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.

Thx for Virus info. Is it in the exe archive or does it appear extracting ? my Virus Program (McAffee) doesnt find anything. I will just upload a new Version (hopefully without Virus)

A good idea is also to put the units into a movement queue, so lets say only for 5 (may depend on the distance) units a frame the way is calculated and then the next 5 in the next frame etc..., nobody will notice that.

Yes thats true but i said for horizontal moves :) . but taking comma numbers isnt very performant. its better to take costs 10 and 14 for example, that they stay integers.

Okay my Homepage is working now. After often trying to reach my homepage people. Here the link again. http://www.skaldi.at/FreeDune.exe'>http://www.skaldi.at/FreeDune.exe and u can check out my homepage too. Its made in 3 minutes, it will change a lot, dont worry. http://www.skaldi.at

Yes water sounds very good :) Water I will take.

Okay but a big advantage of the A* is that u can give different movepoints to the floortiles. So u can say a horizontal move to a Betontile costs 10 movepoints, a stonetile 15, a sandtile 20, a dune tile 25 and so on, in that case the tank will drive the quickiest way. Now I am really thinking of it to implement it in my game.

I know A * but it doenst find the way to 100%

Day btw. night is already implemented. Yes it will have influence, to the sightrange and range anyway. And u can tell every tank to witch off its lights, thhen it wont be detected, only beside a tank lights it :) And fighting is almost everything of the game. It is a RTS game

Hello Stefan, I just found out that ur pathfinding doesnt work to 100%. I would suggest to use the LEE alogorithm. It works so like in the Garphic I added. (was much work to create :) ) U can also check all 8 fields surrounding the aimfield then u have to prefer the not diagonal fields to drive first, else the tank will dirve zic-zac. When u chekck 4 fields u have to allow the tank to move 2 indexes and 1 index (for example from 10 to 8). BY the 8 fields you must only allow them to move 1 (from 10 to 9 from 9 to 8, etc...). And when a field isnt moveable, u dont give a number to it and exclude it from being checked in future. So the algorithm works faster, the more complicated the way is, because it excludes much itself then. On great Areas with no obstacles it works slowest. With this technik u get the best way to 100%. But u have to code it out proberly cause this technik is very cpu intensive. But it is the only pathfinding algorithm I would use, it is the only 1 which works to 100% and always finds the best way. It works that way. All Surrouning fields of the aimFiled (which is marked with 0 normally) is marked with 1. All Surrounding fields from 1 are marked with 2, from 2 with 3, etc..., till u reach ur tank. And never check a field twice, else u will overwirte ist number. And that must not happen. And at last u drive from the highest number to the lowest. from 10 to 9 to 8 to 7, etc... till u arrive ur aim. [attachment archived by Gobalopper]

Okay just have made some stress tests. When there are more than 800+ Units on a map the frame rate on my laptop (PIII 700 ATI Mobility (16 mb Video RAM, 384 MB RAM)) goes beneath 10, -> unplayable. But I guess this is ok, cause on my Desktop PC ( P IV 2.4 GHZ Geforce FX 5950 Pro (256 mb Viedo RAM, 1GB Ram)) there is no difference and to be honest, there wont be more than 200 units on map. Cause I think in Dune II there was a unit limit of 25 per player. Correct me if I am wrong. I will do a similar Unit limitation like in starcraft or warcraft. That means, units will need "food" (I wont call it food, I didnt think too much bout that, but till the game is that far it will take some time :)). So a Harkonnen Devastator will prbably need more "food" than a mg soldier. Harvesters and carryalls wont need any food. (and a Harkonnen Devastator will explode in kind of an atombomb, so if u only build devastaors with Harkonnen it is possible to lose ur whole base in case of a chain reaction. When there are more than 40 units on screen, the framerate on my laptop is beneath 15 -> unplayable. But this problem can be solved. I change the texture for every tank every frame. I only have to sort my Tanklist after the texture and then only change the texture when the tank changes. Cause the textures of the tanks are quite big 1 mb per tank + 1 mb per head, so when there are 20 tanks I push 40 mb around only for tank Textures. When those 20 tanks are from the same type and I keep the texture than I only push 4 mb around -> 10 times that fast. and on maps > 2048*2048 the game crashes, I dont know why yet. It isnt that bad cause this is REALLY big, but i want to get it to run, because principal the engine has no limitations in mapsizes. By the way the testmap in the downloadable Version is 64*64