Thygrrr

I think the enemy carrier should be beatable early on, BUT it should be an immensely high risk endeavour. you have to neglect your own conquest progress chasing the carrier depending on logistics, finding the enemy carrier can be a one way trip (meaning you don't have fuel to return) risk expensive replacement costs for lost equipment risk being left dead in the water with the enemy carrier escaping and disrupting your supply chain with impunity Ideally, there might be two enemy carriers. Meaning you gain a lot from attacking one, but defeating it isn't a certain victory (and probably inadvisable early on).

Tomahawk needs more range and splash damage. Ideally first person guidance (and rename it to Harbinger and put it on Walruses instead) :P Hammerhead needs arbitrary targeting (click point on map, see kaboom).

This is (roughly!) how I'd want the enemy carrier to act, split up into "strat", strategy, "fake" absentee combat, and "real" 3D combat. They could each be influenced by additional factors, such as if an island has only 2 connections, the drive by shooting approach is preferred over the CC destruction appoach. Strategy: Evaluated once every time the carrier is done capturing an island. (strat) 50% of the time it attacks one of the player's islands (strat) 20% of the time it actually shows up to defend an island the player attacks if it's within fuel range (strat) 20% of the time it seeks out a neutral island within fuel range to quickly capture it (strat) 10% of the time it moves to its own stockpile to resupply and rearm (should incur a supply/strength bonus so its next attack will be easier) Absentee Combat (i.e. player only witnesses it in the form of a flashing island), evaluated between strategy decisions. (fake) 20% of the time it vandalizes your island by just destroying the docks. This should take a very short time, think of a drive by shooting. (fake) 20% of the time it vandalizes your island by destroying the CC, but quickly moves on to attack the next island, "baiting" you with the neutral island (fake) 60% of the time it stays and fights, taking time proportional to island defense rating and the island generic mission type and inversely proportional to its own strength (both game difficulty setting - harder means enemy is quicker - and its current state of equipment) Real Defense: Both carriers within range of the same island, island is enemy controlled. Tactics should last for 5 minutes before re-evaluating. (real) 20% of the time the enemy carrier attacks your ground units, reinforcing its island (real) 20% of the time the enemy carrier attacks your air units (real) 20% of the time the enemy carrier attacks your carrier (real) 20% of the time the enemy units constantly patrol the generic mission points of interest (so they can show up even if you cleared all the defenses) (real) 10% of the time flee (unless massively threatened / damaged, it should flee instantly then) Real Offense: Both carriers within range of the same island, island is player controlled. Tactics should last longer, 5-15 minutes before the carrier changes its mind. (real) 30% of the time the enemy carrier attempts to destroy the island's generic mission objective and/or build/hack the command center, which involves taking out the island's defense first (real) 20% of the time the enemy decides to directly wreck the command center (if it has a hammerhead, it will be used!) (real) 20% of the time the enemy decides to attack your carrier (real) 20% of the time the enemy decides to vandalize the island by destroying the docks before proceeding (real) 10% of the time flee (unless massively threatened / damaged, it should flee instantly then) I have no prolem if the enemy carrier uses some sort of cheat technology for instance that makes hacking firewalls easier for it, or if its units try to focus on scramblers but really don't have the telemetry range penalty applied to them as strongly or at all. While we're at cheating, the enemy could maybe have access to a module that captures island defense buildings one by one, meaning they could steal your island's scramblers or manta hangars to get more units for their offense. However, since these ideas change the game a lot from a design perspective, they aren't part of my main "wish" list. Dream ideas: enemy carrier harrasses me with long range fighter strikes (and I can do the same) enemy carrier harrases my islands with long range strikes, creating diversions/projecting power (and I can do the same) enemy carrier is controlled by a human player over the internet :rolleyes:

That's a plan for my mod, but not a priority. (priority is UI changes and better carrier AI / weapons handling)

Native Functions Binding to a native function that doesn't exist causes a read at address 0, I guess their linker simply creates the function pointers and if their loader returns a null, it uses that as the pointer. You then get a very nice crash message with an actual call stack / line number in the script. Script Compiling If you try to call a function in a script that doesn't exist (i.e. "doesntexist()"), the game won't launch.

The problem is that probably something in the EXECUTABLE itself uses the patch00.pak file before all others, so no mod can function that modifies any of the files in path00.pak ... Unless maybe the mod is put into a patch??.pak ... a technique called a fake patch. (I dislike that, by the way, it'd be cooler to have a ".mod" format and allow activating and deactivating these in the game or prior to launch. But for that we need a tool that writes PAC1 files. (I can create such a tool, but there are some unknown values that I probably need to understand before the game will work with it.

