Sentience

[Arbiter]

OK, so accuracy conveys a benefit/deficit to damage done. We could get away with that, but we'll want to keep random values to a minimum. A bit of randomness is OK, but damage that can vary by 100% is merely tedious.

Are we also going to have the accuracy diminish over range. Seems reasonable really.

Also depends on how far the opponent has moved in its last turn.

Right, summary of modifiers:

Range
Chips
Target square terrain
Enemy movement
Friendly movement
A small random element

I never mentioned a random element, merely implied that it should be difficult to attain 0% accuracy through whatever methods.

[Arbiter]

No peasant!

*I* mentioned the random element. Should we have it or not?

mais pourquoi?

[Arbiter]

Monkey.

Right, I'm fed up - I'm going home.

Check this when you get in tomorrow. It's quicker, easier and doesn't clog up my work eMail account.

I'll let you know what I've managed to get done tonight, tomorrow morning.

CYA Later ya zany space cadet!

tata...

[Arbiter]

Thursday morning MONKEY!!!

OK pal, last night I...

Drank some beer
Corrected the problem with the screen whiting out on slower machines
Corrected the problem with the screen blacking out caused by my fix to the previous problem.
Drank some beer
Tidied up some memory issues
Recompiled the whole job lot and ran it on the 166. (Runs pretty smooth - esp the new fillbars)
Stripped out any of the unneccessarryy files to save a bit of space (not that we need it at the mo, but it's good practice)
Drank some beer
Set the screens permanantly (saving space in the directory and load time) and also went with a single, common, background (nebula4). Gives the impression that the background never changes, just the objects in the foreground do.

How was the gig?

roargh!

head hurts...!

Glad to know you managed to get some beer-drinking in last night, I was a little concerned that you may have neglected it. - Managed to get hold of Photoshop yesterday, so I should be a little more productive now.

[Arbiter]

Cool!

Are you busy today? Will you have time to come up with an expanded list of individual components.

Did you manage to find that eMail btw?

completely forgot to look for it. I think its spread across about 2 or 3 dozen emails. I'll have a look today. remind me later (i suspect its in a text file on my desktop at home)

[Arbiter]

Not good enough.

PS - I've reminded you to look for it.

That ship's quite nice that your mate knocked up. Schpunky (no less).

So, SC tonight then?

Dont worry about the movie. leave it to him. he'll render it all out when hes done and give you the movie file.

hes happy to let you have to models et al. should I pass your email address to him and you two can communicate directly?

BTW let me know when (if) you find the mails I was talking about...

[Arbiter]

Yeah, pass my eMither address on to him.

Cool as!

which one?

how did the interview go?

[Arbiter]

My home account please.

The interview went OK, but I've told you that already over the phone.

I've working on multiple WAV playing at the moment and I really struggling.

We could do with getting together at some point and thrashing out the component list. I can't find any eMails relating to them...

[Arbiter]

Chunky monkey!

Awight pal! So, are you going to get me the final two graphics for the resources today?

And we still need to thrash out a list of the components. I'll search my archives today to see if I can find anything and if not we'll need to work on it afresh...

ok. are there any communication difficulties today? you mentioned I'm going to get random emails.

[Arbiter]

The random eMails message was sent on sat when I was working at home. I was just planning on sending you mails of whatever I was thinking at the time.

It didn't happen because a) I saw you b) I had nothing interesting to say.

I'm compiling a list of components as we speak, I'll post it shortly.

Stand by...

communication does seem to be quite an issue at the moment. emails tend to have a delay, so its difficult to know whether they've arrived or been read. These forums are great, but its not always easy to track where the next relevant message should be. PM in here's fine, but again, we still seem to be having trouble.

[Arbiter]

Got the zips now. Took an hour to come through.

Very nice. Not convinced about the background for the 400x400's, will black go through the transparenceriser? If not, I'll have to fix it.

I'm considering using the 400x400's, loading them into memory and resizing them to sizes that we can use. I'll play around with them tonight.

They're very nice actually - they looked a little odd small, but now I've seen them big I'm well impressed.

Good luck with your interview, I'll stay at work until you've finished and then you can meet me and we'll celebrate SC style.

dont worry about the background for 400x400s, I can sort that out (like I did with the one on the white background.) It'll take a little time, but there you go.

BTW. I've had a shave today and look a little bit odd - I may scare you during our SC celebrations.

[Arbiter]

Awight pal,

Nice night last night. Didn't get too slaughetered, had a couple of interesting games. That 'too many minerals' was a bit of a disappointment but some of the others were funky.

I'm going to try and get some work done today as I'm not too busy at work. That may change but I'll work on Sentience until it does.

Firstly I intend to update that spreadsheet you started and then pass it over to you for more twiddling.

