Skaldi

Okay the game is online again and working fine (at least by me). If you have troubles hearing sound (canons for example) download the patch and try it with that. Extract the patch into your freedune folder. And please report to me if the sound didnt work without patch but worked with patch. www.skaldi.at/freedunefull.exe www.skaldi.at/patch.rar I wish ya all a good night.

@Stefan Hihi perhaps of being software developer yourself you know that you can't sleep well, knowing your software got such ugly crashes rofl ::)

@Stefan so you get now the most current version. In this one the lights arnt working right. But the mapeditor can save now objects for the map and the sounddevice has been changed. There is no more 3d Sound now, The most primitive software directsound mixer. This should work for 100%. Only extract www.skaldi.at/Patch.rar into the freedune folder. Make ure to overwerite freedune.exe and the data folder. And pls tell me if it worked

@Andrew should be fine enough, tune your opengl Options... Righclick on your dektop -> preferences -> options -> advanced and there you should be able to tune it. Turn all on highest perfomance in OpenGL @Stefan if you want to risk another crash, could you try to add the tanks in the middle of the map, where the map starts? And only use "T" key. Thats your tank then and they surely wont shoot. could you give it a try? If that works it isnt a problem of creating tanks. And you can show the console with all kinds of messages by Pressing "C" key. Are there any warnings? Like sound couldnt bel loaded etc...?

Okay yes thats right the units move hell fast rofl, its for testing purpose of mine and hasnt to do something with the fps. Units taken in game with the "E","R","T","Z","U" Keys move in normal speed. Okay you can Press "D" to change music if that bug happens. Gilneas? I have the same Problem with my messenger. Always when somebdoy wirtes to me, the music stream breaks, and cant get started anymore, only beside pressing "D" key... Did you have your messenger open too?? CRC file checkorror. Damn Mozilla Fireftp, probably the upload failed. I'll reload it. The exe is working fine by me. @Stefan guess thats couse of the sound... A tank tries to shoot -> trying to play Sound -> bluescreen crash (if windows option reboot on crash is taken you wont see the blue screen cause windows easily restarts). Please tell me your sound card hardware driver version etc... you got the 2nd PC happening that. Sorry for that its a failure of OpenAL, from Creative labs, they got much troubles with other soundcards sometimes, I will have to work around there myself. @Andrew you probably dont have a 3d acceleration card. I am using OpenGL with 32 bits per pixel and do a lot of blending. Software renderer have big problems doing that, so you have that less fps. Hmm guess thats kind of bad luck for you, there wont be a 8 bits per pixel version of that game. And if you have a 3d Accelerator card, put the options to lowest quality and max. speed in OpenGL, then it should work fine too (on my laptop it does I have between 40 - 60 fps, with an ati mobility 16 mb ram and this is a veeeeeeery old and not good graphic card). Hey and many thanks for those fast replies.

Okay dear Dune Fans, I am back ;) Much has changed in Freedune i did a lot of work after Summerbreak. Changes: 1.) I use OpenAL for Soundoutput now, and ogg files for music, so the download is much smaller now, and you can listen to all the music. 2.) Pathfinding is working fine now. You can select several units and move them, and they behave like they should. 3.) Day night changes are implemented. Problems: The Sound makes on some systems problems. On 1 PC there was even a blue screen, and had to be rebooted. So pls tell me if the sounds working on your systems or not, and tell me what soundcard youre using. The music should work fine everywhere. Okay the handling hasnt changed much. Leftclick (actions like moving, attacking isnt working right now, although the tanks already fight.) Rightclick -> Deselect Keys: 'E'R'T'Z'U' -> Will Spawn Tanks under mousecursor. (The first mission will soon be playable working hard on it) And the blue tanks in the left upper corner in the map can be played, no matter which house has be chosen. Okay there will be new versions soon, because i have some time working on it. The latest version is available here www.skaldi.at/FreeDuneFull.exe And please report me all bugs you notice :). Nice evening to all ya Dune fans :)

Hehe yep uploading 200 mbytes takes quite long. Wow my homepage provieds 1.5 mb/s? Hehe i Have a max of 115 kb/s with my internet Provider

Yes they are made by myself. Using Sony Acid Pro, and a keybaord :) u know such an electric Piano :). The female "woow" is stolen form a techno song. Its quite a simple way to change scenes in a song :)

And by the way, some people surely wonder what the glut32.dll is good for, which is by the Freedune Game. GLUT provides a portable API so you can write a single OpenGL program that works across all PC and workstation OS platforms. Other "professional" Programs like "blender" use the Glut library too. I use it, to make my Free Dune portable to other platforms very easily. The rest is all done by myself. http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/glut.html

Ok I said some posts before that I have made my own soundtrack for the game. This is so: every group got its own Soundtrack, so if you play the ordos, there is an other music than playing the atreides or harkonnen. But i will upload the soundtrack later on, when there isnt an update every 1 or 2 weeks, because the game will then take about 200 mbytes, and who wants to download 200 mbytes every week? I could make "small" updates

So finally weekend :). I have had to do a lot of work this weak so I couldn't spend too much time in developing Free Dune and the prmoisded update for monday hasnt been uploaded yet. But this sunday there will be a big 1 (the new pathfinding is implemented now.) And it is possible to move more than 150 tanks on a 1024*1024 map without delay. But make your own picture on monday.

This method finds "almost" the optimal route, and the object will never drive the wrong way. Imagine there is a spot surrounded by cliffs, and there is 1 way out in the north. And you click at the south beyond the cliffs. So my Object will naturally dirve directly out by the north. But the optimal way isnt found.

Okay I am developing this game on my laptop PIII 700 and and ATI mobility I3, and I want the perfomace to be good on it. And so the fps monitor is needed when i add any special effects to see how much perfomance it needs. When it needs too much then I know its designed the wrong way and I have to take an other way to get to the aim. On a fast computer this isnt possible, cause you have to do very stupid (or have a rather complex scene) that you get low fps. I want my game to be runable on a PIII 500 with a Riva tnt quite good playable, so I always have to watch the current fps. Thats the only reason (for me) for the fps monitor. When the game is finished it will be taken out (or u can switch it off over the menu).

Yes I have installed norton now :)

Hehe you know i always try to do the supermega thing, so I am on a really cool A* using binary heaps and naturally sorted lists. Else I have made an algorithm which puts together 32*32 to 1 tile, and the tiles know which tiles can be reached from it (think thats called quadtree). So u can quickley calc the way, cause 64*64map is then a 2x2map, and 1024*1024 is a 32*32.... And the "finepathfinding" is done in those "little" 32*32 tiles. And so i should be able to move 100 - 150 tank in a 1024*1024 (if needed with movementqueues) without a noticable delay.