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Author Topic: Ridiculous UQM mod  (Read 10269 times)
Lukipela
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #30 on: February 10, 2009, 08:46:47 pm »

It sounds like a world unit would be what the game counts in, and a display unit would be pixel on the screen. So when the game has done it's part it has to change the values to display them on screen to the world. But seeing as this is programming, I'm guessing it's much more annoying than that.
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jaychant
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #31 on: February 10, 2009, 08:58:07 pm »

Just out of interest:  What IDEs (if any) does everyone use? 

Jaychant, a good IDE can make life much easier particularly if it has some sort of jump to definition functionality.  I'm not sure if you're using one (or can easily use one with the UQM codebase) but I'd suggest Code::Blocks or Visual Studio.  Both have very good navigation and both can handle - sort of - custom make files.

Notepad++
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Elvish Pillager
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #32 on: February 10, 2009, 10:01:20 pm »

But seeing as this is programming, I'm guessing it's much more annoying than that.

You have put your finger upon it.

Dec 12 08:11:44 Elvish_Pillager   There are:
Dec 12 08:12:19 Elvish_Pillager   - 32 velocity units to a world unit
Dec 12 08:12:28 Elvish_Pillager   - 4 world units to a display unit
Dec 12 08:12:36 Elvish_Pillager   - 4 display units to a max-zoom-out pixel
Dec 12 08:12:58 Elvish_Pillager   - 256x240 max-zoom-out pixels to a max-zoom-out view
Dec 12 08:13:13 Elvish_Pillager   - 2x2 max-zoom-out views to the space

A display unit is also equal to the width of a max-zoom-in pixel.
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JHGuitarFreak
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #33 on: February 11, 2009, 01:38:16 am »

Just out of interest:  What IDEs (if any) does everyone use? 

Jaychant, a good IDE can make life much easier particularly if it has some sort of jump to definition functionality.  I'm not sure if you're using one (or can easily use one with the UQM codebase) but I'd suggest Code::Blocks or Visual Studio.  Both have very good navigation and both can handle - sort of - custom make files.

Notepad++

Well if it's also what we use to edit the main files I guess my main program is Notepad2 from sourceforge, not that other one that can't associate it's own files.
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #34 on: February 11, 2009, 02:17:41 am »

Shiver, just curious: what is the new Thraddash design you have that you're not satisfied with?
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #35 on: February 11, 2009, 04:53:27 am »

I always understood your reason for writing the mod, I assume you (jaychant) wanted to explore changing around the ship designs and such. I was confused because there wasn't really a rhyme or reason for some of the changes you've made, aside from creating an ideal Thraddash and a super-powered Ur-Quan.

In particular, the change to the Nemesis is way out of proportion to say, the Druuge ship change. Doubling the crew and max marines of the Orz makes it extremely powerful, (or giving the Chmmr 6 zapsats), and making the Druuge secondary charge up to max energy isn't a very extreme change.

I know the title of the thread is "ridiculous mod", but for any mod to be really fun to play, all ships should be near balance.
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #36 on: February 11, 2009, 10:46:22 pm »

Shiver, just curious: what is the new Thraddash design you have that you're not satisfied with?

I will answer that question along with every other question you have as soon as this migraine headache I've contracted from reading your posts goes away.
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #37 on: February 11, 2009, 11:30:42 pm »

I always understood your reason for writing the mod, I assume you (jaychant) wanted to explore changing around the ship designs and such. I was confused because there wasn't really a rhyme or reason for some of the changes you've made, aside from creating an ideal Thraddash and a super-powered Ur-Quan.

In particular, the change to the Nemesis is way out of proportion to say, the Druuge ship change. Doubling the crew and max marines of the Orz makes it extremely powerful, (or giving the Chmmr 6 zapsats), and making the Druuge secondary charge up to max energy isn't a very extreme change.

I know the title of the thread is "ridiculous mod", but for any mod to be really fun to play, all ships should be near balance.

The reason I made this mod in the first place was actually because I wanted to be able to abuse the Yehat shield like the Cyborg does. Unfortunately, I still don't know how to do that. I tried increasing SPECIAL_WAIT from 2 to 10, but all that did was force the special to activate like five times in a row before stopping. So I tried changing it to 0 and then 1, but both of those just made the special make no sound and cost no energy (?), although if the energy was extremely low (i.e. 2 and under) and the Yehat was hit by a Chenjesu DOGI, it momentarily lost the shield. (POINT: Does anyone know how to make the Yehat shield only reactivate if the shield isn't already up (i.e. remove the wasteful shielding that occurs when you hold the secondary)?)

On a side note, I wasn't really exploring changes at first, I just think that there are some fundamental errors with the ship designs:

Ur-Quan: The ultimate rulers of the galaxy driving those banana boats? Please. Roll Eyes

Yehat: If the Cyborg is able to shield without being wasteful of energy, why can't I? Shouldn't that just be automatic, considering this is the starfaring age?

