RA1024

Hey guys, I wanted to drop in and let you know what I've been up. I started working on my own game engine about a year and a half ago and have been working on it 7 days straight since the beginning of this year. Along the way I met the former designer on the Sims II and we became friends and eventually ended up collaborating on a simple fps using my coding and his game models and art. After several months of hard work we finally released the game on the Xbox under the Indie games section and it just went live last night. If anyone is interested, you can take a look here. http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/media/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550314/ It's mainly an online game but it does come with 20 single player levels but those are not nearly as fun as the online. I'm glad to see people are still playing on the server and now that all the hard work is over I might even have time to play again after all these years :) Long live House Harkonen! Ra

You guys need to let me know if there are problems. I just saw this thread and the new account problem could be if they don't have their own serial number. There is a limit to how many nicks you can have and this is on a per serial number basis. If someone downloaded the game off the net and is using a shared serial, it could be denying them because that shared serial already has 5 nicks assigned to it. Let me know if anyone is having a problem and they are using a serial number from a game they own.

Hey all, sorry I've been absent for so long. I'd like to say it's because work is keeping too busy but it's not that. I have to confess that I've been unfaithful. I got a PS3 a few months and unfortunately I've been cheating on Emp with Resistance Fall of Man. I'm ashamed to say it but I hear confession is good for the soul. I have no intention of discontinuing the server but my playing time has just been nil because RFOM is just too damn fun. I've neglected features for too long so I'm going to start trying to make some time each week to fix and add stuff on the server. Just let me know what stuff you want and I'll try to work it in. I figure the first thing I'll work on is a nick management feature from the webpage so you can reset passwords and delete nicks. I know gun wanted a password feature for games and that shouldn't be too hard to add as well. So what's been going on lately? I feel like it's been forever since I was online. Btw, if anyone plays RFOM, I use the same nick there as well. RA

Wow, I guess I need to read the forums more these days. I didn't remember there being this much nipple, bath, groping talk before.

Ooops. I made a change that caused the server not to be able to lookup login info. The server was running fine so my monitoring software didn't detect a problem but the server couldn't validate any logins. You can e-mail me at ra1024@atlbiz.com if you need. Someone might want to put that in the emperor info somewhere on the forums as well.

Erjin just e-mailed me about this and I have no idea why all the servers would stop working at the same time. There really shouldn't be any dependence on Wol although there is data that I emulate that could have some bearing on this. If you look in your registry under software/westwood/emperor, you'll see some entries under network that relate to server lists. There's some reference to Europe servers and such and one of these may be causing Emp to look for other wol servers for things like ladder settings and stuff. I'll have time this evening to try and do some troubleshooting if anyone's on and wants to try and load a game.

Hey Spekkio, The server doesn't currently support the chat lobby so that's why it's locking up when you try to go there. None of us use that so it's just something I've never spent time coding support for. You can still chat in game and in the game lobby but the chat room is just not supported. Glad to have you join us, RA

Yea I can do that the problem is just that I've been so busy with my job lately that I haven't had any time to work on improvements. What little free time I do have is spent playing. Things usually slow down around December so maybe in a few months I can finally do all those things I've said I'll do.

I think I can make it so the server sends back a "kick" response if the host is minimized and doesn't send back a response to the join in a timely manner. Just remind me of this and I'll look into it when I have a chance to do some more work on the server.

We need to get a setup package made so the server can live on if I get hit by a bus or my equipment room burns down (or Kalony invades). I built the server with pieces of code from some of my projects that should eventually go commercial so I can't really release the complete source code but I can release the binaries and the backend db so it could be setup somewhere else. Since Gun and Erjin maintain some of the primary Emp info threads here, I figure you guys would be ideal people to help maintain the server (probably should involve Gobalopper) in case it needed to be setup somewhere else down the road. If you're interested, just keep on me to get a setup package and docs made as I'm fairly busy with my company right now and haven't had much spare time for emp coding.

I would report the problem with ATI as I think this is just a driver compatibility issue. I don't know what else you can do if you tried all availabe versions of the drivers and nothing works. I don't know what the "+w" option does but it was just listed as a compatibility tweak for some graphics issues.

