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Topics - Nikita_Sadkov

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Offtopic / Warhammer 40k The Animated Series
« on: April 23, 2020, 06:27:25 pm »
Apparently crowd-funding works.


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Offtopic / Baldur's Gate 3 is actually a turnbased tactics game
« on: March 01, 2020, 09:35:36 pm »
Now that is a bit unexpected :o

I still like the Spelljammer setting with Illithid ships and stuff. Will it have the realmspace with ship combat in late game?


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Offtopic / The Dark Crystal Tactics Game
« on: February 06, 2020, 12:42:49 am »
People say it is no that good.


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Offtopic / What happened to Blizzard?
« on: February 01, 2020, 11:06:18 pm »
I'm not a huge fan of RTS games, but I liked WC2. I have skipped WC3, because of its early 3d graphics, so I had high hopes for the WC3 remaster, especially after the really good looking demo. And now it came out...

Just WTF?!!! Have Blizzard caught that Coronavirus at the infamous Honk Kong show, and it killed the whole team? Because it there is not other excuse to fail that badly. It must have been aliens kidnapping all programmers and artists, together with that early demo.

WC3 Reforged is just a badly reskinned Warcraft 3 mod, on the same engine, with just a bit higher poly models (closer to SC2). They haven't bothered even to rescale the UI for widescreen resolution. What was their SC2 team doing this whole time, after SC2 got released?

I cant believe AAA company can fsckup that badly and just kill their single goldmaking franchise. How can such mismanagement be even possible in theory? Is that the Westwood story repeating all again? What are they thinking?

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Offtopic / Phoenix Point
« on: January 28, 2020, 09:13:58 pm »
What are your thoughts on the game?

Virus seems to be the theme of the later XCOM-like games, starting with Abomination and UFO Aftermath.  And now China began bringing sci-fi into life.

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Offtopic / UFO Themed Synthwave Album
« on: January 22, 2020, 04:26:59 pm »
I know Firaxis also made a synthwave cover of the original XCOM soundtrack, as a DLC alternative to the bland soundtrack of the new games, but I've just stumbled upon this

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Offtopic / Alien Climate Weapon
« on: January 15, 2020, 08:18:55 am »
Russian government claims America uses alien technology climate change super-weapon against Russia. No jokes, it is official Kremlin statement:
https://lenta.ru/news/2020/01/14/anomalia/

Context: this year there was no snow in Russia! Can you imagine?!! No snow in Russia! How would Putin explain to voters why Santa is not coming? The snow got stolen by aliens!


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Open Feedback / Forum is Under Attack by Russian Dating Scam Bots
« on: November 12, 2019, 08:03:46 pm »
Don't click the link! These scam site frequently have embedded viruses!


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Offtopic / A Game Where Player Plays as Alien from The Thing
« on: October 27, 2019, 02:34:54 pm »
https://youtu.be/ZEEiKw-VGsk?t=377

Although the concept is not completely original. There was a really old game called "The Ooze", which was obviously based of that The Blob movie, about blob like alien life form crashing on Earth.


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Offtopic / Another Classic Game Got Reverse Engineered
« on: April 06, 2019, 10:23:44 pm »
This time it is Magic Carpet:
https://github.com/turican0/remc2/wiki

Like most games of its time it was way ahead of its time  :D

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Offtopic / XCOM Inspired Fantasy Game
« on: January 03, 2019, 12:37:07 am »
Hi, folks! I'm working on an XCOM inspired fantasy game. It is not a carbon copy, and the most striking difference is that I don't use RNG, leading to numerous different design decisions. For example, instead of chance to hit, to penetrate high defense armor, attacker has to spend action points. This allows for example using some at first glance useless unit, with a lot of action points, like say bird, to distract defender, while slow heavy hitter does the damage. The next difference is the shift towards spellcasting and terraforming map. For example, if player has imp worker, it can dig underground passage into a prison under castle, free inmates there and then attack the castle from underneath. The other way would be flying over moat (with flight spell or flying creatures), teleport there, pass through walls with wraiths (which also see through walls), create elevation to reach castle wall. Obviously, player can just storm the heavy guarded front gate.

The game engine also supports portals and large doors (you cant have a proper castle with puny little door). And AI uses them too.

