Messages

16

Artwork / Vaccination tech - proposal

« on: February 11, 2013, 05:05:25 am »

I keep this for historical purpose ...

17

Artwork / Re: Tools to generate textures

« on: February 10, 2013, 10:47:35 pm »

I've tested your fluid program - or more precisely your program about fluids ;_). That's quite impressive. It would be funny to be able to shoot in the water (after a miss for example) and see it having such movement.

18

Mapping / Re: Giving the 1980s their vehicles back (sedan/police care WiP, 31 July))

« on: February 10, 2013, 09:04:32 pm »

Go on, attach it. It can always serve.

I've never understood why those old vehicles hadn't been immediatly changed. Just removing the wheels would have given them a futuristic touch

19

Tactics / Re: Aircrafts

« on: February 10, 2013, 08:57:29 pm »

Me neither. Unless the aliens are so strong after a while, for fire power and speed, that the armour difference doesn't appear anymore. Speed makes the aliens able to shoot until death because no escape, and fire power makes any shots to be an episode of a lethal story.
That's difficult to test, but possible anyway. You would have to :

• send first a saracen or any just armoured normally
• let it be fought and shot down
• count the shots required for this
• reiterate and compute a mean
• start the same process with an armoured version of your ship

It would require a dedicated save slot to be sure to deal each time with exactly the same UFO. Moreover it requires a hangar ready to send either a unarmoured ship, or his armoured version.

Second version, easier, could be also to count the damages made to your Saracen even if it survives. With a correct save slot, you could send alternatively an armoured one, then an unarmoured. But here again, repeating is necessary, because there is often some misses when an UFO is firing.

20

Tactics / Re: Aircrafts

« on: February 08, 2013, 12:23:27 pm »

A good question.

21

Artwork / Re: Tools to generate textures

« on: February 07, 2013, 07:01:07 pm »

Well, done! You got it working now. (...)

Yes, at last ;*)

Thanks for the details. Fortunately I can count on french documentation (like this page http://khayyam.developpez.com/articles/3d/povray/?page=page_8#LVIII-E-1) in the hope to understand all of that.

Before I go further into it, you may want to know what kind of texture it may help to generate and what for. From my side, the interest was not too much to use computed texture on maps. I think that there, that 's photographical textures that are needed more. But I've been from one month looking on some classical implementation of flight combat, you know like 1942 and so on. This shouldn't have been too much difficult to code a first thing, but I'm damn slow so it will probably never see the dawn of day ;_) Anyway, I'm attaching here some stuff that will show you this.

I still have to rewrite Generate_Texture.py to include the FFT as well.

Let me know when it's done. Moreover if I've time enough I will see if some tweak helps to get predictable results.


ps : if you love diagrams, using Dia I've made this topic readable in this way About psi and other stories

22

Artwork / Re: Tech images

« on: February 05, 2013, 08:20:01 pm »

I have not used patterned background this time, so it may seem dull and featureless compared to other tech images.

As always, feedback is welcome.

Very nice. It has immediatly evocated particles accelerators so with some fast research I've got this : http://www.pd.infn.it/~dorigo/bubblechamber2.jpg. That's close to your design at the bottom of screen, but bigger.

23

Artwork / Re: Tools to generate textures

« on: February 04, 2013, 07:40:03 pm »

I may be able to put everything inside a single Python script that you can run from the Command Prompt in Windows.

That's would be easier indeed. But why don't you use some more dedicated engine, like Scilab (powerful matlab clone) dedicated to matrix and including all FFT you could dream of

I have to read a bit more about the "pick effect" you mentioned, but the low frequencies can be removed by choosing a central_freq different than zero (for example 10, to 20).

Sorry that's more a "peak" effect. I'm not an english first language guy
As far as I've understood, it is the same effect that you meet when you melt 2 or more identical sounds, the low frequencies make blank sound...

Edit : I've finally obtained my first texture generated by your process, attached below. I removed the part with sys.argv entry at start.py, and I'm entering them manually. I removed also the "make" part, and I let start.py use the exe directly. I don't use povray inside the .py, I just let it generate the surface.pov and open the povray editor. That's fine
   

24

Discussion / Re: 2.5 sucks completely

« on: February 04, 2013, 07:24:05 pm »

Unless I missed some news, what you call 2.5 is just the dev version. It is not a release. The 2.4 is good (overall) and is the last release .

