Shield equivalencies

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Chemus

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I really like the direction that this remake has taken. The ships, bases and overall system are great. I do have some issues, mainly with balance. I'm one of those purist freaks that you hear about, and want what I remember. A Retro, if you will ;p.

Now, admittedly, I've only played this game for a couple hours and could be entirely mistaken. Howsomever, I find the shields punier than I remember, and the armor beefier. According to the Privateer CD version of the manual, there were centimeter equivalancies to the shields and armor. It was 100cm per shield level, and then the ship had its own armor of 5-15cm, then the plasteel/tungsten/isometal armors that gave 10/20/40 cm respectively.

I see the numbers in the game for 4-way shields lvl 1 at about 54MJ (Mega-Joules?) and 4-way lvl 2 shields at 79MJ. The armor ratings for Tungsten are 108MJ and 1080MJ for the Armor and Hull respectively.

Is this because of gameplay balance or something else?

-Chemus, Groveler Before Kobolds
 
we measured how many laser hits a given shield could take and made the shields correspond to these... we could revisit the measurements again to verify--I'm pretty sure a missile could take down a given shield level 1... and we double checked by knowing how much damage those missiles do...therefore we figured things out that way...
about the armor being too beefy--you're right...the game was too hard without some xtra armor. the AI is miles better than the original--- even on easy
 
I've seen some of the talk about making the AI hit less often, and something that I would like to see as well is to make the Talons and Demons, et. al. stop that incessant spinning. It's really irritating.

Now to the guns. The numbers in the Manual or even those available at K's Cluttered Loft Show how the weapons and armor should act IMHO. Those no's are from the objects.tre file and I checked them myself, after I found that page :). Plus, IIRC, when I played priv (orig) a missile does NOT take out fresh shields, but DOES kill most armor for fighter classes. That is after the shields ar gone or mostly gone.

Now, I'm wurkin on fixing those no's onto MS's Freelancer, but I like the possibilities that this game offers. The way I'm working is to make sure that my units are correct by making the cm equivalancies exact to start. Then I just up them by a factor of 10 if tha 'random' factor kills stuff too easily when no's are low.

P.S. Is it feasible to redo the ship examine MFD images? The graphics point wrong half the time (Nose is aft so aft shields look like they're for the nose). I think the top-down view that Priv had worked well.
 
What do you mean by "incessant spinning" please describe...is this the evasion maneuver once they've been damaged (and say I'm battered yet unbeaten) or is this some AI problem that we haven't noticed.

The manual got the guns wrong but hopefully K got 'em right--I'll be sure to take a look--and I think shields were weaker than 100cm...but we can check again--feel free to set the values of shield_level_1 in excel spreadsheet units.csv and let us know... otherwise we'll experiment more.

I like the graphics pointing wrong :-) because they look more 3dish--we could include line-art versions if we had 'em

just do a find *-hud.png with windows to find the hud images that are used in game--only requirement is that they're 128x128 (or 256x256) in texture size.
Feel free to send us a pack of properly positioned hud images...there's no way I'm going to do the work (it took me forever to do it the first time) but if you send convincing replacements en masse to privater atsign gmail.com then we'll put 'em in.
 
Yes, I do mean the *nyah nyah, you can't possibly hit me now* maneuver. It's revolting.

@the hud: Can the tex's be 64^2 or smaller? Saves work :) Plus, how about 3d bases? Are they possible? If so, I'll look into the Vega-Strike 3d editing stuff...Milkshape won't texture anymore with my ATI Radeon 9800se so I'll have to try sumpin else.
 
Err, I don't HAVE excel, and won't spring for or pirate it. Works fubars the .csv fromat with a buncha quotes and removes some characters. I don't wanna edit this by hand. Any Excel replacement suggestions? I'm on dial up btw :)
 
You mean the evasion maneuver works? Good ;) HUD image dimensions need to be a power of 2. 128 or larger is preferred since most VDUs are larger than 64. Smaller images would be scaled up and become rather blurry. Line Art would be nice, but we'd rather not use the line art from the original only scaled up, it doesn't scale very well. An easier solution is to take a picture of the model (in game or in an editor) from a top down perspective.

Excel replacement = open office.org
 
MamiyaOtaru said:
Excel replacement = open office.org
Click to expand...

The file size isn't TOO bad if you don't mind leaving your 'puter connected for a few hours during the 40 to 60 Meg DL on dial-up. Good choice, I'd completely forgotten I even had it. Feature full and bloat light.

Wendy
 
doesn't koffice handle csv's

just about any self-respecting spreadsheet program will load csv's...it's just comma separated text...that's it... only has quotes when there's a comma in the text it's trying to delimit
 
hellcatv said:
doesn't koffice handle csv's
Click to expand...
Of course, and that's what I use. I was assuming he uses windows, for which there are no koffice binaries (AFAIK)

I've been looking at the shield values. I am very sure drain is accurate, but thickness dos seem to be off. I've identified two factors causing this. One is an easy fix, the other requires a slight code change. Hellcat and I will be discussing it and hopefully we can get it patched up quick. It really should fix the feel of the game a whole lot.
 
