Supreme Continuation

7 March 2007 — dan

If I'm going to waste prudently invest so much time on this game, I might as well get another blog post out of it.

First: Quick and dirty frame rate improvement tips.

SupCom has a long list of rendering options. You can manually turn off pretty much every single thing on the screen, giving you a magnificent frame rate provided you have the ability to perceive the action by mental telepathy. You access all this via a neat command-completion console, which you activate with the traditional "`" key (the tilde key on English keyboards, something else on others).

The render options all start with "ren_", and are toggles - enter them again to reverse the effect.

The "ren_decals" command is the most useful, I think. It removes static and animated overlaid texture effects, for a significant frame rate improvement without making the game hideous.

"Ren_water" removes water rendering entirely, so ships appear to levitate (and submarines are undistorted). If you're playing on a map with water but nobody's building ships, you might as well use ren_water whether you care about the look of the game or not.

"Ren_splats" affects scorch marks from explosions and such. "Ren_bloom" affects the glow effect from various landscape features, making everything darker but, once again, a bit faster.

View frame rate with keypad-slash. Turn off vertical sync in the standard video options to get the most frame rate possible - nothing moves fast enough for tearing effects to be noticeable, anyway.

There've been a couple of patches for SupCom already, the most recent of which, as I predicted, turns off the obnoxious SecuROM disc-check copy protection (well, for most countries' versions of the game, anyway).

So it only took about a week after the retail release of the game before they ditched SecuROM. I hope they didn't pay much for it.

The patches seem to have mopped up the few disconcerting crash problems the original version had. For me, those glitches amounted to the ability to play exactly one multiplayer SupCom game per Windows session. Fixed now.

And, in a credit to the developers, very few kinky and abusive game strategies have surfaced so far. Actually, there's only one that I know of, and it's rather obscure.

Apart from that, and lousy frame rates when a lot's going on, the only broken thing in the whole game right now seems to be the hard-to-see "ferry" icon, which is sometimes VERY hard to see.

(Gas Powered Games would probably get sued if they made the pale purple icon bright orange.)

Supreme Commander's GPGNet chat/matching system also has a number of points in its favour. It is, for instance, not a vast bulky reinvention of Steam, which means it's not a big deal that you have to launch and quit the game every time you play.

GPGNet also lets you easily submit your game recordings (SupCom records every game you play, though by default each new game overwrites the last) and download other peoples'. Thus may you armchair-quarterback to your heart's content.

There are a few minor hassles in the GPGNet client, like modal windows that needlessly stop you from being able to reply to a private message without closing the game list you're looking at. The SupCom matching system also, according to ancient tradition, tends to match newbies with experts in "ranked" games, to the detriment of both. That's because the matcher first tries to find you an opponent of similar skill, but then it just tries to match you with someone, no matter how more or less 1337 that person may be.

Supreme Commander is so young that the rating system doesn't have a good idea of peoples' skill yet anyway, and by far the most common ranked game is the one-on-one type, which is always a slapfest on a small map that's an exercise in Tech 1 unit rushing and requires a specialised subset of overall SupCom skills.

But I'd still like to see an option to not play at all if there aren't any opponents available who seem to be similar to you in skill.

Oh, and the Cybran destroyers that can sprout legs and walk very very slowly on the land are, for this reason, awesome. Regrettably, they also have the exact same pathfinding code as every other amphibious unit, which is to say that they do not know that they move with the speed of continental drift when on land.

You therefore have to waypoint Cybran destroyers around any island or isthmus that may get in their way, unless you want to see them lumbering across it. This isn't hard on the common multiplayer maps, but those who take the mellow and easygoing single player Campaign path will soon grow to appreciate the Cybran destroyer's irresistible attraction to even the tiniest patch of dry land.

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 3 Comments »

Let's buy a sculpture, darling!

3 March 2007 — dan

I live in Katoomba, a town replete with cafes and art galleries. Not to mention art galleries with cafes in them. And cafes with little art displays.

This kind of town tends to breed sculptors, and that subcategory of sculptor who's good enough with a welder to make sculptures but not good enough to get a proper job (OK, some of them are true MIG poets, but most aren't) tends to produce weird garden art.

They didn't necessarily mean it to be garden art in the first place. But they couldn't sell it, and it was really big and pointy, and their wives were perfectly clear that it wasn't going to stay in the front room no matter how much they enjoyed opening their beers on it, so out in the garden it went.

I'm not really a fan of the usual whimsical googly-eyed-giraffe-made-out-of-springs kind of welded sculpture.

