Alf and I tried a game, were torpedoed by our ISPs mutual dislike of each other (his signal stops dead near Hudson's Bay, mine stops in Lancaster somewhere).

Zombo, when I tried using the in game chat feature it kept saying it couldn't find "talk.wav". Is there supposed to be one, or should I add my own?

EDIT: Also, adding the ability to rotate the camera with the keyboard lone would be quite nice. I'd recommend switching the controls to WASD, then using Q and E to rotate and Z and X or R and F to raise and lower the camera. This may be because I played too much Descent as a boy, though.

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Rogue Trader Expedition 0.4
The Horus Heresy 0.5
Night Lords 0.1
My Trade Thread

Yeah, I should probably add a talk.wav, it's automatically called by the engine when using the ingame chat.

I'll have a think about adding keyboard controls, one of my aims was to have it as much as possible mouse controlled, but there's no reason not to add the option I guess.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

I think we can get it sorted - basically we forgot about needing to forward any ports and then got hung up fiddling with stuff we both knew once then forgot....

This might be a really dumb question but does port forwarding need to be set up at both ends or just on the host side?

Edit: one more thing for the todo list, hills. It looks like you can drop counters on top of things so it should just be a matter of creating the 3d models right?

Port forwarding only needs to be done by the host. It's an annoyance but nothing can be done about it without paying to get dedicated servers hosted. Stupid modern internet security... Remember to allow it through your firewall too.

Hills are deffo needed, yep, and should pose no issues; as you mentioned you can stack models.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

I actually like having the keyboard controls with the mouse for three reasons:

1) It makes it easier to rotate scenery quickly.
2) I can rotate the camera around while moving my units with the mouse.
3) When I've only got the trackpad on my laptop to work with, it's saves a lot of wiggling my finger on the trackpad.

Of course, I used to play Mechwarrior 2 with just the keyboard. I'm weird.

EDIT:

Oh! Is it at least theoretically possible to make fully 3D units (i.e. darling little 3D Space Marines?)

EDIT 2:

Double oh! Would it be possible to add the ability to name units? Very useful for keeping formations straight.

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Rogue Trader Expedition 0.4
The Horus Heresy 0.5
Night Lords 0.1
My Trade Thread

Keyboard controls will be added, no worries.

It's a lot more than theoretically possible to make fully 3d units, its entirely possible. That's effectively what the terrain is for example.

Being able to rename units in game would be very difficult to add, is it that useful?

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Ok, so SK and myself tried to connect again last night and it sounds like we had some kind of success. I managed to get the port to stay open - don't what weirdness was going on there but still - and when I came back in the morning he'd managed to dump a bunch of terrain on my board.

Apparently it was very laggy with a bad ping but it did work. I'm going to see if upgrading my internet package to fibre optic might help - I was going to do this anyway so it might be an easy win.

With regards to keyboard controls I think I'd like that too - mainly for quickly rotating the world. Also, roads and rivers (and bridges) should make it on to the terrain list - all already there I'm sure.

I would love to see some 3d playing pieces, particularly for vehicles where it would help most with LOS issues. I'm sure I could do something for demo purposes but it wouldn't be quick. I'm fine knocking together some graphics starting out with Vassal graphics but the learning curve involved in anything 3d would put me off. I'm just getting started with CAD for tanks but finding the time is already proving hard... Maybe we need to rope in Deacon and Grimdarkbits to donate some of there cad designs, or export them to whatever format they need too. That would give a pretty good start to Tau, Nids (and then Dark Eldar and Squats?), Marines and some guard tanks from what I can tell.

Ping and lag will be based on your connection speeds and the physical distance between the players, again, not much I can do about it except paying for expensive dedicated servers (not going to happen any time soon...).

Yeah, I'll add keyboard controls for things like rotating carried objects as well. Roads and rivers are a good point too. Basically the terrain and stuff that's in there at the moment is mostly just models I had lying around from other projects. If this is successful I'd hope to be able to get a lot more (and better) terrain options in there.

The same goes for 3D unit models; they're massively time consuming. Not only do you have to model them (with a much lower poly count than that used for the models for rapid prototyping that we're used to seeing here), but you also have to UVmap them and make skins. All in all it takes ages, so they're not something I'm going to be spending much time on any time soon, expect perhaps one or two as examples. Of course the benefit of this extendable system is that it doesn't have to be me doing all the hard work!

Still, what I really need is for people to actually play an few games with it so its not all just theoretical. Things will come up in game that we won't think of otherwise.

