MrFlibble
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Posts posted by MrFlibble
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What really bothers me is the corrupted barrel sprite near the Tesla Coil in this pic, and the snow tiles near the cliff just below. This screenshot certainly has been doctored, although I think there's little doubt that initially, this was a real pre-release screenshot of the game. Or did the guys at Westwood just slap an image as such together manually from the game's resources?
BTW, the rear part of the Ore Truck visible near the sidebar is also truncated at the top, probably by the "snow and gems" tile above. Whoever did that was very sloppy about making their fake screenshot
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Closely following the previous release, the OpenDUNE team gives us v0.6. TrueBrain says:
Just over 10 days ago we made our last release. And today again, we present you with proud the next release of OpenDUNE: 0.6.A day after our last release it became clear to us that there was a critical bug in it, which under certain circumstances (bad-luck situations) could make the game unplayable. Of course this bug got quickly addressed, but right after the release of 0.5 we drifted off too far already with our main development trunk. Within a day we made some critical process, which made us hold a fix-release. Instead, today we release a new version which will be much more stable in many ways.
First off, we removed the last bits of the 16bit world, and removed LibEMU from our project. LibEMU is the library that gave us access to the 16bit world. This is a big milestone for this project, as we are now fully native for which ever system you compile, and we only depend on SDL (and asound under Linux).
The second thing we addressed, is that OpenDUNE always used 100% CPU on one core. This is because it contained many many infinite loops waiting for some time to pass. We located most of them, and made them less CPU intense. The game now uses between 4% and 20%, depending where in the game you are. It is still a lot for such a game, but we are working on it!
The other thing is sound support. Although voices and music were supported in older versions, it was often reported as buggy and often the case for deadlocks ('hanging'). We sat down and fixed all the problems related to voices and music**. So you can now all fully enjoy the beauty of the intro (remember it was made in 1991!), and play the game with all the sounds and pieces on it.
The last major milestone in this release is that we improved the speed of the video-interrupt, from several milliseconds to a few microseconds. This means that many parts of the game are much more smooth, even on slower machines.
We also spent several hours playing the game, detecting and fixing errors when we found them. We fixed issues with 1.07hs and 1.07us datafiles, and they are now fully supported. Many more fixes were made, with over 300 commits made.
And for the people who enjoy those things, OpenDUNE now also compiles with TinyC Compiler, and with that is very much ANSI-C.
So as you can understand, with proud we present you OpenDUNE 0.6. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
As usual, a complete list of enhancements can be found here and a changelog has been made, and can be viewed http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.6/changelog.txt.
You can download the release http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.6/, and here you can discuss the release on our forum. If you notice any bugs, please report them at our bugtracker at http://bugs.opendune.org/
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The "blending" in that original shot is mostly jpeg compression -_-
JPEG compression aside, there still is a certain difference between a scaled-down pre-rendered model (made by Eric Gooch, no doubt) and its recreation from a slightly altered image. Even with 256 colours, the original sprites generally seem to have some smoothing on the edges, while your version appears to be more contrastive. If you ask my opinion, what really catches my attention are the gaps between the rings of the coil, or, rather, the hull of the tank visible through those gaps. There should be some kind of shadow effect there I suppose. And yeah, the dots on the edges, too, don't make it look smoother.
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I never got DuneII running on Windows 98, it tells me i do not have engonth memory.
I think this might be because XMS is not enabled (you need it for digitized sound effects and speech). Open DUNE2.EXE properties, go to the memory tab and check if XMS is enabled. I think setting it to a fixed amount (4096 Kb should be fine) should help.
Turning on EMS, on the other hand, seems to lead to undesired results.
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OpenDUNE v0.5 has been released yesterday. This is what the dev team member TrueBrain has to say on this:
Today we are proud to announce the release of OpenDUNE 0.5This is the fourth release in a set of releases which concentrate in understanding and rewriting all functions of the original code, making enhancements on the way, without really changing the game in any way. A complete list of enhancements can be found here.
This release finally has all functions converted to 'real C', and we are now cleaning up stuff. A lot of functions have been named, variables have been identified, and the stability has increased a lot. Many small (and odd) bugs have been fixed and addressed.