(Though I much prefer it to what one gallery not far from here has out front - a life-sized 3D replica of the screaming horse from Picasso's Guernica. Dear god.)

But I could, in certain circumstances, be persuaded to make an exception.

It would appear to be to scale with the original actor, if not even bigger. It's not cheap, but great art never is, is it?

(If you're reading this after the auction page is gone, it was from this eBay seller, and I've archived the page here.)

I realise that not all men would want this thing. I further realise that women who would also like it do exist.

I do not, however, feel I am being unfairly stereotypical by pointing out that it is (a) awesome and (b) perfectly acceptable grounds for divorce.

Posted in Nerdery, Strange Tales, Toys. 8 Comments »

Supreme Commander Lite

23 February 2007 — dan

I mentioned TA Spring in a passing link in my Supreme Commander post, but it deserves more. It kind of looks the way you'd expect Total Annihilation 2 to have looked, if that had come out in about 2001.

(That's the original TA intro music; TA had a proper orchestral score, played by a proper orchestra. And saved in a perfectly legible format, so it was easy to convert it to a 10kHz 8 bit mono WAV so it'd fit on a floppy, copy it onto someone else's PC, and set it as their Win98 startup sound. Ah, good times, good times.)

There was, of course, no actual TA2 if you don't count Kingdoms; Atari bought the rights to the TA brand and did nothing with it. Hence, Gas Powered Games straight-facedly claim Supreme Commander to be "all-new intellectual property", despite the fact that it's self-evidently a jazzed-up TA for the 21st century.

Spring lets you have a very flexible viewpoint - much more flexible, in fact, than SupCom. SupCom lets you zoom out to see the entire battlefield, but all you can do is zoom in and out and move your camera in the X and Y dimensions - you have no manual control over camera heading.

There's a good reason for that, of course; lots of viewpoints that look cool are useless for controlling a game, not to mention quite confusing. SupCom's puzzling enough for beginners without adding the possibility of moving your viewpoint inside a hill.

Spring's developers are unconcerned with such things, so the Spring engine allows you to fly your camera anywhere you like, or even use a first-person view from a unit.

The old TA units don't have nearly enough triangles in them to hold up well in close examination, of course. But Spring is all open-source-y and extensible, so prettier units, or other features, can be added to it at will.

Mmmmm.

TA was, of course, also highly extensible; people made lots of mods and tweaks and new units for it.

All of which can be seen in all their close-up magnificence in the Spring engine, too.

The old TA sounds are still perfectly decent, though.

I'm still going to be playing Supreme Commander, but there's no point even trying to play SupCom on a five-year-old computer. As long as you've got a 3D card that people actually wanted to buy back then, though, Spring should be pretty darn happy.

And you can't beat a price of "free".

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 2 Comments »

An extraordinary coincidence

22 February 2007 — dan

My productivity has just dropped to zero.

I cannot imagine what connection that might have with the copy of Supreme Commander the nice postman brought me.

I only dabbled with the widely-pirated beta version, so the retail version is pretty much new to me.

Except it isn't, because everybody who tells you that Supreme Commander is Total Annihilation on steroids is exactly right. A TA player will feel very much at home.

It's certainly taken me back to 1997, when I was playing Total Annihilation on my K6-200 (with crazy-fast Tseng ET6000 graphics card and useless-for-TA Monster 3D Voodoo Graphics accelerator) at 1024 by 768 and winding the game speed down as soon as battle proper commenced, to keep the frame rate out of slideshow territory.

Now here I am again, doing exactly the same thing ten years later on my 20-times-faster PC.

Admittedly, I am now playing with one monitor at 1600 by 1200 and the other one (which doesn't seem to be as useful as you might think, but is so cool that I cannot countenance disabling it) at 1024 by 768.

And it's all pretty and 3D accelerated.

And everything's larger in scale, more like real military units in size-to-weapon-range terms. SupCom can also support bodaciously hyper-gigantic maps, though there's not much point trying to play on one today unless you've got a PC that fell through a time warp from a thousand years in the future.

By and large, though, SupCom still feels awfully TA-ish.

All this same-old-same-old stuff does not mean that SupCom is not a fine game. It appears to be one, from what little I've seen so far, even if those timeless unit pathfinding problems are still there. And very noticeable to dorks like me who insist on making 200-unit armies on the early tutorial levels.

(Pathfinding problems are a big obstacle when you start playing with the nifty formation and coordinated attack features. I suppose the developers could have smoothed it over a bit by allowing re-formationing units to cheat and walk through each other, but I'm sure some munchkin would immediately figure out how to use that to make 40% of his units invulnerable at any given time.)

