Updatery

[Ransom Arceihn]

Update: Having just finished FREDing the second episode, Transcend's missions are now half complete.

So uh, screenshots:

http://img18.exs.cx/img18/5048/screen50hr.jpg

http://img166.exs.cx/img166/3286/screen67aw.jpg

http://img150.exs.cx/img150/4849/screen45yz.jpg

[phreak]

why didn't i see this?

anyways this looks awesome

[Ransom Arceihn]

Another episode done, another batch of screenshots. Only two this time though...

http://img64.exs.cx/img64/3233/screen316dk.jpg

http://img228.exs.cx/img228/8450/screen327zt.jpg

[Taristin]

http://img166.exs.cx/img166/3286/screen67aw.jpg


Anukets. :yes:

[Ransom Arceihn]

Aand that's it. All 41 missions are done. Now I need to do some heavy testing and add the final touches. Release is imminent.

But you'll get no screenshots of the last episode :p

[MatthewPapa]

Wow.....
41 missions in only like 2 months right? Thats pretty damn good.

I look forward to playing this campaign.

[phreak]

well then. i think its time to get some homework done so i can blow off a weekend playing this.

[MatthewPapa]

Is it ready yet? It sure would be nice if it was......Its spring break here....there is nothing better than a good FS2 campaign to play on spring break.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Sorry about the delay, some of the last missions are giving me trouble with testing. I'm also trying to get the Kelpie working correctly, if it doesn't start behaving soon I'll have to ditch it.

[Taristin]

What kind of trouble are you having with the Kelpie? Everything seemed to work fime for me with the minimal testing I did...

Is it a collision bug? I've been hearing the max plugin seems to have issues with that, but I've not noticed any directly.

[Ransom Arceihn]

I can collide with it without FS crashing, though if I come at it from below I seem to be able to fly straight through it... and when I shoot it once or twice (varies) FS CTDs.

[Taristin]

...very strange...

There's no geometry errors, I know that much, since it was all made from a cube... so..... must be styxx's pof converter. :(

It's not fair, though. I can't use TS, it destroys smoothing data...

[Ransom Arceihn]

Maybe it has something to do with shields? Cause your capship models work fine... assuming you used the same method thingy.

Edit: ...yeah that appears to have something to do with it. I took away its shield system and now there is no problem.

[Taristin]

What capships did I make? I don't remember....

Shields... That narrows it down a bit. I'll get styxx on it. Although I doubt he wants to hear me.,

[Ransom Arceihn]

Specifically, the HTL Sobek. Any idea how long it's going to take for the Kelpie to be fixed? If it's going to take much longer than another week I think I'll just release it with a different ship and replace it with the Kelpie once it's ready.

[Taristin]

*forgot about the Sobek, oddly)

I really don't know how to fix the Kelpie, though. If it's a conversion error, I suppose I can try to reconvert it, again.
In fact, I'll try now, and I'll attach it here for you to try, since my copy of FS_O is acting up recently.

[Nuclear]

Why haven't I been here yet?

And, BTW, the camp looks awesome so far. If my comp could handle SCP, I'd get it when it was released.

[Taristin]

Tell me if this is any better, will you? :)
I'd really like to see something I've made featured in a campaign that's actually released. :)

[Ransom Arceihn]

Seems to be much better. But it still CTDs when I hit it from a certain angles, especially on the engines. :(

I may be imagining things but, in places it looks like the shield hit effect is intersecting with the hull...

[Taristin]

The shields don't though. Perhaps it's an SCP error. Try the model in Vanilla? (It's not too big for that, is it?)

[Ransom Arceihn]

Does the same thing.

[Taristin]

Bugger.

[Ransom Arceihn]

So... there's no possible way the shield problem couldn't be somehow related to the screwey bounding box on the Sobek?

[Taristin]

I don't know. I just don't know.

All of my meshes seem to have some problems lately. And I don't understand it, since I did everything right, as best as I could.
*sigh* I hate this.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Hmm... what about using the surface shields flag?

[Taristin]

Dunno. Have you tried it? FS_O is buggy for me lately.

[Ransom Arceihn]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it only works if there's no shield mesh. At least, when I used the flag the old shield was still there.

[Taristin]

It'd not be difficult to remove the shield chunk, I think. I may try it later. If worst comes to worst, I'll ask Strattcom to try asnd fix it, since he seems to have fixed the sobek and ares.

[MatthewPapa]

Is this gonna be released any time soon?

Ive been looking forward to this....

[Ransom Arceihn]

Still waiting on the Kelpie. I'd really like to use it in the campaign, but much longer and I think I'll just find a replacement and release it anyway. The last changes I made to the actual campaign happened about a month ago, it's been ready for some time.

[Taristin]

Try this version... although it is lacking the MOI data, because I'm lazy.