I'll also start work on some psuedo code to put into the game (maybe taking into account the 'special weapons'. Ideally I want to get some form of industry online so we at least have a vaguely playable game. I also want to set in stone the RMV settings/costs etc as these can then be a one stop construction thing.

If you have any idea as to the costs/attributes of an RMV then let me know!

[Arbiter]

TbT Industry:

Perform creation at end of turn

At beginning of next turn if allocated indpoints>prod capacity then flag to player

Creation

Check if available resources to create item

Create Item
Deduct resources

Industry Screen:

Micro allocate ind points
Macro allocate (weapons, armour etc)
Link to techs researched

Loop through all components adding ID to temp storage variable if researched

Loop through temp storage displaying details

If temp storage contents < display slots scrollbar.visible = false

General:

Create industry array from outset for each player
Redim to fit number of components
Contains no of allocated points

Construction Screen:

Be able to select all types of component
Clicking a component square brings a list of selectable components from stores
Selecting a component changes the component square to the graphic of the component
When all prerequisites are met, the mech construction button is made available
If the construction yard square contains a unit, a warning is flagged
As a component is added, the units attributes are updated

RMV's:

To be constructed at HQ, one per turn

Check if sufficient resources
Check if HQ square is free of units
Create RMV
Deduct resources

are we therefore unable to stack units?

have you included returning minerals to square upon unit destruction?

damage to surrounding units through self-destruct?

[Arbiter]

Not just yet, I was concentrating on industry.

No, you cannot stack units, I'm thinking of adding in a bit whereby if you try to move through a unit instead of it just stopping you it will move you onto the square past it if you have sufficient moves.

unless the unit in the way is enemy in which case you level it with tons of ordnance...nice!

[Arbiter]

That goes without saying. When all else fails - level the area.

Which gives me an interesting thought. We could have another special weapon which disrupts the IFF on the mech. If it's being controlled manually, it won't matter but if it's on autopilot, stand guard or the controller is stupid enough to walk over another of his troops then the mech gives it the good news.

Yeah/nay?

IFF?

ps did you manage to check out plenderj's craft last night?

[Arbiter]

Identify Friend/Foe

I thought you'd know that. Look it up..

[Arbiter]

Unfortunately I didn't.

I want to check it out, not least because he showed us the courtesy of looking at Sentience, but also because we may learn something. I'll try and do it tonight before I go out...

ok, I quite liked the IFF disruption idea(could be attached to the phase disruptor?), but its too easy to manually control the mech and therefore prevent any damage. perhaps disable manual control?

[Arbiter]

It would have to be a special effect, but there's no reason why it can't be attached to the phase disruptor.

The thing is, when automation routines are finally implemented you won't be manually controlling all your units. Let's face it, how many units do you manually control in SMAC??

And also, it's not going to flag that its IFF is out because it wouldn't know. The first they'd know is when it starting blasting away its allies...

ooh...tension!

[Arbiter]

Function CalcUnitWeight(currplayer As Byte, currunit As Integer) As Single
    Dim temp As Single
    Dim x As Byte
    
    For x = 1 To player(currplayer).unit(currunit).torso.slots
        If player(currplayer).unit(currunit).weapon(x) <> 0 Then
            temp = temp + components.weapon(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).weapon(x))
        End If
    Next x
    
    For x = 1 To 4
        If player(currplayer).unit(currunit).ammo(x) <> 0 Then
            temp = temp + components.ammo(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).ammo(x))
        End If
    Next x

    temp = temp + components.armour(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).armour)
    
    temp = temp + components.shieldgen(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).sheildgen)
    
    temp = temp + components.torso(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).torso)
    
    temp = temp + components.chassis(player(currplayer).unit(currunit).chassis)
    
End Function

pardon?


did you decide whether or not you needed stuff from me?

[Arbiter]

No I didn't need anything from you after all - I had roughly what I needed in my outlook account. I'll need to compare with home to be sure.

The reason I'm posting random bits of code here is because I can't eMail VB code from work. It bans me from doing it.

I'm doing nothing at all at work today so I thought I could get a little bit done on Sentience.

I'm going to try and get some more done tonight when I get home. It's a shame you can't code - there's soooo much that needs doing.

[Arbiter]

Morning Chopper,

As discussed on the phone we need to start writing little modules to calculate things like the speed etc.

Are you going to have any free time to work on these today?

I got quite a bit of behind the scenes stuff done over the weekend, mostly fixes (oh yeah and the RMV creation bit).

There's only three known bugs in the game now. Super eh?

I'm struggling a bit with my organisation. One of the things we need to do is establish a logical colour scheme for the tech tree - do you have the original?
I've tidied up the 2 leg mech, so I can get that to you. We can tie up a few looses ends on Wednesday. I'll try to get the (few) bits and pieces to you before then.