(Oh, and I can't say I'm a huge fan of frickin' SecuROM copy protection, either, but presumably that'll be turned off a couple of patches down the track, as usual. And it only stopped the game from starting the first time I tried to run it. Fingers crossed.)

So SupCom is not just TA warmed over. It's a cool modern RTS that does stuff that nobody else's RTS games can do. It's just that a lot of the stuff that it does was already done by TA, because TA was so very far ahead of its time.

Command queuing, smart unit selection hotkeys (yes, control-Z to select all units the same as the ones currently selected still works, though it doesn't seem to be mentioned in the manual; does anybody know how to set map bookmarks?), the ability to issue commands to factories to affect the units they produce... all TA stuff, and all beefed up in SupCom.

(The perfect example being telling a factory to send its ground units over the hills and far away, then setting one or more air transports to assist the factory, which will cause the transports to ferry the units to their destination automagically. I don't think transports-assisting-other-transports works right yet, though.)

And SupCom, like TA, is still a RTS game for people who hate micromanagement. I don't think micro is bad; I'm just not into it. So Blizzard-y games with lots of unit abilities that you have to play like a piano if you want to do even slightly well leave me cold.

(Yes, I'm aware that high-level TA degenerated into an evil clickfest, as people discovered that vast crowds of missile trucks were unanswerable early on, while giant flocks of stealth fighters, carefully managed, were just as invincible later.)

The Gamereplays Supreme Commander section looks like the best site to soak up info on the game at the moment. Almost all of the replays they have online are for beta versions and fail amusingly...

Supreme Commander replay error

...on the retail release, but that'll change.

I'm pleased to see, as I peruse the replays-I-can't-play list, the irrepressible Gnugs mixing it up in SupCom. Now we old-timers need only see a gigantic Swedish Yankspankers sign rotating over the SupCom battlefield to feel perfectly at home.

(Although SY might, of course, be a little busy.)

The Yankspankers were the people responsible for the TA Demo Recorder, which allowed games to be recorded and played back via a sort of benign man-in-the-middle attack. SupCom has its own record/playback system built in, of course.

If you don't have a sufficiently bitchin' computer to play SupCom, I strongly recommend you pick up a copy of TA - and the Core Contingency and Battle Tactics expansions as well, even if the hovercraft were all useless. Going back to TA today is not like going back to the original Command and Conquer; the 256 colour graphics look distinctly dated, but TA's gameplay is still great.

(Kingdoms was kind of interesting, and prettier, but the original is better.)

Because TA doesn't use 3D acceleration at all (zillions of tiny polygons were un-acceleratable by 3D cards of TA's era), it's also an excellent game for computers with crappy 3D adapters, including boring business boxes and your Aunt Mabel's dreadful Dell.

Any current CPU will push TA along at warp speed at as high a resolution as you can fit on your monitor, and it's a young enough game that you can play online using nice normal TCP/IP, rather than having to do some bizarre tunnelling trick with IPX/SPX or something.

If your PC is large and veiny enough for SupCom, though - the minimum requirements are not completely laughable, but more of everything is a very good idea - forget its little brother.

Get in on the ground floor of the connoisseur's RTS for the next ten years.

Posted in Games, MiniReviews, Nerdery. 9 Comments »

The bad review kiss of death

19 February 2007 — dan

I just had occasion to look at my old piece here about a self-contained water cooling device that did not work very well, and checked to see whether an awful review of the device I linked to was still up.

It was not; the site is now a parked domain. Awwww.

More entertainingly, though, the company that sent me the gadget for review now has a teensy little problem with their home page, which redirects to the entirely reasonable http://yenindustries.com/index.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gifindex.gif before Firefox pulls the plug on its foolishness. Internet Explorer keeps on diligently trying to load it for a while before giving up with a less informative message.

So I'm leaving death and derangement in my wake, as usual. Jolly good.

Posted in Humour, Nerdery, Shop talk, Strange Tales. 4 Comments »

Tankitude!

16 February 2007 — dan

Why didn't someone tell me earlier that there was a show called Tank Overhaul?

(I found out about it in one of Toolmonger's TV updates.)

It's pretty much what you'd expect - one of those blokes-fixing-stuff-up shows, except with armoured fighting vehicles instead of some poxy motorcycle.

Sweat, rust and tea.

There are four episodes, featuring a Comet, a Panther, a Sherman and a Hellcat. I don't know whether there'll be any more (there's not a whole lot of info about the show on the Web; search for it and you're likely to find torrent sites before you find anything about the production company...), but there's quite a lot of tanky goodness in just these.