Blame Duelron for IMing me at 11:20p about it

[Ransom Arceihn]

Hmm, it doesn't seem any different from before. The hull seems to be fine, but with shields it CTDs when shot.

[Taristin]

Grr. Where's strattcom?

[Cobra]

:lol:

[StratComm]

*Appears, as if out of nowhere*

Lets see... IIRC, there are issues with Styxx's plugin and shields. Also, Raa I may have to break out the trout :p. You forgot your dockpoint path for the fighter dock. Insta-crash as soon as anyone in a kelpie calls in a support ship. Plus you have 4 LODs listed in the tables but only 2 in the model.

I reconverted for good measure, but the big advantage over your conversion may be bringing the shield in by way of PCS. I playtested with a friendly squad vs. a hostile one, and as far as I can tell everything works correctly. Awesome mapping job, by the way.

EDIT: If you're not seeing this post for the first time, please re-download the attachment. Forgot MOI and radius, but that's fixed now.

[MatthewPapa]

YaY, this campaign can finally be released!!! W00tage.

(it will also be GW's first completed project)

[Taristin]

w00tage!

[MatthewPapa]

< prod >
ransom, u there?

[Cobra]

(it will also be GW's first completed project)

it will also be the first campaign that includes one of my MODs. :biggrin1:

[Taristin]

What did you do?

[Cobra]

uh uh uh, wait until the campaign is out. :p

[Taristin]

*rolls eyes in doubt at Cobra doing anything of any importance*

[Cobra]

I will give you a hint: it's a highly modified science vessel with a new skin and shit.

[StratComm]

I worry anytime anything is described with "and shit" as the primary descriptor. But I'll remain cautiously optimistic.

[Cobra]

:rolleyes:

the "and shit" means some other stuff i'm not gonna tell about.

:rolleyes:

[Taristin]

Figures, this. When I finally get the model fixed (through external means) Ransom doesn't visit his own forum. :rolleyes:

[Duelron1001]

last i hear of him we was changeing his campaign so it didn't use your ship.

[Taristin]

He said he *may* do that if it wasn't fixed soon... and now it is. :p

If he did, then serves him right. :p

[Duelron1001]

he said to me: next time you see me online I'll have a campaign done. That was before the ship got fixed, but also after you tryed. So I don't know what hes going to do, it's upto him; i'll be happy either way to play his campaign.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Yarr, I did switch it so it used a different ship, but now the Kelpie is back in and everything is as it should be.

BUT THE NEWS IS NOT ALL FLOWERS AND CANDY!

While 100% finished now there are some bugs with certain new sexps which kinda break it (they were working before..) so I'm going to have to withhold it until those are fixed. I get the feeling God does not want to see this campaign released as not only this, but earlier when I was just finished fixing the missions back with the Kelpie in them there was a blackout which lasted for a couple hours and when it came back all the files were corrupt. Hooray for .bak files.

[Taristin]

Why not recommend usage with an older build that works properly? Not all of use use the latest build anyways, since there are so many bugs popping up all the bloody time.

Also, you should upload the campaign now, so that you don't lose the backups too.

[Ransom Arceihn]

I did try the older build which worked properly, and upon closer inspection the bug seems to have been there since the beginning. It's by some bizarre coincidence I didn't notice the bug until now. It looks like you're going to have to wait for it to get fixed.

Also I've already copied the campaign over to another comp which is not Windows and therefore logically will not explode at the worst possible moment.

[phreak]

since its when the sun is shining, can you possibly make a duplicate sun entry with the No Glare tag and use it for that mission?

[Ransom Arceihn]

I'm not sure that's the problem though, because it also happens when the sun's not even within your FOV. Just if your ship is pointing toward that 180 degrees of the background, or something. But I'll try that.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Uh, well now I just feel stupid. How do you give tags to a sun?

[phreak]

you need to make a new entry for the sun in stars.tbl. copy the needed sun entry and add $NoGlare: to the end


$Sun: SunWhiteNG
$Sunglow: Sunglow01
$SunRGBI: 1.0 1.0 1.0 1.0
$NoGlare:

[Cobra]

oh boy...

[Ransom Arceihn]

Okay I've done that, but the new entry won't appear in FRED and if I manually put it into the mission there's simply no sun at all.

[Cobra]

you might have the wrong build.

[phreak]

no its been in the codebase since 2002

RA: can you post the entry?

[Cobra]

oh. :nervous:

[Ransom Arceihn]

$Sun: SunGoldNG
$Sunglow: SunglowGold
$SunRGBI: 0.74 0.76 0.44 1.0
$NoGlare:


Edit: I don't think it's a problem with the actual entry, because FRED isn't even showing it in the list of available suns.

