Slocket

Not to be a pessimist, but many have tried in vain from the past to no avail. I see no reason to even register there upon that website to even beg for a scrap. Try? I am trying in my own way for a remake, it is a slow go for me since I am programming in a BASIC language and a simple game engine. I am frustrated by the slow speed of the compiled code, but it looks nice. So yes, either hope for Steel or DavidAdas to kick out a real remake or sequel, maybe I can learn true C+#, XNA to take advantage of the .NET library and DX optimized routines to make it fast, and then compile it under MS way better compiler to get a decent frame rate. Lucas Arts is busy with other things? It is sad that they will not even give a reasoned answer why they can not release such code - lest it be for copyright holder agreement via the developer or said publisher of game.

Is that picture your 3D battle engine? Those look like high poly models. It would be nice to see an engine that can display something like that. Working for Bethseda Fallout 3 game is pretty good experience. Nice.

This is pretty good. I stuck this '2.5D' TGA skin over the original model for the close up view. http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7462/corvettec.th.jpg

That is interresting find. I assume the file your looking at is FLEETSD.DAT? It would be rather nice to setup the game to give the AI way better ships to begin with for somewhat of a challenge.

In the manual, they say that Force using characters can detect each other through the Force, thus spoiling the mission which is in your case Abduction Mission. I think it then after the mission is foiled of course, boils down to the stats of Combat. Now every time you fail to capture Vader, he also becomes stronger in Combat rating too (plus other stats like Espionage maybe). There is an ultimate limit to on how high you can go on any stat I understand from RebEd, 255' . Each character must battle him I guess. Maybe there is a 255+1=nonsense overflow bug. 255 being the largest number stored in binary for WORD. It is puzzling that his combat is zero, and your not able to capture him. I had that same problem with Luke left on one planet in one game ( I could not capture him no matter what). In the end, I blew it up with the Death Star, and Luke escaped to another planet. Lucky for me I had a giant fleet waiting for him there before he could past that roll test to get through to the planet and was caught by that orbiting fleet sent to interdect his arrival. I can only think that the major characters cannot be killed, force users meeting another force user causes that mission to fail, leading to a Combat battle. If his combat is zero...you would think he could be captured. Maybe it is a bit of a bug. Well, you cannot blow up the planet playing the Alliance, to force him Vader to go through your blockade. Oh yes, as Evaders99 says, you can assault the planet and capture them all, but I think you want to only capture Vader seperately from Palpatine, so the game will not end. So you will have to do Abduction mission... Plus, if you have Luke at 700 rating, I guess you can go beyond 255... EDIT: Try to knee cap Palpy. His rating of espionage and combat will suffer. Then you can capture Vader. If you happen to capture Palpatine, take to an empty planet, then let him go there so he escapes. Then go back and nail Vader without Palpatine's Force spoiling your Mission. Since capturing both Palpatine, Vader and Coruscant is a win condition -you must break that conditional statement.

Lucky for me, I found a website that did get it fixed. It was a Rootkit of the variant UAC. I looked for those files just like RootRepeal does, but I could not find them inside system32/ neither could RootRepeal -it just crashed. Plus it shuts OFF your anti-virus from even launching, nor update (so no scan to get rid of it). Then it hoses your internet browser like a Hijacker. Plus it played an odd music/conversation using some CoolPlay program. I guess they get off on it. The good news is there are some nice people that created a repair tool, ComboFix, to combat this new nasty, nasty rootkit virus that is out and about. Apparently I caught between 7-14 until a few days ago. It did list about six programs I had, mostly demos. So much for that, yes indeed, be very careful where you download a demo from. "Hey, its free to try..." nothing is free. I would like to thank very much to those guys that created ComboFix. The tool is free, they really are decent people to make a tool to combat viruses, during their free time. Sometimes I wonder if PC games are going to suffer with all those virus ware out there. Maybe the console game do not suffer much from viruses? As for the topic about code, public and private. I guess some may want their code private in case they want to make a game for profit, else what would stop a lamer from borrowing your hard work code development, then change it a bit, add some new picture and sound resources, and produce a game for sell out of it?

