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Yay! 0.30 is great runs well on my Core 2 Duo machine under 10.6.
@nms, on Sep 18 2010, 11:41 PM, said in Antares Releases:
Is the new data distribution method due to Nathan Lamont not having the rights to all the sounds? I seem to recall that he wrote somewhere that if someone created a sufficiently complete and accurate port of Ares, he would allow it to be released as "Ares" instead of some other name, which might allow you to include the media intended for Ares that he couldn't release. I'm not sure if you're quite at that point yet, but when you are, you might want to contact him about it.
@pallas-athene, on Sep 19 2010, 12:32 AM, said in Antares Releases:
Yes, that's the reason. I don't think certification as "Ares" solves the problem, though. Frankly, I'm actually quite happy with the current solution, as it allows for a lot of flexibility in terms of improving the data format without forcing the data to be re-downloaded.
Just wanted to clarify, Mr. Lamont requested that we not call our games "Ares X" or "Ares 2" or something like that, which would imply that our games were associated with his. Thus the two projects Xsera (Ares X backwards) and Antares. He said that if either of the games were close enough to Ares at release time, he might give it his blessing and allow it to have straight-up "Ares" in its name. I'm sure he wouldn't want us publishing it under the same name, as that would be confusing and have copyright implications.
Another thing to note is that none of this would solve the ability to use certain sounds -- none of the projects can use them in the final game because the copyright for those belongs to somebody other than Mr. Lamont, and the sounds were licensed for use with Ares years ago. The copyright for those songs does not belong to Mr. Lamont, so they're not his to give away.
If I may interject, is is possible to play in a window? I can't cmd-tab out of it, and I'd like to be able to. If not, not biggie. Thanks!
-K
Just finished playing through the entire 23 mission campaign and only encountered one bug that I saw. However, I couldn't repeat it, so it's probably not a bug with the program itself. During Chapter 17 '... And It Feels So Good' the game simply crashed on me. No error message, no corrupted data, nuthin'. This crash occurred while I was fighting Audemedon ships over the bunker station in the center of the map. My guess is too many things were going on at once, though I'm probably wrong.
I make my guess on the basis of my surroundings; I was flying an Ishiman Destroyer, I had about 8 Ishiman Cruisers and all 3 Elejee Cruisers with me, and almost all of us were firing full blast at the Audemedons at the time of the crash. I wasn't able to get a bearing on the Audemedon ships (those bugger are fast!) but I put their count at about 7 ships, the majority of which were Audemedon Cruisers. Their holo-decoys most likely contributed to the overload of objects.
All in all an excellent accomplishment. I envy and commend your skills, Pallas, this is truly amazing!
QUOTE
There are several issues that need to be fixed before the 1.0 release; the issue tracker contains a list of them. After they are fixed, Antares will have feature parity with Ares in all respects, except for plugins and multiplayer. These are considered features to be added after 1.0.
What does this mean for possible multiplayer?
I believe the quote in your post answers your question. He said plug-in support and multiplayer have to wait till after v1.0. Just be patient, Kas.
Ok. ^_^ Yeah, that's what it sounded like to me, but I wasn't sure. So I asked.
Antares 0.3.1 has been released. This is a hotfix release, fixing two related issues:
Woohoo, keep it up!
This may not be counted as a bug, but the default key configuration is still problematic for those of us without number pads.
Could the number-pad-less situation be detected and accounted for on the first run? I know this isn't the behaviour of the original Ares, but then, when the original Ares came out, all keyboards had number pads.
Hmm. Is there any agreement about what the keyboard setup should be when not using a numpad? I personally use arrows to move, WASD for computer, Q/E for zoom, and ZXC for select friendly/hostile/base. That shifts some keys that were right-handed under the numpad configuration over to the left, though.
I'm not sure how I feel about a "decide defaults based on first run" feature. I can certainly agree that there's merit in indicating to the user that there is be a problem with their key configuration such as a non-existent key. I would imagine this taking the form of a blinking "Options" button on the main screen, and a blinking "Key Controls" button on the options screen, in the same manner that keys blink in the key controls screen when duplicates are assigned. Issue 58.
By the way, I have no idea how the keyboard layout can be detected. Pointers welcome.
QUOTE (Pallas Athene @ Jan 17 2011, 10:01 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
That seems pretty good to me. Really, you need about four hands to cover all the controls regardless of how they're configured. Where would you put zoom to all/closest/hostile? Maybe comma, period, and slash? That would put them just above and to the left of the maneuvering controls, similar to the default configuration.
