harntrox

Galaktikon Reloaded - Free Persistent Browser Based Game easy to remember: www.GalaxySmash.com Think Ultima-Online meets Intellivision Utopia New: Added massive tile based world, plus a server than can handle 1000+ players in a single RTS/MUD world. The art is still in beta (but not for long). all the gameplay features are 100% done. You control an empire with 5 graphical screens (and some sub-menus). Easy one the eyes compared to the typical game in this genre with 20+ text buttons. Heres what it all looks like

Here we have a game of maximums for the Strategy Grognards - maximum strategy with just enough graphics to get the job done. It runs in a web browser, and its designed to be scalable to support thousands of players on a single server. And its 100% free 'MMRTS'. Just how massively multiplayer it can go has yet to be determined .... (by you) ! http://www.galaktikon.com

make sure you set the mod to run at the correct priority, as stated in the readme.txt

Soeldner had the same problem upon release. they fixed it since, because everyone pretty much agreed it was the right thing to do. go rocky go !

Download Mission HX This is the last and best gametype i ever made for GR1. about a year ago in fact... It generates replayable, random missions for all gr maps including mod maps too. a 2 meg mod that gives you as much replayability as a mission pack. not to mention enemy AI that sets paths and runs across the map in a game-type, which gives you a whole new challenge now that you can get flanked from random direction if you dont watch your six. enjoy !

There has never been any intellectual property issues of any kind with HX5. feel free to PM me with your questions.

ooo a gr-repairing challenge,eh ? quick and dirty: delete options.xml in your gr folder. run the game. it will now re-detect your hardware. if u still got 2 soundcards, you are loading 2 drivers either due to corrupted registry or you have enabled 2 sound cards - one on the mobo, one is PCI128. make sure you get the correct driver for your sound card-could be a conflict with your sound card driver and who knows what else. disable the mobo one in the Bios if its on. gr doesnt like multiple sound cards. total reinstall- windows uninstall will fail to remove over 200 megs of crap in gr. there is actually no such thing as 'uninstall' in windows - it never works - theres always files and folders left over. always as such, you must take responsibility for your filesystem, and the failure of the 10,000 operating system engineers at M$ upon yourself, and delete the Ghost Recon folder 'by hand', after uninstalling from the control panel. Now reinstall GR and the standard mods into your virgin GR folder, and take the time to make sure your game works with each mod one at a time. if you copied GR off a CD, the .but, .ass, and .toe files marked as read only. this will cause your server to not respond to players inventory or soldier picked, and will cause you to go insane at some point. otherwise you may be experiencing some kind of corruption on your system, hard disk, bus, memory or otherwise if data is actually changing from what you expect to be on disk. if none of this fixes anything, just ....go get a playstation or something

to all the people who support the argument that reducing a game design by 50% is somehow a good thing - enjoy your game. you will be buying the sequel shortly. and you'll get a few mission packs and thats that. its all by design. the last piece of hardware i received had 6 ubisoft titles bundled with it. i think thats a record for sub-bargain bin product if i've ever seen one. yes there is something lower than the bargain bin, and ubi is hands-down the King of bundled Coasters in the industry right now. great products guys, way to go with those brilliant kick ass game designs that -- arent even good enough for the bargain bin. the future of ubi is bleak. they really do represent what is wrong with the industry these days. i suggest you look elsewhere for some real entertainment.

which is precisely the point of this thread. the whole GRAW development is an insight into whats wrong with the video game industry as a whole these days. Ubi has officially surpassed EA imho. The reason this thread has resurfaced after two weeks of no posts says a lot about how the fans of the franchise feel about their game. With recent developments, it does make you wonder: if Deep in the bowels of some corporate conference room, on the whiteboard is the word PC with a picture of a donkey with a lolly-pop in its mouth. I wonder what the personality profile on the whiteboard with the consoles looks like the real 'value' of mods is bringing together terabytes of useful content known as an online community- like this fine website you all see here. i cant think of very many things that stand to provide long lasting (free) entertainment than that. the scale of what has gone on with GR1 modding here and on affiliated websites is definitely within the top 10 of video game history. it is the fact that this wont be repeated and that it is by design - that is what seriously ###### me off. and not just on one level. as a game developer i know it doesnt have to be this way. and as a game player, now i have to look elsewhere for my kicks. GR1 is not GR3 o i mean AW! . Im still a fan of the game, but not the franchise. Ghost Recon classic is going to taste like Pepsi.

