Random Tinkering

[Major Cooke]

The deform36c is the bitmap image used when rendering the refraction wave from explosions, or it so appears. That would explain why it's giving an error for the dx version. v1.5.11 by default comes with a "textures/deform36c.bmp", as only the dx version uses the refraction waves, also known as the "pixel effect" for explosions.

If you can't find it, try downloading darwinia via steam or something, and copy the textures from the .dat files on over to this new version.

[Shwart!!]

ChangeAvatar <basename>
- eg: ChangeAvatar sepulveda
- Files need to be in /data/sepulveda/, /mods/mod/sepulveda/ or in the packed data. They need to be sequentially numbered starting at 1 (sepulveda1.bmp, sepulveda2.bmp etc) and it will load all of them until it comes across a missing file, so there can be anything from 1 image upwards. The technical limit depends on the size of an integer by default, but its at least 32,000
- If it fails to load *any* images, next time it tries to render it will reload supulveda - this was added to stop a crash bug when 0 images were loaded

Yeah, yeah. I'd read that. I assumed that since it wasn't working, I was doing something wrong. Turns out it is working, just not in certain circumstances. Speaking of which, have you tried replicating the conditions I spoke of? 3 image sets: sepulveda, greenbrae, and computer. Mod name of Insurrection. Under these conditions, I cannot convince it to load computer, but it will load sepulveda and greenbrae just fine.

As for deform36c, it's not in my game, as I've been using the gl 1.4.x files. Just copied main.dat from steam, I'll see if it works better.

The DX version crashes if you try to edit certain maps. The GL version crashed on saving my map, and erased the map file. The mission file remains intact, but the map is simply gone.
EDIT 2: And every time I save a map, the team names become gibberish.
EDIT 3: Current team names:

Code: Select all

   
          7   
à
~¸®‚È®‚Ø®‚讂ø®‚¯‚¯‚(¯‚8¯‚H¯‚X¯‚h¯‚x¯‚ˆ¯‚˜¯‚¨¯‚¸¯‚ȯ‚د‚诂ø¯‚°‚°‚(°‚8°‚H°‚X°‚h°‚x°‚ˆ°‚˜

°‚¨°‚¸°‚È°‚Ø°‚è°‚ø°‚±‚±‚(±‚8±‚h·x·ˆ·˜·¨·¸·È·Ø·è·ø·¸¸(¸8¸H¸X¸h¸x¸ˆ¸˜¸¨¸

¸¸!
          8   Ðèlàÿ‰ðÿ‰
          9   `Ü   

That's just teams 7-9. Team 6 is about 2 pages by itself.
EDIT 4: If the gibberish is bad enough, it can cause Darwinia to crash loading the map.
EDIT 5: It can even cause Darwinia to crash on launch.

Darwinians still have that bug where they often ignore the presence of enemies. This has been in Darwinia for forever, ask IV how they fixed it for Multiwinia.

A centipede with a starting size of about 15 or greater has enough damage to instakill DGs. A centipede that loses segments maintains its damage (and maybe max health) for quite a while, if not forever.

Combine the two above issues, and what you have is a centipede of mass destruction, being able to eliminate entire armies in seconds and do so time and time again. They're supposed to flee from damage, making DGs and their lasers extremely effective, but if not being counterattacked, the centipedes are more effective than even a Soul Destroyer. And even if counterattacked, the original centipede can still instakill DGs even when down to 2 or 3 segments.

Officers are supposed to be auto-selected upon creation. The mechanism for this is to select whatever's under the cursor 1 frame after creating the officer, caring not whether it's actually the officer, nothing at all, or another unit entirely, including Darwinians. I theorize that it would be possible to select enemy units as well, but considering the difficulties in getting a DG to stand on an enemy thing, this would be very hard to test.

