Posts by Wunderboy

  • Programming / Coding for Source

    Couple of tips from someone who's been there, done that...

    Source requires C++ and either Visual Studio 2003 or 2005 to compile. I used 2003 with the first codebase and 2005 with the second. Apparently it will work with the free Express editions but it requires some extra work to get your build environment set-up.

    HLCoders can be useful but be warned that people can be a bit "elitist" at times. ALWAYS check the archive to see if your questions already been asked before posting (http://www.mail-archive.com/hlcoders@li ... tware.com/) because sometimes you'll get a rather rude response if you ask about something thats come up before. Also be warned that any "noob" type questions will probably get you a reply like "go read a C++ book".

    Best advice is when asking a question be as clear as possible about your problem, show proof that you have tried to solve it yourself (and aren't just asking for someone to do it for you) and ask in an intelligent manner. Posts like that generally get the best responses.

    Oh and yeah, tutorials. Some of them can be quite out of date as they were posted for the first SDK Codebase and subsequently don't work with the second SDK code release. Be aware of that before you start copy and pasting. To get the most value from a tutorial, don't actually copy it blindly, read it, comprehend what it's doing and try to implement the idea yourself using the example code as a guide. Not only will you get less bugs but a greater sense of achievement if you've adapted the code to your own needs and learned something along the way.

    Don't forget the VERC forums which have been closed and moved to steampowered. Theres lots of stuff/discussions there which can be useful.

    Old: http://www.chatbear.com/board.plm?b=390

    New: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/f ... .php?f=191

    And last of all - the SDK is *BUGGY*. Expect a lot of hair pulling trying to figure out why wierd stuff happens or stuff wont compile.

    Good luck!

  • EVE Online

    Bit off topic but interesting anyway...

    I was at Nordicgame this year and CPP had a whole booth showing off EVE Online with a lot of their dev-team giving demos.

    Their main guy gave a brilliant seminar/presentation of EVE and the history of it's development. One story stood out though which gives you an idea of what goes on in the universe.

    You start off with a central "safe" part of the universe where you can learn your way around and things are generally kept in order but AI NPC "police". Beyond this safe zone are unpoliced parts of the universe where they hoped people would explore and basically start-up their own empires.

    What they discovered is that players started to group together based on their home countries and culture and so in the "south-east" of the universe map you had the Russians, the "south" the Scandinavians, the "north" held the North Americans and the "west" the French and Germans.

    The Russian players had hacked their client so that they could talk to each other using cyrillic characters but as a result, any other messages came out as junk so they effectivly isolated themselves from the non-russian speaking universe.

    So the russians would often stard conflicts and wars with their Scandinavian neighbours and were baffled as to why, time after time despite being better armed and with superior organisation they couldn't defeat the comparibly weak Scandinavian forces.

    After some time it was discovered that the North Americans in the "north", who claimed to be a peaceful alliance were in fact secretly supplying ships and ammunition to the Scandinavians and shipping them in long freight convoys "south" through the safe zone.

    When the Russians found out, they negotiated and formed an alliance with the French/Germans in the "west" who ran intercepting missions to attack and destroy the supply convoys being sent to re-inforce the Scandinavians. As a result, the Russians, temporarily, won control of the Scandinavian controlled part of the universe.

    What was a suprise was that CPP had no idea this was happening. Their universe was so large that it was hard to monitor what was going on and they actually found out through player communities. They said they might of spotted it if they analysed their server logs but of course this would take a lot of effort to extract anything useful.

    As a result, their considering opening a community EVE-TV portal where players can submit news on whats happening in the universe, as much so CPP know whats going on as well as the people playing the game.

    Other random facts - the EVE servers user as much power per-player as a single chinese person in one day (which led to an awkward question from the audience if they were going to try and make EVE more "green").

    Oh and EVE Online contributes somthing like 45% of the total economic income from Information Technology in Iceland.

    /end

  • Sony upsets The Church of England

    Well for a movie obviously the producers would have to negotiate for the rights to do a location shoot and I'm sure when approached the church would of said know once they knew what the scene in the movie was about.

    I guess in this case, someone at Sony just walked into the church like a tourist, took a bunch of reference snaps and just went off and did it and no-one from the church new anything about it until the game was released.

    I can see their point though - considering it's a place of worship and the plot of the actual sequence I'm not suprised their a bit upset.

  • I. Videogame

    Quote from Kreigore

    Oh, neat! Too bad I don't have Discoverychannel, is there anywhere you can view them online?

    Don't know if there are any legitimate place but its "out there" :wink:

  • I. Videogame

    Anyone been watching this on discovery?

    http://www.discoverychannel.se/emea/videogame.htm

    Some pretty interesting topics they bring up. Episode 3 was interesting to me as it deals with some of the Serious Games stuff I've done and looks into some of the hipocrisy of acusing videogames of making kids violent but then having the US Army using it to "pre-train" potential recruits.

    I missed the first couple of episodes but found them on the etherweb.

  • TF2

    Quote from buddy the designer

    Christ, if VALVe would do a movie, it would be million times better than the incredibles or anything else!

    Yeah but you'd be queing outside the cinema for 6 months before the doors finally open.

  • Now playing

    Was loving STALKER - need a mod that lets you get back into the world to explore when you're done with the "true" ending though.

    Played Silent Hunter 4 a bit - can't get into it like I could SH3.

  • The random model thread!

    Quote from SnipaMasta

    [Blocked Image: http://img258.imageshack.us/img258/3674/conchz3.jpg]About 500 polys and a 1024². The cut in the middle is meant to be devoid of collision so that you can shoot through it but the compiler's ignoring my physics model, so they just hit an imaginary surface when you try.

    How many pieces has your collision model got? If theres too many the compiler will truncate it. You can use the force option to make it keep them.

  • C47 Skytrain/Dakota

    Actually a new WACO glider has been on my to-do list for ages...

    I'm thinking of re-doing the C47 texture from scratch again. It's only 1024x1024 and don't think it'll cut it for a lot of people. Might have to do it at 2048x2048 although that'll hurt source