the only advantage of a ppu is on a properly designed server with enough bandwidth to feed the clients. client side physics processing is a fundamentally retarded concept - with 5 ghz cpu's on the horizon and vertex arrays in gfx cards who needs the extra .0001 frames per second for 'graphics rendering'? not gamers. your money is better spent on peripherals that result in immediate and highly visible performance gains. as time goes on, the advantages of ppu's will decrease as new gfx cards keep coming out. whether or not ppu's find their way into new game designs that actually rise to the challenge and make use of the insane technology remains to be seen. im afraid it relies on what the gamers want - a dumbed down console gimmick designed to run on 56k or something totally bad ass with a complete world of real physics distributed to the clients over broadband.

Rendering is what you see, physics is what you dont- that still has to be processed every game frame regardless. physics comes before gfx, audio, and network, and everything is based on physics in a simulation. so unlike eveything else on a PC game, physics is the least scalable, because you cant get away with the usual 'cheating' or not calculating every grain of sand in the universe, even if you can only see one in front of your face. with gfx, audio, network, and even ai, you can get away with scaling things down to just what the player needs to know. not so with physics. so when all you do is calculate particles or small deformations in front of a players face, thats not by any stretch a fully accelerated 'game' , maybe a partially- or client-only. i imagine that GRAW will look like GR1-type explosions when you break something and dont have physx. well it will definitely look like xbox because they're using pure software physics on that. um, having 2 physics systems is not exactly a selling point using two physics systems is common practice when you realise what you have isn't going to cut it, yet you dont have the time to re-write the net code based on the old physics you wont see havok+novodex in any other title lol. something positive: its a new frontier and the false advertising isnt seperate from the hype - yet. too bad they dinnt have the time or patience to do it right. though, there is still hope: as Grin isn't Ubi and they may have some say in how many years they want to patch the thing to extend its lifetime.

if the game supports and is written to the usual 56k baseline (an xbox standard), i do not see how the server could send even 1% of the accelerated data to the clients. 'client side physics' may be accelerated, but not scalable, which is the problem caused by 56k. if you have 1000 points of light, 1 is on the client, the other 999 are on the server. so what you have here is a nice gimmick - they'll use client-side physics for eye candy and establish that indeed they are accelerating something, but its about 1% of what could have been done had the game and server been designed around the hw early on. obviously, as the hw has only been around for a few months this was not possible. my point is- dont confuse client-side eye-candy with server-side physics distribution. they are apples and oranges. they are not the same thing. in a proper system, one feeds the other in a strict hierarchy. the fact that they accept non-scalable physics as part of their game design indicates that they did not have time to either design the game around nor code a physx accelerated dedicated server. and then theres the glaringly obvious lack of any press release regarding physx hw ...

the primary goal of physics is not eyecandy, but interraction btw as many objects as possible. since the clients can only respond to what the server sends down the pipe, its all about whats going on on the server. if the server wasn't coded to support the hardware, theres no magic in the world that can patch that and the entire networking foundation down the road. whats done is done. even worse, if the scale of the game is so small (only a few players) than the design itself may not be able to make use of the hardware, letting most of it collect cobwebs. so in this new frontier of physx, im afraid it may be up to each server's admin to decide how scalable or not- the servers connection is to the clients. to the degree of simply disallowing non-accelerated players to connect. which is prolly similar to how some games treat a 56k modem nowadays, so in a roundabout way the physx card thing may remove 56k modems from the gaming world once and for all - definitely a good thing to scale-up the size of the conflict by not basing future game designs on the high-bar set by 1988 modem technology. imo, if you install a physx card in a system with a 56k modem it should write 0's to your boot sector. there is no question the physx card will find its niche - but i seriously doubt it will be a big client-side push in the near future. but dedicated servers - maybe very soon. it will be the buzz at E3 for sure.

