Announcing community patch 1.5 - godsend : ]

martin

Heya all, game had its 20 anniversary a few months ago, that would be good to celebrate it somehow - maybe by playing the game? With this patch there is no problem to run it on newest computers with latest Windows or Linux systems. No wrappers or additional third-party tools are needed, game engine was ported to modern and open multi-platform standards (like OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL2 yeah DirectX is no more here) from original game sources. Thanks to ENet high performance networking library you can enjoy four players mayhem multiplayer sessions without lags or other limitations. Some of the in-game limits were increased as well.

Get the latest release from here:
Game assets
Windows native executable 64-bit | Windows native executable 32-bit
Linux native executable 64-bit | Linux native executable 32-bit

Installation is super easy, just extract all the game assets and then all the executables into "machines" extracted assets directory. Please do not try to use original game files since some new extra ones are required. Remember to check out the enclosed readmes.

Adding a new features to the game is in consideration and probably will happen however can't write much more now.

Thanks to a small group of people from here for testing an early builds.

With a love to the game,
Martin

X-Lord

Wow, didn't expect such a big thing :) Great job there Martin!

The game loads straight from the files, there is the in-game music, new Acclaim logo (for what reason? ;).

I only have problems with setting the resolution. I've tried with Options menu and config.xml as well but without any effects. It shows the right resolution in Options but besides that nothing changed. Could you investigate that? What information do you need that would be of any value in resolving my issue?

Once again, great job.

martin

@X-Lord Sounds like you have disabled screen resolution lock, check if it is marked - it does not work as intended for now.
Make sure that selected mode refresh rate corresponds to your desktop settings or try rest of the modes. Correct settings are automatically detected on first run.
Does the problem occur when running the game in windowed mode or as administrator/root (it should be unnecessary)? Are you using multiple monitor displays setup? How many of them? What is your OS and graphics card?

M123

Well this is amazing :D

Did some quick testing.

Some specific improvements I noticed, for those who haven't had a look yet:

Working, separate volume sliders
Music proceeds through tracks correctly
32-bit colour
Texture4 (high resolution) used by default
Improved LOD distance and reduced shadow clipping (original || Machines 1.5)
Improved texture filtering (works better than forcing bilinear via dgVoodoo - smooths transparent texture edges and reduces distant terrain shimmering)
First person without letterboxing / black bars
Menu animations play at a sane speed on high refresh rates
Loads 512x512 textures without crashing (hey @antrad !)
High-resolution support (beyond old Direct3D limit of 2048x2048)
Configurable refresh rate
Day/Night cycle performance issues (stuttering) seem to be fixed

Found only one in-game issue - transparent textures like gun barrels and trees draw out of order: original || Machines 1.5

I seem to have too many available resolutions / refresh rates, so the list runs off the bottom of the screen. My native resolution and refresh rate were selected by default, and setting other resolutions via config.xml works fine.

My specs:

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core i7 4770
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti (driver 431.36)
1920x1080 @ 120 Hz

Note: my original Machines screenshots are with dgVoodoo 2 installed - without it the game crashes on the loading screen.

X-Lord

@martin yeah I disconnected my external display and it worked. Maximum playable resolution for me was 1600x900 60Hz on my Full HD 144Hz display.

The models I enlarged, and are available somewhere on the forums, are also compatible with an exception that fire and smoke directories should not be overwritten.

I had to disable the 3D sound as it messed with my head. I heard some shots on the right but the shooter was on the left and so on.

Playing some Battles gave me an impression that better performance influenced the gameplay a little. E.g. on Midian the mighty wasps were overwhelmed by the not-so-efficient north forces alone.

I have to try out some campaign missions and compare the impressions as well.

Anyway, thanks a lot!

antrad

This is a big surprise ! Where did you get the source code from, are you one of the original developers ?

I really like how you increased the LOD distance, machines used to be just a bunch of triangles most of the time. But can you completely disable LOD switching and let the game render the highest quality models all the time ? Modern computers should be able to handle it, maybe add an option or some multiplier in the config file.

Texture resolution has also been increased to 512x512, is there any reason why there is still a limit ?

https://i.imgur.com/Dgov3ad.png - original 256x256
https://i.imgur.com/XHQ7kEu.png - ESRGAN 512x512

With AI image upscaling algorithms improving, this could get better if even higher resolutions were supported.

I noticed the health and shield icons at bottom-left are now displayed. There used to be question marks there for me.

martin

This looks promising and I was thinking about similar thing. Texture size limit can be changed to whatever but GPU memory usage will raise, how much do you think you need? Example for single texture 2048⋅2048⋅4⋅1.5(mipmapping) = 26MB (about), it is sane to keep the limit reasonable. This can be problematic for old computers with less than 512MB graphics memory hence many texture sets or down-scaling on load are needed.
LOD's can be disabled with additional option but difference is not so noticeable. Game runs on single thread and lighting is done in old way on vertex buffers by CPU - you can feel the performance drop in extreme test cases even with decent processor.

antrad

@martin The example I posted is IMO the worst case scenario, the tutorial map, where the whole map terrain is covered with just 4 256x256 textures and looks terrible. This is probably the only map that would really benefit from 1024x1024 textures, while other maps would probably be good enough with 512x512 since they are more... eh, dense, more textures cover the same surface area, I hope you understand.

As for LOD, is that option already available in this version, I would like to try it ? I think it is best to give an option and let people go crazy if they wish, since it doesn't influence gameplay.

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.