A big welcome goes to Alberth, which joined our development team for this release. He is partly the reason we are much further along than I expected to be.
For the next release we will try to remove the libemu dependency, making that release the first 'stand alone' release.
As per usual, a changelog has been made, and can be viewed http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.5/changelog.txt.
Please keep in mind that until we understand more of the game, you still need to manually put the Dune2 data files in the proper directory; if you do not, the game will not start.
You can download the release http://binaries.opendune.org/releases/0.5/, and here you can discuss the release on our forum.
We strongly recommend that you download an updated scenario.pak (tnx to MrFlibble): http://forum.opendune.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=23
Special thanks:
This release wouldn't have been here if it wasn't for the following people (alphabetic order):
- MrFlibble (for his scenario.pak updates, and his endless questions and suggestions)
- tneo (for, singlehandedly, continuing finding more bugs than the entire team could solve)
The development team (alphabetic order):
Albert Hofkamp (Alberth)
Loic Guilloux (glx)
Patric Stout (TrueBrain)
Steven Noorbergen (Xaroth)
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...holy crap. That unitinfo file has stuff my editor doesn't have yet. They did an awesome job on this.
TrueBrain mentioned immunity to deviation in his post, what else is there that we did not figure out? I haven't looked into the files yet.
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Those who have ever tried running Dune 2 from Windows are most likely familiar with this problem that digitized sounds and speech will seemingly randomly disappear and reappear as the game gets progressively unstable. Well, it turns out it's not due to a programming bug or faulty drivers, but some speech files for the in-game Mentat announcements are simply corrupt. Whenever such sound file is played, all further sound playback is halted until you go to the Mentat or options screen, but, more importantly, these files screw up memory, ultimately leading to crashed. There are only few of them for the Harkonnens and the Ordos, but a whole lot of frequently used files for the Atreides. Here's the list:
AATRE.VOC
AFREMEN.VOC
AHARK.VOC
AORDOS.VOC
ARADAR.VOC*
HSABOT.VOC
HWARNING.VOC
OFREMEN.VOC
OHARK.VOC
*This is most likely the real cause of the "radar bug" that was supposedly fixed in v1.07
Fortunately, the corrupt files weren't hard to fix, so I repackaged the PAK archives with speech sets for each House. This should remedy any problems with sound hat might arise when running Dune 2 under Windows. DOSBox users aren't likely to notice the difference, as for whatever reason the problem with speech files does not affect game performance at all when run in DOSBox.
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Nice, although I'd say the coil rings look a bit differently from the original (I know it was downsized, but still). They do not blend with the rest of the thing as well as those on the original image I think.
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Dune Legacy v0.96.2 has been released yesterday. The big news is that multiplayer over LAN and Internet has been added, which makes the new version the first release of this branch of the project to support multiplayer. The full list of features is as follows:
- Added LAN multiplayer mode
- Internet multiplayer mode with metaserver (Beta!)
- Use scale2x for scaling
- Make game scalable ingame (Zoomlevel x1, Zoomlevel x2 and Zoomlevel x3)
- Add mentat help
- Scroll build list with mouse wheel
- Loading maps is more fault tolerant and shows only warnings in most cases
- Loading maps now checks for non-standard features (see Section "Features" in the Dune II Format Specification)
- Confirm window for game restart and game exit
- Added 13 maps by Rippsblack
- New options "Structures Degrade On Concrete", "Start with Explored Map" and "Instant Build"
- Earthquake ("Window shaking") on large explosions (e.g. death hand explosion)
- French translation (incomplete and only a machine translation)
- Bugfix: Loading SCENH008.INI of Dune II V1.0 failed
- Bugfix: Dune Legacy.log was not used on Windows
- Bugfix: Support non-ascii characters in paths and filenames on Windows
- Bugfix: Infantry units could not trigger spice blooms
- Bugfix: When playing as the Sardaukar, the announcer still says "Harkonnen", e.g. "Harkonnen harvester deployed"
- Bugfix: Sardaukar Reinforcements did not work
- Refactoring: Drop Visual Studio 6.0 support completely and start using C++0x features
Dune Legacy v0.96.2 Download Page
Supported platforms are Ubuntu / Debian, Fedora / Mandriva / SuSE, Gentoo, Windows, Mac OS X and MorphOS.
