Best posts made by antrad

Thanks everybody for you stories. I would say we all had a similar experience; being new to RTS games, having language barriers or quitting the game and then going back to it few years later.

I also like the visual design of the game, the machines are very colorful, you could say the game looks cartoony. Even though it has old graphics, it is nice to switch to first person or third person mode and look at colorful sky with planets, I bet it looked amazing in 1999 compared to the usual 2D strategy games back then. I also like the voices of various machines, it is one of my favorite parts of RTS games when units have unique voices.

I agree with TMG HK the game is very hard and I also got stuck on the Fortress and Controller mission, took me a whole day to beat each of those. I highly doubt I would be able to finish those missions if I played the game as a kid.

...and we all missed it. According to Moby Games, Machines was released on April 14th 1999. According to Wikipedia it is one of the first 3D RTS games. I think it would be nice the few people that still remember this game to go down memory lane and write down something. When did you first play it, how did a 3D RTS feel back in 1999, what are some good memories you have...

Machines is the first RTS game I ever played and it might also be the first thing I ever installed on my computer by myself. I think it was the year 2000 or 2001 when I messed around my Turok 2 CD and found the Machines demo on it. I barely had any games to play, so finding a new game was really exiting. I was such a noob back then, I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so I started shooting at my own units and buildings. When I destroyed everything, new units started appearing with different colors, so logically I concluded that is how you play it; like some kind of shooter with new enemies spawning at the edges of screen. I don't remember how I figured I can build stuff. I remember my neighbor also installed it on his computer, so we slowly explored this new game type. The next breakthrough was discovering that sending a technician to research center gives you ability to make new units, then discovering the one included campaign mission and the shock of being attacked by a gorilla. I remember being in first person mode when I saw it on the horizon, slowly approaching...

Funnily enough I have never finished the full game until November last year. I did join the old forums in 2008 to download the full version, but when I started playing it I got bored. Recently I found new interest in slower games like RTS, so I finally decided to finish what I started 18 years ago. Objectively I think the game could have been better in many ways, with more engaging story, better pathfinding, more missions, but I had a ton of fun with it. There are not many missions, but many of them are really difficult and I had to learn each units strengths and weaknesses and develop new strategies, which I found interesting. Even the first person mode turned out to be much more than just a gimmick, there is a lot you can do if you use it cleverly, to distract larger units or to hunt down large enemy units with Judas Warlord. Too bad there was never a sequel, they had a solid base they could build on.

@TotalDemise You say there isn't anything, but the picture tells otherwise. In your photo we can see early designs for the machines and the tall one is probably a Gorilla. I never saw that before, so it is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing. Is there something interesting in "Acclaim The State Of Play" ?

@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

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

@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.

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.

This soundtrack RIP is not good, some of the tracks don't start and end where they are supposed to. You will probably not notice it if you play it in order, but if you set one of the tracks to loop you will notice at the end it starts to play the next track for a brief moment.

I have ripped the music myself from the CD, imported it all into Audacity, joined everything, then split the tracks manually at proper locations, and exported it all to MP3 at 320 kbps. I also extracted the music from the intro video using RAD Video Tools and converted it to MP3 as well.

You can download it from my Google Drive if you wish: download link

@M123 I heard about ESRGAN just two days ago. I must say the skybox texture turned out amazing. Waifu2x is very bad with banding, because it is made to basically sharpen any lines it recognizes, because it was made for cartoons, so the banding gets even worse. That is why I left out the skybox. I think this technique would be especially great for all the skyboxes and planets.

But, I think the sky is supposed to be clear on a moon, so it doesn't need noise, so I used waifu2x to "denoise" your texture.
https://i.imgur.com/JSwXS7l.png

I also wanted to see how it would work on the terrain texture, and the result is amazing, but only when left at 512x512. Check this out:
Original with linear upscale to 512x512: https://i.imgur.com/STZeKR7.png
ESGRAN + waifu2x at 512x512: https://i.imgur.com/LPI3vdk.png

Such a shame we are limited at 256x256 ! With an increased texture limit, with a disabled LOD system that always uses the highest quality 3D models and dgVodoo wrapper which forces 32 color rendering we would be talking about a real game remaster here. So close and yet so far :(

@wildh0rse It seems I was partially wrong about Yellows and Greens. They sometimes do not attack each other, but today they did. It probably depends on the map, or maybe the position on the map, or maybe it is just random. The Blues always end up destroyed first when I play, they are the worst.

And something interesting happened today. The Yellows attacked my pod with three nuclear rockets at the same time, I never saw something like that. Luckily it was the one I captured from the Blues. They ended up being stuck because of resources and I destroyed the launchers with only one unit, then finished them off with 4 nuclear rockets at one.

We will have to tell they guy who made the 1.5 patch to maybe enable unlimited resources, it would be interesting to see how they would behave, since they always get stuck.

@wildh0rse The reason I hit the limit is because I tend to play these games slowly, build a base, build an army, then do one final attack. I don't attack constantly or try to win as fast as possible, it is more like a relaxation when I don't know what else to play.

