Published November 28th, 2007
in Uncategorized.
More UT3 playing around has had me discover the CustomTimeDilation variable in Actor. Timedilation for the unaware is the act of speeding up or slowing down time and in previous versions of UT was a global thing.
CustomTimeDilation means that every actor in the game can run at a different speed. This is how Epic made the Slow Volumes As Seen in this video.
So naturally I investigated and along the way made this mutator. It was a tiny amount of code to make that work in a rudimentary fashion. Might revisit the idea one day and do something nicer with it but it’s low on my list of things to do.
Anyway I also knocked up a simple Matrix type cheat that slowed down everything in the game to 1/4 it’s normal speed but only slowed you down by half (except your gravity which was 1/4). Took maybe 8 lines of code to get working altogether which bodes well for any ActionUT style mods out there.
In the meantime I get to bash my head off dynamically rebuilding node connections and pathfinding. Woo!
Published November 25th, 2007
in Uncategorized.
Testement to how good UT3 is as a game I’ve so far not played it at all without having first modified it in some way.
Yes I have absolutely no interest in UT3 as the game as shipped in teh box that Epic spent many dozens of man-years developing. Sorry Epic.
I am far more interested in modding it. Within mere moments of it’s first install I had the scripts exported and was cringing at teh horrible directory structure and lack of documentation for developing mods. This will naturally improve over time as it always does but it was a bit of a pain.
Teething pains aside though I now have found my way around the Weapon class quite happily and have created this!
Evidently my blog hates embedding youtube videos so here is a link!
Yes it’a a poor quality YouTube video of me playing a round of deathmatch in the first map in the list (I forget it’s name now) with a clone of the Enforcer that has to be reloaded every 16 shots.
This was actually quite easy to do. About 2 hours of fiddling to get the initial framework in and have a weapon that reloaded. Then another 6 hours of frustration at getting it to work Client/Server. Replication is still a royal pain but that’s largely because I didn’t design the code to work Client/Server in the first place and haven’t done any network related stuff in a while.
I will take my hat off to Epic for being thoughtful enough to include a weapon that has a passable reload animation though. Thankfully replicating animations is SO much easier than it used to be due to all the crap being hidden in the PlayWeaponAnimation() function so I don’t have to tit about with setting an Anim variable and replicating that to the client anymore. It probably still does that but at least I don’t have to worry about it.
200 lines of code to make the gun reload. Ish. It was more than that in UT2004 and I predict this new State Driven weapon stuff to be easier to work with in the future. Which is nice.
Now I need to convince some of the artists to help me make a 6-Legged Walker as that appears to be relatively easy and almost entirely content…
Published March 3rd, 2007
in Uncategorized.
A friend of mine just pointed this out to me.
This is a petition against the proposed changes to UK law that would require you to carry an ID card in order to be allowed to take photographs in public places in the UK. Obviously this must not happen or else it will pretty much kill the hobby of photography in the country.
More after the jump
Continue reading ‘Save Our Photographers’
Published February 18th, 2007
in Uncategorized.
Is buying yourself birthday presents (or unbirthday presents at any other time of the year).
Birthday on the Friday coming and I’ve just dropped a chunk of my savings on a new Camera. Considering the old one was:
A) A Very old Compact.
2) Possessing of multiple broken pixels.
iii) A mere 3 megapixels.
So the new one is a Canon 350D which it would appear is the most popular camera in the internets. Should arrive next week.
People at work (you know who you are) will now be trying to figure out how I can justify spending that much money on a new camera and not a new Guitar. Simple answer: I suck at playing Guitar.
Anyway this should mean that I shall have new photos up soon. Both on here and the deviantart page.
Oh and I finnally got my hair cut and shaved off the beard on saturday. I now no longer look like an old tramp.
Published February 10th, 2007
in Uncategorized.
In no particular order:
God is an Astronaut, Envy, Do Make Say Think, 65 Days of Static, Shadow of the Beat.
And to describe them:
Melodic Irish Post-Rock, Japanese Shouty Post-Rock, Canadian Post-Rock, UK Static filled Post-Rock, Norwegian Electronica.
65 are apparently playing the Academy soonish (May I think) so I shall have to arrange tickets for that.
Published December 5th, 2006
in Hype and Videogames.
And this is one of those occassions.
With the release of Revelations for Eve Online I thought it was about time that I updated my Missile Damage spreadsheet with the new ships etc.
Now it’s not final yet but I have released a version for testing and the release thread is located Here.
Also direct link to the new version and vague hand-wavey changelog to follow.
Missile Damage v1.03b
Changelog v1.03b
* Fixed Siege mode not applying it’s damage bonus correctly.
* Added Heavy Assault Launchers and Assault Missiles.
* Added Tier 2 battlecruisers.
* Added Tier 3 Battleships.
* Updated the Typhoons Bonuses.
* Updated the Hawks Bonuses.
* Updated Assault Ship Signature Radius.
* The Missile Comparison Sheet has been removed. Now only setup comparison remains.
* You can only load allowed types of missile into a launcher. This includes Tech 1/2 restrictions.
* Graph scales if Siege mode is active to compensate for the hidden aoeFalloff “Bonus” in Siege mods.
* aoeFalloff “Bonus” now factored into Siege Mode.
Published October 8th, 2006
in Rantage and Videogames.
I got a 7 day trial of RF Online. Mostly cos I wanted to check out the art.
It is now patching.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SOMEBODY TELL ME WHERE THE MUTE BUTTON IS!
Published August 29th, 2006
in Uncategorized.
Because this doesn’t appear to be anywhere else on the internets I thought I’d post it here so the spider bots can weave their magic and help people with the same problem.
IF! You are running City of heroes behind a firewall and have been using Sockscap to connect with other games (Like WoW, Guild Wars, Eve Online, Counterstrike etc) and discover that City of heroes (or City of Villains as they use the same install) won’t connect then try the following:
If The updater just sits at connecting:
You need an application profile for the updater Exe. You will need a profile for both the CoH updater and the CoV updater. If you are european make sure you use the EU updaters not the US ones. You can’t update from the US server if you are in the EU. I think you can however connect to the US servers once you have updated though.
If you can Update your client and get a Logic screen but it cannot connect to the DBServer…
You need to run Sockscap in Socks5 mode.
If you can connect and when you select a character it says it can’t connect to a MapServer…
You need to make a profile for the CoH.exe file (NOT the updaters but yo udo need those as well). Just make a profile and then leave it. The updater will run the new sockscapsified version and you can then connect to the game.
Published July 13th, 2006
in Rantage and Videogames.
Microsoft are apparently maintaining very stringent quality control over the titles released onto Live arcade. They won’t let you release any old crap on to it. They won’t let you just port an old arcade game accross with no changes whatsoever.
They would never let that happen.
Dear Namco,
Fuck off.
Love and Kisses,
Rob.
Now let me get this straight. I love Galaga and Pacman. But when I was talking about the resurgence of casual games it was more along the lines of new casual games. Or at the least highly polished remakes of classics.
Not doing what I can do with a chipped Xbox and a copy of MAME.
Capcom get away with it because Street Fighter has had online multiplay added to it. That is huge and worthwhile. A direct port of Pacman and Galaga is not.
Also Cloning Clyde looks really cool. More like that please.
