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Omi-Polari posted:Here's a question. How did the different main battlecruisers/carriers (MK1, MK2 and MK3) come about? They are all part of the game's mythos. I designed all of them from scratch. As I did with the backstory and such. The Galactan class Battlecruiser MK3 was the first carrier ever made and featured in the BC3K games. That was back when the first game, Battlecruiser 3000AD, only had that one carrier and it's complement of 12 (4 fighters, 4 shuttles, 4 ATVs) support craft. It's also a very capable craft. I think the reason you see most people playing the MK3 is because of nostalgia. Plus it's a great ship. The game's legacy appendix holds more info on these ships and how they compare.
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Dec 9, 2015 00:45
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I decided to decloak above a base, turrets firing and launching interceptors. I died.
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Dec 9, 2015 03:52
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Omi-Polari posted:I decided to decloak above a base, turrets firing and launching interceptors. This pretty much summarises my entire career in eve online. A failed cloak rear end in a top hat lol
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Dec 9, 2015 11:44
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Omi-Polari posted:I decided to decloak above a base, turrets firing and launching interceptors. heh yeah, not surprised. 
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Dec 10, 2015 03:24
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FYI for those of interested in my plan going forward for the series
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Dec 10, 2015 03:25
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D_Smart posted:FYI for those of interested in my plan going forward for the series That looks like an unbelievable amount of work. I'm seriously considering dropping the £22 on this DLC just on the basis of the horrendous amount of effort that's being poured into this, regardless of whether it's a good game or not (I haven't had enough spare time to figure that out yet)
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Dec 10, 2015 13:57
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UC/BC3000 is still a good game.
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Dec 12, 2015 20:46
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So I just did the part of the tutorial where you kill two fighters, and gently caress ME are they ever squirrelly. Is it even possible to kill a fighter with guns if it has shields up? Also, are the AI fighters supposed to be completely ineffectual against other fighters?
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Dec 13, 2015 06:13
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BMan posted:So I just did the part of the tutorial where you kill two fighters, and gently caress ME are they ever squirrelly. Is it even possible to kill a fighter with guns if it has shields up? Also, are the AI fighters supposed to be completely ineffectual against other fighters? In my experience I have to have numerical superiority with fighters, or my capital ship backing them up. Turrets & fighters working together can be deadly.
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Dec 13, 2015 08:16
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Actually I was talking about the part of the tutorial where you get into a fighter and fly it manually. The missiles were effective, but the AI seems too stupid to salvo them.
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Dec 13, 2015 17:14
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BMan posted:Actually I was talking about the part of the tutorial where you get into a fighter and fly it manually. The missiles were effective, but the AI seems too stupid to salvo them. The AI is just fine. It's dialed down for the tutorial. And yes, main guns in capital ships are patently useless against fighters because a) fighters are faster, more nimble b) the main guns have a "convergence gap" between the gun mountings making it easy for them to miss smaller targets Turrets are laser beam guided and auto-tracking. So they are far more deadlier than "burst enabled" guns. I released a minor patch earlier today.
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Dec 15, 2015 01:46
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Gilganixon posted:That looks like an unbelievable amount of work. I'm seriously considering dropping the £22 on this DLC just on the basis of the horrendous amount of effort that's being poured into this, regardless of whether it's a good game or not (I haven't had enough spare time to figure that out yet) Not as much as the amount of work it took to build the game. But yeah, it is. But it's mostly all content. The graphics upgrade is only about 25% the effort since I'm just porting the graphics engine from AAW/AOA, doing some optimizations etc. So it's not a complete re-write at all. Also note that those are three distinct projects there; not one. More info in this recent Battlecruiser 3000AD – The Legacy blog D_Smart fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Dec 15, 2015 |
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Dec 15, 2015 01:47
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space sims arent my thing, but i decided a cure for insomnia would be to try out UC. I followed the tutorial to the letter and actually had fun. couldnt get the hang of the ground stuff unfortunately. might actually try out the DLC. didnt die to that "youre gonna die" ship. lit his rear end up with missiles as soon as he emerged from jump  your tutorial is very snarky, derek
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Dec 24, 2015 15:57
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I have an unironic love affair with the Battlecruiser series. Myself and three friends pooled together our meager savings (Not bad for a couple of 15 year olds) and bought a copy and a joystick in 1996. I've purchased every iteration since. I cant wait to see what this will look like.
