examples, lookie here: quote: quote:x) Some CTDs. But that's to be expected. Entering ground vehicles and installations seems to be very crash-prone.No, CTDs are NOT to be expected. Roger that, I will try to find a short way to reproduce it. quote: quote:When the camera is playing nice, the combat is great...when it steers off to the left or right on it's own, I get a little dis-heartened. Its your mouse I observed the same thing, and I swear I didn't move the mouse at all.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: And its not going to be supported any less than if it was sold at $39.99. I remember a different statement just yesterday.

Alrighty. The good: I liked the fact that the game has indeed NOT been dumbed down. This will not fly well with some game reviewers as they expect BF1942 complexity (and not more...) everywhere. The game runs smooth on reasonable hardware. The wildlife is really nice, I love to fly at low altitude and watch the birds passing by. I won't go into detail how much I like the range of actions available to the player, as this is what this game is all about. The bad: x) The UI. Take a look at the options menu at 1280x1024 and you see what I mean. Texts overflowing the (fixed size) dialogs does not look professional. Things like the Logistix and Tactical computer could be merged into one screen. Just as in BCM, most screens are empty except for one or two controls, and you have to step through quite a long sequence to get to the light. It's like being forced to crawl through a keyhole to enter the hall. A complete overhaul could really improve the whole game. Hire a seasoned HMI-designer and let him revamp the whole thing. It's definitely possible to keep the whole functionality while getting rid of the individual "mostly-empty-screens". EDIT: I'm actually quite ok with the Tacops screen. It has a lot of functionality yet it's reasonably simple to use. x) The options. There's no support beyond 1280x1024, and especially no widescreen support. The latter is excusable for some older opengl games, but under D3D there's no real reason. There's no global mouse invert that I could find. I can toggle the y-axis invert option on and off, it has no effect on first person mode for example. x) Sounds. They're mostly low quality, some are outright annoying, and almost all samples have been preprocessed with some reverb. x) Trees. Ok they are there, but they look like what I did in my games back in 2000. The upside is that they don't use much processing power of course. It's good that they're there, they just don't look exceptionally nice. x) First person mode. Uh oh. This is the part of the game that still has the most icky feel to it IMHO. There's a whole thread about looking up and down, yet the biggest gripe I have is the fact that the whole fps-episode just doesn't "feel right". The collision detection is shaky, and one never knows what units one can enter. Simple optical cues could tell you that, for example. Some features are really useless IMO, like the ability to look around while keeping the current heading. You can turn your viewpoint and look into your own head, whee x) Some CTDs. But that's to be expected. Entering ground vehicles and installations seems to be very crash-prone.

While I do think that UC still has a lot of rough edges (and even though I don't agree on quite a few design decisions you made) the price change is ridiculous. Talking about quality, there are a lot of cases of totally crappy games being sold at a "regular" retail price, so I hope the judges don't give in to any brainwashing from your publisher. Best of luck to you. I know that most of the $100 I spent went into shipping and DC, but still... Oh and no sign of UC being advertised anywhere here in or around Austria, it's not even listed as upcoming title most by most retailers. OT, I couldn't agree more with you on Painkiller. But then again, what do you expect from an industry where something like CS is still one of the most popular things?

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: I wasn't particularly responding to just your post, but collectively to similar queries in the thread. No problem. I guess these questions (or requests...) do get annoying after the n-th time.

First of all: Take it easy. It was just my two cents here. quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: You are talking about clearly different things and I have no idea what you're going on about.Okay... well the fact is I'm a BCM newbie. I do use mouselook (or at least I think I am), and all that moves vertically is the crosshair and the gun. If that's how it's intended to work, fine - I just wanted to express that I'd enjoy it more if it worked differently. If I screwed up something and BCM does allow me to look up and down using the mouse, forget what I was rambling about here. quote:The crosshair marks the direction of fire and will always be there. If it means that much to you, go play another game which doesn't have a crosshair.What part of my post suggested such a narrow-mindedness on my side? My current project has crosshairs too, I can live with that quite well.

lsmf? I thought I read about the FP mode finally allowing to look up and down somewhere, am I totally mistaken there? It's of course your decision, but I wonder what's so much better about not being able to look up and down (other than that being your preference, Derek ). I personally would prefer the crosshair to be in the center at all times - or better yet: No crosshair at all, but using the gun's iron sights (or scope) for precise aiming.

I'm glad someone still cares about finishing a product, not just demos like so many big corporations. And no, I don't just say that because I preordered - which i did I'm also delighted to see that UC is not that far away after all. When I look at what other companies produce in that timeframe...