I am still working on it. Right now, some pleasant (***) decided to drop a web browser hijacker on me. But this will not let me access my anti-virus/spyware to update to remove. Oh no, it a sophisicated RootKit hider from hell. I had this done to me before about 2 years ago, this one is a mutating SOB. I need to download my important data and reformat my HDD and re-install. It seems this variant came out since the last month. I do have something to show since Nove 2008, now i got hosed, but I think my main data work I did the last 6 months will not be lost. I have back ups of all the models in .X and such. After four years I should have expected this. You would think peeps would have something better to do with their genius at making nasty rootkit virus. Do they not understand they are destroying the very thing they love? If they care about playing computer games on the PC platform, then why attack it? That and piracy just adds more fuel for peeps to buy a simle minded console game over a PC game for that reason. I run three main spyware, virus, etc to stop this stuff, but it happens. I downloaded a "free" trial of a 3D model maker and I find out their was a virus placed into the legit demo trial of Blender (I seem to like it over 3DS and it is cheap / free for basic use). You guys out their that are genius at programming that are making malicious virus: I plead with you, you are the Man, please use your extrodary talent for good, it is always easy to be evil. In the end, do you not want new cool games or remakes to enjoy?

http://www.swrebellion.com/wiki/Rebellion:Windows_Vista Have you seen this wiki? It is for Vista. There is a dll you must have, and other things. I wonder if you can install Virtual machine to emulate the old operating systems on Win7. OK you mean you tried the above Vista fixes under Win 7 and they did not work? Then I seen this around the Web: Some people claim there is an addon for Win7 to make an Win XP mode, which many times will run Rebellion. I have native Win XP 32 and it works fine.

Did people like him only so much as they like his music, or as a real person in real life? As a real person, he had a very troubled life that ended in drug overdose. Plus many allegations that are not so nice. Was he a victim of child abuse himself? Was he a pedophile? Was he normal, or just a misunderstood person? Was he just another crazy music singer? Elvis was liked by many, but he also died of drug overdose.

Yes, same thing here. DarkBasic does not support double clicking as a native function, so I had to create my own function. There was alot of sloppy code on the net but most of it was crap. My double click function works very well taking into account program speed and time of push/on/release and time in between. Similiar to proper debouncing an electric circuit switch in electronics. It seems you are doing to 3D just about I would have done. Place the data bars icons etc onto 3D planes billboarded to your camera view (transparent) so the size will get smaller and bigger as you zoom, and if far enough away, just cut off the extraneous information. Sins of a Solar Empire comes to mind again. I know just enough C language to get myself in trouble, so that still makes me a n00b.

yes, I know I was trying to make a small "geek" joke.

Indeed, it may allow the AI to be smarter since it can react faster. I should give it a try with the AI having a faster move time. Yes, of course, inside the file it says general parameters table...my eyes must be getting older to read.

So I understand, you found the default hyperspeed value location for lets say a character moving by himself to a planet, or a refinery moving through space? This is not inside RebEd I take? And it is located inside GNPRTB.DAT? Usually PR_TB stands for Probability_Table of GN whatever GN stand for. Some are Diplomacy mission success, Sabotage Mission success, etc. I am surprised it is inside that file. Good work, I would like to see the ability to change the default speeds of characters and shipments such as Factories and such. Good find. Wow!

Moving unit is simple the best. I have a data array that holds the time in days and destination of that unit. The time for travel is calculated when you indicate when you want to move a unit to another planet. I do not store the original depature point, it is a one way trip. I can check this data for access in order for Espionage missions to gain knowledge if a unit is coming to a planet, etc. As you say, as in original game, units in hyperspace cannot be changed or given orders. Editing the universe and planets is through basic text based editor "Galaxy Mapper". One Knowledge state of all units for real is kept by the game keeper logic so to speak. The AI (or other player if MP mode) has its own 'Known' universe of units data, and the single player has his known set of units data too. This is from Recon units, interactions, espionage, and spies just like in the original game. Three sets in total. What is a "pointer"? As in pointing to a memory adress ala C++ ? or a good tip? The unit movement state is Universal. I did not use Planet based. Save and load for me are the relevant arrays of data that are literally written out as sequential files into one regular hex format into a normal uncompressed DAT file. It would be very easy for someone to make a savegame hex editor for it. Simple clean, nothing fancy.

