Comments - Orac|

Depends on the day really.

Mostly alive though, most of the time.

Eh, who knows. I'm a sleepy person.

For now, all of that stuff will be on freeze. In the project but not actively under development. Once the build and the team are stable we can start prioritising these things again.

How do you think you patch an engine that you don't have the source code for, my dude?

I don't fully understand it myself, since I'm a layperson, but we're not just talking hex edits to existing code here. Those are cool and pretty useful, but they're bandaid fixes to minor things, and definitely not the holy grail you're hoping for. They come with big problems too, like the how they are hell to maintain and add to. There's a reason that NPatch and RockPatch were abandoned.

If you want to add a feature to TS in the way that Ares does for RA2, you need to let the engine run normally until it gets to that feature, make it execute your code (provided by a separate dll), and then make it go back to functioning normally.

To do that you need to know some things. Where in the engine does your new feature start? Where does it end? What relevant variables are being tracked by the engine at this time? And so on, and so on.

And to answer those questions, you're probably going to need to reverse engineer what's going on. The fact that you're this dense is starting to set off the ol' Troll Alarm to be honest.

For someone who is done discussing this, you're still pretty actively discussing this. Frankly, I don't know what you want from me or what you gain by throwing a tantrum—here of all places—and if it continues I will start exercising my moderator powers.

I think you're oversimplifying a lot of things, and taking a confrontational tone about it doesn't help. I don't think it's necessary. And, while I can understand your frustrations, you being frustrated doesn't actually make anyone want to work any harder or any faster.

As for "a new Hyperpatch", I've listened to Hyper explain the process of reverse engineering the bulk of the TS engine, and it's not a simple or easy job. The idea that all of our problems would be solved if Hyper simply downed a few more bottles of vodka and got down to learning the deep magic of an obscure 90's 2D RTS engine is laughable, and honestly it ignores the toll that that sort of thing takes. Calling people fools for not wanting to take on such an intense task is deeply condescending.

If you want a detailed explanation for the other things going on in TO's history that you have touched on, I am happy to continue this in private message. Assuming you have any actual interest in hearing the answers, and aren't just here to bitterly vent about how you haven't been able to police how I do my hobbies.

I'm just doing this for fun.

I really like some of the more Aztec-y Necron concept art, I wish it came across more in the minis.

GDI and Nod will be getting campaigns - we're slowly working on those. Scrin is just as big a part of TO as it was in TS. Cabal remains an enormously important part of the story, and is a catalyst for the whole story.

GDI uses the Atlas Superheavy, a quadrupedal mech with dual railguns and SAM sites. Mammoth tanks continue to exist as relics of wars gone by.

(Courtesy of Google Translate)
游戏还没准备好
"The game is not ready."

We've had some recent breakthroughs getting the client to work again, so there is actual progress to show. "Update soonish" sounds about right.

And Chaos will pay for it!

We'd really like to, but we've come up against a few technical issues which have slowed development recently. We're using a version of the client used by Dawn of the Tiberium Age, and migrating from one version to another is always a bumpy task because we need to adapt to changes made for the benefit of a completely different project (which is not a criticism at all, and I highly recommend you go play DTA Moddb.com).

On the other hand, I have been working on some pretty important art assets and things of that nature, so we have plenty of stuff to show. I just want to wait until we can show it off in game.

Expect an update soon-ish.

Wow, the colour palette you're working with here is fantastic. The environments feel so Portaly, but yet so new and different at the same time.

The community's understanding of the VPL has only just begun to increase, so I have barely touched it. Our current tem/sno palette swaps are purely a colour replacement thing, so they were fully doable even way back pre-client. Since it's effectively a gold->allied colour swap, the VPL hasn't been a huge hurdle so far.

We'll get around to fully rescheming everything colour-wise as soon as we're both not lazy and happy with the colours we're getting, but I'm not sure we'll be touching the VPL.

Hopefully that's a complete answer :)

Given the number of assets we'd need to rescale and the fact that I'm ambivalent as to how much it'd really add, I don't personally intend to implement such a thing. We've got many hundreds of voxels and I'm not going to go through them all and resize them down for a purely aesthetic tweak.

