Windwalker

Guys, please forgive me for my missing number of synapses, but does this mean "if" we can work on it some more, we can save our games replays and watch them afterwards using some kind of "demo.exe?" that would be.. wonderfull..

So we cant change it? Something strange is, when i give the worm a bullet weapon with a range of, say, 3 and 300 damage, the worm kills everything it can, but it does not disappear after killing. So the weapon type somehow also plays a role in it.

Heya guys; I was wondering if there was a possible way that we could add in-game text messages triggered by events or time variables. It could really enhance the storytelling, which is very important for a dune game. This sounds possible as there is the option for in-game messages, like when you select a building for the first time they show up and tell something. And there is that message that tells there is not enough concrete space. I also would like to remove the option that when you are out of harvesters, the game brings one for you. Or at least making it a very late delivery could be wonderfull. I believe both these aspects are buried in exe right? Also, there are crew values for vehicles in the manual. Sometimes when your harvester gets destroyed, a single soldier is given. And when buildings blow up, they leave back random number and hp of soldiers. These could be used to create interesting options. Does anyone have any idea on them? Feels like the more number of crew for a vehicle, the more possibility of a survivor soldier emerging from its ruins. I will check nyerguds editor and try to figure out. Buildings slowly degenerate when without power right? They also degenerate faster when built on bare rock. So there is a kind of degeneration value somewhere. and when you repair a building it regenerates so there is some code about it too. Repair facility repairs vehicles too. Can we somehow make regenerating units or units with a limited lifespan? Spice bloom is also interesting. Does anybode know where are the codes for it and what could possibly be done with it? Maybe we can use it like crates of red alert and similar? -Manual has hints for this. It says it may contain an abandoned vehicle or credits or spice, and if you shoot, you destroy if there was a "prize" and if you walk over you lose your unit if its spice. In the game, there is only spice. Does anyone have any idea to solve the half damage in some directions bug? This is also interesting; how does the game decide to deal half damage? How can we use this?

I cant figure out which piece of script in worms lines refer to three swallow limits. There is no value set to "3" inside or i keep constantly fail to see it. Does using new version of the decompiler make any changes in the values? I am absolutely sure there was a "push 3" line with another decompiler. It was not towards the end though, it was closer to middle. So maybe it was in general section? Being a complete noob on programming doesnt help either. I am thinking hard on possibilites of all this "pushreg popreg push" mess, but i cant form the picture. I know the stack uses the first value last, the values are used from last to first. But how do i change a value which is not on the top? This worm thing is important to any modder. Shai hulud should be more fearsome, both hp wise and duration-wise. (maybe even a little bit faster)

Yes it worked! However your decompiler handles everything in a different way i guess, because when i used another one before, all lines had a line number. I also couldnt see which part belonged to which unit. Differences is not just these though, i couldnt find push 3 anywhere. This is not too important now because i know where the worm codes are thanks to your decompiler. However being a complete amateur, i cant resolve all the codes, nor how they work. I learned basic when i was 14, which was completely by accident when i tried every command in dos. This one is quite different. It feels so abstract to me. Anyway, what i am trying is to make permemant worms, which do not vanish when they eat 3 units. I found the first few lines could be about it. But the pushed value there is 0 first, 10 second. So another line checks if they are equal, and if it is, "destroy" is executed. But on what? On the worm or on target unit?

Ermmm... I am getting an error from windows like "the application couldnt be started because it was not created correctly" I am not sure about the exact translation. It advices me that reinstalling can solve the problem. Did i miss something?

Hey! Does this mean we can now toy with unit.emc? Other decompilers messed it up in the process so i couldnt even try to make worms ever-hungry (which means they dont get lost after 3 swallows.) I believe i have found the piece of code for this, but i wasnt sure. This EMC thing looks to insubtsancial to me, but there is only one "push 3" in the code. This should be it.

This is becoming very handsome :) Today i inspected your method for sardaukar. Thanks for this nice touhce!

