Announcing community patch 1.5 - godsend : ]

antrad

So... is there any blog or something to follow the development or we will have to wait for the 40th anniversary ?

martin

@antrad So you are done with textures up-scaling? That is good.
There is no blog to read but some instant messaging server mentioned in readme and here. It seems to be a bit more active so you should get answers quite instantly. Project development is connected with interest around it and my free time (I'm working on other things) - for now do not except frequent updates.
Aside from that I think I can make it before the 21th anniversary, at 40th world will become a different place almost without a middle class - you can't go too far with a civilisation built on top of burning an oil or coal, you know...

antrad

@martin I can't do proper upscaling at this point. First, one needs a good trained AI upscaling model, and the one I used in the example is not really good, because it was trained on JPEG compressed images with artifacts, so you get those JPEG squares and noise when you upscale with it, the higher the resolution the worse it is. To train a new model I need thousands of images and a NVidia GPU (which I don't have), because the algorithms are based on CUDA. I need a good model trained with ground textures with rocks, sand and grass. Even if I did find a good model again I would be limited by doing the upscaling on the CPU which is very slow. And then a day later someone could release a new model that would give better results. It is best to wait until this tech matures and people make better AI models.

Btw, I don't want to rush anything, I was just curios, because these few posts are all public info I know about and it came out of nowhere. I don't use discord, because I don't like the closed nature of it, I am more old-school and hang around public forums like this.

I used to work on a "20th anniversary" update myself, but for Abuse from 1996. Haven't touched it since I released it:
https://github.com/antrad

Pisarz

@antrad

Btw, I don't want to rush anything, I was just curios, because these few posts are all public info I know about and it came out of nowhere. I don't use discord, because I don't like the closed nature of it, I am more old-school and hang around public forums like this.

I believe that it would be cool to release stuff publicly, but since @martin was the one who proposed the use of Discord, then some of us moved over there, not replacing this forum, but accompanying him since he showed us promising results. I like to think of Discord as a development site, and this forum as a publication platform. For instance, I am developing lore stuff there, and as soon as I finish, that could be published with the game in the same package, and shared with all the information about the game, and its community.

We tried to do that with Trello a few years ago with @bilal.

So far, we are looking for bugs, doing the lore, and also, someone (I don't remember the username right now) published original images of the old demos.

EDIT

I published here in the forum the lore development done so far.

Vencorr

Made an account here just to thank you and all who contributed to the community of this. This is absolutely amazing.

I had the original disc of the game back in my childhood but it never worked since I was using XP at that time. On my journey of getting it working with Linux WINE, I was getting frustrated and then I found this. This is amazing. I can enjoy the wonders of a game from long ago natively.

The only issue I've had is some resolutions don't display well in the menu upon first boot, but once you start a game, all menus look fine.

Thank you and great job!

Pisarz

@Vencorr Have you seen our Discord?

https://discord.gg/J6e9MsY

Vencorr

@Pisarz Now I have and now I'm in. Thanks!

X-Lord

I have three remarks after playing some campaign missions.

On Talon/Talok Prime (snowy map with eradicators) the voice message is played in infinite loop
In the mission Espionage and Kidnapping where one has to command a treachery attack of a commandant, one of the two commandants appear in the wrong place, nearby the starting point, making this mission very easy
Sometimes the sounds of Machines dissappear or sounds of Machines fighting far away is to be heard during 1st person mode
Homeworld - the game was minimized and the console was shown stating that a model could not be extracted from .x file(something like that)?
Final Assault - the game suddenly shut down with no error messages etc.
The Controller - crazy things happened with Judas Warlords.
*The treachery attack haven't worked for some time from time to time.
*Sometimes Judas Warlords changed colors from friendly fire?

