Things that Tidalis has that AI War Does Not (Yet) -- Updated 5/26/2010

[RCIX]

(Apple makes a neat device, but man it is truly the worst PHONE I've ever owned, and I got my first AMPS cellular phone in 1992.)

Blame it on the gimmicky steel-band-around-the-edge antenna; i've used earlier ones and those are pretty good as phones.

And, wow! glad to see a post from one of the relatively few people that joined here before me!

[Collic]

Hi,
I haven't played AI war for a while, and on logging in saw this thread. This is great news. I recently had to do a full windows re-install, so I was dreading the .NET installation so I could check out what's new in the game. Moving to unity is a brilliant move, for that reason alone. It seems to be a very impressive and robust rendering engine, and I can only see it doing great things for the game.

If anyone reads this and is curious about any other games that use unity, this is the best, most recent example I can think of: http://www.interstellarmarines.com/ It's a completely different genre and game to AI war of course (and still under development, with some impressive tech demos), but I think it highlights what the engine is capable of in terms of gfx and performance.

Keep up the good work, and I look forward to trying out the new incarnation of AI war. I think I'll hold out until the port is ready. It will give me time to read up on the masses of features that have doubtlessly been added since I last played.

Oh, I've also had the opportunity to try out Tidalis, and from what I've seen of the demo, it's a very, very good game. It isn't my kind of thing, but it deserves to do very well indeed. I'll have my fingers crossed for you in the hopes it does as well as it should.

[x4000]

Many thanks for the support, guys!

[ttomm46]

Will the next add on for AI war still play ok on my low spec intel 2.66 ghz computer with XP and my lousy pci Nvidia 6200 video card..?.Right now I just have the first AI war without the Zenith Remnant.

[x4000]

Yep, our expansion packs don't increase the system requirements at all except in terms of disk space.

I'm not certain exactly what the ai war 4.0 required specs will be, but hopefully at or lower than what they are at present.

[RCIX]

I just thought of another awesome idea: you ought to be able to use a basic shader to offer a range overlay system, since it's (relatively) trivial to do. I'd even be happy to help with that, as i'm working on something similar. As long as you let me use it in my own future commercial ventures too

[x4000]

Sure, I'd be open to collaborating on shaders, and would always be open about the result of something like that. The main challenge would be that generally a sharer would have to be applied to some texture or object in game space, but in the case of range overlays for ai war, the only thing around to apply it to would be the camera. Given the per-pixel nature of shaders of the sort, and the way that textures that we currently use can be cached on the gpu for multiple vertex draws, I find it unlikely that the shaded would be faster. And there are compatibility concerns with older hardware without shaded support; having range overlays disappear for them would be seen as a pretty critical bug. So it's possible something like that could work for ai war, but those are my concerns at the moment, anyway.

[madpinger]

I'm sorry if I might of overlooked this being mentioned somewhere, tho with this change.  Will it be as if it is a update to AI Wars or will I need to pay for the game again ?

[RCIX]

The way i was figuring the shader would work is that you translate all the range circles into screen space, then you pass this data to my shader (probably in blocks), and render a semitransparent texture over the entire screen. The shader would so some relatively simple calculation to strip out pixels you don't want (some simple length and stuff calculations, i'm still working out the shader details), leaving you with a nice cool looking range effect. As for platforms with no shading support at all, i would imagine you would have some fallback effects quite similar to those you have now, as you'd need for any shading effect.

@madpinger: I'm sure it will be an update to AI war. That's what makes x4k so great

[dumpsterKEEPER]

I'm sorry if I might of overlooked this being mentioned somewhere, tho with this change.  Will it be as if it is a update to AI Wars or will I need to pay for the game again ?

It will be a free update to the game.  The new Children of Neinzul expansion will be a (very) small amount more, but the updates and enhancements for the base game will not.

[keith.lamothe]

Yes, the 4.0 update (which includes the port to Unity3D) is free DLC.  The CoN expansion stuff is not free ($4, last I heard), but is just new content, so if you don't get that you aren't missing out on any bugfixes or new features that apply to existing content.  That said, we are planning some rather cool stuff for CoN, so I do suggest at least playing the trial version of that when it's done (or during the beta, if you like, though obviously that will be work-in-progress)

[x4000]

Yep, the 4.0 version is free. And if you already have the windows version, you get te Mac version free, too. When you buy any of our games on Mac or pc, you always get both at once if they are immediately or ever supported. So no worries!

Regarding the shader, that coupe potentially work, just depends on the implementation. I don't know enough about shaders to say for sure, honestly. But it's intriguing!

[madpinger]

Ok, thats nice.  How long till the expansion is on steam then, in all likely hood ?

Also, if you're going to support MAC, You going to let us have it on linux at last ?

[x4000]

From past experience, I wouldn't expect it on steam until it officially releases. So probably sptember or possibly October, really, because I'll be out for three weeks of paternity leave in the august/September timeframe. Mainly depends on how smoothly the porting to unity goes and when my son is born.

Regarding Linux, unity does not officially support that platform and so we can't either, but hopefully it will be coming before too much longer. They support practically every other platform under the sun now. But; word is that Tidalis works great in WINE from what I hear, and that was even before WINE 1.2 just came out, so I imagine that the windows version of AI War will at least be playable in Linux, though I have no idea if there will be issues or what. Fingers crossed, hopefully not.

[madpinger]

From past experience, I wouldn't expect it on steam until it officially releases. So probably sptember or possibly October, really, because I'll be out for three weeks of paternity leave in the august/September timeframe. Mainly depends on how smoothly the porting to unity goes and when my son is born.

Regarding Linux, unity does not officially support that platform and so we can't either, but hopefully it will be coming before too much longer. They support practically every other platform under the sun now. But; word is that Tidalis works great in WINE from what I hear, and that was even before WINE 1.2 just came out, so I imagine that the windows version of AI War will at least be playable in Linux, though I have no idea if there will be issues or what. Fingers crossed, hopefully not.

Well,  I'll offer my congratulations on your son now, as I'll likely forget.

Far as running it under wine,  I'll just hack the mac version to run if I can swing it rather than run the windows bin. :/
Working on Safari for mac currently as moonlight is supported by netflix but moonlight for firefox under linux is not.  RAGE !