[phreak]

the only other thing is that you ran into the maximum number of starfield bitmap entries, which is 160. I don't want to make you count that :)

[Ransom Arceihn]

Even if I just rename an existing sun without modifying the entry suddenly it won't appear in FRED.

[phreak]

you have to create a duplicate bitmap named SunGoldNG.tga/pcx/dds

it sounds pretty stupid, but thats how it works.

[Cobra]

simple solutions for complicated problems. does it get any better than this?

[EDIT] Yay! my 400th post! :biggrin1:

[Ransom Arceihn]

Even with that duplicate bitmap it's still not appearing.

[phreak]

is it in data/effects?

[Ransom Arceihn]

Indeed it is.

[phreak]

ok we're obviously going aboot this the wrong way. time to actually fix the bug.

[phreak]

check the recent builds forum foo'

[Ransom Arceihn]

Cool, thanks for fixing it so quickly.

But having just finished playing the campaign through once more, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you all again. While it's ready and sitting in a rar file on my desktop, I'm simply not willing to release it while certain bugs are around - the three I mentioned in the thread for that build. Once the second (movie bug) and third (warp out CTD) things are fixed the campaign will be released, I just think they hinder the campaign too much.

[phreak]

i think baby jesus hates this campaign or something. i'll take a look at it this weekend. the weather should be shitty enough to warrant spending the day inside to code.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Damn that baby jesus, always one step ahead of me.

[phreak]

well i do have the loading screen bug fixed. I don't think i'll be able to fix the third one since i can never recreate it.

The second one may be related to this bug: http://mgo.maxgaming.net/mantis/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0000404

its the only this i can think of at the moment, so if you're running d3d then i don't know what's going on.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Yeah, I'm using D3D.

If you don't get either of the problems it may just be something wrong on my end, I'm going to try a fresh install of FS2 and see what happens.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Ghn... still happens. I have a couple ideas so I'll see if they fix it, if not I'm going to try to make a couple of campaign missions to demonstrate the bug (because it only happens in campaigns).

Also the loading screens aren't fixed, at least, not in the May 14 build which seems to be the newest build posted. And with that build, training-msgs now only display the first line of text, everything else gets cut off.

[phreak]

mantis the training message one.

I fixed the loading screen bug on the 16th or so, so it shouldn't be any build. except for the one thats compiling now, which will also include a new FRED as well.

[Cobra]

And with that build, training-msgs now only display the first line of text, everything else gets cut off.

must be a render problem.

[Taristin]

BRILLIANT!

What EVER would we DO without your cunning INSIGHT?!

[phreak]

can somebody just delete that fucking post of Cobra's?

and before i forget:
http://dynamic4.gamespy.com/~freespace/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32771

[Ransom Arceihn]

Training-msg bug mantis'd. (http://mgo.maxgaming.net/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000420) I uh, forgot to set the category, DirectX isn't really a relevant category since it happens on OGL too.

[Taristin]

Unread 13 Minutes Ago
Cobra
This message has been deleted by Ransom Arceihn.


I love it! :lol:

[Cobra]

yeah, well you know what? grow up. so i'm younger than you, big woop. that doesn't give you the right to just flame, torture (in certain ways) etc. start acting your age.

[Duelron1001]

lol

[Taristin]

yeah, well you know what? grow up. so i'm younger than you, big woop. that doesn't give you the right to just flame, torture (in certain ways) etc. start acting your age.

grow up? GROW UP? Listen to YOURSELF! Three times in THIS thread alone you spoke when you needn't have spoken.

Tell me, how, POSSIBLY, could saying 'must be a renderring problem' help? HOW? Especially when there's already a coder, and the mission developer who is already far more experienced in troubleshooting, working on the problem?

WE don't flame you because you're younger. We flame you because you point out the obvious, you make nonsensical comments, and you make replies to threads with only a smilie.

YES, we do that from time to time, as well. But you have done it in almost everythread you've participated in.

The 'torture' I've had no part in. (Except if you've been getting emails from the GTD bastion forums... :nervous: )

[Cobra]

oh yes. emails from the pr0n forum. :p

meh. i was tired. now shattap. :p

[phreak]

And its not actually a rendering problem


It's because of the way Training_buf and Training_lines work together. When a change is made to Training_lines it makes that same change to Training_buf. That's why Training_text was there, to have a clean copy to reset the message. When it goes through the split lines it will put NULL at the end of the line. This ends up in Training _buf as well which is why it ends up showing only one line. It does show all of the lines the first frame but doesn't at any time later.

The basic fix I have is to spilt_str just the once in message_training_setup() but I really don't know if that breaks any variable replacement which is why I haven't put it in CVS yet. Simply going back to having Training_text there fixes it without breaking anything else but it is rather wasteful.

