Sentience

Cool, you're already in here.

Right, points:

We have that kind of thing on our projects already. Some give benefits and deficits.

1) Ok, I like the pod which heals
2) Not too sure about that. A random mech belonging to no-one would be impossible, it would have to be a native life form. Unfortunately SMAC beat us to that idea.

Map Editor:

Thats sounds good gaming. Dont want to upset you but....

If you look, the map in Sentience is cunningly formatted. Mountain ranges have beginning, end and middle peices and coastlines surround the islands.

I imagine I could get Sentience to format the map when it's loaded, but it means it will look pants in the map editor.

Aww.... don't be so mean to PlenderJ. He's been a great help from the beginning of the project - he's my hero.

Let's go with one large multicoloured bitmap. That'd look cool if anyone opened it.

Anyway, you're making the map editor. Save it how you wish, just remember to let me know how you've done it.

phew! busy in here!

Hi Gaming, nice to have you on board.

OK...firstly, I cant get the map editor to work, i assume Im running the wrong version of DX, so I'll check it out later.

Im glad we're going with the bitmap idea, itll give us opportunity to specifically design maps in a graphics editor too. plenty of flexibility.

I've dabbled with graphics recently, but i could do with getting really stuck in soon. I'll finish the walls and work on more wandering monsters.

I don't see a problem with you showing up this afternoon. Give me a bell just before you leave to let me know.

I went for a meal with Rachel last night (at the pub) and drank lemonade all night :) you proud of me?

Good man on the lemonade!

I'll call you before I come round then.

What errors did you get on the map editor?

You need to make sure the pictures are available to load or it says unable to init DX.

You got any clue as to how I might add in a grid? I tryed drawing line, using a picture with transperancy, shapes, and the line control. None of them worked correctly.

By the way, I'm gonna have to crash soon. Its nearing 3 AM here. Incase you didn't read all of the post when I offered to make the editor, I will be gone from Saturday @ 4AM to sometime Sunday or Saturday (11th to 18th or 19th)

Rightyho.

BTW, I did read the post.

And for a grid, merely draw lines using the line command. Easiest way.

Tryed that. If I place it before the MainLoop, they disapper, and during the mainloop it displays half editor/half grid, and makes it look really ugly. Like I said, I had tryed that.

You place it at the end of main loop.

Once you've drawn the screen, you then draw the grid over the top. If you haven't cracked it by the time I get home tonight I'll knock up an example for you.

FAO: Jotaf

Pods: They should sometimes affect the nearby units, like healing them, making them invisible, giving them free components, abilities and anything a mech can have . They should also do stuff like exploring terrain, increasing the resources in the surrounding terrain or change it somehow - like planting trees. They could also contain creatures (remember it's a planet which is being terraformed). And there could also be a very rare pod with a mech which uses only the most expensive components

Comments are...

Healing them is ok, invisible isn't, free components is too much effort. The game isn't designed for amending units on the fly and I'd have to put loads of checks in for all sorts of things.

Exploring terrain we have already decided on, increasing resoursces on the ground is a good idea, as is planting trees.

Not sure on containing creatures yet, it's too SMAClike. You can get free units and buildings within the pods as well.

Check the list above where we've penned some rough ideas for each of the terraform pod types.

Like I said, placing it in the mainloop makes it look ugly. What it does if I place it right after the blting is to make 1/3 of the screen as it is now, 1/3 with a faded mix, and 1/3 with gray & the grid.

I haven't the foggiest what your on about I'm afraid.

If you post the code, I can have a look.

OK, look at the version posted here. It is drawing the grid right after blting the tiles. So it looks like this:

Code:

---

  Blt
  For X = 0 To frmEdit.picDraw.Width Step 40
  frmEdit.picDraw.Line (X, 0)-(X, frmEdit.picDraw.Height), RGB(255, 0, 0)
  Next X
  For X = 0 To frmEdit.picDraw.Height Step 40
  frmEdit.picDraw.Line (0, X)-(frmEdit.picDraw.Width, X), RGB(255, 0, 0)
  Next X
  DoEvents

---

Just thought I would mention that the scalemode is Pixels.