DEADLOCK is definitely a very broken island. The bridges, beaches and slopes are almost unnavigatable for Walruses. There is a road triangle at the center of the island. The walruses try to avoid some invisible object on the road there it seems. I think some of the islands simply have broken / suboptimal navspaces. ---------- Post added at 16:01 ---------- Previous post was at 14:38 ---------- Example of broken Deadlock (unmodded game) - http://i45.tinypic.com/264oynn.jpg (250 kB)

Nah. A bunch of people usually can't finish in their free time what a dozen professionals (no matter the talent) left unfinished in years. Rare exceptions: Just Cause 2 Multiplayer (nice hack! monster-kudos to their team!) GTA 3 Multiplayer (even though that wasn't really robust) Forged Alliance Forever / Community Bugfix Patch / etc. TA Bugfix Spring RTS The various Söldner: Secret Wars mods That said, I'm looking hard into making a solid mod for this; I worked on a Carrier Command remake ages ago but I decided it was too much work, especially on the art asset side (infathomably time expensive and probably not doable when you are a coder, not an artist). Also, my real life job has kind of scratched my game development itch on a daily basis almost a decade now... ;) Now Gaea Mission has a great collection of assets, and they are even Carrier Command themed! And they have a solid engine (and a semi-solid game built on top of it). So, pretty decent starting point. I wouldn't expect to have a blockbuster mod like CounterStrike oder DayZ, but one could possibly build a deep and challenging Carrier Command Plus from the looks of it. The dream would of course be a solid multiplayer implementation, much of which is totally off limits without any access to the (an) engine like Enforce itself. And even then this could easily become a multi-man-year project. So I actually hope CCGM will get multi player (that is, full CARRIER multi play, not Vehicle or - god forbid - FPS multi play) and we modders can make it shine.

At a certain point, a team can't make a game better, they will just break it more. That happens a lot with AAA titles lately. It's one of the main reasons why indie games, which focus on game play and innovation rather than content (in the AAA sense) are experiencing such a huge renaissance these days. Funny enough, I wonder if Bohemia Interactive had forsaken the massively subpar campaign (which was IMHO the worst addition to the game they could do... what did it try to achieve? compete with Halo and CoD and even BF2142 and BF3 and all those other games?) if they could have made a more solid overall game without a story-driven campaign. Yes, all you single player game fans and magazine reviewers out there, who whine when a game has no story yet great game play... THANKS FOR NOTHING! </rant> ---------- Post added at 14:58 ---------- Previous post was at 14:45 ---------- Addendum: Oh, and of course when your core team fails, you can bring in new guys (if you look at the scripts, you see this has most likely happened) but they usually can't fix it either, so your project cost explodes even more. Then you axe or demote the project lead and reassign a new, more business savvy one (which I think may have happened for CCGM) and at the same time have the team work double time and release the game at all costs so you can recover at least some of your expenses. Because after all, the games industry is a business. :cool: I just wish studios didn't fix bad situations as ham-fistedly as they sometimes do. But there's no recipe to steer clear of a disaster once it has happened. Management is hard.

This game was in development since about 2006 or 2008. The initial release data was Q1/2010 ... there's nothing "early" about its release, it was long overdue.

