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Messages - Destructavator

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1
Offtopic / A goodbye note, a token offered in respect.
« on: October 08, 2017, 05:32:46 pm »
One needs wings to take to the skies.

One needs to channel a Letharg to push a bull; One needs courage, bravery, determination, and confidence to cleave.
One needs other virtues as well, but as to what those may be I'm not going to tell you - at least not here.

One needs to chill if they have a lack of tolerance for my sucky poetry.

One cannot recover what one never had to begin with.

Now, to cut the ****, I'm going to talk straight (as if I ever did otherwise):  I'm not going to be here much longer, and those that know my face might not see it much longer, as I'm moving on from playing video games, a well as programming video games with regards to coding, etc., and I'm moving forward to undertake some serious work on issues that will make changes far beyond the potential influence a video game would make on society.  Granted, I have more than one role, more than one job as such, although I have to focus on a few select roles that are the most important and leave the rest to others.  The concept that a single individual can only do so much within the scope of a human lifetime is relevant.  Others would see that change is coming yet of a spiritual nature not typical of most is also relevant.

Don't look for me here, not after the time this is written, but look for a better future, one where there is a better future for most, in particular for those who may come along to survive in a better world as one may see it.  I would advise not to look down a rabbit hole, but to look for those who fly the skies like the eagle, have predatory instincts and other traits like that of a tiger, puma, or other great feline, grow to one day have a mighty yet modest spirit like that of a dragon, have a magical and spiritual nature not found in most others, have a responsibilty to life, culture, and virtue of many worlds, many lands, and many beings including those not found on this planet, and this galaxy in the long term.

Look for beings that bring about and enforce a new way of life, new lands to live in, new relationships in the long run among the galaxies.  Look for new ways to live free of harsh attitudes, runaway bureaucracy, sicknesses, laziness, inefficiency, cruelties and unfair punishments, injustice, ruin and derelict, false empty promises offered by cruel gods, godesses, and the fates that pretend to offer.

Look for life with deep respect to culture, spirit, honesty, trust, art and music, nature, and respect for life and the lands and air and waters about oneself.

Look for this to be enforced, as all things do have a price, and one cannot expect such things to come via instant gratification, and there is no solution in living in a pretend world of such.

This shall be enforced in the form of justice, as criminals are evil as as a matter of common sense and are not tolerated.  Keep in mind that good and evil are not black and white, much as these other concepts I have mentioned and talk about in this text.

Look for those that enforce this justice, as well as these other roles, and more which might or might not come with time.  Understand that this justice is relevant to removing deception and lies - especially of extreme nature, which is itself certainly evil any way one slices it.

Look for those who slay and remove such evil, meaning those who create and back such madness and craziness, sickened by their own influence that they perpetuate.  Those who push such insanity are themselves criminals, and are even more evil for offering a so-called cure for the Lifemare they create.

These beings who offer and bring about such justice are not human, and although some would call them "space aliens" perhaps, they are spiritual beings of a special nature.  They also have emotions and something of a playful nature as well when they are not working hard within their roles.  Their roles differ, as they are not clones.  Their personalities are dynamic, and they can be creative, insightful, and wise in different ways.  They are magical in nature, a key and vital part of their spirit which is inseparable.

These beings have respect for honor in their own right, and are not to be feared or misunderstood as enemies as long as they are not provoked or mistreated.

They can also both teach and learn, and have much to offer, although they are not doctors or nannies.
They all have potential to be a warrior in their own way, although what titles others have for them will vary, as well as what they call themselves.

Look for their wings, their feathers, their personalities, their magics, their spirit, dynamic in nature, and especially their courage and altruism.  They are best known by face to conversation, not by gossip.

Scorchcrafter is not dead, and although much was not uploaded, it will be passed along and still available in one form or another.  It will not disappear, or what inspired it.  This is not what will be a severe issue, in the face of maturity and non-involvement in petty childish arguments, as solving problems are more important than blame.

I do not expect to paint any more guitars any time soon, and as such I would not expect anyone to look for the workshop that offered such in the town of North Olmsted, Ohio.

Artworks are sacred, precious, worthy of respect, and are worth fighting for, so that they survive.

Farewell, I offer.

2
OK, here's my own take on the subject:

- I've already been registered in the forum (for years now...) so I didn't have to go through this new system, but I'm glad because I myself had a lot of trouble finding the answer to the question and could certainly imagine how much a pain in the a** it must be for new people who want to join.