Ubi makes no claims to support the hardware option, only the software baseline. ('woohoo multithreaded'. big deal.) Had the hardware been designed into the server, both the replay and scalability issues would be eliminated. Other developers have taken a different approach, and they are using the full features of the hardware as it was meant to be run on a dedicated server. The beta physx cards are just now reaching dev's desks. It is only after the coders have had some serious time to play with the hardware that we will see the results in numerous 2006 titles. There will be a rush to get some stuff up at E3 in May, but this is a new frontier and i expect some time before we see the full force of hardware accelerated physics on not only clients, but (more important) dedicated servers as well. Est about 6 months.

replays were never that good for detecting cheats. the server would happily interpolate a guy into a wall glitch from which he would be seen firing, but on his client playing with 56k and lag he was 20 ft away on the other side of a fence. replays can only show the sever's actual state, and a player may not be seeing what is shown on a replay, for a significant time like several seconds. aside from the little bugs like the ret, there were some serious limits in coop and large team games that made replays more of a gimmick than a useful tool. finally, rse indicated that replays were never created for cheat detection, as they were only an approximation of as many events as could be collected in a given time. preventing cheating on computers is best accomplished ... by computers. and right at the source - inside the dedicated server itself. humans, particularly those with less than 20 years coding network security, should not be involved. it only causes problems. just look at M$. solving cheating has nothing to do with 3rd party software or humans spending hours pouring over replays which dont fully represent what all the players saw in-game. re: physics we are entering a new age of phyics simulation. soon all hardcore players will need a physics-accelerator or equivalent hardware on their server. in this day and age, any company that claims physics arent scalable is living in the past, and clearly has no plans for proper implementation of next-gen gaming technology. (despite the claims to the contrary that they have some super bitchin engine.) a number of companies have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming they're using the latest greatest physics engine blah blah - theyre not. they're using the software baseline that is only a little better than havok. if you're lucky there will be a patch-but it wont be able to solve the lack of planning a solid, scalable physics system that is running on a dedicated server further accelerated by a physx card. to return to the topic of scalable replays: i think Valve has that going, yes? Havok is like Novodex with even less impressive performance, less scalability, yet they have replays? so much for excuses about 'it cant be done'. and its still scalable in software - their game came out before physics accel. was even possible -a year ago? with all the recent devlopments at the outer rim of the game development frontier, this is going to be a great year (2006) for games. something tells me a lot of ppl aren't going to be putting their eggs in one basket the way they did with gr. just look at the attittude in this thread about perceived problems that haven't even been confirmed. god forbid they become so... for there will be even less eggs in this basket.

Yes he did. He asked very specific questions. And he got very specific answers from the head of Grin. There is no rumor or inuendo. This is fact: (um No but...) This was the same answer provided by RvS developers, verbatim. And look what we got for modding that game. What is more obvious is that this is GR, and they dont mention any other aspects of modding besides 'sandbox'. Let me translate what 'Sandbox' means in terms of game design and development : ' we dont care about you, you're not a console and could impact console sales.' Which indicates a meeting was held and it was decided that 'modding was bad' lets remove it now and maybe they'll forget about that feature as they buy new sequels to the franchise; hopefully across platforms (xbox+pc). I would not be surprised if they took it to the next level either: Hey, Lets charge PC users to get Xbox Live Mod updates !!! It just goes on and on, spiralling downward into some kind of console-hell world where the PC is to be shunned and especially those who create free content for free entertainment of the masses. You see, according to Ubi, thats pure evil,ya know, that game-modding thing. Thanks to the Ubisoft corporate line, the golden age of modding RSE games has past.