See ya in a week Arbiter. My flight leaves in appox 1 hour.

Ciaó for now!

Hey, I finally discovered this thread :p

Ok my ideas for the pods weren't THAT good, but anyway... I think you have all the ideas that you need :)

I have another idea if you want... for the mech design screen: Each part is simply a 3D model, already in place. So you just use DX to show each part in the mech disign screen. Then, have a small pic of it facing up, left, down and right, and save them along with that mech's properties. So if your mech has a nuke launcher it won't appear with a tiny minigun :p

Listen lads, its a pain in the ass to read thru all this bollox.
So arb, could you stick a .txt file up on the btinternet site that just contains the pertinent information from all this drivel ?

Jotaf,

I think it would be too time consuming to knock up 3D models of all the components and then write stuff to put them all together. We'll stick with the current otherwise we'll never finish the game! :)

Also, Ian has draw a couple of rough drafts of hydrogen trees which he sent me last night. With a couple of amendments they'll look pretty cool. You may even see them in the next version!

Plend,

No

I take notes in my black book of power and eMail bits home if I need to. It would take me forever to trawl through this. It's a discussion forum where we thrash out ideas - whilst reading through the dross it may trigger some long dormant memory of when you were back in 'Nam and you might come up with a really good idea.

Maybe.

Your supergiant mutated dinosaurs have become the stuff of legend...

I dont remember much from my previous life.
I'm listening to the bongo song real loud in work right now.
I've gotten ****all sleep over the past few days.

I feel hyper and full of coffee and great ;)

You're nuts!

No, I'm pedro the amazing breakdancing chicken!

Ian,

I'll probably see you before you read this, but if not...

What do you think to having S create the masks for the transparent images the first time it's run, and then merely monitor them to see if they've changed?

e.g. The first time you run Sentience, it scoots through a list of all the graphics that need to be transparenterised. If they're not done, it will then transparenterise them, save them back to the disk and record their file size. Then, whenever it runs, it merely checks the file size against that stored in the list - if it's different then it transparenterises it.

This will significantly increase the speed the game loads (except the first time where it transparenterises everything).

Sound like a good idea?

I am back. My trip to Hawai'i was fun but too tiring.

Hiya Gaming!

Have fun on your little trip?

Not a great deal's happened whilst you've been away - Behemotha and I have had a bit of a break from Sentience to pursue other interests (Behemoth's new job, his girlfriends birthday, beer, Diablo II, etc etc)

I'm awaiting a couple of graphics from him, and once they're done I should be uploading a new version.

I was thinking about having some kind of attractor for the native lifeforms on the planet. A unit could maybe drop this 'thing' which attracts thingies to it (similar to the thumpers in Dune maybe?)

A 'planet' type faction would drop some near their own base and be relatively safe (maybe capture them - whatever) or you could drop one near an opponents base to swamp them with little monkeys.

Thoughts/comments?

Also, these little critters are going to have to spawn from somewhere. We need to have 'houses' for them to pop out from. That way, you can make creatures extinct (unless you generate your own from stored DNA).

Would it be worthwhile having a DNA screen where you can tinker with the DNA of monkeys and make them into huge kickass monsters.

We weren't originally going to go with the idea of living creatures, but the idea's seeming more and more appealling...

"We weren't originally going to go with the idea of living creatures, but the idea's seeming more and more appealling..."

Hehe sometimes you sound exactly like me :D

I told you having living creatures was a good idea :p

That DNA screen idea is awsome! But you could also just have a team of scientists eating up research points that would sometimes give you the power to clone an animal type :)

The "houses" could just be caves, water vortexes or trees, depending on the animal.

What about if you could upgrade that research so you could also select the species that that thing would lure? ;)

So you could have it lure nasty animals to the enemy's base ;) MWAHAHAHA!!! :)

Btw you should also make that thing a bit hard to find, but destroiable, right :p

Jotaf,

We seem to be thinking along the same lines, though instead of scientists it's be processor banks ( think of the game plot :D )

I like the idea of the DNA screen, but I'm not in a bright mood at the moment and can't think what form it would take.

