Dune Dynasty

[MrFlibble]

EagleEye, I must ask that you follow the rules and behave. There aren't too many forum rules and they aren't super strict, but people here have always treated each other with respect, and I'd rather this tradition carried on with new members.

Although not obligatory, it would be nice if you edited your post to remove swearing and off-the-point remarks, not just use the strikethrough tags.

[EagleEye]

EagleEye, I must ask that you follow the rules and behave. There aren't too many forum rules and they aren't super strict, but people here have always treated each other with respect, and I'd rather this tradition carried on with new members.

Although not obligatory, it would be nice if you edited your post to remove swearing and off-the-point remarks, not just use the strikethrough tags.

Yes, sir. I apologize.

[Zocom7]

Just tried the latest version of Dune Dynasty and it turns out to be much improved. The crashes are mostly gone and fixed.

There are two suggestions that I think could change the overall balancing of Dune II: changing the unit limit for each faction to 50 instead of 15-25 and changing the barracks and infantry to tier-1. It feels like I am more dependent on vehicles to win with little chance to get the infantry at tier-2 and I am tired of a similar C&C4 idea of limiting a number of units on the battlefield. Another suggestion if possible, could you make the spice harvesters harvest spice a little faster than usual?

[dynasty]

Just tried the latest version of Dune Dynasty and it turns out to be much improved. The crashes are mostly gone and fixed.

Thanks, that's great to hear.

There are two suggestions that I think could change the overall balancing of Dune II: changing the unit limit for each faction to 50 instead of 15-25 and changing the barracks and infantry to tier-1. It feels like I am more dependent on vehicles to win with little chance to get the infantry at tier-2 and I am tired of a similar C&C4 idea of limiting a number of units on the battlefield. Another suggestion if possible, could you make the spice harvesters harvest spice a little faster than usual?

I won't be introducing balance changes in Dune Dynasty directly (unless they are bug fixes*), but I'll enable the code to read an external stat file. You can't change the spice harvester's harvest rate, so just buy more harvesters. Four harvesters is not such a big investment with a raised unit cap, which you can get by adding

[enhancement]
raise_scenario_unit_cap=1

into your config file. You will need to restart a scenario for it to take effect. This will increase the limit to about 40 units in the earlier levels, which is still small but a little bit better. (Oh, I guess there isn't a way to tell what the cap is.)

* Ordos get siege tanks at the same time as other houses. Deviators now fire considerably slower. I really should fix the sonic tank range bug too.

[Nyerguds]

Could you fix the Deviator, so the ones you produce as Atreides or Harkonnen after capturing an Ordos Heavy Factory don't turn enemies into Ordos? Or is that already fixed?

* Ordos get siege tanks at the same time as other houses.

Did they get them earlier, or later? Because I think the sides, in Harkonnen-Atreides-Ordos order, serve as difficulty levels. So if they get them one level later, that may be intended.

[EagleEye]

I think the sides, in Harkonnen-Atreides-Ordos order, serve as difficulty levels.

That's a pretty neat idea Westwood had. It's amazing how alien a concept that is compared to modern RTS games, isn't it?

[Nyerguds]

Well, difficulty levels nowadays just seem to be of the "Um, I'm new to this so I'll choose easy" kind -_-

Kinda funny though, I found difficulty levels (EASY and HARD) as hidden options (command line parameters, even) inside C&C1, when researching the EDITOR command line parameter we found in Red Alert 1 (which started the game in an operating mode which was probably the defunct remainder of an ingame mission/map editor). To this day, I still have no idea what these difficulty levels are actually supposed to do. I can see in the code they enable or change SOMETHING, but I have no idea what the things they change actually are, and the functions using them are completely unidentified as well. That's the problem with disassembling, of course :P

Personally I prefer games without them. Except if they got a 'hard' mode to unlock when finishing; that's kinda neat. Giving a reason to beat it all over again :)

[MrFlibble]

* Ordos get siege tanks at the same time as other houses. Deviators now fire considerably slower. I really should fix the sonic tank range bug too.