Aside from the reticule and no climbing interface - this sounds like .... another game completely. I have been waiting for the answer to the 'modding question'. And today i have read what is probably the most dismal piece of information released about GRAW. My last hopes of ever taking this game seriously have been comjpletely and utterly destroyed. It is good that i have kepy my expectations low, or i would be approaching the level of dissapointment that I'm quite sure many of you will sadly feel - once you drop the cash for this uber-polished turd that bears no resemblance to the game known as GR1 - save a few words in the title. This new game will hold less than 10% of the interest of what was once an active modding community. Clearly, it has not been designed to meet the level of modding support we saw in the other unrelated game known as GR1. They (developers at Grin, under orders from Ubi) have replaced the GR1 mod system with RvS mod system. This is by design, in keeping with the corporate company-line. The writing is on the wall .... <extreme sarcasm follows> No mention of weapon, character, or vehicle modding. Or even creation of new assets from 3dmax - just level placement 'sandbox' editing ala RvS. Nice. Maybe they can add punkbuster and completely eliminate any chance of connecting to a server with new maps too .... And sure if you know Python or C Sharp go write a 1000 line script to get a gametype up and running. I'm sure there will be hundreds of gametypes like in GR1. (not) Mark my words, with the scale of the conflict reduced from 10 plr coop vs 100's of hostiles to 4 vs 25, Coop will be forgotten. It will be all about MP adversarial play. Even if they release tools at a later date, the game has not been designed to have the depth that GR1 had. The impetus to make total conversions and missions simply wont be there. They console-holed the design. for the pc, its over before it began. this game's popularity will be console based, as proven by the mass of savvy pc gamers who move on to something with more meat in 6 months. Why? Because there will be no mods.

first there was new coke and then there was lime coke and i think they spent 10x as much on the advertising for lime coke ....which tastes like pepsi buy enough lime coke, and people will forget what classic coke was

then you have not encountered a drunken glasgow ned in the wee hours of the morn, armed with only a bottle of buckfast, have ye? quite entertaining but a bit confusing for this california boy seriously, teamspeak is half the game. of any game, really. regardless of genre. its what makes it not single player with humans remotely controlling targets on your screen. it makes it personal - both adversarial and cooperative, and both at the same time. and if you have 56k, maybe its time to read up on the TS help about how you can quite easily throttle your bandwidth so as to not impact gameplay at all.

look whos logo is top right ....and center http://www.ageia.com/ i doubt the games coming out this year will have it, but next year ....

lol stop with the HX4 stuff .... just get HX5. It contains everything from hx4 as well as bug fixes ... and 300 megs of additional original content. You can also get Mission HX, the random mission generator here as well. link to forum thread Dragmods - download links for Ghost Recon mods

Currently, GR is the best skill-based coop game all around. I say this because ...If you want to press an attack button and watch your hobbit dance, then i guess thats a massively coop experience but lacking the skill component - bigtime. And the replay value... Several reasons, not in any particular order: Its design is flexible enough to allow many styles of online play-and support them successfully through script and server options. You can run and gun with infinite respawn or crawl for 8 hours with none. Nothing is forced, nothing is assumed. Play the game you want to play, and set up the server accordingly. And you can set up to 27 players in coop missions, which is simply incredible imo. Because it is one of the only titles to not use singleton Bot-Ai, and instead uses a fire-team based system with global pathfinding, the possibilities of what can happen are far beyond anything else out there. This sophisiticated design is also more scalable than most games because the ai is handled globally. This scheduling allows the server to balance the load between ai and traffic, which in turn lends itself to massive amounts of enemies in a wide-open environment. --------------- More ai, more enemies visible, more challenging enemies, more performance = More replay value.

Yup. Dont die. The game wasnt meant for the team to have control while in a helo during a mission so the load/save logic doesn't know how to handle it. Hint: That 1st mission you must switch control to the SAW gunner at the left window. the ai doesnt always see the boat - better to do the job yourself, then switch back and clear the boats to the right. I think its funny how many ppl thought getting shot down was part of the mission. Hehe. conditioned by too many cinematics i think. Come on: Getting shot down is never supposed to be part of a mission !

The All Seeing Eye SDK is being used by developers who understand this. Its so simple to integrate that technology into any title - they'll even send out an engineer to the game studio to implement it in a single day - on-site. Its there. Its ranked #1 by JDPower and EE objective analysis. They all know about it. They are choosing not to use it. http://gamesdomain.yahoo.com/ase/sdkinfo In fact, I have this SDK (with permission) from Patrick Ford who is now head of Yahoo games after they bought out ASE. They recognized the power of this technology and snapped it up for a huge crapload of dough. Captain obvious mounts the soapbox once again: The real reason, as usual, is they (makers of crappy server browsers) want to capture advertising and extend marketing partnerships rather than provide the best entertainment experience. Compare Ubi to ASE and you'll get it.

fileshack rules search fileshack for 'Ghost Recon' (shameless plug, i know )