- I would suggest, as mentioned already, having a question that has an answer in the download for the game, and *not* posted *anywhere* in the forum.  I don't know of any spam bot that could download the whole game and then extract the answer.
- I would also suggest having the answer in some quick-start or game manual that comes with the download, and *not* require actually starting the game, for the exact same reason already mentioned in the thread - In case someone has trouble starting the game and needs support in the first place.
- The answer to the question should not be a real name (of any person) or real word, because some spam-bots can still guess different random names and/or words, in some cases based upon an "educated guess" from other content and the language used on the website.
- The answer to such a challenge question should be provided in a image format in the download, not necessarily as hard to read as some captcha images, but just enough that a bot scanning downloadable files for the project wouldn't be able to easily scan and extract what they think might be the answer.
- Having a simple PDF or HTML quick-start guide included in the game download with the answer in an image would be very easy, it could be in a FAQ or part of the guide that tells how to join the community or ask for support in the forum.  Putting together such a guide would be very easy (If no one else volunteers, I'll do this part myself, I don't think it'll take long.)
- As a *secondary* measure, the answer to the question should be mentioned in the actual game main menu or somewhere when the player checks a help screen for support.  Either that or it could tell the player where to look to find it (such as "Please read the Quick-Start guide included in the game download for the answer to access the forum, under 'Support Options' or 'Getting involved in the game community'").

- I think something along these ideas would be reasonable, not be too much to expect of newcomers, and would be effective for fighting bots.

Many spam bot create first post with links to another resource. for my friends forum (phpbb) i write very simple script - automatically block user if founded links in first post. This stopped bots.

This is also a very good point, and not a bad idea IMO.  I would offer to do this part myself as well, except that I don't have the expertise for writing such a script, I only know how to code in primarily just C/C++, some Java, HTML, and Reaper JS script (mostly, I'm still learning Python and a few others).

3
Artwork / Re: Restyling Mesh&Texture Firebirb
« on: April 25, 2014, 04:28:28 pm »
OK, I'm fine with whatever kOba wants to do here.

@kOba:  If at any time you change your mind and want to upload it to a folder on my own site via FTP, that option will still be available, just send me a PM with whatever login info you want.

For reference, my own site does not have limits on space or data transfer, and does not require advertisements.

Side note:  I should probably put this in a different topic thread (a sticky?), but does anyone else need a place to upload stuff for UFO AI?

4
Artwork / Re: Restyling Mesh&Texture Firebirb
« on: April 19, 2014, 07:59:29 pm »
OK, I checked my website and yes, the account is still active and working.

If you still need a place to upload stuff, just do the following:

- Send me a PM with:
    -- A log-in name of your choice (can be almost anything)
    -- Whatever password you want to use (can also be almost anything)
- Wait for me to set up the upload folder on my site with the login and password you chose (I check email several times a day, and it only takes a few minutes to set this up)
- Upload all the files you have for the project that you think are relevant and want to share via secure FTP (can be done via nearly any modern FTP client, such as FileZilla, etc.)
- If you need help with exact settings for whatever FTP client you use, just PM me (and let me know what program you are using), and I can provide exactly what info to type into various fields on the option screen(s) for your client.

After this is all done I will make sure all the uploaded files are available to the project and other devs here.

I'd also suggest picking a compatible license for your work, preferably a rather liberal one without too many restrictions.

BTW, please also make sure Duke and/or Mattn has info on exactly what name you want your work credited under (either your real name or whatever you want to be known for as the creator of all the content).  You could also include this in the PM you send me with your chosen login and password, and I would then pass it along.

Any questions or technical issues uploading to my site, send me a PM please.

The server for my website, under my account plan, doesn't really have any special limit on file sizes or how much you can upload, so 100MB or so should be no problem at all.

EDIT:  If you need help choosing a free FTP client, you can ask openly in a reply here in the forum, and many of us can point you in the right direction.  (We will need to know what platform / OS version you are using.)  Some of the programs that will do this also come in a "portable" form, so you don't have to actually install anything, just download the program and run it out of the folder, and then once all is done you can delete the downloaded program (In case you don't like to have to install / uninstall a program you don't plan on using again).