Yes, mesh instanceing is very important. I call it "cloning". A person uses one mesh model and that is in memory RAM then the hundred ships based upon that model can be instanced pointing at that spot in memory so you do not use up 100x of RAM. You can give each one its own texture, again pointing at it. In DB it is simple, too simple so I change it so I can keep track of the book keeping. I think this is why in object oriented language they uses Classes? I do not know why they make such simple logical process so complicated. load object "ISD.x",11 instance object 1000,11 that will make one memory for ISD model (it can have its own texture or you can add it externally, such as if you want to show a seperate damage texture as it is being destroyed). Then I create a clone (instance) of that mesh or model called object 1000 here. I get really lost fast using those numbers that DB likes to use. So I do this create arrays to numerate all the ships you will need of that class, then the name of that array tells what it is so I do not get lost. `declarations of Ship Meshes numbers DB assumes Integer. Basic not C++ VSDMesh=10 ISDMesh=11 SSDMesh=12 `constants declarations `start number of ISD mesh objects from 1000 to 1500 ISDMeshNumStart =1000 ISDMeshNumMax=500 `declare Array to store ISDMeshObjects DIM ISDMeshObjects(ISDMeshNumMax) as integer ` number of ISD Ships mesh for battle get from code ISDMeshNumBattle=ISDNumBattle `create ISD Ship meshes array objects for battle load object "ISD.x",ISDMesh For i=1 to ISDMeshNumBattle instance object ISDMeshObjects(i),ISDMesh Next i Well, it is short hand and not complete but you get the idea. sadly DB is limited to 64,536 =2 ^16 I think for objects. You can have the same number of textures seperately, and also the same number of sprites seperately. So as you can see, if I had say 100 space ship models, and nothing else, no planets, no laser fire, no astroids, I am limited somewhat to a maximum of 500 here gives 500*100= 50,000 objects numeration leaving very little flexability. So I need to change my arrays sizes dynamically on the fly. I can not really just say 500 as a constant. Of course I am not going to use 50,000 ships and fighters in battle, so I need to adjust those maximum constants for making the Arrays on the fly so I can take advantage of the fact I know going into batte if I am going to need 1000 ISD, or no ISD and say 2000 TIE fighters. I need to generate the numeration adresses for the array dynamically so I do not hit that 65,536 limit. That is one annoying thing about Dark Basic. The object numerations. So, yes I do use memory instances for the short answer. But in the future I wish to learn a more formal programing language to keep the book keeping mess of DB away. I think maybe that is why they created Classes and types. But this DB was a fast neat way to get a understanding of what it takes to get a game together. The overall picture. Sadly DB would be too limiting for a large scale project I think. Great though for pocket rocket games. I think it maybe be amazing what I could ring out of DB pro though. It did take alot of hassle coding it around those numbers.

Yes I am still working on my remake. I did most of the work back on November 2008, but then I realized that using the DarkBasic Pro engine compiler is not very effecient in producing an EXE binary compared to VC++ Microsoft or other popular compilers. So I figured out you can use ordinary C++ with a newer DB version (literally it will compile under Microsoft's free Compiler!). Thus I can achieve much faster speed using their more effecient compiler High level language to Binary. Plus I had to use some tricks of the trade to speed up the computations with the 3D engine models, sounds, random stuff, laser shots, explosions, book keeping for the complex 'StarFleet Battle' damage system I am using. I discovered if a person wants hundreds of ships and thousands of fighter squadrons and not bring the FPS to a crawl, there are ways that a CPU does not have to compute every thing every frame per second. I am skipping code loop that the normal human eye cannot see any way, and to cheat on math routines using a simple look up table for say trignometry in 3D vectors ( my version of a poor man's but high performance DirectX). Psuedo random numbers for RANDOM function, etc. So I went back and rewrote alot of the code, and my gosh it will display hundred ship battle now without slowing down. I should mention that models that are far away I use progress less polygon model like the original did. Close up very high detail, medium distance I use what the artist made here on this website and low poly ( a convertor I found) low detail poly for far away. Make for a very cool zoom in high detail ( I need to get permission from artist off the web to use those movie quality models) then zoom out for the over all action. Of course this version of the game you should not have a dozen Imperial Star Destoyers over every planet, it goes against my design. Each ship is precious resource and you should be using your heroes and agents on missions, very important. I do not want a 300 hundred ship spam fest anyway. After looking at what your doing for your GUI, I think I should have an option to remove the original games artwork background so people can see more. In fact, that 3D galaxy style instead of the 2D of the original would have been a nice idea. Where a person can zoom in like in Sins of a Solar Empire, but zoom out for the overal tactical. Too late for this version, I need to stay on target to get something released for an alpha demo to see how it will work on others OS and computers. I am too far into the design to back track now. Maybe in future I can make a 3D worlds galaxy and use the cannon galaxy map to zoom in and out. I still have the 3D battles in space and let me say, it is pretty darn good and I have not seen anyone make a decent AI and 3D battles like this, it is more than Homeworld but that was long ago and no company is making a true 3D space battle game with any decent level of strategy ( google "StarFleet Battles": complex ships and crew, not "simple minded ships with a small health bar go boom"). After this project, I would like to make my own original game using what I learned. I have to eat too. Worlds at War:...cliche. Galactic Wars:.....sounds like Star Wars. Heroes of Fallen Empires:...hey original...Heroes of Might and Magic. Null Space.....Was ist das? Another RTS shooter? Galactic Core....OK bad Sci-Fi movie. Battlecruisers in Love?