We have discussed this issue in the past here in some thread, and I think arrived at the conclusion that it wasn't a bug but rather a feature - as Nyer said it's part of the difficulty level thingy. After all, the Deviator the Ordos get at level 7 is a rather specific weapon, so getting the Siege Tank could be seen as an addition to the Ordos firepower.

On the other hand, the absence of the Siege Tank at level 6 makes this level ridiculously easy for the Harkonnens, who get Siege Tanks and the Ordos AI has neither Siege Tanks nor Rocket Launchers. But then again the Harkonnens are the easy difficulty, right? :D

BTW, I've considered making "reverse" campaigns for each House, that is, in which they would face enemy Houses in inverted order, making HK level 6 against the Atreides and level 7 against the Ordos with the Deviator, which is so effective against the slow Devastators.

Also, have you noticed that the AI does not actually build House-specific units in levels 8 and 9? They only have pre-placed ones and reinforcements. No AI faction has a House of IX on either of the later levels.

Kinda funny though, I found difficulty levels (EASY and HARD) as hidden options (command line parameters, even) inside C&C1, when researching the EDITOR command line parameter we found in Red Alert 1 (which started the game in an operating mode which was probably the defunct remainder of an ingame mission/map editor). To this day, I still have no idea what these difficulty levels are actually supposed to do. I can see in the code they enable or change SOMETHING, but I have no idea what the things they change actually are, and the functions using them are completely unidentified as well. That's the problem with disassembling, of course :P

Wow, I wasn't aware of this. Could it have been similar to the difficulty settings in later Westwood titles? IIRC this affects both the AI and the player, but actually I forgot in which way (does everything get built faster and cheaper or vice versa on high difficutly in RA? ???).

Personally I prefer games without them. Except if they got a 'hard' mode to unlock when finishing; that's kinda neat. Giving a reason to beat it all over again :)

Tyrian has two secret difficulty modes if I'm not mistaken.

[dynasty]

That's a pretty neat idea Westwood had. It's amazing how alien a concept that is compared to modern RTS games, isn't it?

It's kind of funny how they always refer to Atreides as weak though. I originally thought Atreides was the hard difficulty. But then I played Ordos and struggled to beat the Atreides.

Personally I prefer games without them. Except if they got a 'hard' mode to unlock when finishing; that's kinda neat. Giving a reason to beat it all over again :)

There's a brutal AI mode to play after finishing, so you have a reason to beat up Frederick all over again :)

We have discussed this issue in the past here in some thread, and I think arrived at the conclusion that it wasn't a bug but rather a feature - as Nyer said it's part of the difficulty level thingy. After all, the Deviator the Ordos get at level 7 is a rather specific weapon, so getting the Siege Tank could be seen as an addition to the Ordos firepower.

There's a mention of it in the OpenDune improvements thread, and I'm sure I've seen other threads about.

http://forum.opendun...7&t=21&start=30

I still think it's plausible they intended to give Ordos siege tanks at level 6. e.g. the mentat briefing uses the heavy factory picture like the other houses, the siege tank entry in the mentat help is unlocked, and two siege tanks are delivered as reinforcements. The mentat doesn't explicitly say "build siege tanks", so it's hard to tell. The difficulty thing is a rather interesting feature though.

On the other hand, the absence of the Siege Tank at level 6 makes this level ridiculously easy for the Harkonnens, who get Siege Tanks and the Ordos AI has neither Siege Tanks nor Rocket Launchers.

Right, this was the primary reason the change. But keeping with the OpenDune tradition, you can re-enable most of the old behaviours fairly easily. Even silly things (or rather, especially silly things) like the IX palette bug, unit wobble, and the "enemy approaching from the <wrong direction>" are still there.

But then again the Harkonnens are the easy difficulty, right? :D

BTW, I've considered making "reverse" campaigns for each House, that is, in which they would face enemy Houses in inverted order, making HK level 6 against the Atreides and level 7 against the Ordos with the Deviator, which is so effective against the slow Devastators.