I did some quick mockups for how 'corrected' scale would look if we're playing the realism game. Obviously its pointless to go for 100% realism, because it makes the game literally unreadable, but if you're not aiming for that 100% then why make the token effort at all?

This: Media.moddb.com
Becomes this: Dl.dropboxusercontent.com

This: Media.moddb.com
Becomes this: Dl.dropboxusercontent.com

If we use the ships (probably the largest units if we're using real life as a guide), then almost everything else becomes smudges. If we use anything else, the scale issue that prompted all this still stands and all we've done is wasted many hours of tedious effort for an effect which is close to meaningless.

I actually really love the old school Termies, with their weird pauldrons.

Yeah, we're still tweaking colours. We'll convert them all in as close to one go as possible in order to keep them unified. We're still trying to get the colour right though.

Because we have two other options:
1) scale the MLRS down so that it's the correct scale, and also scale all the other vehicles to match (because otherwise it'll look weird to have a teeny tiny MLRS next to regular sized everything else). We'd need to make the infantry one pixel tall, and bring the buildings into proportion too, since we're following this scaling system.

or

2) Scale up the ships to be the correct size. They're still only be able to take up a single cell for gameplay though, so that's going to look weird. Then we just have to work out a way for the graphics not to glitch out, since ginormous objects come with a whole host of drawing issues.

So instead we just went with the simple solution of it just being a game. Units all need to be well sized to remain readable in complex situations, and this means there needs to be compromise - unit sizes get a bit weird, and there are giant patches of bright colour on them to differentiate their owner. (There is also a subtle size increase in units as we progress through the tech tree. Bigger unit tends to equal scarier unit).

The same reasoning is what has brought us to retaining the Tiberian Sun infantry size. For a long time we used smaller infantry, but when we came to overhauling infantry combat (so that it wouldn't be totally irrelevant) we found that differentiating dull brown blobs was difficult in circumstances where snap decisions were needed.

It's just a headache to aim for realism, and doesn't actually make things more fun in my experience. What it does do is introduce a whole new layer of difficulty in making art assets, and sometimes actively makes playing the game less fun.

Cyborgs are CABAL, so they're out of the Nod Roster - replaced at by the Hellspit (Flamethrower) and the Elite Cadre (Directed Energy Weapon).

The Forgotten have been thoroughly fleshed out with more units, a larger role in the story, and more well defined motivations.

The Scrin Ship, the Tacitus, and all the other materials related to them continue to be a mystery..

Nah, the voxels came first and the models are extrapolated from them. I have to give a lot of credit to Muldrake, the guy who did the GDI units, for defining the appearance of the project early on and giving people who joined later (like me) a strong style to work from.

Both sides have functioning conyards, with all the graphics (vehicle, deployment animation, building, active animations) working and ingame.

In the first of the four testing screenshots at the end of the news post you can see the Nod CY taking damage from purple player.

Still alive, still well, still not very good at keeping a schedule of public updates :p

That spider is already making me very uncomfortable.

The swastika map manages to capture something of the nazi architectural aspirations, which is pretty neat.

Our personal issue with accepting money is that it makes us feel bad when we don't work on important assets for a little while.

My gut feeling is that while lovely donations would allow me to afford slightly more alcohol or steam games, it would also deeply change the relationship between us as content creators and the people donating. I would feel like I was stealing if people were giving me money to work on TO, because I don't work on a preset schedule.

If we were running a slightly more professional project then I'd be less against a donation/patreon style setup, but because this is the most loose-knit, for fun, hang-out-and-contribute system possible I don't think it works.

Thanks for your interest, you're awesome all the same!

Yes, it will.

If you're looking for a good Tiberian Sun mod to play, might I suggest Dawn of the Tiberium Age (or DTA for short)? DTA is a wonderful recreation of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert with a bunch of new goodies added in - new units, more naval combat, co-op missions - there's just so much there to have fun with.

I know! It's been driving me mad, but you can see the grid under it and the base is straight as an arrow (on the forward facing long side). The building is triangular, so it looks slightly odd against the norm of TS's rectangular structures.

Yep, lots. Though sometimes the Forgotten do not want or need your help.

Nod MSG, GDI Urban Pacification Drone, GDI Surveillance Airship, and Forgotten War Convoy.