Most Darwinians are fairly stupid. This is normal. Not so normal, however, is the occasional DG that goes far beyond what it should ever do. I logged a case last night of one Sally Stickman, who in solo defence of her hive killed at least 21 enemies while staying out of range of return fire, drove two enemy platoons off of two seperate hills, single-handedly occupied an entire forest, and then grabbed a soul and took it back to the hive. Two others who I didn't care to name undertook similar feats.
Why are some Darwinians awesome? What causes their AI to be so much better than their companions? And would there be a way to force this to occur for an entire team? Darwinians this skilled could take on armies many times their size; that would be quite a challenge for a player to counter.

Shwart!!

[Major Cooke]

It's all a matter of height and threat. They do lots of height checking, which will cause absolute geniotic mastermindedness or complete mental retardation on some dips of land.

[Shwart!!]

Still doesn't explain why one DG, while standing amongst others, would be going on its own individual spree of death. They should have the same height and threat values.
No matter. If this is valid to do to the threat value, could you make a version where one of the teams has it's DG's percieved threat maximized at all times? I'd be interested in seeing what that does to it...

Shwart!!

[Major Cooke]

The problem is, the darwinians remain the same in multiwinia with the added exceptions of things like being plagued. There's nothing I can really do about it because that's wondering into an area which looks like a gibberish mess.

[Shwart!!]

Hmm. :/ Well, I can't ask you to wander into gibberish without good reason... I'll probably be getting the source myself at some point, though, and when I do, I can focus on AI since you guys seem to have everything else covered.

Shwart!!

[Stormchild]

Yeah, yeah. I'd read that. I assumed that since it wasn't working, I was doing something wrong. Turns out it is working, just not in certain circumstances. Speaking of which, have you tried replicating the conditions I spoke of? 3 image sets: sepulveda, greenbrae, and computer. Mod name of Insurrection. Under these conditions, I cannot convince it to load computer, but it will load sepulveda and greenbrae just fine.

I've run this setup and it works :/ I did trap another error though. Apparently dividing a number by 1 sometimes leaves a remainder of 2. Go figure. Its trapped now to prevent further crashes.

The DX version crashes if you try to edit certain maps. The GL version crashed on saving my map, and erased the map file. The mission file remains intact, but the map is simply gone.
EDIT 2: And every time I save a map, the team names become gibberish.
EDIT 3: Current team names:

Code: Select all

   
          7   
à
~¸®‚È®‚Ø®‚讂ø®‚¯‚¯‚(¯‚8¯‚H¯‚X¯‚h¯‚x¯‚ˆ¯‚˜¯‚¨¯‚¸¯‚ȯ‚د‚诂ø¯‚°‚°‚(°‚8°‚H°‚X°‚h°‚x°‚ˆ°‚˜

°‚¨°‚¸°‚È°‚Ø°‚è°‚ø°‚±‚±‚(±‚8±‚h·x·ˆ·˜·¨·¸·È·Ø·è·ø·¸¸(¸8¸H¸X¸h¸x¸ˆ¸˜¸¨¸

¸¸!
          8   Ðèlàÿ‰ðÿ‰
          9   `Ü   

That's just teams 7-9. Team 6 is about 2 pages by itself.
EDIT 4: If the gibberish is bad enough, it can cause Darwinia to crash loading the map.
EDIT 5: It can even cause Darwinia to crash on launch.

I'm hoping all of these crashes are related to the dodgy string handling. I hate working with strings in c++, its just not intuitive at all. I finally have a working version though.

Officers are supposed to be auto-selected upon creation. The mechanism for this is to select whatever's under the cursor 1 frame after creating the officer, caring not whether it's actually the officer, nothing at all, or another unit entirely, including Darwinians. I theorize that it would be possible to select enemy units as well, but considering the difficulties in getting a DG to stand on an enemy thing, this would be very hard to test.

Actually, the code specifically targets the newly created officer. There is no blind targetting of 'whatever's under the cursor'. Not sure where you got this idea from.

Most Darwinians are fairly stupid. This is normal. Not so normal, however, is the occasional DG that goes far beyond what it should ever do. I logged a case last night of one Sally Stickman, who in solo defence of her hive killed at least 21 enemies while staying out of range of return fire, drove two enemy platoons off of two separate hills, single-handedly occupied an entire forest, and then grabbed a soul and took it back to the hive. Two others who I didn't care to name undertook similar feats.
Why are some Darwinians awesome? What causes their AI to be so much better than their companions? And would there be a way to force this to occur for an entire team? Darwinians this skilled could take on armies many times their size; that would be quite a challenge for a player to counter.