The series started out very well, with a collection of small-budget English blokes whose repair strategies involve a lot of sledgehammers, crowbars, wedges, and big baulks of wood. They love their jobs, and they make fun of millionaire tossers who hire other people to fix tanks for them at great expense.

Then along comes Episode 2, which is (a) quite heavily padded and (b) all about those millionaire tossers and the men who work for them.

(Curiously, it appears to be a rule on both sides of the Atlantic that no tank restoration workshop is complete without a black and white cat wandering around.)

Have at thee!

But episode three has the English chaps again. Hurrah!

Actually, all of the episodes have a non-trivial amount of somewhat repetitive padding, including the old Cheap-Ass War Documentary Maker's Favourite - shots of the place where a battle happened, with sound effects that give the impression that the fighting's still going on, if only the stupid cameraman would turn around. The producers are trying a bit harder than that, though; they also have sequences with pretty decent CGI tanks superimposed on the scene. I'd still rather the show spent all of its time with the actual restorers, though.

Rotato-tank!

The first three eps don't actually feature the end of the job, on account of how... the job doesn't end.

If your "restoration" only involves making the outside of a reasonably complete tank look presentable for static display in a museum, then you can get it done in a week. But these are proper restoration projects, with the aim of making a working and highly authentic vehicle. And, on top of that, they're not starting (in the first three episodes) with something that's been perfectly preserved in a bog. No; they get tanks that've either been sitting in a river for sixty years, or used for target practice for thirty.

You get to see a lot of progress, and other tanks trundling around and, upon occasion, deleting one spatial dimension from a smaller vehicle. But they kind of gloss over the fact that the actual project tanks in the first three episodes aren't even rolling chassis by the end of the show.

The last episode's got Americans again, but it's not as badly padded as the second, and goes all heartwarming at the end. Which is permissible, since you also get an M18 Hellcat tearing around like an 18-ton sports car.

This is almost enough to get me to forgive the voice-over guy for, earlier in the series, talking about how terrifying the German tank force was in 1941, over stock footage of ranks of Tiger IIs that didn't exist before 1944. And, more seriously, for using the term "military-industrial complex" as if it's a compliment, which it isn't.

Tank Overhaul is still excellent viewing, though.

Now - how can we get Tim and Rex involved?

(I've reviewed quite a lot of toy tanks over the years, by the way. Plus one centipede.)

Posted in Nerdery, Strange Tales, Toys. 5 Comments »

The 3.5Mb Amazon page

13 February 2007 — dan

This Daily WTF post amused me much more than is reasonable.

Amazon will presumably fix this listing in the near future, so I downloaded the page source for posterity. If you for some reason want to view its full 3,677,481 byte magnificence - I recommend you use a text editor, not a browser - you can find a Zipped version of it here.

Posted in Humour, Nerdery. Leave a Comment »

Next: The Zork FPS

11 February 2007 — dan

DoomRL

Doom - The Roguelike sounds like a strong contender for Nerdiest Thing In The Entire History Of The World. And, OK, it is.

There are, however, two strong points in its favour.

1: It works. It's not what you'd call a deep game, and it has no lofty goals, but it's more complex than you might at first think. And it really does function quite well.

Thought has gone into how to translate the FPS experience into a turn-based ASCII game, and DoomRL has kept the spirit of Doom without making bad decisions like trying to translate famous levels into 80x24 screens. There are new weapons and old ones, and skills to beef up your character when he goes up levels, and things like shotgun reloading work in sensible ways.

There's even an ADOM-style tactics setting, to simulate dodging around to avoid fire or standing there pouring your own bullets into enemies. (When you pick up a Berserk Pack, you are of course stuck on Aggressive tactics until it wears off.)

2: It's got sound.

Roguelikes, traditionally, are silent as the grave, but DTR has standard DOOM sounds. And they don't seem out of place at all.

I didn't realise how deeply those grunts and snuffles and yells and scratching noises had burrowed into my consciousness until I started hearing them again. After I came to, hunched in a dark corner of the kitchen holding a carving knife and snarling, I was really impressed.

You don't have to have the sound on to play; if you're goofing off at work it's obviously inadvisable, and it's not even possible if you're running DoomRL on some ancient system or other, according to roguelike tradition. But the sound really does help. It lets you know what monsters are out there, and even uses stereo panning to tell you where they are.

There's a Wiki for DoomRL as well, by the way. Oh, and the same author has produced the going-full-circle DiabloRL, and a seven day roguelike (previously) called Berserk!.

I wonder what he'll turn into a roguelike next.

Myst? Civilization? Metroid?

Posted in Games, Nerdery. 7 Comments »
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