Mycon: I can regenerate crew, but what use is that if it costs so much? Besides, the damn weapons are much too slow to be of any use!

Thraddash: I don't think the Thraddash generally use a long-range strategy. So why the excessively long range?

My original intention was to fix these errors, but I decided I'd upgrade the rest of the ships as well.
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Cedric6014
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #38 on: February 12, 2009, 12:13:49 am »

There is merit in fixing the Yehat shield, down-powering the Thraddash and up-powering the Ur-Quan.

The Yehat shield was made next to redundant when SC2 came out. SC1 was played on much slower systems (like 8086) so you didn’t need Jedi reflexes to use it effectively. With either game played on modern/fast systems (i.e post 386), the shield is nigh-on impossible to use. 

Shiver: I’d love to see you address this somehow in your balance mod. The Yehat Terminator should be a powerful ship.

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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #39 on: February 12, 2009, 01:20:11 am »

POINT: Does anyone know how to make the Yehat shield only reactivate if the shield isn't already up (i.e. remove the wasteful shielding that occurs when you hold the secondary)?
Yes.

Tip: the shield is up when the ship element's life_span is greater than NORMAL_LIFE.
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #40 on: February 12, 2009, 01:27:29 am »

There is merit in fixing the Yehat shield, down-powering the Thraddash and up-powering the Ur-Quan.

The Yehat shield was made next to redundant when SC2 came out. SC1 was played on much slower systems (like 8086) so you didn’t need Jedi reflexes to use it effectively. With either game played on modern/fast systems (i.e post 386), the shield is nigh-on impossible to use. 

Shiver: I’d love to see you address this somehow in your balance mod. The Yehat Terminator should be a powerful ship.



He did address it. The only thing I don't like about it is he also added a penalty. Basically, there's a gap between each shielding 2 frames wide, from what I gather. (This means the Yehat can't shield consistently anymore.)

POINT: Does anyone know how to make the Yehat shield only reactivate if the shield isn't already up (i.e. remove the wasteful shielding that occurs when you hold the secondary)?
Yes.

Tip: the shield is up when the ship element's life_span is greater than NORMAL_LIFE.
So, wherever it puts up the shield, I should add an if/then statement, like this?
Code:
if (life_span < NORMAL_LIFE)
     {
     //put up shield
     }

EDIT: I tried that, but MinGW says that life_span is undeclared. I put that code up there that I guessed in yehat.c, lines 228-251.

EDIT2: I've been looking through the code trying to find out where the effect of initializing the shield is. Unfortunately all I really have to go by are the small amount of comments in the code. Can someone tell me what exactly preprocess and postprocess are? (All of a sudden I don't really want to just be told exactly where I need to look and what to put there. This is rather fun.)
« Last Edit: February 12, 2009, 02:15:05 am by jaychant » Logged

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JHGuitarFreak
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #41 on: February 12, 2009, 02:28:06 am »

So you want a constant shield when the special is held down?

Meaning you don't like it when it "sputters"?

you could just make it so the energy regenerates faster
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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #42 on: February 12, 2009, 02:31:48 am »

So you want a constant shield when the special is held down?

Meaning you don't like it when it "sputters"?

you could just make it so the energy regenerates faster

I did consider doing that, but there are some things:
- It wouldn't feel the same
- the Cyborg would still be able to abuse the shield much more easily than humans; In fact, it will be able to use the shield indefinitely.

So no. I'm not doing that.

EDIT: Can someone point me in the general direction of where it activates the shield? I can't find it anywhere.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2009, 02:45:09 am by jaychant » Logged

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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #43 on: February 12, 2009, 02:45:45 am »

So you want a constant shield when the special is held down?

Meaning you don't like it when it "sputters"?

you could just make it so the energy regenerates faster

I did consider doing that, but there are some things:
- It wouldn't feel the same
- the Cyborg would still be able to abuse the shield much more easily than humans; In fact, it will be able to use the shield indefinitely.

So no. I'm not doing that.

Bounce the Special Weapon cost to 1 and you get the same effect but with sound and it goes off as soon as you let off the button.

those are the 2 easiest ways i can conceive.

the idea that you could use, although it'll take some coding, is making the shield not so invincible, make it so 2 shots from anything will achieve the same as it being shot once without the shield with whatever weapon shot it.

EDIT

I believe line 156-201 deal with the shield activation, but i could be reading it wrong
« Last Edit: February 12, 2009, 02:48:23 am by Kohr-Ah Death » Logged

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Re: Ridiculous UQM mod
« Reply #44 on: February 12, 2009, 02:48:32 am »

I don't think you understand: I don't want to change the behavior of the shield. I just want to allow human players to be able to realistically abuse the shield in the same way the cyborg can.

EDIT (in response to your edit): Thanks, I'll look.

EDIT2: Maybe I'm mistaken, by the title "yehat_intelligence" I got the impression that that had to do with the AI. I also see a bunch of statements like PERSUE and the like, which sounds to me like decision-making.
« Last Edit: February 12, 2009, 02:53:15 am by jaychant » Logged

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