More findings even as little as 10% damage to the engines makes the enemy carrier avoid your carrier The carrier could be totally trashed otherwise (down to 60% or 40% depending on player.getskill() [whatever that is, exactly]), but if its engines need as much as a gentle wipe with a soft damp cloth, the enemy carrier becomes the world's largest chicken coop. ---------- Post added at 12:19 ---------- Previous post was at 11:56 ---------- Question Has anyone found out where the concrete ______Advisors, like, APA_MilitaryAdvisor and UEC_ProductionAdvisor are actually instantiated? I suspect it's in native code, but I'm not sure. Not even their names are mentioned as strings anywhere, yet they contain sumbstantial code. ---------- Post added at 12:45 ---------- Previous post was at 12:19 ---------- Eeep! Patch Files c:\Program Files (x86)\Bohemia Interactive\Carrier Command Gaea Mission\patch00.pak <--- uh oh. I'd really like to take a look at that file, please. On the plus side, we probably found a way to deploy mods in packages (still poor mod interoperability, of course). ---------- Post added at 13:50 ---------- Previous post was at 12:45 ---------- Patch Files The 1.02 patch is almost identical in script code (it only has a demo campaign added). However, the databases are different. I'll try the new DB and tell you if that improves Steam pathfinding. Retail data02.cc is identical to Steam data02.cc ---------- Post added at 13:57 ---------- Previous post was at 13:50 ---------- Self Patching Game doesn't run after fiddling with the database. I suppose they are incompatible. Putting the whole .pak in doesn't work (no visible changes); and putting the unpacked .pak in breaks it as well. On to a binary comparison of the two databases... ---------- Post added at 14:01 ---------- Previous post was at 13:57 ---------- DB Differences 1.01 Steam to 1.02 Retail Version info at the start, and a dataset containing the string "Gravon", near some Walrus data. Several bytes were changed there. ---------- Post added at 14:09 ---------- Previous post was at 14:01 ---------- DB Manual Patch Well... smack my head and call me Sandy. I think I now have the smartest Walruses on Steam. Actually, they fail depending on island. They are pretty good on Fornax (and I think they are worse with the old db), but they completely fail trying to move across Deadlock, for example. They seem to have problems on the roads leading down to the bridge at the center. And at the beach. And slopes in general, because they slide a bit or move faster than they expect, and then they skid when they come to a screeching halt, totally disoriented. Hmm. Actually I think Deadlock has a totally broken navigation map. The walruses don't even understand how to go to certain locations, even though there's clearly roads leading there.

I can confirm the patch00.pak makes modding through files impossible at the moment. It contains a lot of stuff that probably overrides everything in the directory. I'll look into writing a packer for the files so we can make mods in PAC1 format instead.

Tools updated. Read first post for changed - I added a convenient little batch file to just drag the .cc files onto to unpack them. As long as your environment variabled (namely, PATH) properly points to python.exe in your Python 2.7 install (I think it should by default!), that's all you need to open those PAC1 files. I also renamed the tool in anticipation of a pack functionality.

I find them kind of okay. Nothing to get too excited about... but then, I have an SSD, so maybe short loading times are too normal for me to notice.

You, too, have the patch. We steam users don't! So we need a chance to look at that path00.pak file. How big is it?

FTL is awesome, and gave me plenty of fun for $10.

Pathfinding is being addressed, read the News forum! But the overall AI needs work. Fortunately, it can be modded. And I expect BI to improve it as well.

So strange. deanoTimeWarp works, few island start works (obviously by the "start game" number of islands slider, which is actually there even without the mod). ---------- Post added at 12:43 ---------- Previous post was at 12:42 ---------- BUT!!!! c:\Program Files (x86)\Bohemia Interactive\Carrier Command Gaea Mission\patch00.pak <--- uh oh. I'd really like to take a look at that file, please. On the plus side, we probably found a way to deploy mods in packages (still poor mod interoperability, of course).

Disregard my PM. You have the same version of the game. ---------- Post added at 12:32 ---------- Previous post was at 12:29 ---------- http://i48.tinypic.com/30lfplv.jpg (165 kB) This is what it looks on my PC. Just installed the v2 mod, works right out of the box. What does your "scripts" folder contain, Tontow? For me, it's ccgame.c and the Campaign subfolder.

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More Findings: the bad island avoidance code appears to be overly convoluted. I'm also pretty sure that once the maximum of avoided islands comes up, it will repeatedly overwrite the first island in the list (index 0), which could induce the "Ping pong" behavior we witnessed, where the carrier bounces between two islands it keeps failing to conquer I haven't checked all the places, but array index overruns are probably quite likely to happen in that code if enough islands are being avoided, too Actually, I'm pretty sure that once the 9th island is being marked for avoidance, the whole system breaks badly (the carrier is probably no longer able to make any decision on attacking an island, or the game even crashes). That is presuming the military advisor / APA_MilitaryAdvisor is even used. I can't really find evidence of it, but it may be some native magic.

You can repair, rearm and refuel your Walruses on land if need be.

*coughcough* VATTLAND *cough*

This is most likely unrelated to the mod. Neutral islands sometimes have hostile units on them. (the very first island I visited in Strategy Game had turrets, I found that... disturbing)

Yes, I can imagine an Infantry "tool" for Walruses. Maybe even use that 1 slot that is never used? At the very least, for starters, you could write your mod so that it's an additional weapon that just spawns a friendly infantry soldier/droid behind your walrus. Try it, it might work! :)