Yeah you are really deep into it. I almost suspect you are one of the programmers :D

Heya everybody! Been away for a while as my mother had an operation, now she is fine and i am back to work. Today i made some more playtests in first 4 levels and tried to make an interesting 5th level. To emphasise more on infantry, i made it more like a reinforcements war; with almost all reinforcement being infantry. I will try to show the first sardokar here; I hope this level will have a distinctive playstyle too. I played it for once, and not to the end of it as work got huge again suddenly, but up to part i played it was nice, forcing me to use some harvesters to crush infantry. It suddenly became a twofold gameplay of using my reinforcements to attack enemy base while trying to defend at the same time. Hope to finalize it tomorrow and move onto next level. After all levels done, i will get into mentat image thing. Btw i am happy concrete bug is fixed! I can imagine the relief MrFlibble! Oh-btw-i will try to do the same sardokar thing as in d2ext. of yours, if you would aprove. Wind out.

Interesting. Today was full of work and i am still at work too. So not much development. But i have already changed many tracked movement type to wheeled already. So possibly the burning down animation for tanks and siege tanks will go away seemingly. The -get damaged when crushed- option seems wonderfull. Not that there are many vehicles that can do so in my mod, but its still tempting. And the possibilty to modify the raider trike to some serious infantry power (for fremen or sardokar) is quite tempting. This week i am going to have a break at work for about 5 days, in which i hope to at least complete my level design. After which i can go on with my experiments. Thanks for all the support guys!

Here are some of the changes i am thinking to make on units: Infantry: will be a little bit (about %15) cheaper, will have a longer LoS, will be uncrushable except harvesters and devastators. Trike: will increase LoS greatly and speed and hit points slightly. Raider trike: will be a lot more expensive but will have superior firepower. Ordos will be given normal trike, while raider one will be like a fast tank with low hp. will reduce the weapon range greatly though... Quad: will almost be the same. Basic tank: will be dirty cheap, rapid fire low damage medium range vehicle. Siege tank: will amost be the same. Rocket tank: will almost be the same. Might consider a slight range increase to better take down turrets. I must see how the cpu uses this though... If they are complete failure, i might indeed shorten their range to force the player when facing turrets. Deviator: Will launch small misiles rapidly over an extreme range. Player will not be able to build or order them from starport. They will be expensive and slow to build, even for the cpu. So no more gas thing. Saboteur: I will see if i can change saboteur to something else. What i have in mind is a close compat specialits sardokar which will be a real trouble to player. I will show a few of them in the mid levels which will demonstrate their serious power, and i want the player to live a shock when they rain down to him in final level. I hope i can do this. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way left to them for fremen. Which should have been superior to emperors troops. I may try to change the raider trike to fremen, however this will be the final touch if i can. Turrets: Will require double the energy (maybe even more) and money. I dont want the player to sit back and enjoy. He should be in his toes all the time. Also note that this mode will be for veteran players. So no laziness! Work up your fingers! Most buildings: Will have slightly more hp. Most importantly, construction yard will be about %30 boosted. No easiy opponent finishings. Worms: will move faster. fear the shai hulud and love the rocky terrain. Bring back the strategical movement factor.

Waiting for it! I really need something like that... Yesterday i played another level of harkonnen at hard setting v1.07. for the first time the computer was able to beat me, because of my untis superior pathfinding capabilities. When i noticed that backup did not came yet, my combat tanks were fighting inside enemy territory for almost 10 minutes, all in red hp and burning. (micro helps extend thier lifetime) I looked at my base and saw them all stuck in the bottom of my bases hill area. they couldnt succeed.. Neither could i. All my units died, some big amount of atre combat tanks and quads arrive and i reload the game. A tiny hope? ... maybe... maybe...

Its all right if Fremen are always allied with Atreides. It suits my scenario. However, i wonder why fremen worms attack atreides units, in this case. And why do they prefer player units over enemy ones? 3rd level was very fine. I had given the player a single basic tank, but noticed it still makes huge difference, even when it cant crush infantry. I am trying to give the basic tank a capability so that it can still be producable in latter levels. The way to make units still preferable should be about giving them unique abilities, or boost one of their abilities so high that you may need them later. Like a trikes speed for scouting, or even hit and runs. Siege tank in every aspect is much more stronger than a normal tank. To solve this i have to change the potential area of at least one of them. Giving the normal tank the ability to crush infantry might solve this, however this may again trash the infantry thing. Needs a lot playtesting. Open to advices, your wind. (damn i wish i could add a regeneration ability to a unit...)