That would be really neat!

Also, have you noticed that the AI does not actually build House-specific units in levels 8 and 9? They only have pre-placed ones and reinforcements. No AI faction has a House of IX on either of the later levels.

Noticed. One level of ornithopters is enough, particularly with the HP buff. That was a messy level.

[Nyerguds]

Wow, I wasn't aware of this. Could it have been similar to the difficulty settings in later Westwood titles? IIRC this affects both the AI and the player, but actually I forgot in which way (does everything get built faster and cheaper or vice versa on high difficutly in RA? ???).

Well, the prices all stayed the same, at least. I don't have any information on build time handling in C&C though.

BTW, I've considered making "reverse" campaigns for each House, that is, in which they would face enemy Houses in inverted order, making HK level 6 against the Atreides and level 7 against the Ordos with the Deviator, which is so effective against the slow Devastators.

Would be even nicer if it was just one of the 3 choices that did that (like how that kind of thing is done in C&C), but I guess Dune II's briefing system doesn't allow that :(

It's kind of funny how they always refer to Atreides as weak though. I originally thought Atreides was the hard difficulty.

That's kinda mostly because the Harkonnen have a feud with them :P

Noticed. One level of ornithopters is enough, particularly with the HP buff. That was a messy level.

Oh dear gods yes. Ornithopter attacks suck :|

...wait what? They got a hit point buff? :O

[MrFlibble]

Would be even nicer if it was just one of the 3 choices that did that (like how that kind of thing is done in C&C), but I guess Dune II's briefing system doesn't allow that :(

Well, that could be alleviated by using extremely vague phrasing in the briefings, such as saying "enemy" instead of naming the House the player has to battle.

After all, most mission briefings in Dune II boil down to "take out the enemy base" anyway :)

[Nyerguds]

I just tested normal Opendune on my work laptop, and neither the 32 bit nor 64 bit build of OpenDune 0.7 had the problem with the black graphics... so it really is a Dynasty problem.

[Zocom7]

I got two more issues with Dune Dynasty.

1. When I created a team or two and saved the game, there's no problem selecting a team on the field. When I re-load that saved game, the teams I created for the units were forgotten and I had to re-do.

2. The Sandworm has a broken balance issue. When it's spotted on the map, it can gobble up an unlimited amount of vehicles without a timeout of disappearing (which is heavily embarrassing to the spice harvesters). There was a restriction mentioned in the official v.1.07 patch notes that the Sandworm has a timeout after swallowing three units on the field.

[dynasty]

I got two more issues with Dune Dynasty.

1. When I created a team or two and saved the game, there's no problem selecting a team on the field. When I re-load that saved game, the teams I created for the units were forgotten and I had to re-do.

They aren't saved at the moment. The same goes for build queues and rally points, and some other things.

2. The Sandworm has a broken balance issue. When it's spotted on the map, it can gobble up an unlimited amount of vehicles without a timeout of disappearing (which is heavily embarrassing to the spice harvesters). There was a restriction mentioned in the official v.1.07 patch notes that the Sandworm has a timeout after swallowing three units on the field.

Oops, it seems I left insatiable sandworms on by default. You can disable this behaviour in enhancements section of the config file.

Still looking for interesting ways to make sandworms more relevant. Simply feeding it three soldiers seems like such a cheat.

[Nyerguds]

Oops, it seems I left insatiable sandworms on by default. You can disable this behaviour in enhancements section of the config file.

lol, that was a bug? I noticed this and disabled it right away.

Still looking for interesting ways to make sandworms more relevant. Simply feeding it three soldiers seems like such a cheat.

Well, it'd be nice for the worms to be less predictable, like in the first levels. That way they'd become better as environmental danger, rather than just going through the classic "discover sandworm", "panic and pull all units on rock", and finally "lure worm close to rock and kill it". All it really does now it delay the harvesting for a while. I guess that's intended behaviour, but Ambush worms are ridiculously easy to kill because they don't move if there's nothing on the sand in the explored area.