I got it to work. It looks clean and professional. I like your approach of simplifying the planet information boxes. I see your going 3D for the planets, which is very nice touch. I seen something like that in Free Orion. Gives the game more of a real galaxy feel. Good job so far!

Maybe I think sometimes the registry must have an entry to tell the OS that file d3drm.dll is located inside the system 32 folder. I read that from the above link. Try adding the registry entry into your registry. They give the instructions for XP only. I guess it is something similiar for Vista 64.

Yes that answers my question. It seems to really make no difference, array or just one big namespace. I notice this. I was using to find distance upon a mouse click on screen with a specific spot in 2D interface. D< SQR(X^2+y^2) now that if with bounds of that circle is AND with MouseClick(). Simple? but not efficient. x=(x1-x2) and y=(y1-y2) the difference of course, for brevity I am using a bit of short hand here in words. SQR takes time to computate. So it is better to compare INTEGER numbers by the SQUARE only. It does the same thing so drop the extra square root calculation. So makes program run faster to compare INT D^2 < (x^2+y^2) Next, I thought, maybe faster to do a INT BOX (X,Y) click area. Simply is X and Y between the Box co-ordinates integer (only a <> operation). Maybe that is faster than multiplication? [(X>X1 AND XY1 AND Y Inside the first evaluation, if the X is not in range (say 50% chance same as Y ) using the complied IF statement and register comparison >, then the program will skip the rest of the calculation making it speedy. Which is faster than adding (D*D) < (X*X + Y*Y) to see if it the whole expression evaluates to be TRUE. Is this logic true? I measure the main loop speed and it is much faster using INTEGER and this way to find Distance closer to Mouse Click (x,y) When doing 3D calculations, I think I can use a few math cheat aproximations to speed things up alot there too.

One thought for the regular game is to double the shield recharge rate and maybe boost the maximum to 400. In the remake of a game. Special shields can be researched to refit ships. Just like Shield penetrating torpedoes can be researched by the Rebels. 1). Harden Shields. Unique to the Star Destroyer Class. Only a certain amount of damage per second will ever overload and get through to damage the shields. Example from the movies, a single ship could plunk at it all day and never do any damage, but when Akbar used concentrate fleet power then several small ships power will overload and get through the threshold to damage the Star Destroyer. Ion fire is taken full. 2). Refractive Shields. Using the immense size of a Star Destroyer platform, these shields are completly immune to Laser Class Blaster fire and only susceptable to Heavy Turbolaser damage as found on Capital class ships and Ion Cannon of any sort. Thus a Corvette laser only ship will have no effect. A Mon Calamari would have full effect on shields. Maybe the regular Turbolaser batteries found on say a Bulk Cruiser or Dreadnaught may do half damage. In my remake, I only have three damage bolts (Turbo) (Laser) (Ion). I would like to add Heavy Turbo (HTurbo). 3). Magnetic Shields. Guess what? only the Torpedoes fired from fighters will penetrate fully through these, their only weakness. I want to have the Fighter/Bombers Torpedoes will penetrate shields but are limited (think X-Wing series of games). Once spent, maybe the shield generator damage will be enough to quickly fire upon the weakened shield after a bombardment to finish the Star Destroyer off. Or in place of that, allow the Y-wings to replenish there load of torpedos back at its escort ship for another fun load of love to bust the shields down. Now that would give a reason to have and go after any escort ships carriers to remove the fighters torpedo bombers from reloading their dangerous payload. Ion cannon fire maybe only 1/2 effective. 4). Particle Shields. No torpedoes can pentrate these. Turbolaser ? Laser ? Ion ? I think that would really brighten up the game tactically in battle. Three Capital Shield Classes. EAW did have a ARMOR vs FIRE matrix that gave a % damage of what was firing on what to get the real dmage done to try to simulate what is a good counter to what in game. Easy to do, but a bit transparent and cheesy.