Thanks for the screen. I hoped to work on them today, but work is getting large, probably wont have time today. And i have yet to playtest my third and fourth levels. Third one is a basically, defend your base from a constant rain of enemies till the reinforcements arrive, and fourth one is a classic build and - destroy enemy style. I am having hard time giving theme to my levels because of the limitations on win/loseflags. Will try to color them up as much as i can. Hope you will like it guys... EDIT: oh btw, i am going to change, currently bugged and out of style deviator to a rapid - mini rocket launcher. Small amount of damage for each misile but they rain. Will be only limited to Harkonnen. And.. do you have any idea how to make a cpu fremen ally to player?

I believe i have some lead now. I did not leave office in order to be able to solve this disappearing worm problem. I failed and failed and than, failed again. However, when i began to get crazy and decided to try a Grocket launching worm, things changed. I will pass the many hours worth of weird experiments and come to results When i change weapon type for the worm and make it for example "bullets", worm normally moves under its victim to swallow it, but then begins to shoot a bullet few squares left of victim. When i move some poor harkonnen troopers to this square which is rapidly being hit by a 300 damage worth of bullet, this poor troopers die. And the worm is still there, trying to "swallow" a trooper on top of himself but keeps killing poor harks i move a few squares left. Which means, the weapon type:sandworm is responsible for worms disappearance. I might try to a) change the properties of this "sandworm" weapon b) give another weapon to worm and try to alter its killing method. both are out of my reach at the moment... Wind. LATS MOMENT CHANGE: when i change worm weapon type to bullets and give it a range of 1, it succesfully destroyed all 9 harkonnen troopers in the map. poor guys. will try to make some... err.. make up?

Fearing i was dreaming of my worms always swallowing three units as i did in regenerating harvesters; i prepared a map for harkonnen and tried it. It always eats three. I changed the harvesters to devastators and to troopers, and the result was same. It always eats three. But i still cant change it. Whenever i edit unit.emc and repak it, the game crashes so badly that i have to reinstall it. The aforementioned "push 3" line is... line number 250. my damaged line is: "5:

I am going to find my emperor cd's right away. And tell my friends here do the same! We are real unexperienced in multiplayer but will begin working hard. Now... where was it...

By saying tremend, you mean fremen right? Did you actually change their names too? Can we have a file to playtest your current progress? Info from here would be very nice. Yesterday i began playing dune2000 in hardest difficulty settings with harkonnen. The game AI is... dated... to weak. Its frustrating when you select a group and send them to enemy base, only to notice they try to go there directly, come to a hill, begin moving along it, trying to find a way. Or the square based system pereventing your own units to reach combat. The inability to select same units in the view or map like red alert 2 has. The inability to give a waypoint for your buildings. And when you increase the difficulty, all you get is slower build times, higher build costs... Enemy ai is still weak. The units are "tremen"deously unbalanced... just pump out as much as trikes as you can, head for enemy harvest zone... Really, what you can expect from such a game when enemy begins his base build, with many units guarding it, and you try to reach him from scratch, yet it still cant handle you. Even in hardest setting. Sure, it was a little bit difficult in the beginning, i had to smash some infantry with mu harvester. After that, it is a "waiting game" and the only real difficulty is tyring to manuever your units. And after tanks show up, you dont need anything else because they can crush infantry. I am still having difficulties understanding this. But i know its hard to balance things, especially as i am toying with dune 2 nowadays. However, i see dune2000 as a wasted project. Westwood could have hit to top with it, yet they wasted it under red alert 2. And when they tried "emperor"... well it was much better, but still same kinds of problems existed, and those awfull movies... Where in the end they put a crown on their heads... The crown is made of plastic, and some pixels are applauding "the emperor of the known universe who wears a plastic crown" Even in dune 2 endings, the emperor was really in a palace. It shouldnt have been so hard. Wasted... An now it is us, a handfull of dune fans who try to turn them into something exciting. Some guy had even made a mode where you could order your carryalls around. Oh, and the awfull, terrible spice and worm in dune 2000. The warm is like a swarm of grey pixels who sometimes buzz some ligthning, and the spice is just the orange version without any movement. You expect to hear some kind of "wind" when you click the windtrap right? maybe some water dropping... And the units... the extremely deep characters and environments of dune is what makes it so strong, yet you create units who share the same sounds all. There is no difference between a light infantry and a rocket infantry, no difference between a tank who began the game with you and killed 20 enemy units and the newly produced tank from factory. No difference in your buildings... No difference in playstyle... You expect ordos to use raider trikes? Not until final patch where they gain stealth, and then? They should have been merchant kings, bureucrats and money lords, yet they get the same price for starport units, they create all same kinds of units. Harkonnen with their crushing force can crush my a... whatever. They dont play differently then atreides. Overall, its the same kind of nostalgic thrust that keeps me still playing these games, and the works of such a handfull of fans who try to do some "quality" Thus i wait your mod with hopes.