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Dec 24, 2015 18:45
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TheHoosier posted:your tutorial is very snarky, derek  "It's like a headgame. Oh? I'm gonna die? We'll see about that. And then you die.
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Dec 24, 2015 18:54
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Omi-Polari posted:For me that's part of the charm. You'll get to a part and he's like "okay, now reload the game because you definitely just died I quite like the part where I can either listen to the sound of music ost and cut my throat or do the planetfall section
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Dec 24, 2015 18:59
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TheHoosier posted:space sims arent my thing, but i decided a cure for insomnia would be to try out UC. I followed the tutorial to the letter and actually had fun. couldnt get the hang of the ground stuff unfortunately. might actually try out the DLC. hehe, glad you like it. I wanted to break the monotony of learning such a complex game, which is why I wrote the tutorial the way I did Also, the Lyrius Conflict DLC is currently on sale and you should definitely get it because aside from the on-going tweaks, bug fixes etc, I'm completely overhauling the graphics engine, updating the entire model dB etc. I hope to get that all done by the end of 2016. It's poo poo ton of work, but it sets the ground work for what I want to do with a sequel few years from now. e. as you guys can see, the Star Citizen twats have been doing their review bombing poo poo on my game's pages. So if could take a moment to rate the free and paid DLC, that would be smashing. Omi-Polari posted:For me that's part of the charm. You'll get to a part and he's like "okay, now reload the game because you definitely just died LOL!! Yeah, pretty much. Deadmeat5150 posted:I have an unironic love affair with the Battlecruiser series. Myself and three friends pooled together our meager savings (Not bad for a couple of 15 year olds) and bought a copy and a joystick in 1996. I've purchased every iteration since. Thanks for your support!! I think you're going to be impressed with what I have planned for the old gal in these upcoming updates via the DLC. D_Smart fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 22:43
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I cant wait to get home from ths in-laws to take a look!
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Dec 25, 2015 00:17
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I remember playing the demo of BC3000AD when I was a kid. I was completely baffled how there could apparently be entire planets in the game. I gather it was pretty buggy but it seemed way ahead of its time in terms of technical content.
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Dec 25, 2015 00:20
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I wanna recreate the scene from Ben Counter's Grey Knight where they get the ship shot out from under them trying to make a planetary insertion then fight their way into a stronghold. Is UC the game for me?
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Dec 25, 2015 00:31
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coconono posted:I wanna recreate the scene from Ben Counter's Grey Knight where they get the ship shot out from under them trying to make a planetary insertion then fight their way into a stronghold. Is UC the game for me? It could be!
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Dec 25, 2015 01:06
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OwlFancier posted:I remember playing the demo of BC3000AD when I was a kid. Entire planets had been done just fine earlier though in Elite 2, and better too to be honest, since the transition from space to planet and vice versa was seamless whereas in BC3K I'm pretty sure there was a loading screen. That said, I enjoyed BC3K when I played it (around 1999 or so), and don't even remember the copy I played being particularly buggy. The complexity of the simulation and the fact you were in control of a capital ship with all its subsystems, crew, docked fighters etc instead of a little X-Wing or dinky tradeship hit a lot of the right buttons with me, so I was able to overlook many of the more glaring issues it had with UI or whatever. The fact that the universe was 'alive' as well with different factions fighting each other, and how you could jump in somewhere and see this huge battle going on was really cool for the time and obviously something that had been lacking in many games of the genre up to that point (hell, it may have even been the first game of its type to make a serious effort of doing that - was it, Derek?)
