DescentBB

Diedel wrote:

Aus-RED-5 wrote:In v1.4.0 Dual rockets are on even when the box isn't enabled.

Single or multi player? In multi player the game host determines this setting independently of what you have set in your gameplay options menu.

Save game issue has been verified and will be fixed.

Single player is fine.. In multi, I started the game without dual rockets enabled. But they are on no matter what I set it to.

I played anarchy and coop yesterday, and missile launch was set to single and worked like that.

Diedel wrote:I played anarchy and coop yesterday, and missile launch was set to single and worked like that.

ok... so what am I doing wrong then??

Setting up the game and unchecked Dual Missiles for a UDP/IP Netgame....

But I still end up with Dual Missiles!

Here's what you are doing wrong: You didn't give me enough infos in the first place.

Well.. time for me to put in another 2 cents worth.

Downloaded version 1.4.1 the other day and I loaded up a saved game. It didn't crash, however, the movement seems rather choppy, and weapon shots would not travel at all, but just hang suspended in mid air for a few seconds before vanishing. Tried creating a new game with the same result. Created a new pilot, and then tried that with the same result again. Shooting at a door would not cause it to open so it seems like weapon shots are not traveling at all. Flying into the suspended weapon shots also didn't do anything either - no damage to the ship. Tried downloading the d2x-w32 package in case of corruption, and still having the same issue. Here is a link to a screenshot.

http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y111/a ... irebug.jpg

1.4.1 has a severe bug. Please wait for 1.4.2 where that bug is fixed.

I really dislike the new speads of pitching and yawing for the ship. Why did you change them in the first place?

Of course if like them so much that's okay, at the least give the user the option between using the old speed settings the new ones. That of course would be a very nice thuing to have since games are getting less and less custmisable.

There is also the problem with "Version Mismatches" when I try to load old pilots. Is there anything that can be done for that? and there is a a lot of choppy movment, thus making it hard to aim when fighting.

Just tried 1.4.3

Everything appears fairly smooth with one slight bit of wierdness. The little blue ITD bots seem to be able to go through doors without openning them now.

Right on level one they were able to fly right through the red key door.

Draco,

There has been a discussion about turn speeds in D2X-W32 weeks ago, and I have tried to tune everything to D2-Win95 speeds. Imo your nagging about D2X-W32 is unconstructive and so unspecific that I don't really know what you mean and what you want.

Nosferatu,

I'll check this.

Edit: I couldn't observe that. I could however observe these drones open doors. When examining the code I found that this was correct as they have the sniper attribute, and snipers can open doors in D2.

That might occur in a co-op game with some loss; you didn't receive the 'door opened' packet from the machine that was controlling the ITD, but you did receive at least some of the movement and thus saw it go through the door...

Sirius wrote:That might occur in a co-op game with some loss; you didn't receive the 'door opened' packet from the machine that was controlling the ITD, but you did receive at least some of the movement and thus saw it go through the door...

This was in SP.

If we can have mutators like dual missile firing, can we get a D1 fusion option?

If you tell me what that would be ...

Diedel wrote:If you tell me what that would be ...

Fusion should do the amount of damage it did in the original. D2's Fusion is way too nerfed.

Trackball wrote:Fusion should do the amount of damage it did in the original. D2's Fusion is way too nerfed.

X2

So what is the damage it does in D1?

Diedel wrote:So what is the damage it does in D1?

I'm not sure how you would find out. Im sure someone here else must know though.

Is it more or less than in D2?

Diedel wrote:Is it more or less than in D2?

Much more.

I also think cinematics should play in game. I got them working for D2xGL by simply putting the movie files in the Descent 2 directory.

What cinematics? The movies? Put a semicolon in front of the -nomovies switch in d2x.ini in the descent 2 folder.

I could add a switch to double Fusion hit points. No, better: A slider with lets say 6 notches, each meaning a plus of 50%. So you could have quadrupled fusion hit points max. The choice would be yours then.

Diedel wrote:I could add a switch to double Fusion hit points. No, better: A slider with lets say 6 notches, each meaning a plus of 50%. So you could have quadrupled fusion hit points max. The choice would be yours then.

That would be great. Although it would be better if we get an exact damage count on Fusion in D1. It seems like its roughly twice that of D2's.

From D1's bitmaps.tbl (this file is the D1 equivalent of a D3 tablefile):

; (14) ---------- Fusion Cannon ----------
; Note: On January 26, 1995, Mike changed energy usage to be 0. The fusion cannon is now a strange weapon
; that consumes energy based on how long the firing key is held down.
@$WEAPON picture=gauge10.bbm weapon_pof=fusion1.pof weapon_pof_inner=fusion2.pof lw_ratio=1.0 mass=0.5 drag=0.0 blob_size=0.0 strength=30 30 30 30 30 flash_vclip=15 flash_size=6.0 flash_sound=24 robot_hit_vclip=65 wall_hit_vclip=65 robot_hit_sound=11 wall_hit_sound=11 impact_size=5.0 speed=150 150 150 150 150 persistent=1 lighted=0 lightcast=5.0 energy_usage=0.0 ammo_usage=0.0 fire_wait=1.0 fire_count=1 lifetime=10.0

So, I imagine it does 30 damage per blob. 60 between the two. One shot. Uncharged. Ouch

The D2 fusion also has a basic damage value of 30, but that gets multiplied with some "weapon->ctype.laser_info.multiplier" which might be different.

