Toumal

The -client and -server commands are taunting me. I wanna have multiplayer :/

You need to produce fuel or fuel packs, then when they're completed you need to ship them to your carrier via the resupply submarine. Just click on the SUPPLIES button, put the fuel on the supply barge, and click the "Send supply barge" button on the bottom right of the dialogue.

Hey folks, This simple mod removes the animated characters from the background of the island map. This makes the game run with 25fps and more on a intel HD3000. Previously the map screen crawled at 5fps for me. This is a modified file that needs to be copied to a "worlds" folder within your Carrier Command directory. Just extract this with folders and it should work. NOTE: This may not be compatible with all versions of the game, at least until a patchfile packer is available. http://remixshare.com/download/p2gyl

The moment you release that packer i will release my performance mod for all you laptop gamers ^^

First of all, there is a "pathing grid" as you call it. It is in fact being used for the walruses. I found no evidence of such a system being used for mantas however, nor would that be necessary. I don't see GPU doing A* / Dijkstra yielding much in terms of benefit. This isn't massive amounts of floating point or matrix operations we're talking about. Indeed CPU is certainly not the limiting factor for functional pathfinding. Did you disassemble the code to arrive at this conclusion? Based on my observation, the actual pathfinding code is fine, it's a combination of walrus vehicle performance and errors in the path data that causes most of the issues. Again, I'm fairly certain that there's no pathfinding going on here. Mantas seem to do very basic terrain avoidance, but otherwise they fly straight to the objective. I agree that this terrain avoidance is pretty bad at times, other times it works ok. They only seem to add points when the vehicle is backing up or missing a point, to account for the vehicle turn radius. This is to prevent walruses from driving donuts around a single waypoint. However, the remainder of the route is not recalculated all the time - I can't say this for certain, but I am fairly sure about it. Note that what you see happening on the map is most likely not representative of the actual workings of the pathfinding, as points are not rendered depending on your map zoom level.

Sadly much of the internal stuff just seems to not be exposed to scripting at all. I don't know if they'll change that anytime soon because it would mean converting the stuff currently in C/C++ into script code... Also Thygrrr, nice to see someone else who's read the GOF book on patterns ;)

Thanks for the praise ;) I don't know for certain, but my guess is that there's a lot of pre-calculated waypoints that define where a walrus can drive and where it can't - these points are most likely precalculated because there's a db file with coordinates. The pathing algorithm, most likely Dijkstra, then finds the optimal path within that mesh of waypoints. I think some islands have an incorrect waypoint database, and for some others it's just not optimally done. In Spoonbot for Tribes I created the waypoints manually for each map. It took some time, and it made the AI a bit predictable, but it ensured that the bots got where they needed to be. I think that's a special piece of code that kicks in when the walrus misses a waypoint, or is reversing. Most of the time this works great, but I've also seen such extra waypoints being created way outside any sensible radius. Oh and note that you do not see all the actual waypoints unless you zoom in quite a bit - the map actually skips rendering waypoints as you zoom out to make the route look less complex.

Well, multiplayer would definitely fix this. It wouldn't fix singleplayer, but it's a real bummer to see no multiplayer in what could be a real gem among coop and strategy battle game.

Thygrrr, AFAIK any function needs to be specified to be scriptable before you can hope to call it. I've successfully done some UI scripting already, that part of the game is pretty well scriptable. What I'd loooove to find out is where the animated crewmate stuff is defined (you know, the two guys sitting at consoles pushing buttons). I'd love to remove them from the background of the map because they make the game unplayable on my laptop (they use up a ton of polys and add little to the game) - Any ideas? ---------- Post added at 13:44 ---------- Previous post was at 12:58 ---------- Answer to my own question: The map background is defined in worlds/carriercontrolroom.ent and I've succeeded in completely removing all the background of the map. This makes the game completely playable on a Lenovo x121e with intel HD 3000 integrated graphics! Can I post the modified file here or is that a problem?

Heya, I've taken a look at the script files and the general AI pathfinding. I've got extensive experience with pathfinding algorithms, and have implemented pathfinding in various mods and games. Some people may know me as "Werewolf", the author of Spoonbot for Tribes 1 and BotPilot for Tribes 2. Basically, I saw no way to meaningfully improve pathfinding as part of a script mod, most of the relevant functions do not appear to be exposed to the script. Either that, or they're just not overridden and we don't know how to script them. The good news is that pathfinding is certainly fixable, and there are a few things BIS can do to greatly enhance the walrus AI: 1) Fix the broken islands - As Thygrrr pointed out, some islands appear to have near-unusable pathing data. On other islands, there's quite an inconsistency of pathing data vs. actual walrus performance - sometimes the walrus can't climb a hill without missing its route waypoint, other times there's a downhill slope that is easily traversable but the pathing info marks it as no-go terrain. Obviously it makes a difference between a walrus traveling from A to B vs. the other way around if we're talking slopes, but this doesn't seem to be implemented. Top priority should be to get the pathing info right though, even if there will always be fringe cases where the AI will not go somewhere because it thinks it can't. 2) Improve waypoint positioning vs. turn radius When the walrus needs to turn, the game adds additional route points to accomodate for this. Definitely a cool feature, but it always assumes a level ground. If this happens on a slope, the walrus will miss the waypoint. There's an easy solution: Just cheat! Make the AI controlled walrus able to reach that waypoint under all circumstances. It's better to have the AI have a bit better vehicle performance instead of having a broken player experience. 3) Fix the Assist function Assist is currently unusable because it makes the walrus try to directly follow the other vehicle. Instead, the game should chose a position right behind the followed vehicle as a navigation target and use waypoints to navigate, as usual. Only if our the assist target is *very* close it can use the direct route. Also, if direct route fails for any length of time, it should fall back to waypoint navigation again so these situations fix themselves. 4) Unit behavior after relinquishing control Imagine you give a walrus an attack order, then take manual control to have it fight and eventually retreat - switching units will make that walrus attack again! That's very frustrating and very easy to fix: Once you took control of a unit, ALWAYS put it on hold after exiting. Don't assume that the old order is still valid. 5) Formation There seems to be basic support for formation, but it is certainly not used for walruses. Not as high a priority as 1, 2 and 3, but certainly a good thing to improve. 6) Retreat This is something I think we can probably improve via script - the units should switch to "chicken" status much sooner, especially when taking heavy damage. What can't be improved via script is enemy avoidance - ideally units should try to retreat someplace safe, preferably via a route that does not take them right through enemy lines. I'm certain the first 4 items on this list would go a LONG way towards fixing the pathing issues. What do you think?