With less predictable sandworms, on the other hand, it becomes a tactical choice whether you spend time killing them, or if you leave them alive hoping for the best.

Making a config option to override the sandworm's Ambush command with their Area Guard behaviour may make a nice experiment though, especially combined with the insatiable sandworms option. I think sandworms in these early levels (on Area Guard) are actually a lot scarier, exactly because you never know if they'll keep wandering or if they'd suddenly eat your stuff.

[MrFlibble]

With less predictable sandworms, on the other hand, it becomes a tactical choice whether you spend time killing them, or if you leave them alive hoping for the best.

Making a config option to override the sandworm's Ambush command with their Area Guard behaviour may make a nice experiment though, especially combined with the insatiable sandworms option. I think sandworms in these early levels (on Area Guard) are actually a lot scarier, exactly because you never know if they'll keep wandering or if they'd suddenly eat your stuff.

BTW, I remember I got the impression that the behaviour of sandworms on Area Guard in early levels in the original game (both v1.0 and v1.07) may be affected by whether or not the player attacks a sandworm or not. However, this might have been a side-effect of the Atreides/Fremen ally stuff, because only the Atreides will not auto-attack sandworms on sight, so I guess it's more likely that I observed this behaviour (Area Guard sandworms not being aggressive towards the player unless provoked) when playing as the Atreides.

What's for certain is that in Super Dune II Fremen-owned sandworms on Area Guard will just follow Fremen units on sand (when you're playing as the Fremen that is), but will break away from that and attack any enemy units they can reach. After which they go back to following Fremen units (usually a Harvester). With any other orders (like Guard or Move), sandworms switch into their "hunt everything" mode similar to what they do with the Ambush command, and will eat allied units as well as enemies.

In fact, if the sandworm eating limit were disabled (IIRC drnovice discussed this somewhere in Dune Editing some time ago) that would make for a fun Fremen superweapon of sorts :)

[Nyerguds]

BTW, I remember I got the impression that the behaviour of sandworms on Area Guard in early levels in the original game (both v1.0 and v1.07) may be affected by whether or not the player attacks a sandworm or not. However, this might have been a side-effect of the Atreides/Fremen ally stuff, because only the Atreides will not auto-attack sandworms on sight, so I guess it's more likely that I observed this behaviour (Area Guard sandworms not being aggressive towards the player unless provoked) when playing as the Atreides.

I dunno. Now I'm playing through v1.00 again for these animation tests (with Harkonnen), I saw one Area Guard sandworm eat anything I put on the sand, while the other one in that level kept moving under my units without eating em even when I was shooting the crap out of it :P

[Nyerguds]

I was going to say that's not how we do it in America, but I looked it up, and that's a rule under APA, making you a psychologist. Since you've also mentioned riding a train, and the only other person I've heard of riding a train is Sherlock Holmes, that makes you Sherlock Holmes the Belgian Psychologist/Assembly Hacker. My logic is foolproof.

The writing community I'm involved in is largely American. Oh, and I think you might mean 'psychic'. Also, the Belgian version of Sherlock Holmes is Hercule Poirot, who was quite famous for his case on the Orient Express train :P

(Mind you, Hercule Poirot was invented and written by the decidedly British Agatha Christie ;))

[MrFlibble]

The writing community I'm involved in is largely American. Oh, and I think you might mean 'psychic'.

APA is the American Psychological Association. I also stumbled upon their writing guidelines when Googled for the standards of capitalizing articles. Those nifty psychologists have thought of everything! :D

[EagleEye]

Also, the Belgian version of Sherlock Holmes is Hercule Poirot, who was quite famous for his case on the Orient Express train :P

(Mind you, Hercule Poirot was invented and written by the decidedly British Agatha Christie ;))

U.N. Owen Was Her?

[Nyerguds]

On the "Any right-click command on sand sets the harvester to Harvest"

This was done intentionally so that harvesters would go back to work after crushing soldiers.