Well, for some time i have been working on unit.emc Its in fact much more complicated than build.emc. Unit buid.emc all script is seperated into different parts for buildings; like repair, refinary, etc. But unit emc is looking like an endless sea of scriptual madness. It stars with line 1 and rains down to thousands without a break. Only somewhere is some statement like [concrete] However, after learning very very small portion of emc scripting, i have began searching for push 3 line, which i hoped to be the number for the worms swallow limit. So script should have been something like push 1 push 3 if worm eats subtract push rc there is nothing quite clear like that, however, there is only one line consisting push 3 With hopes this is the worm swallow limit, i increased it to 9... However, there seems to be a problem with the pak/unpak procedure. fifth line does not show up in normal chars. And when i return txt to emc some error messages are given. And when i repak and use the edited dune.pak, game crashes as soon as game starts. "division error" I would be very happy if anyone herearound (which seems like only 3 people) could remove unit.pak and transformed it to a clear txt, or could show me how to achieve this, i would be very gratefull. Think about real worms. The fearsome effect of shai-hulud in novels. For now, i will try to see if there is a solution available on exe file, using nyerguds editor. Man, i love this program...

Thank you Nyerguds! But according to what i read in Mr Flibble's super dune 2 extended project where he changed the mentat images, i will have to find a way to remove the animation from mentat screen. I believe he mentions somewhere in his topic about it, but yet i need his help. Seems he rarely visits nowadays. I feel like i was a little bit late into this... I have also been thinking on why i am happy in doing this, why my friend gets excited in the idea of playing a 16 year old game, when dow2 is out and star 2 is in the door. This nostalgic aproach is indeed everywhere in my life, and i began questioing the reasons and if that is allright. I have some answers but i dont if they are correct. Perhaps its about hope. Back at those times, the world had the hope to be a better place, and i've grown up with the stories of people trying to achieve this. However, either i was dreaming and wrong about hope, or the world is now in a lot worse shape. Feels like quantity is gaining over quality, expression gaining over meaning, dreams gaining over hope... things like that. Or that, i am actually not missing the "old times" but missing the hope itself. What is hope in the rapidly "material"ising world? A substance that cant be used to gain "money" or to build a "future". Aw.. forget it. Back to... "work"... i guess...