Oh I should tell you that it works great! Here is a picture of a corvette running away from a VSD, similiar to A New Hope. The textures are on the ships. Yess! http://img2.pict.com/15/85/0e/4aab4d00202828fb69b5eaa241/KoGS8/corvetterunner.jpg http://img2.pict.com/15/85/0e/4aab4d00202828fb69b5eaa241/KoGS8/300/corvetterunner.jpg

The most I know about using virtual PC machine is this, it is made by Microsoft. You get it from their website. You use part of your HD space to install lets say Windows 9x OS. You must have an original Windows OS disk (or find a free copy on Abandonware since they do not support it no more). Then you boot up the computer and you use that selection. I think someone here on this forum is running it that way with no problems. 3D space battles can be a problem I hear for some/many. Could be the newer graphics drivers to run DX10 (only a guess). Will not render the ships. But if that was the case, then it would still not work. I thought Rebellion was based upon win32 API coded the hard way. Maybe it is in changes to that. That link above does tell you how to install the virtual pc. Try it out and tell us how it works for you.

I love it when the AI sends only "one" character on a rescue mission to get a prisoner held on a very highly fortified Coruscant. Sit back and have fun watching them get caught one by one. Especially if you got Luke. The AI does not seem to understand how to make an effective force for what it is is up against, and when to not even try. I really hope I can do better (will I ever finish?), or DavidAdas for Reb 2. I do find those lowly Y-Wings (excorted by X-Wing or a Corvette to remove TIE) can tear up an ISD with only two or three squadrons. But it is nice to see someones thoughts on balance. I think the best bargain for the Empire is the standard Carrack Cruiser. All around good for taking out fighter, plus turbo for capital ships, high repair rate at 35, plus not that expensive to build. For what you spend on a (ISD + TIE6) to a few Carrack Cruisers will kick arse most well at the beginning through middle of the game. If you have not already won. Having four (or five if you count 6 TIE cost) Carracks gives 4*200 shields worth to destroy, while that one ISD has only 300. After that, the shields are down it is over. With the laser cannons extra makes up for the lack of Ion cannons that a ISD has, so I say four (or five) Carracks will do more damage by themselves for any circumstances than the ISD + 6TIE.

Good points. Maybe it is best to leave it as it is for gameplay sake. Even if it is abit over the top in real life. I do remember many developers that tried to remake XCOM game. Of course they tried to improve too much upon its original gameplay, but in the end it failed. Almost like a special work of art, you really do not want to mess around too much within reason with the original piece, or else risk losing that magic something that makes the game unique and fun to play.

Thanks. Yes the Correlian Corvette is in the this website download. I have the mesh and can display the mesh fine in the DB pro engine. I just cannot use the texture in BIN form. I need the original BMP, JPG or normal format to texture the object.x with. I believe people used a "Convert to BIN"? program to make those BIN maps out of the normal BMP maps. If I had a way to reverse the procedure. If I had the source code to that convertor people used to make the model textures work inside Rebellion as BIN. I tried to make a simple 32*32 bitmap square 256 bit color RBG basic format BMP used the convertor and tried to understand what it was doing to the data to reverse engineer it. I was only partially successful (yet -and it is time consuming). But if you know what or how was done to those original BMP texture maps being created into those BIN textures... I should say that I only need the 'close' up .X and close texture. The game engine make mipmaps to scale the far awya models automatically so there is no real need for those medium and far mesh and textures at this time or ever. ------------OT interest The newest upgrades to 7.3 DB pro is working much better even still. The new Pure GDK is interesting in that compiler can almost match VC++ Express if I dare say. I would not mind migrating the code to that to take advantage of the ability to use the Win 32 API calls to get more control of the window/mouse call backs messaging (networking messages too) and playing movies and such. It seems to be almost 2x faster than plain old DB pro. By stepping the code, I can find the choke points and and optimize the code at assembler level (inline) if something fuddy is going on. I call that a real personal touch. A human mind can go in there and make the code run very fast by doing that, though I would need to 'upgrade' to Pure GDK. You can't make a super graphical "Halo" game out of it with huge MP support ASAIK, but it will do simple hardcore gronard games like what we want without needing to be a PHD master in progamming. Plus I think the graphics and FX are not bad if a person wants to learn how to get them to work. So it is a good starter /intermediate complete game engine to work with. Soon I can release an alpha tech demo , I just need some decent textures so peeps will not say booo on the 3D models. http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/4790/rebelshipdispay.th.png http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/4790/rebelshipdispay.png As usual pic quality is terrible. Thus I want to release a real EXE tech demo. > Looks 100X better.