And yes, I agree that 2.5 will need a lot of tweaking. My first concern would be to find a release good to play but above all still light enough for the smallest computers.

25

Artwork / Re: Tools to generate textures

« on: February 03, 2013, 10:39:14 pm »

I just post a feedback here. Don't worry about the previous post, it's outdated.

So I've finally compiled the c++ part with gsl inside. Let me tell you that I've again encountered some strange problems. I tried first with QT4, which has a so nice editor, but linking was impossible (using visual C in fact). Then jumped to Visual studio directly, and again encountered some weird issue. The good new, is that, I have been following the first steps provided in the UFOAI wiki for compiling the game and downloaded the great Code Block. This one compiled the file almost immediatly. It uses directly some gcc, that apparently helps. 

Ok, I have now to run it with your python script even if I wonder what new surprises are pending

I would like to add some information here about the UFOAI wiki pages dealing with textures. I've read some part, some days ago, so I'm not sure about the links but this one is an example : Wiki..

I discovered there, that there could be a "pick effect" when tiling a texture, just like in tiling sounds. That requires to remove the low frequencies from there, and a gimp plugin helps for that. Anyway if you are fluent in gsl as you seem to be, you may remove those frequencies by advance in your tool when you get the time for that.

ps : compiled version of GSL here : Geldreich compiled gsl

26

Offtopic / Re: Arma Tactics

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:39:44 pm »

Another entrant to the turn-based tactical combat market. Could be promising if it's not just a lazy spin-off of the Arma brand.

Those new graphism are impressive at least.

27

Offtopic / Re: My 3D Modeler

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:38:44 pm »

That's great

I've loved to watch your screenshots there : http://deimosproject.sourceforge.net/screenshots/index.html. The titles help a little to guess what are the model, but nice try anyway. Could have been useful in his time I suppose...

28

Sounds and Music / Some try in the mysterious art of MIDI

« on: February 02, 2013, 08:30:25 pm »

Hello. I've grabbed some midi software, some old, named Bigboss6. That works fine, if you leave the editing affair when you made mistakes. I would like an opinion on such a sample like this in attachment. I'm not a pro but I tried to imitate the +hill ambiance, bringing a version more overload and more disturbing if you were counting on concentration.... But at least it is a first try. And it allows me to jump at this section again (I did some time ago and got an answer somewhere else at my questions), to ask if there would be an ideal free tool, easy to use and accurate, to make Midi stuff and things useful around sound and music?

Thanks.

Stuff below grabable at will of course.

Oh yes, I forgot to say that the difficult part had been the Midi to Wave conversion. I was using a cask wich changed my output mode or such a thing, and I was unable to record any sound. Half a day to understand this

29

Discussion / Re: Just started 2.4

« on: February 02, 2013, 01:48:03 am »

Hi Kjaamor,

Nice review. Readable, clear, clever. I also think that this 2.4 is really great. Moreover, important point for me, it is light enough to run on a relatively slow computer.

I loved your description. And I noticed this remark in particular, with which I agree totally :

...
As a possible suggestion, although your mileage may vary, I would allow squads to land and escape in these instances, but let the ship be destroyed (and the men have to be picked up). Perhaps the ship costs could be increased to increase the penalty for this (although as it stands, a fully armed transport will cost me over half of my precious budget anyway).

The ideas emited about soldiers levelage are very sensitive too. You have now to end the 2.4 campain and download the still under dev. 2.5 version. I have the feeling that you would say some accurate things about this one also, which would be pretty appreciated here in my opinion.

Have a good night.

30

Discussion / Re: Add soldier voices

« on: February 01, 2013, 10:53:28 pm »

So you mean each of your soliders would have unique voice and you would recognize them by voices? Thats a lot of different voices...

Not really all. But maybe some differences can help enough. Male/Female distinction could thus be exploited.

But you 've said an interesting thing that points here at what could be a real additional value to this great game. We maybe could give many voices but also many languages to our soldiers. You should have noticed that their names are already refering to different countries, like Garcia for Spain or south America etc... That would be funny to have this difference extended to the voices. But just for saying "Yes sir", not to make long sentences.