Another thing I noticed is that Yellow and Green machines don't attack each other at all, Also Green like to use ion cannon and nukes, Yellow don't seem to use them at all. I guess if you want at least some challenge, you could do the things above, then destroy the Blue machines as fast as possible, so they don't damage Yellow and Green, and then continue to play against the Yellow and Green Alliance that will only focus on you.

Skirmish against the AI in this game is terrible.

First you have the unit/building limit, so you can easily get stuck and not be allowed to build more. But you can use the Loader program to fix this.

Then when you do this the AI builds like crazy and easily runs out of resources, without even building an army. You can help them a bit by selecting starting resources to 10000, but then they end up just focusing on nukes.

It's like they put no thought in it and after some very challenging campaign missions skirmish is very disappointing to play against the poor AI.

I never like these weapons of mass destructions. I guess it is fine for ccampaign missions to spice things up a bit, but in skirmish mode it basically boils down to who builds the these weapons first. I wish there was an option to disable ion cannon and nuclear weapons in skirmishes. It was good that the last mission was underground so they couldn't be used.

@Pisarz The mission in space was very memorable, because it was so different, with being in space, building on the ship and asteroids and having to use flying units. I forgot to mention I also did use an APC in the Behind Enemy Lines. While the main force was in the canyon I flew in to release a small group inside the base. It was a fun mission.

I have completed Machines without cheating and I must say it was extremely difficult at times. I only played it last year, if I tried to complete the full game when I originally fooled around with the demo when I was a kid there is no way I could finish it then.

The levels that stick out as being very hard to me;

• Military Research Fortress where you constantly get attacked by Gorillas and Eradicators from two direction and it is extremely hard to build a base and start a counter attack. The beginning in the woods is also very hard, because strong enemies immediately attack you and you only have a handful of units.

• Talonthia was also very hard, because you get attacked by Gorillas and other strong enemies all the time from different directions and all mining locations have very few BMUs, so you need to constantly expand and build new mines. Then at the end enemy starts attacking you with Ion Canon that can easily mess you up.

• Mission where you are rescuing the commander in the desert is also very hard. I couldn't pass the guarded canyon north-east to get to the enemy base. Gorillas and Eradicators always cause problems. Then I realized I should actually use the Commander himself to do some damage to the enemy base from the back first and slow down their production. Destroying the enemy mine or a smelter at the beginning is vital.

• Final Assault is also very tricky because you have very limited resources. This is the mission which forced me to capture enemy base to south, instead of building my own to save resources.

• The final mission took me whole day to finally finish it. This mission was interesting, because it also forced me to use new tactics and use Judas with treachery, which I never used before, and also showed how the first person view is not just a gimmick, but a has a high strategic value. The AI can not do fast sneak attacks and capture enemies as efficiently as you can do when you take control. In this mission the importance of Scavangers also comes to light and they are more important here than actually building mines.
  One big flaw of this mission is that when you destroy some enemy buildings, the enemy does not move production to new locations even though there is plenty of space. So, if you survive the initial attacks and destroy the buildings on the East the enemy will never recover even though it has unlimited resources. There is a lot of space for improvements in individual unit AI and global AI.

As I said in the beginning this game is very challenging at times and I like that in games, because it forces me to become a better player; learn how the game works, how to best use various units and develop new strategies. After I finish a mission there is a sense of accomplishment. Major drawback is that it requires a lot of time and sometimes you don't have enough time to spend with a game like this.

Shame that concept artist didn't share more stuff. With mothern technology they could easily realize the original concepts and it would look very unique.

I didn't know about that whole setup process, I only had the winmm dll files from another game (extreme g 2 Steam release), so what I did is I lowered the volume of the music tracks when I was ripping the music from CD. If you don't figure it out, I have uploaded the files, I have tracks down to 12.5% and 25% of original volume.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Vslhbrn9-yFmbUfYJL-BYlgSy5LNh13Q

Just extract the files to the installation directory, it will add 4 dll files and a music folder. Default is 12.5% volume, you can overwrite the files in music folder with the ones with 25% volume folder. If you want to disable music completely, rename or remove the music folder, but leave the dll files which will block the CD music. The music folder has 3 extra tracks(just copies of menu music track), because otherwise it wouldn't play correctly, maybe because the dll files were originally configured for a different game, I don't know.

As for music not looping in the game, in my case it would loop, but not right away, it would take about a minute to start playing again.

@bilal I didn't even realize how useful Judas Warlords (with treachery) were until this mission. And to be really effective you must use them in first person view, make a suicide charge and dodge attacks until you get to strong enemy units and capture them. It really makes you appreciate the first person view. I would always keep few scavengers around to pick up the debris after the resulting chaos and few medics to heal the captured units if they survive the attack from their group.

The most difficult part is surviving the first 10-15 minutes, until the big attack with the Goliaths, after that the attacks slow down.

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.