God, this is just like being a list developer and begging for playtest reports! I've put a lot of time into this and I'd really like to see it actually being used, or there'll be no point me doing any more work on it.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Thanks.



I suspected as much. I wonder how practical it would be to use DoW units.

That, or you said it's the original Quake engine? I think there were some 40K Total Conversions for Quake...



It'd be useful to have some way to denote "this unit is part of Formation X, while this unit is part of Formation Y". Renaming seemed like the most practical way, but it's not the sort of thing that can't be done without.

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The Apocrypha of Skaros 1.1
Rogue Trader Expedition 0.4
The Horus Heresy 0.5
Night Lords 0.1
My Trade Thread

From my experiments, converting DoW models is possible but you lose the UV mapping so skins won't apply correctly. In other words, it only does half the work for you.

The engine is based on the quake engine but heavily and entirely rewritten and upgraded. The best model format to use is probably quake 3 .md3 format, but there are boring technical reasons why you can't just put existing quake 3 40k based player models in the game (Quake 3 split the models into multiple parts to give bodies articulation, and it'd be a real pain to convert that to a single model while retaining the UV mapping again.)

The quake 1 model format is not recommended for use since it's a very old, low precision format.



It's a very tricky thing to add, so it'll be low down on my priority list, but I might get to it.

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Epic: Hive Development Thread

Damn. That combined with DOW's army painter would rather simplify everything for a lot of armies.

How simple is recreating the UV mapping?



I thought it might be something like that (no, really. I swear I did).



Would it matter that much at such a tiny size?



I can't really think of an alternative solution, unfortunately. Adding a "link these units" tool sounds like it'd be MORE complicated.

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The Apocrypha of Skaros 1.1
Rogue Trader Expedition 0.4
The Horus Heresy 0.5
Night Lords 0.1
My Trade Thread

I'll probably be free this Saturday day time (I'm currently in Perth so +8 GMT). Anyone like to play me then? I may not be available that often but I'd really like to get a game in to help Zombo (and because it's good to play).

If I can find an opponent I'd like to take screen-caps during the game and post up a battle report of the game and tabletop. Some people might not be checking this thread but if they see that the game works they might try too. I've mentioned Tabletop and linked to this thread in my signature, this could be a good idea for others too.


Real pain as in time consuming and/or fiddly? Or requiring technical knowledge/experience? If the game takes off then I'd think about spending occasional free time trying to get armies done for it if it was something I could do. I have no artistic experience, so would have to re-use existing models.


Is there any way to have more than one base colour in a player's army? That could be an alternate option to distinguish units. If using some armies say infantry heavy orks, it could be particularly handy to be able to differentiate the formations. If there could be a dozen or more colours and a player could select different ones for units as needed that could work.

Help - how do we do get it to work, do we have to do something with pings or ports?

I might get a game with Jaggedtoothgrin on Saturday. I tried creating a new game so we could check it works in advance but it's not showing up his side. My internet security suite might be blocking it, do I have tell it to allow a particular port or something? I wasn't expecting a problem as I think it just worked last time I briefly tried it with Simulated Knave.

I mentioned it to Gr00ver too and it sounds like he might be interested in trying Tabletop Epic too.

Apologies if this is over your head, but this is what uou need to do...

You need to forward port 26000 for udp (and tcp to be on the safe side) to the IP address of your PC inside your home network. Only the host needs to do this.

You may also need to open the port on your firewall. This probably won't be a problem, windows asks if you want to grant access to the darkplaces app anyway.

There's normally a port forwarding menu item on your router's admin screen, often found at http://192.168.0.1, but google your router model number if it doesn't work. Enter your pcs local IP address here and 26000 in the public and private port fields.

Ipconfig from a windows command prompt (cmd.exe from the start menu) will tell you your local IP address, you're looking for a line beginning ipv4...

http://ping.eu/port-chk/ is useful to check if the port is open. You can find your external IP address from www.whatismyip.com, enter that for IP and 26000 for port.

Hope this helps...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

Could you give me a bit more detail on how to do this please? I've told the firewall in Bitdefender Total Security 2013 to allow darkplaces and tabletop. I've managed to get into the Asus dsl-n12u router's menu too, but I'm not sure what I'm supposed to change in there. There's a lot of different options and I can find a menu under the WAN section entitled port trigger but not port forwarding, might port trigger be what I need to change?

I've found my IP address and port 26000 is currently showing as blocked with the other site.