Shwart!!

While it sounds like a good idea, I think this lies squarely in the infinite number of monkeys realm: sooner or later the random numbers are going to align to make rambowinians.

And on the topic of AI, I have a (long-term) plan to merge the AI of all the entities into the base class. Doing so would make it much easier to allow one unit to use behaviour normally attributed to another. At present, it requires duplication: SoulHarvest meant copying several large chunks of code from Engineer to Darwinian. Eggwinians was the same, moving Virii code into Darwinian. While this works, its a pain to maintain. Buildings are the same: the new code for allowing multiple teams to cooperate in capturing a building is only present in SpawnPoints and GunTurrets (the latter because I've just ported the multiwinian turrets over). I'm going to have to either rework every darwinian controlled building, or move it into the base class.

[Shwart!!]

Officers are supposed to be auto-selected upon creation. The mechanism for this is to select whatever's under the cursor 1 frame after creating the officer, caring not whether it's actually the officer, nothing at all, or another unit entirely, including Darwinians. I theorize that it would be possible to select enemy units as well, but considering the difficulties in getting a DG to stand on an enemy thing, this would be very hard to test.

Actually, the code specifically targets the newly created officer. There is no blind targetting of 'whatever's under the cursor'. Not sure where you got this idea from.

Got this idea because that's actually what's happening. I know it used to specifically target the officers, always did in the IV versions, but in these betas it does seem to be blind targeting. Half the time it misses the officer, meaning I have to select it myself. 3 times it's selected a Darwinian instead. (I'll screenshot it next time.) Once it selected a different officer.

Shwart!!

[Stormchild]

No idea why its happening then. The code there hasn't been touched.


Latest build: http://iridiaprime.co.uk/darwinia/mods/darwinia.r77.zip

I've dropped the dx build because its crashing on me, but not in a repeatable way and never when the debugger is attached so I can't pin it down. GL build is as stable as these things ever are.

Only two significant changes: team names should no longer be corrupted (manually check your maps and delete any corrupted sections). Multiwinia turret types added. Currently only placeable in the editor, but deploy-from-armour support is planned. Will use the multiwinia canon_*.shp files if you copy them over, the default darwinia turret otherwise.

[Shwart!!]

Turret_3 doesn't fire. Turret_2 fires grenades in random directions.
Turrets controlled by Team0 are allied with Team0. Turrets controlled by any other team are allied with Team1. So my Team2 army is subvert-turreting itself into Team1 units.

Shwart!!

[Major Cooke]

Flame turrets are not yet available. Rocket turrets should fire just fine.

[Shwart!!]

Perhaps I should've been more clear; the turretmode box goes like this, from top to bottom:

Code: Select all





GunTurret

(the first 5 are invisible)
So from top to bottom, I refer to them as
Turret_One = rockets
Turret_Two = random grenades
Turret_Three = none (probably flame)
Turret_Four = subversion
Turret_Five = laser
Turret_Six = default GunTurret

So the bugs from above are that the flameturrets don't fire (of course), and the grenades fire in random directions.

Shwart!!

[Stormchild]

Looks like I forgot to include the updated english.txt

Add the following to it:

Code: Select all

buildingname_rocketturret      RocketTurret
buildingname_grenadeturret      GrenadeTurret
buildingname_flameturret      FlameTurret
buildingname_subversionturret      SubversionTurret
buildingname_laserturret      LaserTurret


[Shwart!!]

IDK where to put that, but that's not too important. What is important is that AIs will not fire GrenadeTurrets. (cause I totally wanted to build a grenade trap...)

Shwart!!

[Stormchild]

/data/language/english.txt (anywhere in the file)

Grenade turrets seem a bit iffy. I've got them firing in the right direction in my local copy, but as soon as they fire all the darwinians manning the turret run away

Also, you wanted to change rocket behaviour - what would you like it changing to?