- Added LAN multiplayer mode
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Return of the Triad is a fan recreation of Apogee' FPS classic, Rise of the Triad that runs on the Doom engine (more accurately, the ZDoom port). It uses the original resources (graphics, sounds and music), and tries to keep close to the original game while utilizing the features of more advanced engine to the game's advantage. The current release, v1.5, has 11 single-player levels which are completely new, and 6 multiplayer maps.
Return of the Triad Home Site (has download links)
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A dedicated old-gaming site with a huge database of detailed articles about PC and console games and game series.
El Zee's Amulets & Armor Forum
A fan forum for discussing Amulets and Armor, a first-person action/RPG game that runs on the Doom engine.
[Edit] Updated the link to the A&A forum.
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Just noticed that the official Descent II soundtrack downloads from Interplay's website aren't working, but the official soundtrack MP3 pack can be downloaded from Planet Descent.
Rise of the Triad Headquarters
As the name suggests, this is a site dedicated to Apogee's Rise of the Triad, and it contains extensive information about the game and everything related to it. The downloads section offers source ports, the shareware version, and various extras. There's also a forum.
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In a bit belated news, TrueBrain of the OpenDUNE development team has posted in the OpenDUNE Developer's Blog that the current stage of project development is nearing completion:
[P]rogress report:Functions done: 1163 / 1229 (94%)
Functions named: 1180 / 1229 (96%)
That says most of it. We are nearly done converting all functions to real C (not my fake assembly-C). The functions that remain are related to sound, voice and music. It has little to do with OpenDUNE itself, so it slowly walks after us.
The rest of OpenDUNE is done. Including all the bugs, the weirdness and the exact identical behaviour Dune2 had. I am so proud
When we started this project, I was hoping it would finish some day .. just never imagined it would. Makes me want to say HA! to all those pessimists who told us this was the wrong approach, that it would never be finished, that we should join (team up) with existing projects, ... Well .. for those I only have to say: HA!There, I enjoyed doing that.
So, I am sure you now wonder: and now? Well .. a lot.
During our conversion, we kept the 16bit memory allocation. Its a pain. It does not allow for any extension in any way. So, the job that followed immediately after finishing conversion was: start moving the 16bit pointers to real pointers. This is not as easy as it sounds, as there are tons and tons of references in the 16bit world to structs and arrays. Simply moving them to the 32bit/64bit world causes many errors, because calls in the 16bit world can no longer see these objects.
A few days ago we managed to move out all UnitInfo, StructureInfo, TeamInfo and HouseInfo to the 32bit/64bit world, which was a HUGE milestone. Today we are very close to move Widgets out, which is around 80% of the work that has to be done for that. While at it we are also moving other variables and pointers from the 16bit world to 32bit/64bit when we feel like it, and the list of variables that needs doing is getting shorter and shorter.
The other thing we have been working on in parallel, as they kinda depend on each other, is dumping the information from Dune2.exe in a format we can work with, without needing Dune2.exe. In theory it would be possible to just read Dune2.exe on startup, read the information, and use it. But because there are many many pointers (which we would have to convert, which requires knowing where it used to point to), we decided to dump this information in plain C, in so called table-files. These are just files where you see endless variables defined for every entry. See for example:
http://svn.opendune.org/trunk/src/table/unitinfo.c?mode=view#filecontent
The content of the file is converted one-on-one from Dune2.exe 1.07EU. We simply parsed the information via a simple tool. So we start to depend less and less on Dune2.exe, which is only for the better
What else ... yeah, we named many more variables. And we also see a lot of unused variables. At least we know 100% sure they are unused now, as if not, we would have noticed by now (by the reason we converted everything
Shall I say it again? We converted EVERYTHING).The next public release of OpenDUNE is scheduled for August the 1st.
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I remember reading some interview with her sometime ago. What was especially remarkable was the part about her future husband, who was a C&C fan, who asked her to say "Ion cannon ready" in her C&C voice, immediately after which he proposed to her :laugh:
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Hades 2 is a pretty obscure FPS from a Brazilian studio, Espaco Informatica, which was released somewhere around 1999-2000. In 2009, the developers have released it for free to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the game.