5
Feature Requests / Re: Simultaneous Movement
« on: April 17, 2014, 03:18:36 pm »
A long time ago (more than a year), IIRC Mattn said that this wasn't possible due to how the code was structured and things were implemented, not without a lot of revamp work in the code base.

Of course, that situation may have changed since that time, I'm really not sure and I'm not as familiar with the current source code.

6
Artwork / Re: Restyling Mesh&Texture Firebirb
« on: April 17, 2014, 03:09:14 pm »
I may be of some assistance here, I have my own website, and although I haven't uploaded anything to it in a long time I believe it is still there (My web hosting service does have inactivity policies in extreme cases, but I've still been getting billed for the site, so I'm *guessing* it is still there...)

In the past I've been able to set aside upload space on the server for my site, for files used in projects, and I've had other people upload stuff to folders there before.  Assuming I can set this up again within a few days without issues, I could set up a folder for the files if you just need a temporary spot to upload all the stuff.  The web interface for the web hosting pages are likely all different now, but it should be do-able within a day or two.

The host I have uses a server based in the United States, hopefully that won't be an issue.  (It's with Yahoo web hosting, and they're a big company with international branches, so I would think it would still work.)


7
Offtopic / Getting this going again (pics attached)...
« on: April 17, 2014, 02:52:32 pm »
As some of you may have guessed, I've been busy for quite a while, but I never gave up on any of the open source projects I've been working on, just slowed down quite a bit for a while.  Anyways, I plan to soon be not only working on UFO AI again, but also my own game project.

I've got a new main character model for my game, as shown in the pics, and I think it looks much better than the old, clunky one.  This model has the benefit of normal-mapping technology that the old one did not have, as well as some newer modelling tricks and techniques I've learned.

I've also studied up on how to use per-pixel special maps (lighting, specular, bump/normal/tangent-mapping, etc...) in shader code, and at a glance it doesn't look much harder than some of the shader work I've already done so far.

I'm especially proud of the feathered wings in this model, which I think look much more real.  There's a trick to how the wings are rendered, done with a total of less than 350 faces for both sides of both wings (They do have depth, they are not simply flat planes), yet by looking at the pictures one might guess at a glance that there would supposedly be a lot more mesh verts and faces for all the detail.  Most of the edges and faces are broken up simply for the joints, so they can be animated (each side has 11 bones, 1 base connected to the character's back, and 10 for bending/flapping the wings).

I think the material for the clothing came out kinda cool, too.

I'm still doing some planning for exactly how the game will work and what it will be like, but one thing I know for sure: Much of the game's content will be generated randomly for each campaign/gaming session, so it won't be exactly the same game every time it is played, including map layouts of game areas being different every time.

As for UFO AI, I *do* plan on finally getting together some kind of air combat system in 3D, although I'm probably going to keep the first implementation rather simple and try to add to it, rather than trying to shoehorn a complex, extensive addition all at once like I had tried to do before with the code than got busy part-way through coding it.

Hope to see more of you guys around, soon, and hopefully get to know some of the newer faces in this community since the last few times I checked in to the project...

(I've been involved with UFO AI for years, a long time now, on and off...)

-Dave

8
Design / Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« on: January 27, 2014, 12:03:30 am »
I realize this has been on hold for quite some time, but I got this going again and after a lot of hard coding (C++ and GLSL), I have a new little demo for all of you to try out:

You can find it in the folder at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/tribalcreature/files/terrain%20demos/

It features 3D moving clouds as well as some of my better terrain generation code and such.

Right now it is only built for Windows, it has 32 and 64 bit binaries in the download plus a config / game launcher utility for setting up video options and such (which is incomplete at this time, I admit, but most of the important stuff needed for the demo is in there).

Use the mouse and cursor arrow keys to move around, and ESC to quit.

Yes, it's from my own game project, but I plan to use some of the same code and concepts for air combat for UFO AI and possibly along with a new system for the battlescape as well.

It does have some known issues, which I plan to fix.

On my test machines it runs smoothly, in real-time, and mostly looks great, but I wanted to post it here so others could tell me how it works for them.

I await feedback...

9
Discussion / Re: Anti-Virus problem trying to download 2.5
« on: November 18, 2013, 11:45:49 pm »
According to some quick research on "Insight network threat":

http://forums.cnet.com/7723-6132_102-501695/norton-says-download-has-insite-network-threat/

Someone got the same detection when downloading some game, one that I'm guessing wasn't released by a major commercial publisher (Much like how UFO AI isn't), and simply because the AV company never heard of the game, they automatically flagged it as a problem.

