Upgrading weapons

[bb1]

Or "CDP": Convienent Damage Programming

[Dx]

Or "CDP": Convienent Damage Programming

Or the lack there of sorting plans for damage effects.

[Avatar]

*cough*PENTIUM*cough*...

They would have if they could have, but they couldn't so they didn't...

I can't even imagine how they got what they got when we had what we had...



-Av-

[Rocket]

well, even with all of the power of c++ to change an older engine, i don't think you could ever get pieces of ships blown off, or damages that realistic.. *sigh

then the subject of a "BZ3" kicks in.. .....

[Avatar]

You might be able to add tracking damage by GEO piece, but for many of the ships that wouldn't be much better (or more realistic) than it is now.

I agree that some day someone will make something very much like BZ in a modern engine, with all the goodies and playable only on the latest 20Ghz systems... 

-Av-

[Dx]

*cough*PENTIUM*cough*...

They would have if they could have, but they couldn't so they didn't...

I can't even imagine how they got what they got when we had what we had...



-Av-

I'm not so sure, the sorting was already there from prior games (dx3 games?) and all it's doing is switching the model that is being rendered similar to LOD1 , 2 , 3. I had a PII 350 back then so i would say it was more than possible at the time.

[ssuser]

Even sprite based games before that time would show damage to enemies, I don't think it would have been too much harder to implement more types of damage in the bz1 engine even back then, though I think it would have slowed down those antiquated systems. 

A slightly later patch could have added damage to skins and perhaps altered GEOs, the top end systems from 1999 or so could have run stuff like that very easily.

[bb1]

Are you forgetting that where a GEO meets another leaves a hole?

[ssuser]

What I meant was, is that you could have the game do an on-the-fly substitution of a GEO piece - say a front panel - with an actual gouge or dimple in it in conjunction with a different MAP skin to show damage. This of course would require more code as the game would have to track each individual unit on the map for damage status  -you would use a lot more memory too as you would be keeping more GEO pieces and skins loaded at a time.

[Dx]

Wholes in the geos don't matter as the damaged geos are not the same piece, they probably wouldn't use more memory as they are not loaded till the lod1 geo is unloaded, same with the texture.

In UT2k4 the damaged ship replace the lod1 ship and tossed in some smoke and sparks before it exploded to nothing. Bz explodes the parts of the ships to chunks, toss in the flash bang and smoke. There really is no reason to do the damaged versions unless like in some newer games you has damaged buildings left behind. That would demand a lot more memory and cpu in that case. Would be cool to do that, i resently tested Bz up to 286,100 poly count @ 8.2fps on my new pc. If only i could get a longer view distance.

[Avatar]

Even sprite based games before that time would show damage to enemies, I don't think it would have been too much harder to implement more types of damage in the bz1 engine even back then, though I think it would have slowed down those antiquated systems. 

I could barely even RUN BZ1 when it came out.   Remember what was common at that time?  486Dx2-266?  RIVA 4M (that's MEG!) graphics cards?  Nobody had a gig of ram, that would be nuts...

A hot system was a Pentium 120 with linked dual Voodoo2 graphics cards (SLI is nothing new...).  My current video card has more computing power and memory than my first three DOS boxes combined. 

They didn't even have enough clock cycles to give Scavs real brains...   

I think they did what they could, given the time and hardware they had.  I also think, as I said, they would have done more if they could have, but the hardware at the time and the time they had to code weren't enough to go nuts with.

[ssuser]

In 1998 when BZ1 came out the new systems you could buy were hotter than that, though, and would run BZ1 easily. I first played BZ1 on a "budget" PC that I bought in 1999, had a 466 MHz celeron and 64 MB of memory, BZ1 just smoked on that, though I was stuck at 640 x 480 screen res ( had the low budget motherboard video).

Gotta keep upgrading Av.  A 486 would have been painfully obsolete by then. Though you could probably play Duke Nukem 3d on it ok, though.

I wonder what Windows 7 is going to take to run well? I assume 4 gig of memory is going to be regarded as the new "standard" by Microsoft.

[Dx]

486DX2 was very old from back in 1992, if you played bz on that in 1998... too funny. I had got the dx4 chip and sold the whole thing for 400.

When bz was release we had PII 586 and 66Mhz bus speeds an shortly afterwards became a 100 Mhz bus.
My old I740 video card at 8Mb got 45fps back then in Bz.

[ssuser]

I used to have an ancient 486, it had a VGA adapter but you could really only play 80's style games on it well, even when you ran a "small" dos program like edit you could actually watch it load, lol.

Anyone here planning on upgrading to Windows 7 right away when it comes out? I wonder if BZ1 will run on it.

[Dx]

I tested the beta version and i think it will run it ok. People using Vista should get windows 7 asap when it comes out next month.