Essentially, it's a 2.5D FPS with high-res sprites, digitized actors (dev team members actually
) and a sci-fi/horror theme, and a very dynamic interactive world. Also, it has reminded me of the Marathon games a bit. The game was obviously quite dated already when it was released, so it is no wonder it had gone largely unnoticed (although it is said to have been quite popular in its home country). However, it has an excellent retro look to it, and it has an overall good, quality design.Hades 2 gameplay video at YouTube
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There's some controversy about this project in the Duke3D community though. To quote MusicallyInspired (the guy who made the high-quality music pack for Duke Nukem 3D):
I've known about it since its creation. I'm not that excited about it. The goal is to create Duke3D as if it were a modern shooter. Dark, gritty, bland generic atmosphere instead of the bright and colourful look Duke3D was known for. Personally I really don't think the two ideas go together at all. It's somewhat of a controversial subject among the Duke3D community. They've also released nothing but concept artwork and podcasts since it started. It's like there's no proof of anything. They keep promising stuff "soon" and we never see anything. They've been saying a multiplayer demo will be released very soon for months now.Good luck to them and everything, but I'm not holding my breath that it's going to be anything that great.
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The site features a rather extensive list of old FPS games, organized by year of release, and contains screenshots and download links for demo/shareware/freeware releases of each game (if applicable).
The content seems to exclude vehicle FPS games though, but it has quite a few rare titles so it's worth looking into.
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Cool
Those purple-robed priests in the first screenie are from MK2, aren't they? :laugh: -
Have you guys heard of this? It's a very promising (still WIP) non-commercial project aimed at remaking the original Duke Nukem 3D in high-quality true 3D, using the Unreal Engine 3. This project has been officially sanctioned by the current copyright holders of the Duke Nukem franchise, and it is going to be a freeware stand-alone game. The primary objective of the development team for now is to recreate the original episodes of Duke Nukem 3D with both single- and multiplayer capability. A multiplayer-only beta demo is expected to be released in the near future.
Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Official Website
Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Official FAQ
Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded Developers' Blog at the Official Forums
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That seems strange. I know the way C&C looks for files, and it shouldn't matter whether the file is in a mixfile or in the game folder.
RA1 is a bit more picky with data inside/outside mixfiles, C&C is far more liberal in this respect.
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Thnx , but recently i found out something which fix the problem but i'll still say it anyway.
The whole time i use the portable version of C&C95 , which was still the whole game
and then one day i re-installed C&C95 , then later i started XCC Mix Editor and the "New"
button worked. Found that very weird
Note*
i had created a "Westwood" folder and had put C&C95 folder right in there.
Thanks for clarifying that, I also have that problem and I was at loss as to why it occurred (I ascribed it to moving from v1.45 to v1.46, incorrectly, as it turns out), but I used the "copy existing mixfile" workaround just fine
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Then I looked up the original mission file inside the general.mix (I think it was that mix file) - I changed the Briefing section inside the original map file inside the MIX but it still just showed the original mission briefing. Since I could not find any other files inside any of the MIX-Files which contained any mission briefing information I was wondering where the game gets these informations from and if it was somehow possible to change the mission briefing texts?
I think you have to remove the Digest section in the ini for it to work.
Hmm, IIRC if you change something in a RA1 INI without removing the [Digest] section, it will just refuse to load that scenario at all. If it shows the original briefing, then the modifications either were not saved, or a different version of the map was loaded.
On the other hand, all briefings from the original campaign (not add-on missions) are stored in a file called MISSION.INI, just like in C&C. If you want to change campaign briefings, you should edit that file, not individual scenario INIs.
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Here's a promising forum about old gaming (not limited to PCs) I've just been told about:
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I've removed the link to DOS Games Download as it turned out that its entire content and categories have been copied from dosgames.com without the latter's admin's authorization, so I was asked to remove all links to it.
Beta RA tesla tank!
in Graphics
Posted
You mean a Tib Harvester from C&C? Nope, I can't find it...