I found this on the Emp tech support board. Try it out and see if it makes any difference. You can do this by right clicking on the shortcut, and then selecting the properties option. You'll then see a text field that has a directory listing, something like "C:westwoodemperoremperor.exe". You'll need to place a +w at the end of this line, resulting in "C:westwoodemperoremperor.exe +W". One thing you didn't mention was your directx version. Is it up to date? If your video drivers and directx are all up to date, I would suggest going back a version and see if there's any difference. I just updated my video driver and it caused some problems in areas that worked fine previously so "latest" isn't always bug free. Also, are you using drivers from the chip maker or the card maker? If your card uses an ATI chipset but is made by someone else, check the manufacturer's website for their drivers as they may be more reliable. In my case, the older drivers from the manufacturer were bug free whereas very up to date drivers from the chip maker had problems.

That freeze happens when the game tries to report the results of the game to the game results server. The xwis results server stopped working and I've had trouble attempting to create a new one. Every time I restart the game server, I have to go back and disable the reporting feature so the games won't try to report the results. If you see it hang after a game, just wait about 10-15 seconds for it to timeout. Whenever I realize it's enabled, I turn it off so just let me know if you notice it as sometimes I forget to do it after a restart. If the game says you've lost a connection to the server, that's something else and could be caused by a number of things such as dsl router disconnecting momentarily or other network problems.

I found the problem. One of the recent changes broke the new nick creation code. I've fixed it and you should be able to login now. Sorry for the trouble.

I checked and those nicks are available so you're probably not setup to go the server. To test it, pull up a dos prompt ( start menu->run->"cmd" or start menu->run->"command"). In the dos prompt type "ping servserv.westwood.com" and press enter. If it says "reply from 72.17.137.93 or something similar, you're setup correctly and the problem lies elsewhere. If it says "reply from 159.153.208.17", you're still pointing to WOL. If it says "reply from 195.13.63.187" you're pointing to xwis. If you're not pointing to the correct ip (72.17.137.93) then you'll want to check out Erjin's instructions here http://dune2k.com/forum/index.php?topic=15876.0 and go to step 4. If you use method A, you'll need to change the ip from 195.13.63.187 to 72.17.137.93 as we don't play on that ip any longer.

What nick are you trying to login with? I'll check and see if someone has already registered it.

I was loading the Atr barracks model so Jules could see the rendering quality. It sounds like they don't currently have a rendering tool that can show solid models or textures.

I've got the textures loading now although they are being applied upside down. Since the models are triangles, I don't have all 4 texture coords so I can't just rotate them around. I'll probably have to go through each texture and swap the bytes around to get them in the correct order. [attachment archived by Gobalopper]

Ok it renders it but it's just basically a flat square. It looks like the bulk of the file deals with some type of animation data. When the file is loaded in, it contains no child objects and only 2 faces. Do you have any sort of screen shot of this as I'm not familiar with this unit so I don't really know what it's supposed to look like. Also, do you know what the _L0, _M0, _H0 extensions mean for each file?

OpenGL is part of your OS and should be on your computer if it's fairly recent. If not, check with your video card manufacturer for an openGL driver. XbfVertV2k is an application you can find in the Dun2k files section.

Can't find it. Where is it located?

I don't know about the texture scaling but if it's in there and can be adjusted, there's a good chance we can change it. For OpenGL, yes you would need it but it's been part of Windows since 98 I think. I don't know if the default OpenGL will work with your card or if you need a specific OpenGL driver. If you don't have any OpenGL options, I could probably add DirectX support as the bulk of the application is reading in the file format. The OpenGL specific calls are a small part of it.

Sure, I'll be happy to post it. It was mainly something fun to help learn OpenGL. Right now it does solid rendering using an arbitrary texture and lets you scale and rotate the model. It also lets you cycle through all the child objects and arbitrarily hide/unhide them. The next part I'm going to work on is using the real textures so it should render like it looks in the game. I tried to use XBfVertV2K but it wouldn't run on my machine so I ended up coding my own. RA

I could make the model. I just worked on a program that reads in and renders an .xbf model. I could write something to export it in a .obj format, read it into blender, and make the changes. The only problem would be the animation and such as I don't have any real knowledge of those parts of the .xbf file. I do have a resource who could help if he has time so I might be able at some point to do what you need. This would be a low priority as I have a number of things I need to fix first on the server but it's at least feasible. RA

Do you mean while you're playing? I can't make the game do anything like play a sound as that's part of the game code which I can't change.