Still the game borrows a lot of elements from Gollop's games, especially Lords of Chaos and XCOM. I.e. there is chryssalid style monsters and a raise dead spell producing undead units, which are very resistant to non-enhanced attacks. The game has a world map, invasion threat and randomly generated maps (cities, dungeons, etc...), but I also plan adding ability to play as bad guys instead.

Do you have any suggestions or wishes for such a game? For example, what do you think should happen if two units teleport into the same place or if unit tries to teleport into the fog of war ends up teleporting into a wall? For now, just strongest unit survives (i.e. the wall).



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Offtopic / Open Source Fallout Tactics
« on: December 06, 2015, 12:55:39 pm »
Did you knew about https://github.com/nadult/FreeFT ???

Fallout Tactics was basically an X-Com clone, with evil AI instead of aliens.

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Programming / Field of Vision
« on: December 06, 2015, 11:32:11 am »
How did the original X-Com managed to calculated field of vision back in 1994? The only way I know is spherecasting - an expensive calculation to do in realtime.

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Programming / Magic & Mayhem Engine Open Source Clone
« on: August 30, 2015, 04:07:37 pm »
Hi, folks!

Besides X-COM, there is another game using very similar and powerful isometric engine (among the most advanced to my knowledge) by the same designer (Julian Gollop). The game is Magic & Mayhem, based of Lords of Chaos - an old Amiga game.

The game has a lot of issues, due to the publisher interfering with developers and enforcing the usual christmas deadline (November release date speaks for itself). Running the game modern computer is pain too (although I've succeeded running it on OSX with PlayOnMac, after disabling opengl). Maybe now is the time to fix it and bring back to life as an open source project?

Most game data resides as open text in *.cfg files, but a some things are hidden under binary and few *.cfgs are encrypted, which is solved with waiting for the engine to decrypt them and then just dumping them from memory.

Tinkered a little with Magic & Mayhem engine (without using any debugger) gets some knowledge on how to decode binary data (I've successfully decoded all sprites), but unfortunately not the most interesting thing, which is the map encryption algorithm, required to get factual knowledge of how maps are stored and rendered.

Algorithm decoding CFG files would be nice too, because distributing decoded files would be copyright infringement.

Does anybody know how to decode *.map files?

I'll share with you my Magic & Mayhem engine facts and guesses:
- All map tiles are 64x48 (with light source coming from the southwest), where 16 pixels are used for height. There are no wall or floor tiles, like in X-Com style engines.
- Map is drawn in layers, using either priority queue or zbuffer.
- Water is procedurally generated between layers, as specified by `WaterLevel` variable in level files.
- Creatures have width/height size (TileSizeXY) and TileHeight, which determine their blocking profile and when they drown (water level gets past their height).
- Creatures move on grid lattice (directly using mapping to 64x32 tiles tops), like in older RTS games (Warcraft and Starcraft). Creatures can move only 8 directions, which is especially noticeable with flyers, where bat flies in zig-zag.
- Non-creature game objects (like trees and doors) are made completely out of tiles. Quote from doors.cfg "Terrain tiles need to be assigned a door number, the tile numbers that make up the door are listed [...] along with the animations for the door opening and closing"
- Game maps files (*.map) inside ./Realms appear to be compressed using the same algorithm as the txt files inside of ./CFG/Encrypted folder. The *.nod files are not compressed, but I guess they hold something like precomputed movement maps for AI.
- Due to the rhomboidal minimap shape, the map format appears to be rhomboidal too. So the Y-axis is diagonal to the viewport (like in X-com), as opposed to the vertical successive Y's, in games like Civilization II. The map is also toroidal, meaning that its west edge transitions into it's east edge, Pacman-style ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wraparound_(video_games) )
- The map drawing algorithm can be copied from: https://sourceforge.net/p/pentagram/code/HEAD/tree/pentagram/trunk/world/ItemSorter.cpp which should give correct occlusion for a world made of arbitrary bounding boxes. I.e. projectiles and spells like tornado will render correctly.
- the lightmaps are implemented by simply altering the tile and creature brightness. Fog of war appears to be more complex.
- The sprite format used for creatures and tilesets is described in https://github.com/saniv/sau/blob/master/src/fmt_spr.c
- "It was designed first as a multiplayer game and we sort of retrofitted the single-player experience, so it didn’t work so well unfortunately, for me." -- Julian Gollop

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