DEMO 4 - progress

[Dark Knight ez]

I do appologise for having said I'd help out and then not letting hear from me in a while.

I was stuck on the NDS-side of development and only received a flashcard containing a Micro-SD card two days ago. This means I can finally start loading in graphics and textfiles dynamicly using file accessing (no need to compile it in the executable itself) and make rapid (and highly modifiable) progress.

When I get the displaying part fully functional of the engine, only then can I really start taking peeks at your code and submitting possible improvements. Hopefully this will be in a couple of weeks.

Greets.

[DoomerMrT]

Hi!

Stefan,your DTM is awsome!I can only say hats off You man!But pls do the next ver I can't wait! :D I hope the next release will have options menu enabled.

[lord vernius of ix]

Ill soon be taking a c++ programming coarse in my school! so mayvbe someday ill be helping out on future projects though not likely anytime soon :(

i intend to do free lance programming after that since ill still bein high school and also because im not allowed to get a job because of a custody predicament im in between my parents...

YAYY D2TM!!!!!!

[AntiBodies]

On subject of Infantry Trooper usage..

enable slowish (a bit faster than completely pointless ability) healing for trooper/infantry! Would add some major cool factor to infantry usage and potentially increase the use of hard rocks (or cliffs.. infantry only areas) as you could place wounded solders up there to hide and heal.

troopers are way too powerful in DEMO 3 but glad to see they are a bit more balanced in this testing version which is cool.. although I don't know if limiting there firepower is the way to go.. They should be devastating units if not countered with Infantry/Trikes/Quads/Squishers but decreasing there firepower may reduce there ownage whereby reducing there Hit Points make Infantry/Trikes/Quads more of a counter which is how it should be. How I see it the counter against Troopers should be as so.. (Hard/Soft being how much ownage the counter is) -- Infantry = Hard , Trikes/Quad = Medium and Squishers = Soft (although Hard in the right situation)..

Although its hard to take away as its such a major cool factor in Dune 2 how about limit "squish"er vehicles to the Harvester, Siege Tank and Devastator (i.e. not combat tank).. or actually how about just Harvester, Combat Tank and Devastator?? either way really.. the later increasing the combat tanks usefulness at the later tech levels and either limitation give a minor nerf to the shear brutality of the "squish" and increase infantry/trooper use at the later tech levels. siege tanks i suppose have better reasoning as they are to be tactical weapons for bombarding buildings as apposed to in the field close range infantry squishers.. just a thought

Since playing DEMO 3 Ive had all this nostalgic Dune 2 stuff come back to me... remembering what things I would change/add to the game to make it better when I was a kid. So yeah bid thanks to the developers and hopefully I can get this bleeding edge SVN version up and running soon.

[outcast]

any possibility of there being a demo for mac osx?

[stefanhendriks]

so far i had no luck on compiling it at mac os x :(

[outcast]

:(

Is their even the possibility of it being on osx?

i havent palyed a dune game in forever.

[stefanhendriks]

Well, i can compile Allegro. The problem is more in the third party libraries and such. But i really, really have no time to figure it all out. I bet it can be compiled at some state, but without mp3 support and the blending support. It does work on Linux, and Mac OS X should be not that hard of a competitor (due its Unix background). However, i've spend days on getting it compiling until i got frustrated.

[Grimbringer]

Stefan,

  Have you ever considered compiling all the sprites and letting some people take a crack at making new images for them all?  I mean you're reworking the coding, a fresh slap of paint may do wonders?.  I'm sure if you put them on the site you'll probably get all kinds of wonderful emails with rehashed units.

[stefanhendriks]

There is already some pack of gfx on the site. But it is not the fully fledged upgraded gfx pack as delivered with the d2tm demo 3.x ;) Perhaps i might do that. But i do have to agree with the gfx authors first though. I wont spread it just like that ;-)

Who knows, i might do it in Java after all. But i cant tell atm.

[nemafakei]

I'm happy for anything of mine to be distributed. The only thing I ask is that any changes you accept be applied across the board (i.e. no drastic alterations to trikes without similar ones for quads, etc.).

[Grimbringer]

  Well I'm not upset with somethings ingame, mostly the buildings. lol. I've always thought they where kinda ugly. 

Heres the units in order of unbeautifuliness in order in my mind

The devestator

Siege tank

Missle Launcher

Troops both types (heh pretty much the same thing)

Trike

quad

harvestor

Sonic tank

Arial Units aren't really a concern to me i hardly notice them heh.

I wondered if you added more animation to them if that would change the visual effect.

[lord vernius of ix]

Wow its been nearly a 3 months after i was last on here, and im saddened to see that Demo4 isnt out

I hope to see it soon, And if not, I hope to see it this year :D

[stefanhendriks]

Basically i am kinda stuck to write d2tm. I want to have it MAC compatible. But that rules out the third libs i have used on Windows. So i have to think of a way to make it work on MAC without using these libs... Lovely issue isn't it?

[MrFlibble]

Stefan, I'm sure you'll cope with everything once you're in the right mood ;)

[stefanhendriks]

Hehe, ofcourse! :D Even if it means i have to rewrite it in assembler, i will do it!

But ofcourse, mood, time, etc. There aint plenty of this.

[outcast]

Here is an easier way to make the game compatible with oth os (such as mac). It's free and much easier than recoding it! so check it out

http://www.transgaming.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&file=index&func=display&ceid=24

[stefanhendriks]

Ah yes. I have seen that before. Would be great if more developers considered that.

In fact, i have been doing some research myself in SDL, OpenGL, Glut, PLIB, etc. I also have made some drafts. There will surely be some progress soon. But consider this 'branch' (ie of d2tm demo 3.5) the last.

A rewrite is on the horizon, and more.

[ryandeboer]

I was thinking of porting the allegro stuff to OpenGL. OpenGL gets my vote.

[stefanhendriks]

You could consider OpenLayer or AllegroGL for that perhaps.

[ryandeboer]

Yey got it rendering in OpenGL. It was as simple as this:

allegro_gl_set_allegro_mode();
blit(bmp_screen, screen, 0, 0, 0, 0, 640, 480);
allegro_gl_unset_allegro_mode();
glFlush();
allegro_gl_flip();

Of course there was more window setup and a clear.

All my OpenGL tools work now :).

I used allegrogl binaries from here:

http://retrospec.sgn.net/allegro.php

[nemafakei]

I'm currently working on redrawing the graphics in the style of Picasso's 'Guernica' for the next release, though I ultimately intend to work up to something like Heironeous Bosch.

[stefanhendriks]

So, its now magically open gl or is it:

-draw all on bitmap with normal allegro

-draw the screen buffer with opengl to screen

I think this is the case now.

Nema, did you read the Arrakis dev board? ;-)

[nemafakei]

Nah, the process is

- draw atmospheric background with fancy effects as bitmap

- draw massive rubbishy colourless cartoons of mangled bodies over it

Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm probably just going to resort to cubism.

[stefanhendriks]

Hehe. You're feeling alright? ;-) Anyway. Nice.