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Dec 25, 2015 01:17
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D_Smart posted:
Steam doesn't acknowledge the 5+ hours I put in this morning or I would. I'll try again when I get home. ill probably have to dive into the manual some more; ive just been playing this poo poo like Space GTA.
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Dec 25, 2015 01:26
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god drat those guys hate your guts, holy poo poo
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Dec 25, 2015 02:22
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Drunk in Space posted:Entire planets had been done just fine earlier though in Elite 2, and better too to be honest, since the transition from space to planet and vice versa was seamless They weren't "entire planets" though. And they were "empty" and made up of mostly low res Gouraud shaded polygons. This is what the planets in the original BC3K looked like back in the day. Good times quote:whereas in BC3K I'm pretty sure there was a loading screen. There is no loading screen in any of my games prior to LOD. Here is someone playing BC3K and going from space to planet. What I did was cache the planet you're going to once you engage the jump engine with the planet as the target. Then if you commit (after being asked Y|N) to the planetfall procedure, I cut to an external camera view of your ship showing it flying into the planet. That's why during that transition, you don't see any loading screen, no pausing etc. Even now in UC, it's the same procedure, but with a different camera angle, atmospheric burn effects etc. And there are loading screens in LOD because : 1) it uses a completely different engine, and doesn't benefit from any of my earlier tech. In fact, when I finished the design in 2009 and we started the development in 2010, it was with my pre-existing tech (the iteration used in the AAW/AOA games from 2009. It then dawned on me that I would end up making yet another BC/UC game, and bringing along a lot of legacy tech, a bunch of stuff that had to be stripped out etc. So I scrapped it, and started to build a completely new game engine in 2011. 2) the planetary terrain is not procedural, since it's hand-crafted due to each base being stylized according to a specific climate (desert, (hot, (moderate, (artic) zone 3) the hand-crafted (in a level editor) planetary scenes are massive and won't fit into memory 4) in order to handle multiplayer clients efficiently, since the game is neither instanced, nor sharded - and all players exist in the same server - separating the game world into "scenes" provides complete control. It also allows the game engine to support both an MMO multiplayer model, as well as a standard client/server model with a server browser. The latter, on the console (or PC if we went that route), allows players to either host the game as server + play as client, or play as client connected to a dedicated player hosted server. quote:That said, I enjoyed BC3K when I played it (around 1999 or so), and don't even remember the copy I played being particularly buggy. You probably got it after I released that first mega-patch. Or maybe two years later after Interplay released v2.0 to retail. quote:The complexity of the simulation and the fact you were in control of a capital ship with all its subsystems, crew, docked fighters etc instead of a little X-Wing or dinky tradeship hit a lot of the right buttons with me, so I was able to overlook many of the more glaring issues it had with UI or whatever. The fact that the universe was 'alive' as well with different factions fighting each other, and how you could jump in somewhere and see this huge battle going on was really cool for the time and obviously something that had been lacking in many games of the genre up to that point (hell, it may have even been the first game of its type to make a serious effort of doing that - was it, Derek?) Yeah. It was the first game of its kind to do it. And last I checked, it still is. All of that is still maintained (obviously improved upon since that first 1996 release) in the UC games. It's because the BC/UC games have such a large following, that after I released UCCE v2.0 free on Steam, that it dawned on me that it's probably a good idea to improved on it. Hence The Lyrius Conflict DLC update. That DLC is what will determine where I go with the series in the coming years.
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Dec 25, 2015 14:53
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D_Smart posted:They weren't "entire planets" though. And they were "empty" and made up of mostly low res Gouraud shaded polygons. This is what the planets in the original BC3K looked like back in the day. Good times That's fair. I wasn't aware of the technical side of things regarding how they accomplished it in Frontier vs what you did with BC3K, and it's clear that graphically the planets in the Frontier were a lot simpler. Nevertheless I do like the fact that the transition was seamless, or at least visually seamless, to the player, which was very immersive for a space sim, whereas in the video you posted, and as you yourself explain, you can see that as the battlecruiser approaches the planet, it switches to a transitional external sequence (what I had mis-remembered as a loading screen), there's a brief (a few seconds) pause, and then suddenly it's down by the surface. That to me is just not as impressive visually as what was accomplished in Frontier, i.e. flying through the atmosphere from space, seeing clouds appear and the ground gradually start to form details (albeit very primitive details) as you got closer and closer to it. And since that game, which I played about '93 or so, was still relatively fresh in my mind in the late 90's, I do distinctly remember thinking at the time that this was an area where BC3K was weaker. Of course, at the same time, it also had many features that Frontier lacked, such as the aforementioned active universe, which was pretty cool.