Odd. Isn't that only for the players then? I'd imagine the right-click behaviour to be totally unrelated to fixing the AI harvesters getting stuck after crushing a unit (which seems easy enough; just change the Move command for the AI auto crushing retaliation action by a Harvest command). Not sure if that bug/exploit actually still exists in v1.07 though.

And if it is only for the player... can't you still just check the ground below it? If it harvests on after crushing an infantry unit that was on the spice, sure. If I make a harvester move away from the spice to crush an enemy, though, that's my own responsibility. I really dislike it automagically going back to harvesting afterwards. Sometimes, for spice storage reasons and such, I stop my harvesters, and with the right mouse click commands it's really easier to do that by just moving them away from a spice patch.

Hm... a neat feature would be for harvesters to remember and go back to their last harvest spot after they automatically switched to "return" and headed back to unload (like it's done in C&C), though I guess your waypoints from refineries kinda fix that too.

[Zocom7]

If I ordered Harvesters to manually harvest spice and then go back to the refineries, they often wind up standing still without an order. I wish the auto harvesting control needs to be more enhanced.

So any progress on Dune Dynasty 1.3 yet?

[MrFlibble]

Not sure if that bug/exploit actually still exists in v1.07 though.

It had been fixed in v1.07. AFAIK the code that is responsible for this is inside UNIT.EMC and not the game executable (I had played around with swapping EMC files from different versions some time ago, and putting UNIT.EMC from v1.0 into DUNE.PAK in v1.07 would bring the stuck Harvester bug back).

Hm... a neat feature would be for harvesters to remember and go back to their last harvest spot after they automatically switched to "return" and headed back to unload (like it's done in C&C), though I guess your waypoints from refineries kinda fix that too.

Well, at least in the original Dune II this becomes a non-issue as soon as you get Carryalls, which indeed bring a Harvester back to its spice field unless all spice there had been mined out.

[dynasty]

Nice game :) good work.

Thanks.

And if it is only for the player... can't you still just check the ground below it? If it harvests on after crushing an infantry unit that was on the spice, sure. If I make a harvester move away from the spice to crush an enemy, though, that's my own responsibility. I really dislike it automagically going back to harvesting afterwards. Sometimes, for spice storage reasons and such, I stop my harvesters, and with the right mouse click commands it's really easier to do that by just moving them away from a spice patch.

After some more play testing, I found the return to harvest behaviour did kind of get in the way, so changed.

Well, at least in the original Dune II this becomes a non-issue as soon as you get Carryalls, which indeed bring a Harvester back to its spice field unless all spice there had been mined out.

Same in Dune Dynasty; the rally points only get used when the harvester wasn't picked up by a carryall.

If I ordered Harvesters to manually harvest spice and then go back to the refineries, they often wind up standing still without an order. I wish the auto harvesting control needs to be more enhanced.

I've noticed that too. Sometimes harvesters will wait around for a carryall to pick them up, even when there aren't any around. It could be related to the carryalls that show up to deliver your harvesters when you build a new refinery. I've had those carryalls return my harvesters to the refinery before disappearing. I'm not really sure at this stage, and I don't have a reliable way to reproduce the bug.

[Nyerguds]

If I ordered Harvesters to manually harvest spice and then go back to the refineries, they often wind up standing still without an order. I wish the auto harvesting control needs to be more enhanced.

Hmm. You mean when they finished harvesting? Yeah, I've seen that too...

I've noticed that too. Sometimes harvesters will wait around for a carryall to pick them up, even when there aren't any around. It could be related to the carryalls that show up to deliver your harvesters when you build a new refinery. I've had those carryalls return my harvesters to the refinery before disappearing. I'm not really sure at this stage, and I don't have a reliable way to reproduce the bug.

Hah. Well forcing the dropoff carryalls into permanent duty carryalls by keeping them at work for a while still seems to work. I wonder what exactly causes that 'status switch' though.