Other than these small issues everything's perfect for now. Congrats :)

antrad

If there ever is going to be version 1.6, here are my wishes:

support for 1024x1024 textures
option to further increase draw distance (LOD)
if anyhow possible I would like an option to disable ion cannon and nuclear silos in skirmish modes, make them unavailable to build
add an option for more resources, like 100 000, because AI is very poor at resource management and eventually gets stuck, so to give them a chance in skirmish. It would be interesting to see what would happen.

Gameuser10

Extremely late, but thank you so much for all the love and effort poured into my childhood game. Can't wait to enjoy it all over again.

darkreaper88

I have Windows 8.1 & you guys don't know how much it means to me that I can finally play this again! Anyway, question. I have some modding tools that I have acquired from here eons ago as well as a set of instructions I wrote on what I did to set everything up. Since this is basically a "new" version of the game I'm dealing with, what new steps do I have to take to make the mods work? I saw in the "ReadMe" where it said to NOT use any of the original game data files. I figured I'd ask so I won't screw anything up. Anyway, thanks again for all of your hard work! (If this was posted in the wrong spot, please let me know)

martin

Hi darkreaper88 have you tried using old modding tools? Those should work fine, upcoming release facilitates scenario customisation and fixes all mentioned here issues (in current one some of them are fixed). Language localisation packs are not going to work. See modding section for information and asking questions.

darkreaper88

I'm using the old modding tools. I did the extract/parmdata/compile sequence & replaced the mach.met file with the newly created one (remembering to backup). The game would reach the menu, but when I try to start a mission it would crash. Sometimes it won't load at all & would give me an error message saying some kind of plugin was missing. Tried this multiple times & still got the same results so I'm not sure what to make of it. However, when I replaced the original mach.met file the game played perfectly fine (without the mod alterations, of course Lol)

X-Lord

Which mods do you try to play? You have corrupted mach1.met file. If you adjusted it yourself then it's possible that you made a simple mistake where a single character is missing and then the game won't start.

I really recommend using a version control system like Git or Subversion. It helps you track your changes and it's then easy to spot errors or revert back to working settings after unsuccessful mass edit :).

darkreaper88

To test & see if mods would work with this new version of the game, the only thing I did was change the amount of damage the reaper's plasma rifle inflicted. (From 3 to 99) With the new version I downloaded I have noticed that there is no "data" folder, only a "pdata" folder (which only has descriptions of missions). However, in the old modding tools folder there's one that says "data" which lists everything. (constructions, machines, weapons, etc) Weird...

WICKED WAITER

TRIED THE PATCH 1.5. IT WORKS LIKE A DREAM........WANTED TO PLAY THIS GAME FOR SO LONG...I BOUGHT THE ORIGINAL TWO CDS WAY BACK IN 2002 WHEN I HAD PENTIUM 3 WITH 128 MB RAM...IT WAS SO AHEAD OF ITS TIME. I AM FROM INDIA AND EVEN TILL NOW I HAVE YET TO COME ACROSS ANYONE PERSONALLY WHO ADMIRES THE GAME. THANKS A TONNE.GOD BLESS YOU !!

Pisarz

@WICKED-WAITER Glad to have you around! We have a discord server as well: http://wiredforwar.org/topic/169/wfw-discord

Hepativore

So the game works great and runs really smoothly. However, for whatever reason the game will not let me make save files and restarts my profile every time I exit the game. I am running the Windows 64-bit version on a Windows 10 machine. As this was a clean install, I did not have the vanilla version of the game installed before this one.

This is becoming an issue because my progress on the campaign is restarted every time I open the game.

M123

@Hepativore Where do you have the game installed?
Windows might prevent the game from writing files if it is installed under C:\Program Files or C:\Program Files (x86) - I would suggest moving it to C:\Games or similar, if that is the case.

Hepativore

I did as you suggested and it seems to work. Ever since my computer forced me to upgrade to Windows 10 I have hated it as I hate not being able to write to the Program Files folder by default unless you go messing around with profile permissions and so on.

Anyway, thank you for your help this quickly. I was afraid that I would be waiting awhile as there do not seem to be that many active users on the Machines forum anymore.