Thanks for the links folks! I found Quatro Pro on my compu, and it turns the trick (hmm that may not be what I meant...)

I have a question about the VSD units in the units.csv file. What do they represent?
Being blind, I can't find it in the wiki.

Thanks again :)
-Chemus, Atlantean Hamster
 
VSD means vega strike damage units...it's from the vega strike engine... but it basically is cm durasteel of damage.

also: I think I got the shield thicknesses patched up properly... :-) now things should work as expected with respect to shield energy drain. thanks for the pointer! I owe ye one
 
You're welcome, and thank you Hellcat for listening ;).

Now, I'm having trouble getting the ingame models on my screen with Wings3D, and am interested as to what program you used to get the pics and animations that you have from the origianl. I've had spotty luck with HCL's Viewer...or are there commands I don't know about? All I've been able to do is view ships and then flip to the next sprite.

Thanks again,
-Chemus, Geronimo's Adviser, Emeritus
 
mesher.exe should be able to convert the bfxm format to .obj :-)
the latest version of this file is always available here:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/vegastrike/data4.x/bin/

there is usage if you type it in the console... viewing obj in wings is doable.

You can view all bases with HCl's viewer... some code mods can allow you to extract them if you so desire. Then you need to get the palette right-- best achived by going to the original scene--once you have the palette, you'd need to position things write, and figure out the alpha channel... it's a pain ;-)
 
Tweaking of the shields and reactors is complete, and the tweakage doesn't seem to have broken anything. I used a lot of info from this thread. I really wish I'd found that before I did the stats the first time.. I did it by playing the original and noting down how long I could hold down afterburner and various combos of guns with different shield and engine levels. I got the energy usage and production of shields and engines very close to correct, but failed to take into account that higher level shields used less energy per cm of shield thickness. IE: higher level shields were too thin. Further, weapons were all too strong, the damage was multiplied by a random magic number, search that linked thread for it. Thanks Chemus for finally pushing us over the edge so we could fix it lol

mesher.exe should be able to convert the bfxm format to .obj :-)
Click to expand...
There is also a plugin for wings that lets you import xmesh files. This was the format used by Vegastrike, and still is to a degree.. to put it simply, bfxm files contain a bunch of compressed xmesh files.

Of course Vegastrike can also load obj files, and the mesher can convert from xmesh to bfxm to obj and back again.. meh. It gets a bit messy.
 
Right on! I've never been able to get reliable shield data (I'm awful at getting the info out of the .tre files)

Thanks Mamiya!
 
I'm not trying to get outta doing the HUD pics here, but...I think that I can. ;)

A little question though: Since the video system in VegaStrike is so advanced, couldn't one make the default enemy view in the MFD be a top-down 3d Camera of the enemy? This would operate like the video views do. but from the POV of the top of the Enemy's ship. Could the shields be just an alpha'd HUD Pic? (or whatever they are now, but with Alpha mask)

And that data listed on that 'old' article...I have it in .csv format. All pretty and clean. anyplace I can put it? (No, no not there, I'm having that fixed anyway. heh)
 
Actually I think there was a mode that let you show shields on the View mode ;-)
It's some config option in the vegastrike.config file in your privateer dir
"graphics","hud","draw_vdu_view_shields","true"


<var name="draw_vdu_view_shields" value="false" /> <!-- privateer -->

change false to true and your done
it is currently FORCED to false (to mimic the original)...feel free to turn it to true for your own pleasure...then you can have a hud view of the ship...current spinney keys ar e q,z,s,f though in the next rev that will be changed ot ins,del,end,home.

how about e-mail the csv to privater *atsign* gmail.com

PS: we're lookin forward to your huds
 
The reason I was asking about the HUD is that my 3d proggy is nerfed by either my vidcard setup or a screwup in my OGL ver. I have been having a tough time getting the ships to import into Milkshape or wings correctly (Textured). In MS the ones that (I assume) have LOD models are jumbled together. I think I can fix that manually editing the file. But the converter seems to screw with the tex mapping and I can't make them look right because The tex editor in MS don't work with my vidcard.

I guess I could try blender...

Long Story Short: I was trying to get screenies for the HUD's even if I meant to make, say, a line-art view. The HUD view option seemed to be an elegant solution. If it actually showed ship damage by region as well as shield ranges....well then it seems to me that that would fit the spirit of Privateer very well indeed. Also seemed better cuz I'm not an artist, per se. I just wanted to get a more user friendly view...*sheepish shrug*

^
|
Obviously not good at summarizing.
 
you don't need proper textures to get good line-art sort of huds, like in privateer...
just get the outline, then draw it out with green lines, no? :-) in fact you could rip the privateer huds and then trace them out at high rez...same lines, only better rez

To clarify: I would just take all the old hud images... then start a 256x256 transparent texture...
paste the old hud image, resized to 256x256
then draw thin line art to outline the old hud images

like that guy for instance :-)

http://www.crius.net/zone/attachment.php?attachmentid=699

cut out the little black square...then make a 256x256 texture...resize the square with the egg in it, paste it into the 256x256 texture as a new layer...move your layer ontop of it...and start tracing :-) making it nonblocky....
 
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