I tried saboteur - red hp enemy structure dilemma. Saboteur directly destroys it instead of capturing, or capture+destroy. So there is no bug there. I also tried some flying worms. I dont know why i did something like that. Note that if you change a units movement type to slithering, they can only move over sand. I wonder if i can create a seemingly burrowed unit... probably will look like a worm, will only move on sand, attack in close proximity. Like the deadly machines in the old movie "screamers" Might name it hunter/seeker. And one final note: I am worried about sandworms disappearing after three swallows. I want permament worms (except for killing them) In fact, having real permament worms would be much more dune-like, but i believe it would be very frustrating for the player to harvest anything. In order to make them stay after 3 swallows, i believe i will have to modify unit.emc. I followed the basi guides in emc editing in somewhere, first step was fine but it gets complicated for me afterwards. I will try to find out what makes worms disappear. I will today also try to change the mentat image for atreides. However, i am concerned about palettes. ı dont think i can put anything i want there right? And advices? Do i have to modify dune 1 too and take palette files there? NOTE: for some time i have been working on mentata.cps. I tried to edit it, however i dont know the correct steps. I can extract it wit xcc mixer, however i cant change it to an editable format. There are options like "copy as png" or alike, but the red horizon tools dont have png2cps kinda option. Need some help here guys; Wind.

Teh heh he! A lucky shot indeed; On buildings tab of nyerguds wonderfull editor, unknown 27 is hereby identified: It is the attack priority for the building. The higher the number, the higher priority it has in enemies eyes. I am adding a workfile for it; In this map, atreides has a conyard and a windtrap. I chose these two because they shared uk27: 300. I surrounded them with enemy ordos tanks in hunt mode, and they were evenly attacked. When i increased uk27 of conyard to 900, all tanks attacked it, ignoring windtrap. When i lowered conyard uk27 to 300 and increased windtraps to 900, all tanks ignored conyard and attacked windtrap! So, it will be easier to modify the enemy behavour and create a more potent ai. I suspect units have this kind of value too. But i am unsure of that. Oh, btw, i accidently noticed something else. In my first try where each building shared uk27:300, the tanks were evenly distrubed while attacking. However, when i began repairing my windtrap, more of them began attacking it. Seemingly repairing temporarily increases this value. The trial map is in added zip, mod the numbers and see for yourself; Your wind. building unknown 27 target priority.zip

about the problematic buildings; here is the .ini file atre buildings; ID001=Atreides,Windtrap,200,2753 ID002=Atreides,Windtrap,114,2945 ID003=Atreides,Windtrap,77,3137 ID004=Atreides,Refinery,256,2756 ID005=Atreides,Refinery,222,3797 ID006=Atreides,Outpost,244,3098 as you see, the numbers are below 256, but these buildings still begin gameplay with full health. Is there a problem here? Also; ID001=Atreides,Harvester,128,1081,160,Guard ID002=Ordos,Soldier,256,2521,64,Hunt ID003=Mercenary,Soldier,256,2456,64,Hunt ID004=Mercenary,Soldier,256,2522,64,Hunt ID005=Atreides,Soldier,256,2564,64,Guard ID006=Atreides,Soldier,256,2565,64,Guard ID007=Mercenary,Soldier,256,2436,64,Guard as you see the succesfull attempt in my harvester beginning with half hp, its line has "160" as the third number, however everything else has 64, and buildings do not have a third number at all. What is this 64? a portioning between 256 and 64 means the total hp? I am about to try this timeout thingie...

Standart method of screenshop (pressing prtscn and pasting it in paint) did not work somehow. I downloaded capture2file but it failed too. Thus, i am organising everything in folders and zipping them. You will have three for now. The first one is the modified campaign for atreides (first two missions only) For now, it is completely in turkish. I you may exclude english.pak for just the gameplay. The second one is the complete failure in ordos defence drone, my trial on flying raider trike. For trial purposes i gave it to the atreides player in my modified scena1. Just for the hope's sake, i am going to give them to player "flying, wormcamouflaged and shadowed" so that wraith like trike could be seen. The third one is the more stable, yet still problematic flying trooper. When you change their movement to "flying" they fly, but attack like failed trike, (circling around enemy in short range) and cant give them orders and no shadows could be added. When you make them walk, and change their movement pattern and attack like a good ol' thopter, however, they are not flying in fact. Feel free to toy around and hopefully find a solution. For now, i decided to exclude any flying unit except for normal thopter and carryall in my mod. Hope i can add zip files to post.... here we go: Hmm.. seemingly they have to be zip. Another go: Now what! I did not post this message already. Come 'on! my mod first two levels for atre.zip defence drone.zip Flying trooper.zip