Posts made by Byrgius

Wow, that looks really good! Would love to play this map one day.

Looks interesting. Is there a list of commands anywhere or what does it do?

Very interesting idea of force field generator. I imagine you have to first break through somehow (by destroying it and turrets protecting it) before you can face another player. By that time you should have at least medium tech to be able to break through. It would make it more interesting and giving you some time to evolve at the same time.

@Pisarz

Also, your trailer is awesome!

Thanks, unfinished though and the planetary textures didn't render in full quality and I couldn't figure out why.
This is the first frame I rendered while I was working on project and it looked much, much better:

The planet actually consisted 3 spheres. One is the planet itself, one is a transparent sphere for cloud textures and shadows and another is gassy atmosphere which difuses the light around it. All spining in different directions to give it more realistic feel.

If you want to make animations as above I'd recommend learning some 3D program, It would be way more convenient when making sketch animations. Textures and lightning/materials are very complex to learn and master, but simple modeling and animation isn't so you could make results quite quick and you could use the models later for the game as well.

The "draw over previous frame" is way better in flash. In photoshop for example if you have done like 50 frames and you want to change something in between you have to change it in every frame seperately - this is to my view a huge downfall. I assume you'd want to change a lot of things while doing the animation or maybe you'll miss something, that way you'll have this problem constantly.

For the gif you posted: yes but only if you have frames rendered already. The frames were exported from some 3D software like Maya or Blender and then put together as gif. Although I must warn you .gif only supports 256 colors so it's really hard to make it look good. There are ways to make it look better taken out of video format, but it will still be only 256 colors once in gif. I'd recommend exporing as something like .avi or .mp4 if you want to make animations like above.

Example of gif from motion picture format:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaXnYRlAtks

GIF explained:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

There's another way to get around in having more than 256 colors in gif but I haven't tried it out, ever. Theoretically you could divide your (unprocessed) frame sequence into several squares and add 256 colors to each of them. So it would take as many colors in each section as possible (if there's not more than 256 then the algorithm would compress), and if you sum all together you could get around 2000.

I haven't tried this tehniqe though for at least two reasons: I haven't found a decent software to do so; it would't take seconds to download the gif but minutes. GIFs can take a long time to download even in 256 colors (up to 5mb) but we're talking easily of 10Mb+ here, so it's actually like preloading a short video before watching it.

My conclusion is that gif is an outdated format which should better be left alone. You could do much better with simple video format.

Also here's my first Maya animation I did few years back and it was all exported as still images (frames) and rendered with Sony Vegas:
https://youtu.be/ZRaXzUmC-Hk

What about a simple dropdown menu before the game of "max units" and a script that detects the system and warns the user if he selected the "max units" above his optimal specifications?

Though the specs may vary and there should be some testing done, but then again the users can "test" the fps rate based on unit count for you to collect and thus optimize the "max units" in menu better. For example users could agree in the begining to send data to you (so the servers won't get overflooded) and when their fps drops below let's say 20, it sends a short xml or whatever of unit count and system specs.

Here's a quick example:

@Pisarz Yes that's the one. Even though it's becoming obsolete you can export the file to movie format or .gif. It's still a good tool to make animations and one good thing for example is that you see a previous frame with transparency on current frame so you can easily draw over. The flash format is only meant for (obsolete) flash players which is uncompressed and all in vector graphics while other exports result in compression and pixelization - still the compression is not noticable by human eye.

I can tell you first hand because I'm working with Photoshop animations daily and there are A LOT of things that make the job frustrating. The concept animations you have in mind I think are even more complex though.

@19MAR94 Sounds interesting. Maybe you should post the question here as the original WFW music composer registered on this forum.

@Pisarz Photoshop isn't meant for more complex animations believe me, you'll have a lot of trouble with it doing such concept animations. I recommend using Adobe Flash instead, you can export in .gif too I think, otherwise you could just upload an .avi on Youtube :)

Amazing, I'd love to see this in game!

@Encrypted Yes that's it! Oh the nostalgia... :D by the way were there more than one version of demo out there? I know that Knight with bolters and plasma were the top tech you could produce there. How did you get the Wasp, Overseer and Warlord to control there?

I played that a lo too. The commander had way different voice as well as higher stats like hp and shield but also higher weapon damage.

@SinJul Well I think a lot of game OSTs are brilliant nowdays and I listen to many of them. One of my favourites are ofcourse TES Oblivion and Skyrim. I love listening to that while hiking in nature. Also Anno series has some great music, Destiny and many more...

Here are the links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpqSdORmCX4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQeIYVM3YBM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvwDiV2K_0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_AUZVS5LP0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDihK7YFa7o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG6YMLEWus

@croftish Ahh not familiar to any of those, I'm from a different era haha, but it's very interesting to know the background.
What do you use now for Elite Dangerous?
I use Ableton 9, I also used Reason for years but it doesn't support any VSTs which is a huge downfall.
Also how did you become a game music composer?
I wish to write game music later in my carrer when I stop DJing and producing electronic music.

Cheers :)

Omg, is this really you? I've listened to Machines OST so many times during work. I'm also a music producer, for about 7 years now and I can say I'm a fan of your work.

My questions are: what DAWs did you work on for the original Machines and did you design sound fx and voices as well?

It's lagging so much to me. Some people said you have to install Win XP patch for Machines, but all the links are broken on the internet. Does anyone have that patch to upload here?

@bilal Yeah I know it's a tough call

@bilal Would be amazing to have him on board.

@Pisarz Wow an actual Machines 3D designer? :o

@Pisarz said:

The original idea was to make an aerial transport for one specialized unit only, that is too slow/big to move by itself.

Actually I had a combat unit in mind (not a carrier) that would assemble with two or three units, though each of that units are standalone combat units already if not assembled.