DescentBB

Sirius wrote:If memory serves, D3 had an option to improve the accuracy of packet data.

I think you're talking about advanced smoothing - all it does is graphically show the ship keeping on moving at the same speed/in the same direction as they where when the last packet about them was recieved. It doesn't do anything for the actual hit/miss or loss - it just makes it look like they are less lossy by "guessing" where the next packet will be client side.

about demo recording and "XXTV" stuff. The developers over at digital illusions have this new way of demo recording, instead of actually recording a demo from player data that requires large amounts of HD space, you could have the recordings saved as an "Engine Data Output File". a 10-15 minute demo recording will then only be around 200KB or so. not only that, but you can pause, slow mo, and move the camera around as you wish.

great idea for clan and tournament matches, and it is being implamented into Battlefield 2 =]
would be a cool idea if the devs from CD would do this to.

That's what they are doing, Punk, all the demo file will save is corrdinates for all of the objects in the world - in order to play the demo, the engine will have to run those coordinates and regenerate the models. What people are saying is they would like an option to extract these demos to some sort of video format, so people without the game can see what's going on in the game- essentially, a way to make a video of the demo.

BF2 demo recording has an option of outputting into .avi also. it's just not done yet =]

but whatever.

Curious about level design aspects.

1) It's already been said that outdoor areas will not be natively supported. Can you fake them and still retain your reputation? Although people did it even in D1 and D2, they quite frankly sucked - it'd be nice if Core Decision supported such architecture a little better.

2) It's also been stated that CD is cube-based. How flexible is this? While adaptable enough and certainly passible if you knew how to use it, D1 and D2 don't exactly break ground for the ability to create new and interesting levels. How much better can CD do? Could it do anything (indoors) D3 does?

If a player is cloaked and selects the Tesla Cannon, will they become decloaked if they begin to charge the Tesla Cannon?

In the one chat log the HOs said that the terrain is possible with the engine, and could be done with a plug in(Aparently the engine is modular). They just wern't going to use that capability because, you know, it wasn't in the almighty D1.

They said teh cube system has a highly modifyable mesh, but since the engine can also import D1/2 mission I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of old classics reamerge. Like the 13 diffrent versions of Minerva.

Mr. Perfect wrote: They said teh cube system has a highly modifyable mesh, but since the engine can also import D1/2 mission I suspect we'll be seeing a lot of old classics reamerge. Like the 13 diffrent versions of Minerva.

Ugh....

I'd rather see a total remake than a straight port of a level....

Burning Indika 3, for example, might play nice, but frankly, it looks like shite...

The idea for the Rail Gun in CD sucks. What's the point of making it go through walls if you don't have an x-ray scope? The coolest thing you can do with it is get a quad kill. And you'd have to be a psychic to know where someone is behind a wall and actually hit him. Why not just make a Beam Cannon?

Succesfully predicting if an enemy is behind a wall and shooting him down through it would be a multiple-orgasms inducing experience for me.

Omega works through walls and glass. I have frequently killed peeps in Skybox upper power generator with the Omega. Sweet kills!

IsAB wrote:Succesfully predicting if an enemy is behind a wall and shooting him down through it would be a multiple-orgasms inducing experience for me.

Either voice chat or that gun has to go. I'm not listening to that kinda crap in-game.

Neo wrote:The idea for the Rail Gun in CD sucks. What's the point of making it go through walls if you don't have an x-ray scope? The coolest thing you can do with it is get a quad kill. And you'd have to be a psychic to know where someone is behind a wall and actually hit him. Why not just make a Beam Cannon?

What about when you're fighting someone out in the open, then all the sudden they try to flee by ducking behind a wall or going down a tunnel? Then you could switch to the Rail Gun and guess pretty well where he is.

RUL- wrote:

Neo wrote:The idea for the Rail Gun in CD sucks. What's the point of making it go through walls if you don't have an x-ray scope? The coolest thing you can do with it is get a quad kill. And you'd have to be a psychic to know where someone is behind a wall and actually hit him. Why not just make a Beam Cannon?

What about when you're fighting someone out in the open, then all the sudden they try to flee by ducking behind a wall or going down a tunnel? Then you could switch to the Rail Gun and guess pretty well where he is.

Yeah, but the thing is that the rails are so thin that you have to be a marksman in order to hit someone. If you can't see someone, then how can you hit him with such a thin rail?

I agree with MP. ^_~ IsAB, that would be great, but...well, look at what I just said.