Hey, just one question...

Have the changes you've recently made meant you can use full 24-bit colour textures in Descent 2? If so, how is transparency done?

Either way it sounds quite interesting... depending how much else changes design might be very different...

Nonetheless, since DH and I have plans to do a near-redesign of most of the D2 custom content for a short-ish mission, just to play around with D2x a bit... it could give us a lot more flexibility.

Edit: Two questions actually.

Are robot bitmap sizes flexible? If they're big enough we can do D3-style 'skinning' of the robots... much more realistic result.

q1: Full TGA support, but no alpha channel.
q2: Dunno.

Oh, I wasn't referring to alpha, just D2-style 'colour key' transparency, like on grates.

Nope.

Ok, going to have to be careful about those then.

Jeff,

I will add color key transparency handling of TGA textures, but I need to find out which color key Outrage has used first. DLE-XP does not allow you to combine differently sized textures as primary and secondary textures though (you cannot e.g. put a 64x64 lamp texture on a 128x128 wall texture).

I will post a zip file with all D3 textures that are suitable for wall texturing (a little less than 800) as TGA files on my descent site in the resources section and notify you once I've done that.

To my knowledge Outrage always used alpha channels for transparency, as opposed to colour keys... I think all textures were 16-bit, either 4/4/4/4 bits RGBA or 5/5/5/1.

Jeff,

I have used a converter program to create TGA images from the OGF image format D3 uses, and the resulting TGA files do not contain an alpha channel. That's the problem.

Try extracting them with this.

Ih Photoshop CS, the alpha channel saved with that tool shows up as an actual channel. I think it shows up as a selection in PS7.

I have used "this" (D3-IT).

Edit: D'Oh! I had tried another tool first, and that one had removed the alpha channel. D3-IT doesn't. Very good.

So there will be an update for DLE-XP shortly reading/writing TGA alpha channels, too.

Any hope on getting ogg or mp3 support for music (to dump eg. ogg rips of the D2 audio tracks into the d2x-win32 directory or a subdir and get those played), and/or a way of giving the game a high-res texture overhaul (like so many other sourceports of games have done)?

The latter would involve enabling d2x-w32 to load textures from external files and using the external versions instead of the normal ones to render. There would, of course, be a need for some sort of mapping of Descent texture ID to file name. Heck, I'd be willing to remake textures if there was any way to use them.

theoutrider,

you can use high res true color TGA textures in D2X-W32 by loading them into a level as custom textures with DLE-XP. That's what the last few posts here were about.

I think he meant overhauling all of the default D2 graphics in the main .pig file.

If somebody would take the work upon himself to create an alternate pig file, I could teach DLE-XP and D2X-W32 to use it. I wouldn't however touch the original pig file - rather create replacement textures for the original ones plus a set of additional new ones.

Off the top of my head, you'd have more than 600 textures to redesign. That's a lot of work.

Diedel, something broke/changed between 1.4.6 and 1.4.9 with keyboard control ... now, all keyboard axis controls act like cruise is on (which isn't btw) - a tap on left sets continuous left motion until countered with a tap on right = much harder to keep baddies in cross-hairs!

Haven't figured out the keyboard "ramp" settings, but have tried default "on" (as was in 1.4.6), and turned them all off, but no change to this latest drift problem.

Not a fan of WinDoze, but installed a copy just to play with your enhancements to this classic - very nice!

Looking forward to your code base being *nix friendly again.

Diedel wrote:If somebody would take the work upon himself to create an alternate pig file, I could teach DLE-XP and D2X-W32 to use it. I wouldn't however touch the original pig file - rather create replacement textures for the original ones plus a set of additional new ones.

Which is pretty much exactly what I meant, only without an alternate pig. The concept used by most source ports for stuff like that is just dumping files following a set naming scheme somewhere and the sourceport will use that instead of the original texture.

For an example with d2x: let's assume only a single texture replaced. DTX2 exports textures as [texture_id].gif by default - let's assume we would want to make a high-res replacement for

This is exported by dtx2 as "misc032.gif" - an external replacement should thus be named "misc032.tga" (I assume tga for now, because it makes for full colour depth instead of the 8-bit gif). So if there's a misc032.tga in a pre-set place, d2x-w32 could use that in the game in place of the normal misc032 texture from the pig. Replacements should probably be thrown into a subdir of d2x-w32.exe to keep things clean - so to replace this texture for example, one would make a high-res version of it and dump it into:
<d2x dir>\textures\misc032.tga (or .bmp, or whichever file format you prefer).

Would something like that be possible? It would make for the possibility of incremental upgrading as well; so as long as there's only few textures remade, people could use those and add new ones whenever they come up.

Sirius wrote:Off the top of my head, you'd have more than 600 textures to redesign. That's a lot of work.

Actually, 742 just for the Walls/Doors and Floors/Ceilings categories in dtx2, plus 196 for the Robots (if those should be done), plus 339 for effects. If all textures were to be remade (including the powerups, rotating weapons, cockpit, everything), we'd arrive at a whooping 2096 images for D2 alone. Still, the possibility of making high-res textures would be awesome, and in a community effort, even a complete texture overhaul would be nowhere near impossible.
It's been done before for other games.
Come on, look me in the eyes and try to tell me that the concept of stuff like this doesn't make you drool .


[edit] Because I can:

D2 Originals


High-Res Remakes


The leftmost one took about ten minutes to create. From there, the other two were about two to three minutes each.
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