Messages

21

General Announcements / Re: Kashmir going down temporarily.

« on: December 16, 2006, 01:56:02 pm »

They replaced the proc heatsink and ram.

I was guessing that either the ram was bad or the heatsink was overheating.

22

General Announcements / Re: Kashmir going down temporarily.

« on: December 15, 2006, 06:50:49 am »

Ok, it's better now (I hope).

23

General Announcements / Kashmir going down temporarily.

« on: December 14, 2006, 09:49:40 am »

Kashmir.g33xnexus.com is going to be going offline at some point over the next couple days while I try to determine why it's been crashing when it's emerging stuff. I'll update with more specific information when I get it.

--Rosencrantz

24

Bug Reports / Re: On the CS_Assert (n < count)

« on: November 30, 2006, 05:42:43 pm »

Excellent! I'm glad we figured out what it was. Lynx, how did you figure that one out? Your comment earlier today about iRegion* makes much more sense now, but I'd love to know how you tracked that one down.

--Rosencrantz

25

Bug Reports / On the CS_Assert (n < count)

« on: November 30, 2006, 09:06:46 am »

Well, after some tracing in gdb I discovered that the reason the assert is popping up is because both n and count are zero. Which fits with the assert, but leaves me feeling uneasy.

1) Count isn't being set right for whatever reason and should be > 0.
2) Count is fine because there's nothing to count, but the CS_ASSERT isn't taking that into account.

3) Something else entirely.

26

Precursors Artwork / Modeling stuff

« on: November 12, 2006, 01:16:39 pm »

I've got a friend who's been interested in doing some modeling stuff for us on precursors. He's taken a look at some of the stuff on trac, but he wanted more information/guidance on what was being looked for (as not all of them were concept sketches, and some were modeled, etc..). Anyway he's going to be calling me this Tuesday night about 7pm EST. I'll make the best guesses I can, but more input is always good. Mostly I'm looking for some people to hop on IRC so I can type and talk if there are questions, etc (Caenus & Morgul, can you guys make it?).

27

Precursors / Re: Galaxy Generator.

« on: November 10, 2006, 12:21:10 pm »

   Moving things around in RA/Dec/Dist space is a bit more complicated than I'd like, and doesn't give us much advantage... we need rectangular coords for rendering (even to the skybox) so it'd be easier to convert to the galactic scale (number 2)

I actualy disagree here, I think the RA/Dec/Dist is exactly the system we need. while rectangular cordiantes are easy to understand they require lots of calcualtions. as for the sky box , the simplest and quickest way I can think of doing it is using a sphere instead of 6 planes. Then do a orthagraphical projection onto a flat material. If there is a simpler way to do this I dont know it.
 

Just to play devil's advocate here. How does RA/Dec/Dist require less calculations? What specific calculations are you referring to? How many conversions to and from rectangular need to be done, and what about re-deriving equations of motion and translation if you aren't going to convert?

In short, What specifically are the benefits gained? And what is the range of use of these coordinates?

(FYI, I'm all for changing coordinate systems if it makes the calculations significantly eaiser).

28

Precursors / Gems and References

« on: November 02, 2006, 08:30:04 pm »

Some gems and References for Contingencyplan. I'll post more as I find good/relevant ones.

Keeping a Massively Multiplayer Online Game Massive, Online, and Persistent by Shea Street, Tantrum Games.

References:
[Ratcliff01] Ratcliff, John W. "Sphere Trees for Fast Visibility Culling, Ray Tracing, and Range Searching." Game Programming Gems 2. Charles River Media, Inc, 2001

[Street05] Street, Shea. "Massively Multiplayer Games Using a Distributed Services Approach." In Massively Multiplayer Game Development 2. Charles River Media, Inc,. 2005

Fast and Efficient Implementation of a Remote Procedure Call System. by Hyun-jik Bae

References:

[Breck99] eNITL. The Network Improv Template Language Available online at http://networkimprov.com/enitl/enitl.html.

[Parr04] Parr, Terence. ANTLR Parser Generator v2.7.4 Available online at http://www.antlr.org

*Note: Actually not all the rest of these references are useful. Just some OS stuff. Will post if cplan wants it.

29

Precursors / Re: Precursors, Open Source, GPL and community?

« on: October 28, 2006, 12:25:02 pm »

Recon, I'm not an expert on this but I don't think you can mix LGPL and GPL like that unless the parts are independantly viable. What makes you think it's going to require a huge amount of work?

30

Suggestions / Re: Hyper-Drive implementation idea

« on: October 23, 2006, 07:47:21 am »

Ah, Caenus my dear friend. You're assuming. Your example is correct, but you didn't take into account that 3d objects, might have 4 dimensions. Length, Width, Hiegth, Mass. I'm making the (most likely incorrect) declaration that the force of gravity is a vibration of the 4th spatial dimension, and that the phsyical manifestation of the 4th dimension is the property we know of as Mass. Just like a 2D bug could see the effects of height of a 3D object, we see the effects of the 4th dimension, namely mass. So, Mass has a true meaning in the 4th dimension, and has effects on 3D ships traveling the 4th dimension.