Moving the split_str() lines to message_training_setup() should also reduce some processing time on each frame if that's a valid fix for you. The variable replacement would still work, but only once, so it wouldn't ever be change *while* the message is displayed. I don't know if that's intended though and if it is then the Training_text fix should be used. It's the least problematic fix as I'm sitting here looking at it though. After testing it seems to work fine but if it's wrong then feel free to change it.

[Cobra]

there, ya see? all you had to do was let phreak prove me wrong. :rolleyes:

[Ransom Arceihn]

If you hadn't said anything nobody would have had to prove you wrong, and everyone would have been happier! Especially Salazar, because he just hates it when this kind of stuff happens

Cobra stop using 'I'm tired' as an excuse, whenever you say something stupid you say that. By that logic you must be in a perpetual state of tiredness.

But on to business, now the minimalist in me likes Duelron's apt 'lol' response better. It's succinct, it has style, and it's a TLA. On the other hand Raa's avatar is a polar bear with no pants on so he wins by default

[Duelron1001]

dam, i'll out style you yet Raa!!

now as an admin i should stop spaming right about here.

[Taristin]

You can never beat the polar bear without pants!
'cause he's too sexay for his coat, too sexay for his pants, so sexay it hu-urts!

[Ransom Arceihn]

Well after a few tests I can't seem to replicate the ship warping out CTD, so since nobody else seems to have the problem I'm going to assume it's something on my end.

I'll release it once the loading screens and the movie playback is fixed, I'm not sure about the latter but loading screens still don't seem to be displaying correctly.

[phreak]

loading screens should be fixed in the newest builds. Taylor has one dated the 30th you may want to test. You're also in luck since redmenace duplicated the movie screen bug and it should be getting looked at. An official release of 3.6.7 is hopefully going to take place within the next two weeks, so you may want to release it then.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Aye, I tried the 30th build, loading screens were still acting weird.

[phreak]

ok mantis both of them. hopefully i'll pull myself away from EVE to take a peek at the loading screen one.

[MatthewPapa]

Any additional news on this project?

[Ransom Arceihn]

I don't know. I guess I'll check one of the newer builds to see if anything's fixed.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Nope. Loading screens still broken and movies aren't showing video.

Edit: Wait a second... after trying a few more times it seems movies are working fine. I wonder why it didn't work the first time...

Loading screens definitely still borked though.

[Ransom Arceihn]

I'd swear I did it before, but apparently not... loading screen bug mantis'd (http://lore.maxgaming.net/~scp/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000457).

[MatthewPapa]

If you have any more problems try this CVS buld that I just compiled, its as up to date as possible right now.

http://www.game-warden.com/GW build.zip (http://www.game-warden.com/GW%20build.zip)

[phreak]

taylor just fixed them. everything worked for me though which is wierd :wtf:

[Ransom Arceihn]

Hooray. I've also reported the movie bug (http://lore.maxgaming.net/~scp/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000458) now, hopefully this can get fixed soon and I can finally release this thing.

[Cobra]

yay! i wanna see my mod in action, too. :biggrin1:

[Ransom Arceihn]

So uh... any progress on that bug? :nervous:

[phreak]

try this, i made the relavant code change that taylor suggested.

http://fs2source.warpcore.org/exes/phreak/fs2_open_r_trans_test.zip

[Ransom Arceihn]

Problem's still there :(

[phreak]

ok. does it still happen in taylor's 01/03 build? thats basically 365 + movies

http://www.game-warden.com/20050103-win32.zip

[Ransom Arceihn]

Yep, still happens.

[phreak]

well thats interesting. you may want to make a note of that in mantis. we also need your system specs.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Sigh. I'm tempted to just release this and tell people to only play it with OGL until this gets fixed, since that mode has no problems...

[phreak]

just wait for 367, should be out by the middle of the month (thats what we said in june too :))

i've uploaded a change with taylors new suggested fixes
http://fs2source.warpcore.org/exes/phreak/fs2_open_r_trans_test.zip

[Ransom Arceihn]

*phreak uses coding attack!*

*Bug is immune!*

:(

[phreak]

dogshit taco!

[Gai Daigoji]

So hows this going? I just finished playing Sync (Yes I only just got around to it) so I am interested in playing this, so any news you can provide would be great. :)

[Ransom Arceihn]

Since it seems doubtful this bug'll get fixed any time soon, I'm probably going to release it within a week under certain conditions...

Duelron get on MSN.

[phreak]

release it. If that problem happens to me, I can take a look at it and test it myself.

[Taristin]

release it so all may know the glory that is the Kelpie class assault fighter!

[Ransom Arceihn]

Aye aye cap'n, splice the mainbrace

Uploading now. Gimme about an hour.

[Ransom Arceihn]

Done. (http://www.game-warden.com/forum/showthread.php?t=963)