TonyD

Excellent :). I will release an updated version soon then. BTW stefen, I noticed you have a bit of the westwood intro at the start of your game. I beleive that is encoded in the wsa format isn't it? If so, do you understand its format well? It would be great if I could run the entire dune 2 intro. I also have a great idea for my intro screen too. I could resort to screenshots or I may even have to research the wsa format myself otherwise.

Things are looking very good now, the ai is actually quite fun to battle against. Their units now stay together when attacking making a much more efficient strike, and having 5 hard ai players teamed against you is very difficult. I have fixed many bugs and done various improvements to the game. However, networking won't be working perfectly for a while, so I am wondering if there is enough interest (if any) for me to continue releasing incomplete versions. I am also trying out tracked units automatically running over infantry targets which is just as fun as it sounds. ;D

Ok, I'll go ahead and put it at tech 4. Stefen, have you tried out the multiplayer mode at all?

hmmmm. Well they are randomly placed so they are pretty much evenly distrubuted about the base. You guys will have to see for yourselves, its a good start nonetheless. I now can see that good placement of defending structures and units will indeed be very difficult. Anyways I also got the ai defending and rebuilding its base in the original missions. Right now I'm trying to remember the tech levels required for each structure and unit. Does anyone know these? Otherwise I'll have to go through missions to check them. Heres what I've got so far: tech 1 - windtrap, refinery, small slab, big slab tech 2 - radar, silo, WOR, light infantry, trooper tech 3 - light factory, trike, quad tech 4 - heavy factory, tank tech 5 - gun turret, launcher tech 6 - rocket turret, star port, siege tank tech 7 - ix, special unit (sonic, devastator, deviator) tech 8 - palace

It works now, although the building order is very predictable. I'll just have to test out multiplayer with the computer players added.

Im now gonna work on ai self building, so they construct there own base and attack in single and multyplayer custom maps

An effective solution for this might be for the selection box to only select ground units, but if there are none only select air units, and if there are none select a building. Or if modifier key is pressed, only select one or the other. I've decided to go with the grid option for flying units. It will save me alot of time and trouble.

Its currently hard coded to 5029. It's easily changeable by me though, and perhaps i'll and make it user definable for next version.

acually, I could very easily restrict the air units to a grid, but I prefer the free movement that results when they are not. All the ground units I have done are restricted to this grid as described but because air units will have far few less obsticles in the air to worry about, an advanced path searching alogrithm and thus grid restriction are not really required.

has anyone tried the networking? I've had a few battles with max of 3 players and they have run perfectly so far.

I am trying to fix this now by making it so air units can't move to an unoccupied cell. The problem with this is at the moment is that air units are not restricted to a grid, so its difficult to predict which cell they will occupy next and thus assign to before another air unit tries to. I have a patial solution now, which works but looks quite shitty. I have removed the random movement of ornithopters which looked like shit and also made them very overpowered.

It uses 100% because it tries to get the highest framerate possible... I have no idea in respect to windows programming, but is it realy worth throtling the game so it only uses at most say 50%. If your playing this game you don't need to be doing anything else I would have thought. Its not as if its a "windowy windows application" or anything. I'll look into this though - I'll see what other games do. Quake 3 arena, Jedi Knight both use 100% of cpu. I beleive this is common practice. Quake2 did not use 100% though. Only about 30-40%. You can set gather points for buildings, just select building then right click destination gather point. I have basically removed the barracks from the game and use only the WOR. I was thinking maybe of using the barracks graphic for a hospital instead. The structure information stuff is planned.

Theres a bug on the clients side which will make infantry sometimes appear to run off in random directions. If wont crash game, but is more of an anoiyance, I'm trying to fix it now. Fixed it, ill just replace the last posts attachment with b3.... And now finally I beleive this to be a good reliable version ;).

0.77b is now up! :D Please try out the networking and letme know how it goes. argghh.. crappy icq page, its going on here now. b2 slows starport arrival time significantly. Try the later version posted next page.

star ports are now done.. took longer then i expected, hopefully I will get palaces done tommorrow

At the moment I would call my network code crappy :'(, so there is still a bit of work to do on it. It definitely will work over the internet. Im not sure how well though, so it will be up to u guys to test. I fixed the major inefficincy of the net code and it now runs very well, Ill just get the palaces and starports working then release the next version :)

Ok then, well have to wait and see waht happens after this game is finished though. I am happy to say networking now works, except for palace and starport functionality. The games do seem to stay in sync well and it no longer seems to crash. It does slow down abit because I'm sending to much data to keep it syncronised but I should be able to cut it down by alot. Soon we should be able to play 6 player dune2! :D

Can that 3dengine import 3dstudio max models? If so, I'd love to model all the models you might need ;D Hmm, I'm not sure yet because I'm quite new to 3d graphics. I had a quick md2 viewer running before but thats about as much as I know u see. If you are up to the challenge of making an entire games or at least a significant amount of 3d models I would be interested indeed. :D

I think the best way is just to leave it as it was, ie no crazy power things. inadequate power = no radar + no turret fire + maybe half construction speed? :- Anyways networking is coming along nicely. Unit movements, and building now works. I'm trying to get the start multigame menu much like warcraft 3 has atm so u can quickly set team, house colour and add computers into the game. This will mean I'll have to adjust the map format but its possible i could have networking working well enough for release in maybe a week. I am looking forward to getting this game completed so I can start on another fully 3d engine. ;)

neonext: don't panic! I'm still here, I have been on a bit of a break from programming recently but I'm having a go at networking again atm, then I'll probably fix the build lists tech level issues and stuff. carryalls: I was thinking that the user will have to click repair on the unit, much like in dune2k. The unit will head towards the repair yard and if/when there is a free carryall it will be picked up and it will also be returned unlike in d2k. turrets and power issues: The problem here is in the original dune2 missions there was never enough windtraps to power the computers rocket turrets so they will have to cheat and not require power in the original missions. I am planning to make it so user turrets do require power and ai turrets will cheat only in original dune2 missions. I like the idea of being able to prioritise power output to rocket turrets in emergencies because this is a little more relistic. Perhaps production speeds could be halved in all other buildings when emergencvy mode is activated as to allow rocket turrets to run in low power situations. This way would be easy to use too.

This is probably the most important issue, so I'll probly fix it next. Try using the light infantry against tanks - they are almost completely useless agaisnt heavy armour, but they will cut through heavy troopers like a knife through butter. Heavy infantry can be very easily destroyed by the much cheaper light infantry, or run over as u say. I don't know, I think I got the troopers about right, any other with oppinions about this? These will be fixed soonishly. The problem with this is, when a player builds multiple palaces they have a very good chance of hitting their enemies base a number of times.... I'll probly make the death hand much lesss powerful but perfectly accurrate like the dune2000 one. what do u think?

Thanks for your info, I will look into it :D. That is dissapointing that the music doesn't work, do have midi's under the datasoundmusic directories?

I use a technique which sounds very similar to stefens, i just store whether a tile is rock, sand, spice etc and smooth only at runtime as well. The smoothing is quite simple but a relatively large problem. U just check whether the tile left, up, down, and right is of the same type or not, and set the tile accordingly. The dlm format I created is very simple because its binary, just the file size and then a large array of types is fed into the file, although this makes it uneditable outside the editor ofcourse. Hope this helps too.

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Oh yeah, well basically that ai is really crap and just sends units as soon as they are completed. I only put it in as a tempory thing.