Maybe the reset to default button should choose a configuration based on your hardware, if you figure out how to determine that. Or it could bring up a dialog giving you a choice of configurations. If you want to get fancy, maybe you could allow saving and loading custom configurations there.
By the way, how is the graphics performance overhaul going?
QUOTE (NMS @ Jan 18 2011, 04:07 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I don't know–I don't use them. My left hand is well-trained to find WASD, so it's always faster to use Q/E to zoom than to find the shortcuts. The only shortcut I use is F8 (control ship), which I should probably move to something nearer to one of my hands (R? V? Forward slash?).
Is there a reset-to-default button? I think a save/load preset mechanism shows promise, but I'm not ready to start thinking about interface layout changes yet, as that's a data change rather than a code change.
Alright. I got sprites to render in OpenGL recently, including the static effect for shields/cloaking, which was the complicated part. I've been working on beams, after which come sector lines and the instruments panels. I expect I'll need to convert the DirectText routines over too, which is probably the only difficult part remaining (but even easy parts take time when there are a lot of them).
Obvious keypad detector as a stopgap (but not a real solution) is to look for the substring 'MacBook' in the hw.model sysctl, but I think there are desktop keyboards without number pads now, and there are certainly those who plug in external keyboards that do have number pads to the laptops.
I use a MacBook. But, ordinarily, I plug in an external keyboard. But, it doesn't have a numpad. But, before I implemented the Options screen, I plugged in a separate numpad. There's might be a way of detecting layouts, but it's probably complicated. Also, if I recall, OSX wasn't sure what the layout of the numpad was when I plugged it in.
While I'm here, allow me to advertise a few alternate ways of finding out about Antares releases:
@pallas-athene, on Jan 18 2011, 04:29 PM, said in Antares Releases:
I mostly use the default controls because I'm used to them. (For speedrunning I change warp to c so don't have to take my hand off the weapon keys.) I find zoom to all and closest hostile very handy, so if you don't have a better idea, I stand by my suggestion of comma, period, and slash for the dynamic zoom modes. I can see changing transfer control to something more handy, but I wouldn't change the default.
Apparently not. I must have been thinking of practically every other game I've ever played. I was thinking you could change it to bring up a window (which could be OS X style), but I guess you'd have to add a button. Another option would be to store the key bindings in a separate text file, so they could be manually backed up and edited, which would be better than nothing at least.
Well, keep up the good work.
Why not just have a small thing pop up when the game first starts asking the player whether they want to use the default keyboard layout for keyboards with numberpads or for those without? Solves the auto-detect issue, at least as a stopgap, better than prophile's method.
While I remember (I have an exam today, so I'll investigate afterwards) - there appears to be some magic in the usage tables in the HID section of IOKit which can tell whether a device has a numeric keypad or not (or, more specifically, any specific keys from the keypad).
@Pallas Good to see Antares still going. Downloading now
EDIT: Just been playing it. Very nicely done. I got Ares going recently through Fluffy Bunny — an update of Sheepshaver. Antares gameplay is as good as on Fluffy Bunny, thought it crashed when I launched it initially and it couldn't find an internet connection to download its dependent files.
On controls, I'm an inverted T user for motion; piloting with my right hand and shooting with my left. Glad to see that I could re-assign the keys. I use an MBP with an external keyboard.
I also like the way that you have put everything in Application support, good for adding third party scenarios
Well, off to play the rest of the scenarios now. Very nice work, congratulations on the rebirth of Ares as Antares!
I'll report any bugs.
This post has been edited by Lord Commander Anic : 26 January 2011 - 11:46 AM
I can't believe I forgot to post in this topic. I've played Antares completely. And reliving the Ares experience was awesome. Sure there's an imperfection here and there, but all the important parts and most of the unimportant parts are in place and accurate to my memory. All it is lacking is multiplayer and Hera, but considering that both of those would take significant work, to understate it, I'm fine without them (my nostalgia was completely fulfilled with single player anyway since I only got to tinker with multiplayer and Hera for about a month compared to the years I had access to Ares).
The only gameplay issue I noticed that wasn't recorded anywhere I saw was that Mission 12, Make Way, the Catharans seem to produce a crapton of ships at a very fast rate without them holding any bunkers. It felt like they were keeping pace with me when I owned both bunkers and was spamming Cruisers. Far faster than I remember and this speed doesn't seem to match anywhere else in the game (barring ownership of resource-generators) and isn't mentioned in the Ares walkthrough I wrote years back.