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Dec 26, 2015 06:13
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Drunk in Space posted:That's fair. I wasn't aware of the technical side of things regarding how they accomplished it in Frontier vs what you did with BC3K, and it's clear that graphically the planets in the Frontier were a lot simpler. Yeah, those are all fair statements. Remember that Elite's world was procedurally generated; even back then. Hence the primitive showcase. btw, the slight pause you experience in the BC3K planetfall sequence, are the textures (sky, terrain, buildings) loading from disk. The raw planetary data was already fully loaded. And you will only experience that hiccup depending on how much memory your video card has. That's why, though the same tech is used in UC games, you tend not to notice is anymore due to the sheer amount of memory in video cards now. I had procedural generation tech from way back then; but never used it due to limitations of the computer systems at the time. e.g. the planetary terrain back then, and even in the current Universal Combat games, are procedurally generated. It is because of those tech limitations being no longer prevalent in modern systems, that we're only now seeing seamless space <-> planetary transitions in upcoming games like Battlescape, NMS, ED: Horizons etc. I am not including Star Citizen in the mix because theirs is i) a glorified hack running in the CryEngine editor ii) it will never see the light of day as a finished product. When I am finished with The Lyrius Conflict and which determines whether or not I move forward with one of the two new titles (UC Advanced | BC3K remake) I am planning, I intend to do seamless space<->planetary transitions as well, thus removing the external camera flyby sequence.
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Dec 26, 2015 15:36
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You know, I have always hated simulation games like Flight Simulator and Farm Simulator, the ones that are over complicated. However I still love Battlecruiser.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:03
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Deadmeat5150 posted:You know, I have always hated simulation games like Flight Simulator and Farm Simulator, the ones that are over complicated. However I still love Battlecruiser. heh yeah, love or hate them, my games are an acquired taste. Which is why there is never a middle ground. You either like them or you don't. And if you're an idiot, you hate them because you hate me.
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Dec 27, 2015 01:50
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D_Smart posted:heh yeah, love or hate them, my games are an acquired taste. Which is why there is never a middle ground. You either like them or you don't. And if you're an idiot, you hate them because you hate me. Do you have any gameplay vids of what the ground combat looks like? I tried looking on youtube and all I saw were people laughing at you.
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Dec 27, 2015 01:56
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coconono posted:Do you have any gameplay vids of what the ground combat looks like? I tried looking on youtube and all I saw were people laughing at you. im gonna say the ground stuff didn't go real well for me. let me preface that by saying that deploying ground troops while hovering my CC above the battlefield and blanketing enemies in pew pew lasers is a really awesome experience. however, sending my own guy down there and playing it as an FPS was super clunky for me. i probably need to just read the manual more, but that part of the tutorial didnt go as smoothly.
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Dec 27, 2015 05:26
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TheHoosier posted:im gonna say the ground stuff didn't go real well for me. let me preface that by saying that deploying ground troops while hovering my CC above the battlefield and blanketing enemies in pew pew lasers is a really awesome experience. however, sending my own guy down there and playing it as an FPS was super clunky for me. i probably need to just read the manual more, but that part of the tutorial didnt go as smoothly. Yeah, the FPS module in the UC games is kind clunky. I aim to fix that in The Lyrius Conflict DLC though, since the FPS engine in All Aspect Warfare which is the engine I'm porting to the DLC, is far more superior. Deploying your marines from the ship (via transporter or shuttle drop launch) smack into the middle of hostile territory, is a sight to behold.