Mobius wrote:Omega works through walls and glass. I have frequently killed peeps in Skybox upper power generator with the Omega. Sweet kills!

The Rail Cannon is not the Omega Cannon. ^_~

Uhm...

The rail gun isn't called a rail gun because it fires rails.

It just uses rails to aid propulsion of a projectile. Basically it works by running a strong current through the rails and the projectile between them, which creates a magnetic field that forces the projectile along the barrel. Usually has a muzzle velocity a few percent of light.

(Naturally, this mechanism doesn't permit the drawn-out damage High Octane have opted for, but when it comes to improving gameplay anything goes.)

And you're right, hitting someone like that SHOULD be nearly impossible, if you left it up to chance. With a little bit of l33t Jedi mind tricks you can get it right though.
Really, once you know the instant your opponent is coming around the corner (in the days of D1 and D2 duels, the better players did), this isn't too much of a stretch, especially if you saw them less than a second before.

PS. About levels again.

There were some awesome levels made for D1 and D2, but they were often meant to stay that way. That's because while they squeezed the most out of their native engines, they won't come close for CD. (Remember Burning Indika 3? Although, strictly speaking, the D1/D2 versions of that didn't do as much as they could have either.)

If I was making levels for CD - and I probably will be if it is released - I wouldn't try to clone D1 or D2... I would try to exploit the new possibilities having a hundred times the number of cubes would give you. More advanced architecture, doing what you want instead of what you can with twenty cubes, and probably making just simply HUGE co-op levels.

Terrain would be nice too, even if as an add-on. I only hope that it's not as annoying as that of D3 to work with (sometimes we don't want the hassle of building a rock face around a square of disabled terrain).

Actually, if you could deform parts of the mesh to fit with your structure, that would be quite nice. It would also be nice if someone could find a way to improve the texture mapping on steep slopes.

Sirius wrote:It would also be nice if someone could find a way to improve the texture mapping on steep slopes.

That alone would make terrain look so much better! Great suggestion!

That's easy...

Just look at UT2004.

On steep slopes, instead of mapping the texture from the top down, they rotate the mappings 90 degrees so it's straight on the slope, and blend the edges.

Has anyone done a digest of the chat sessions yet? Because frankly, I don't care enough to dig through 'em.

Where are the screenshots?

HO said "one month".... one month ago!

Mobius wrote:Where are the screenshots?

HO said "one month".... one month ago!

I was wondering the same.

Read the chat log for the answer to that question (and more!)

Suncho wrote:Read the chat log for the answer to that question (and more!)

/slap I did read it... I still see it saying within a month, and I still havn't seen a shot.

implementing a rail gun that doesnt have the ability to see through walls is just begging for people to start crying hack. do you think people will accept the fact that you are just that good that you can guess flight patterns/lead (not all that hard really, i predict where people will be entering a room all the time doing just that), or say you hack so you can see through walls and thats how you hit them?

kurupt wrote:implementing a rail gun that doesnt have the ability to see through walls is just begging for people to start crying hack. do you think people will accept the fact that you are just that good that you can guess flight patterns/lead (not all that hard really, i predict where people will be entering a room all the time doing just that), or say you hack so you can see through walls and thats how you hit them?

...so? :p

Well those hit and run pilots wont be able to run around corners anymore.

in the chat sessions HO pointed out that the damage effect of the railgun will be totally different from what the massdriver did. read the log.

Just to clarify, the Rail Gun doesn't shoot through walls. We never said that. Read the log.

be weary with the cloaking idea. some video cards will render a cloak differently than others, and theres a very good possibility that older generation card users will be able to see the cloak and have a really unfair advantage.

in halo older cards see cloaks with a blue tint, and the fact gearbox wouldnt fix that is one reason the game failed miserably on the pc. i'd hate to see that happen with this game.

you gotta find a way to either code it so every single card renders a cloaked player as actually cloaked, or just not make it such an integral part of the game.

kurupt wrote:be weary with the cloaking idea. some video cards will render a cloak differently than others, and theres a very good possibility that older generation card users will be able to see the cloak and have a really unfair advantage.

in halo older cards see cloaks with a blue tint, and the fact gearbox wouldnt fix that is one reason the game failed miserably on the pc. i'd hate to see that happen with this game.

you gotta find a way to either code it so every single card renders a cloaked player as actually cloaked, or just not make it such an integral part of the game.

