Spice value ?

[ArrakisResearchCo]

I might have missed it in one of the several hundred threads on the board but has anyone ever figured the space / tile value ?

I've tried watching / timing the harvest process to try to figure out the spice value. A fully loaded harvester produces 700 credits when the spice is turned in at the refinery. From what I can see (visually) one tile of spice holds about 22% of the harvesters capacity - i.e. about 154 credits. I'm not entirely sure about these values but I think they are fairly close to the real deal.

Anyone have any insights on this ?

Thanks

[MrFlibble]

I have thought about it myself, but so far, I don't know. I haven't seen any discussion of this question before though. Unless someone analyzes the executable, only meticulous observations of how a harvester works through a spice field may give some clue.

BTW, welcome to FED2k, ArrakisResearchCo :) It's nice to see people who are still interested in Dune II around 8)

[ArrakisResearchCo]

Old School ~= Good School ;)

Thanks for the warm welcome MrFlibble.

I spent about an hour watching the harvester behave and do it's job at different game speeds and comparing harvest time, percentage filled and tile graphics "removal" when the harvester moved away. Came up with about 22% capacity pr. tile.

I've seen a bunch of clone attempts and a lot of modding attempts but I havnt yet found anyone debating the value of spice pr tile - hence my question :)

I've been considering writing my own Dune 2 clone which is why I'm researching all the parts of the original game that I can get my hands on. Given the wealth of information and tools available here it should be a managable research process. Your modding project has some interesting ideas btw - good work :D

[MrFlibble]

Good to know there's another Dune 2 project in the works ;D Do you have a homepage? Or a dev blog, at least? Links please ;)

BTW, have you figured out how different terrain types affect unit movement speed in accord with their movement type? AFAIK, the exact values are unknown too.

[ArrakisResearchCo]

Well - I'm still in the research stage but I'm thinking about using junkyard.dk for the project. Info will follow :)

Biggest problem with research is keeping track of where you got the information. I think it was while I was researching the EMC scripts that I found a note on script timing and game ticks - something like one tick equals 1/60 of a second.

It seems to me that the speeds setup for each unit is based on speed values set for concrete slabs - i.e. the "actual" speed set in the executable. The stone tiles (the gray ones) seem to be about 33% slower that concrete, sand is about 40% slower and dunes are about 60% slower. Spice tiles are the same as sand tiles - heavy spice tiles are the same as dune tiles.

Please note that this is through observation only ! I havnt really looked deep to find the exact values because I'm too lazy to decompile a 200kb executable and read through the assembler code to find it - sorry - hehe.

[MrFlibble]

Oh, EMC scripts. Any new info on them is welcome :) I take it you know about Minniatian's research of BUILD.EMC?

[ArrakisResearchCo]

Well - I only scratched the surface on those babies and decided to skip them altogether. I'd have to create my own AI control anyways :P

Best info I've found was posted here :

http://xhp.xwis.net/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?a=26;mid=3408

And yes - I've seen Minniatian's research on the subject. Pretty interesting stuff he's come up with. It might be worth further study in the future but for now I'll see if I can put up a site :D

[MrFlibble]

Good to hear that :)

[ArrakisResearchCo]

I've set up a simple page that for now contains the images from my patcher/analyser I've refered to elsewhere.  I've decided to use http://www.dune2.dk/ as a base for my project. Feel free to drop by - I'll setup more info and site-features when I get the time - thanks for the push MrFlibble ;)

[edit: may 4th '10] Changed the URL to the correct new site

[MrFlibble]

Nice start :) The sample map (the large one) lacks some of the vertical and horizontal rock/sand border images though (at the top and somewhere in the middle of the left corner).

[ArrakisResearchCo]

The original version of the patcher/analyser lacks completely the smoothing routines which is why they look somewhat straight. In essence the "out-of-view" tiles are "constructed" based on the neighbouring tiles which are visible on the map.

The next version of my patcher/analyser will contain a smoothing routine which will smooth out the constructed "out-of-view" tiles. I just need to decide wether to let the constructed tiles continue to the actual border of the map or if it should "round off" the areas. Havnt decided which yet - inputs are very welcome :)

[stefanhendriks]

Looks nice what you've got there at your site.

There is already a lot of information known, so be sure to check out that (these forums and such) , it could save you a bunch of time.

Fun to see that you're trying to reveal seed maps with screenshots, you might give it a shot to use the map revealer(s) through savegames. Even better, there is a seed generator (but that does not everything, i thought it missed spice) somewhere.

[MrFlibble]

I have played around with the revealer some time ago, it is interesting that the terrain which should be covered by spice is not always sand (as one could think since sand is left when spice is mopped up by harvesters), but can be anything else. Also, I think there's a correspondence between sand and non-sand area on the "spiceless" map and spice sand/spice dunes distribution on the actual map: spice dunes appear where terrain differs from regular sand (e.g. sand dunes or rock) on the spiceless map.

Which makes me think that the game first generates everything except spice, and only then covers the map with spice.