I'll have to discuss it with Ian.

Got any ideas Jotaf?

Whats all this about a DNA screen ?

Read the last couple of posts.

I was toying with the idea of having a screen where you can manipulate the DNA of lifeforms to make huge kick ass wandering monsters.

Bit like some of the birds I've pulled on a night out....

Hmmmm.

Well depending on how flexible you've made your mech design, you could use the same approach for putting animals together.

Also, you could let people manipulate DNA themselves.
But there are, say, 50,000,000 combinations of the DNA they could try, but only a few yield results.

So the person can brute-force the combinations, or they find DNA strings/string fragments in those funny bonus pods....

Now THAT's a good idea!

Hey, so they're basically just organic mechs, which use different components and have a slightly different creation screen :)

Hum, I have a good idea for that screen, but you'd have to use D3D ( :D ) - there was a DNA strand rotating in the middle of the screen, and the player would change the strand by clicking on the atoms :)

Heh wait that's too complex for a 2D game like Sentience... so why not make the DNA strand 2D? I think I saw a demo like that on Planet-Source-Code a while ago... you could use the same "click an atom to change its color" thingy.

There could also be some kind of list where you saved the combinations that worked (and loaded them), and when you find one in a pod it would be automatically added to the list :)

But be cafeful ! The strands in the pods might not create what you expect ...

Also if you ****up a creature, you could get a pile of slime, or a wandering mutant freak (aka behemoth), or an insane weirdo with delusions of grandure (aka arbiter) .... ;)

...or a pile of crap, aka plenderj :p

Like in MI:2, that guy steps on a pile of sh*t, then says "Sh*t!", and the other guy says "Yes it is" :D

But yeah that's a good idea, you could even sometimes make a virus that would kill everyone in the research center :)

*whacks Jotaf repeatedly with a big stick*

YOU ARE A MACHINE IN SENTIENCE!!!

You cannot catch a cold from DNA and die. Research centres have processor banks, not scientists!

(I sometimes wonder what game he's playing - cos it doesn't sound like Sentience)

But a metal eating biogenetic organism would do the same thing - which I'm sure is what Jotaf meant... ;)

Yeah, mutant wotsits wandering around due to failed experiments would be nice. Maybe they could set up a house somewhere and procreate. Cool!

And I don't have delusions of Grandeur. I have delusions of Adequacy. Anyway, that's rich coming from a clinically insane Irishman.

Huh!

I'll knock up a draft DNA screen for you guys shortly.

Aren't you privelaged? :D

D*MN! It ate my post! :mad:

Anyway...

Yeah sorry I had forgot that Sentience is about machines :)

Here's my little contribution for the DNA screen:

http://www.planet-source-code.com/xq...s/ShowCode.htm
http://www.planet-source-code.com/xq...s/ShowCode.htm

(Personally, I'd use the second one :p )

If you want I can make an enhanced version of it where you can click the atoms to change them.

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Arbiter
Ian,

I'll probably see you before you read this, but if not...

What do you think to having S create the masks for the transparent images the first time it's run, and then merely monitor them to see if they've changed?

e.g. The first time you run Sentience, it scoots through a list of all the graphics that need to be transparenterised. If they're not done, it will then transparenterise them, save them back to the disk and record their file size. Then, whenever it runs, it merely checks the file size against that stored in the list - if it's different then it transparenterises it.

This will significantly increase the speed the game loads (except the first time where it transparenterises everything).

Sound like a good idea?

---

I vaguely remember discussing this with you in the dim and distant. I've already offered to mask the graphics for you. if you want, we'll use your engine and give em the graphics pre-masked. It'll be a larger download but faster load.

Whaddaya reckon?

Hey, here's my little code contribution for sentience: I made you the DNA screen! It not only looks good, but you can also click the atoms to change them ;)

Hey behemoth, I'd rather wait for the program to generate the masks than to wait for flashget to download them :p

What do you think of the screen? No, I didn't use Direct3D ;)

not played with it yet. busy downloading porn at the moment...;)