I think the idea was to make cloaked pilots completely invisible.

the only way to make them completely invisible is to make them not even there. older cards may have a light blue outline around the ship in contrast to the background, for example. i dont know anything about coding, i just know what its like to be a fan of a game who gets no support from the developers and have watched a mistake in coding kill alot of skilled players desire to play the game. when you lose players, you lose dev support.

Sirius wrote:It's also been stated that CD is cube-based. How flexible is this?

An interesting example of a game produced out of meshes of cubes is the aptly-named Cube Engine. The visuals are definitely on par with the first Unreal Tournament and Descent 3. In this engine, the editor is actually handled in real-time within the game itself. You can, on-the-fly, raise and lower cubes and blocks to create level geometry. A bizarre corollary of this is that the Cube Engine affords multi-user level design. Several builders can join a multiplayer game and modify different parts of the level at the same time.

On some level, a lot of Unreal Tournament maps are actually quite blocky themselves. It's the hyper-detailed static mesh geometry that makes them look more detailed than the core geometry really is.

An interesting example of a game produced out of meshes of cubes is the aptly-named Cube Engine.

Nice though those screenshots look, it seems pretty apparent that that particular engine is designed for a groundpounder. There's nothing like being 'outside' and hitting the edge of the sky. Of course, the invisible ceiling above the terrain in D3 was just as lame, but a cube-based engine does seem like a big step backwards from existing technology.

As I said earlier, though, as long as it's a true 6DOF FPS, it could be zero-g chimps flinging poo, and I'll be happy.

What complexity they show does indicate some power, though. Although it does appear pretty cuboid in general, that doesn't tend to mean much other than that designers like to do it that way. (I'm sure perpendicular faces aren't enforced... or at least not in CD.)

From a brief glance, that stuff -can- be done in Descent 1/2, but not particularly nicely or quickly.

The sky does look pretty lame though. But that's not really the point; CD isn't even going for sky. (On the other hand, if we have large enough cube limits, it would be pretty easy to fake a sky, even in a cube-based architecture, if you make it large enough and include a texture broken into a few thousand pieces with your level. Obviously the process would be enormously time-consuming, but...)

The terrain ceiling D3 had was lame, yes, but also necessary. Unless, of course, you can think of other ways to restrict the player's movement so they don't go out of bounds. In Mechwarrior 4 they just have invisible 'walls' at the edges of the map, but you don't get to fly anything there.

The terrain ceiling D3 had was lame, yes, but also necessary. Unless, of course, you can think of other ways to restrict the player's movement so they don't go out of bounds.

There are far better ways to do it, though I'm not sure how easy or difficult coding it is. Commanche Gold used a system where the terrain would repeat as you left the map. In other words, as you left the map, you'd enter a duplicate of the terrain (minus any objects that were on the original map). If the terrain was designed properly, the transition would be seamless. To prevent you from getting lost in the infinite space this allowed you, you'd have mission waypoints to guide you to where you needed to be.

Maximum altitude could be handled for a Pyro much like it is handled for helocopters... When you get too far from the terrain or massive object that you're flying over (i.e. you go too high), your engines start sputtering; the ship starts shaking; your antigravs fail, and you crap yourself as the nose points down and you begin hurtling toward the ground. Just have to remember to map a 'restart engines' key to spam once you're within your operational altitude again.

Not that any of this matters, but it is possible to give the player a lot more freedom in terrain-flight than Descent has yet allowed.

Yes, that would be preferable... although, yeah, it's not really happening in CD anyway.

Any word of screen shots yet? Anyone seen the game at all? Is this going to turn into pie in the sky?

I would love to have my foot put in my mouth, is High Octane going to help me out?

Today I was thinking: "It would be cool if robots could crash to the ground after you killed them and then smolder as scrap wherever they landed smoking for a while instead of always blowing up and not leaving a trace."

Nice idea. Though getting past wreckage in small places would get difficult. And imagine the pileups around matcens!

I've always wanted bots with some real damage zones. The D3 tailbots where supposed to have arms that could be shot off, but they ended up like most every other bot, all or nothing. Mechwarrior 2 had better damage systems on their bots. I want to be able to mutilate these things before I kill them.

some of the d3 bots have damage-zones, the tracker-bot for example. you can shot of his megamissile-turret. this small spiderbot with red lasers can be disarmed too. also the juggernaut and some other bots.

No, really seriously HO- where did you all go?