ta3d-0-4-2-TEST-1.7

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mr_kyle
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ta3d-0-4-2-TEST-1.7

Post by mr_kyle » Sun Dec 09, 2007 9:42 pm

This release compiled no problem which was good, installation
script is a little better although it installed the *.hpi files in the wrong folder (the src folder!) and the music was not installed and a playlist was not automatically set up (which is maybe not that
important right now). Also the installation script did not install properly all of the needed files when ./configure --prefix=$USERSCHOICE was specified. The gui was better as well too, although the graphics need work as well (such as when an aircraft flys off the map and it is being tracked by the screen, the screen flickers and jumps about as well as the ai of the aircraft which cannot seem to strafe in order to avoid being shot down as easy. I believe the ai has already been discussed as well that it needs improvement (such as ground units not being able to walk as easily around obstacles and getting stuck easily). The sound effects worked ok with the occasional complaint in the log file that it could not find a sound (like: "FMOD: LoadSound(torpsel2) , no such sound found in HPI"), but the music did not work at all (yes i placed the music in the music folder and edited the playlist.txt). Overall i would say this release has been an improvement over the last. It would also seem that ta3d is easier to compile and use than spring (at least for me anyway) Looks like we are making progress keep up the good work guys :)

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Sun Dec 09, 2007 10:00 pm

Thanks for reporting!

I'll see this installer bug.

Pathfinding is what I am focusing on right now, it's very hard to make it work correctly ...

Currently the playlist isn't auto generated. In a near future the playlist will be generated automatically if it doesn't exist, and you'll be able to edit it through the config menu (Audio section).
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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:15 pm

Well, yes, very nice build. Good-looking textures and at last real TA-gui for game setup screen and other things like music control panel.
The good thing that all it works quite impressive, not get any crashes and all seems to work as it should, except pathfinding and some mods handling, but that`s will come next...

Suggestion for further builds - set default camera heigh more high - something like +30% from current. I see the things too big with default one. Conserning, that most of TA players play with resolution 1024 or 1280 - all units and buildings seems much smaller, and operating huge units kinda scary and uncomfortable IHMO.

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Mon Dec 10, 2007 5:26 pm

hm, is default camera's height so important ? every time I play I can't help changing it to the height I need to do what I want ... I'll let it as is for now, because everyone can change it and everyone will set it to a different value ...

pathfinding is what I am currently working on. It might take a while, I don't understand why it sometimes doesn't find a path ... I only know the pathfinder function doesn't return it or fail to reach the target position.

I've also reduced memory footprint, did you notice it ? on low-end systems it should speed things up (and it speeds up loading a bit on all systems because I removed useless data).

Now texture compression is used everywhere, but I noticed that it might be buggy on some systems (the radeon 9800 SE I use to do some tests doesn't draw some textures correctly - it's simply unusable). I might add an option to disable it, but it will require a huge amount of memory for those systems that doesn't handle it very well (may be make it selective depending on the size of the texture...).

could you run some tests with different gfx hardware to see if the texture bugs is only present on Linux/(old ?)ATI configs ?
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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Mon Dec 10, 2007 7:06 pm

Well, I don`t have much different hardware, but I do have Radeon 5500 on Win OS, and do some tests.

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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Tue Dec 11, 2007 5:30 pm

There`s some kind of background corruption... In Options screens and Game setup screens backgrounds are don`t displayed properly. They are filling only upper half of screen - the bottom half is black. At first I thought that it was because of testing new GUI but later I suppose that it is a bug. Can`t post screenshots, my hosting is currently down, but i`ll send it to Zuzuf by mail.

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Tue Dec 11, 2007 6:42 pm

Ok, I think it's the same bug I get on my Radeon 9800 SE ... bad support for texture compression. I'll look for a work around ... (using uncompressed textures isn't a good work around because of memory consumption :( )
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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:43 pm

Doesn`t think that it is somehow related to texture compression... Looks the same bug as before with build menu GUI.

Also - we should add flag - options_changed = true, when major options settings was changed like resolution, fullscreen or mod - so new game can`t be started before re-run of TA3D. Overwise they will not take affect, or game might crash.

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Tue Dec 11, 2007 7:56 pm

It's somehow related to the texture compression extension TA3D uses maybe not to how the data is stored, but how it is read and how its width and heights are computed ...

yes making TA3D able to make a "hot restart" would be a good thing, but I'll wait until we've our command line parameters and a mean to start a game directly from a Lobby, so we can use the same system instead of making one small part of code for it and change it later because it doesn't suite our needs.
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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:05 pm

Kinda strange, since ATI cards was the first one to use dynamic texture compression (DTC) method. It`ll be intresting to find the cause of this strange behaviour.

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:38 pm

maybe its due to AllegroGL, it's strange, but it shouldn't be impossible to fix !
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Balthazar
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Post by Balthazar » Tue Dec 11, 2007 9:16 pm

Yep, just multiply height by 2 :)))) Just kidding :roll:

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zuzuf
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Post by zuzuf » Tue Dec 11, 2007 9:48 pm

I am reading stuffs about the texture compression extension, it seems possible to compress the textures the first time you load them, and put the result in a cache system, then get them back directly into the texture memory when you need to load them again. It would greatly reduce the loading time !!! But I am still looking at how to do this :)
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