BTW, I've downloaded some builds off this site both before and after the date shown in that pic, I've run scans, and I have not found infections in the installer.  It is safe.  Actually, it's probably more safe than most typical bloated commercial games, many of which still come packed with all kinds of junk, even when the publisher denies it.  I've seen commercial games sold on DVD that have confirmed virus infections, by comparison many of the builds for UFO AI, at least the official releases, are cross-compiled from Linux, last time I checked.

10
Feature Requests / Re: 1920x1080 resolution, also known as 1080p.
« on: October 31, 2013, 10:12:31 pm »
I have the same display resolution and have had similar issues with not having it show up in the lists in the game.  I personally don't handle the part of the code that takes care of this sort of thing, but I was told in IRC that such a resolution *is* (or should be) in the lists, but might not show up if the game doesn't detect it as one that your video card can handle.

If that's accurate, it means the game has a video card feature detection issue of some sort, which is a bug, and should therefore go in the bug tracker (when making a bug report, please reference (give a link to) this forum thread).

11
Bugs in stable version (2.5) / Re: What Walking Sounds Like
« on: October 28, 2013, 03:58:36 pm »
Perhaps I can be of some assistance, given that I'm an audio DSP software coder.

Although I've been away from this project for a long time, as you may have heard I'm coming back and working on getting caught up.

Writing C/C++ code for resampling audio on-the-fly (in realtime) is indeed one of my skills.  What I'm not too familiar with, though, is SDL2 and exactly how it handles sound.

I was working on upgrading my ancient Linux distro to a current version with all packages, but given that this issue was reported on Windows, I suppose I could get a copy of the source and set it up on one of my Windows machines, most likely by sometime later today.

I could use some help in being directed to what parts of UFO AI (which source code files) are used to interact with SDL2, and then I might be willing to help troubleshoot the issue.  (And if it is with SDL2 and not UFO AI, I could then send a patch to the SDL devs.)

BTW, my Windows machines have Windows 7 x64, Windows 7 x32, and one has Windows 8.1.  I also have some special "pro-sumer" (professional audio engineering-grade, intended for high-end recording studio) level soundcards as well as basic built-in ones in the Windows machines, so I could definitely find out if it is a soundcard issue or not.

12
Okay, for those who have asked me for screen shots, I now have a bunch, in this post are a few of them.  The project page also has some pics now, too.

13
All right, for those of you who for whatever reason didn't see the chatter on IRC about it, I've finally registered and started my own game, open-source GPL:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/tribalcreature/

It is still in infancy, but already has a simple demo where you can make the main character move around in the game world and do a few things, including basic flight implementation.  (The main character is a creature that is somewhat like a human, but has large feathered wings to fly with and also fangs and retractable claws.)

I currently plan to make it into a game with a mix of fantasy (spells and magic) and technology (also fighting enemies with machine guns, pistols, grenades, etc.).

Eventually the game will be built for all three major platforms (Win, Mac, Linux) as all the libraries used support this.  The code uses OpenMP for easy multi-threading on machines that have multiple cores.

At this time I don't even have many people to test it, and I've found a few issues with running the demo on my laptop with an ATI graphics card, although I get spectacular results on my desktop with an NVIDIA card.

I'd welcome opinions and feedback from anyone interested.

14
Design / Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« on: November 30, 2012, 07:13:28 pm »
Regarding number of aircraft: I realize it's a little bit early to ask about it, but are there any plans to implement aircraft collisions? So far, none pilots expressed kamikaze tendences, but who knows what may happen...

Hmmm....  I hadn't really thought of that.  Thanks for bringing that up, I don't know if that will be in the final product or not, but I'll keep that in mind.

15
Design / Re: Improved Air Combat (coming soon...)
« on: November 18, 2012, 02:05:29 pm »
Will this still support mass fights? I can't imagine trying to bring down a Harvester or Corrupter with one aircraft.

From the beginning of my plans I intended for support for multiple aircraft within the combat area, as well as the ability to get reinforcements involved mid-battle, so to some extent, yes, although I'd imagine there would be a (hard-coded?) limit of some kind on how many aircraft are in the zone at once.

I'm not sure what that limit will end up being, whatever number it will be will affect gameplay balance and of course be subject to Mattn's approval.

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