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Dec 27, 2015 15:43
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Never played a space simulator, might have to grab this.
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Dec 30, 2015 03:01
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I wanted to enjoy this, but both times when I tried to play seriously were wasted due to saves corrupting, which has put me off. Apparently the quicksave function (shift+ctrl+G) is unreliable, which might have been nice to know beforehand.
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Dec 31, 2015 06:35
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The Interloper posted:I wanted to enjoy this, but both times when I tried to play seriously were wasted due to saves corrupting, which has put me off. Apparently the quicksave function (shift+ctrl+G) is unreliable, which might have been nice to know beforehand. Not sure which version you're playing, but the saved games work just fine. Most people don't know how the quick-save actually works. See if that helps. But you should use the full save if you want a full saved game image. Also, if you are running the freeware version on Steam, that version is 2.00.02. The paid (full version) is 2.00.03. The Lyrius Conflict DLC (for the Steam version) is 3.00.07
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Jan 1, 2016 19:15
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In other news, Battlecruiser 3000AD is 20 years old this year. Were you part of the 1996 revolution? 
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Jan 1, 2016 19:17
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D_Smart posted:Not sure which version you're playing, but the saved games work just fine. Most people don't know how the quick-save actually works. See if that helps. But you should use the full save if you want a full saved game image. I have the Lyrius Conflict DLC on Steam, and yes I'm running the game through that option every time. I'm calling it "quicksave" because that's how it's referred to in the command reference sheet. The one that saves to the "autosave" slot without quitting the game. Normally it works (which is why I was using it so as not to have to quit to the menu every time I save), but on two separate occasions I've had saves that don't work when I try to load them. The loading bar stops at 50% and doesn't move no matter how long I wait. The program isn't frozen though because pressing ESC exits it. One of the saves was from the free version before I bought the DLC, but the second is all with the most recent version of the DLC.
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Jan 1, 2016 20:06
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The Interloper posted:I have the Lyrius Conflict DLC on Steam, and yes I'm running the game through that option every time. I'm calling it "quicksave" because that's how it's referred to in the command reference sheet. The one that saves to the "autosave" slot without quitting the game. Normally it works (which is why I was using it so as not to have to quit to the menu every time I save), but on two separate occasions I've had saves that don't work when I try to load them. The loading bar stops at 50% and doesn't move no matter how long I wait. The program isn't frozen though because pressing ESC exits it. This is the first time that I am seeing or getting any such report. Can you please run CHKDSK on the drive? It could be that the games are being saved to a bad sector, one that's flagged as going bad or bad, but files are being moved to good sectors. Also, start a new game. And if you run into this problem again, please open a support ticket and attach the saved game files so that I can analyze them. e. CTRL+SHIFT+G (Quick Save) is the same as COMMAND/SYSTEMS -> QUIT & SAVE WITH RESUME but doesn't quit the game. D_Smart fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jan 1, 2016 |
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Jan 1, 2016 20:27
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D_Smart posted:In other news, Battlecruiser 3000AD is 20 years old this year. Were you part of the 1996 revolution? I was!!
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Jan 1, 2016 21:10
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I was on the CompuServe forums and on USENET back when this went down. The threads were epic, and Derek, to his credit, was right in the middle of it all. It was pretty wild watching the developer wade into everything that was going on. It was pretty unheard of to see or hear of a developer who was as visible as Derek was back then. The only other one who came close was Andy Hollis, when he was developing for Jane's Combat Simulation / Electronic Arts. While Derek's approach to the situation is well documented, I did and do admire that he didn't quit on the project. He fixed it, got patches out, and eventually released the thing for free, while continuing to develop and improve the game. I remember 2.0 coming out on a PC Gamer cover CD and thinking how wild it was that a full game was actually out there for someone to play for free. That takes a lot of internal fortitude and determination. Others would have likely abandoned the thing and moved on to something else, but Derek didn't choose that path. Full points for taking the hard path.
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Jan 1, 2016 21:35
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