Now, this is most likely 99% bullshit, but that's what I've been seeing.

[EDIT:]

This all being said, the math would basically be adding a 4D vector to your 3D vector (velocity). So, when you're hit by these eddies, your mass will change as well as a directional vector being added to your ship. As a second note to this, a computer is key to travelign subspace. It makes piloting work just like you'd imagine. However, without the computer, you will either kill yourself, or get lost, edning up who knows where in realspace. Perhaps a NorAellian could pilot without a computer (some do), but they can visualize in 4D.

[/EDIT]

Hmm. I think I've heard something like that before as a theory. Or at least something similar to that. It does make some things interesting. I have to think about this some....

31

Precursors / Re: Scale, Physics, etc..

« on: October 18, 2006, 04:45:23 pm »

What I would like to hear is idea's to deal with travelling within a solar system!! some sort of FTL drive that only works outside gravitational fields, can get you near a planet or star quickly perhaps. 

See this topic for subspace, ftl, etc...

http://forums.g33xnexus.com/index.php/topic,77.0.html

32

Precursors / Scale, Physics, etc..

« on: October 18, 2006, 10:55:17 am »

Ok, I've been thinking aout this for a while, and Recon's post kind of reminded me to post about this.

Anyway, scale. While using actual physical scale is a really neat idea it suffers from at least two flaws.

Traveling over Interstellar distances is boring, and even intersystem distances can be boring. These can both be fixed, but you have to be careful about how you fix them.

Population density can be a game killer. By nature all the players will gather in certain areas, and areas further away from that will have less players. This is to be expected and is normal. Unfortunately if you have too much space, many areas will be underutilized, if not outright empty. That detracts from the game experience and leaves the player feeling like they are playing a single-player game.

The density problem is a complex one and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Except limit how much content is created and add more when it starts getting too full. However, the density problem is also very dependant on the scale problem. If the scale is too far out of the normal range it will feel fake, but if it is too close to the realistic range then it will compound the density problem.

I'm not sure how to fix the scale problem, and I think we have to be careful, I have a feeling that an arbitrary changing of variables may have disasterous consequences (at least as far as the physics engine is concerned). This first occured to me reading about the Infinity engine/game. The dev on that game noticed the scale issue and increased the rate at which time passed so that realistic speeds "appeared" to go by faster. My physics instincts tell me that that is a very bad idea, but I haven't looked into it enough to have a proof as to why.

33

RaptorNL / Re: A C++ Sockets library

« on: October 14, 2006, 12:39:47 pm »

I've done a bit of poking around. The major problem: library's licensed GPL.

:-\

Kind of, there is an alternate license agreement but you have to pay for it.
http://www.alhem.net/Sockets/license.html

34

RaptorNL / Re: A C++ Sockets library

« on: October 13, 2006, 07:53:01 pm »

It looks pretty straightforward to use. The documentation is pretty sparse, but the tutorials aren't too bad. Not sure if it does everything we need it to do or not (specifically RUDP).

EDIT: Also, if I have time this weekend I might try to figure out how the networking plugin works and take a swing at giving this a quick test run on kashmir.

35

RaptorNL / Re: Idea: Socket class

« on: October 06, 2006, 06:22:57 am »

Sounds good to me. Toss bind and listen into the constructor for ListenSocket, and connect into the constructor for ConnectSocket. I don't really know anything about the statistics, but your idea sounds good to me.

36

General Discussion / Re: This fits just about everybody here....

« on: September 24, 2006, 06:15:19 pm »

10 points if you can name the equation in the large white background

37

Bug Reports / Re: Error when trying to start local server

« on: September 21, 2006, 12:49:42 pm »

The part with multiple clients is a known issue. We're currently working on redoing the networking stuff since it's more or less not working as expected right now.

38

Bug Reports / Re: Error when trying to start local server

« on: September 21, 2006, 09:44:04 am »

If I have problems after an svn update like that I usually just do a full clean, reconfigure remake/jam.

You also might try the phystut under CS and see if that works.

--Rosencrantz

39

Bug Reports / Re: Error when trying to start local server

« on: September 21, 2006, 08:13:41 am »

My gut says that this is due to the lack of double-precision from your previous post. Currently recompiling to check this out.

--Rosencrantz

40

RaptorNL / Re: Start of the RaptorNL project

« on: September 15, 2006, 12:53:16 pm »

I can't think of anything to add specifically, what exactly are the convenience factors? Is it just that development on HawkNL has slowed down, plus wanting additional features?

Also, what are some of the additional features that you're thinking of putting in?