[MrFlibble]

The Watchtower, on 20 August 2019 - 11:55 PM, said:

Overall, I have to say, SC is a slightly better game despite some dullness and chore inside the missions. The payoff is better.

Back in the days when I actively played StarCraft campaigns (including the more difficult Enslavers series) I quite enjoyed exactly that methodical buildup to defeat the AI, bit by bit. Incidentally this is almost the exact opposite of how multiplayer or even skirmish games work in the same game, where you have to be rather quick on your toes and the AI or human opponents press you pretty hard.

I can only name a few campaign missions that I would call comparable to the skirmish AI in terms of difficulty, and both come from Enslavers II. One has you against several Terran and Zerg players including that campaign combo T/Z AI seen in later BW Zerg levels (however I've just watched a vid of this one played quite comfortably). And the other straight puts you against one Insane Zerg AI, which I didn't beat

[NNC]

MrFlibble, on 28 August 2019 - 02:59 AM, said:

Back in the days when I actively played StarCraft campaigns (including the more difficult Enslavers series) I quite enjoyed exactly that methodical buildup to defeat the AI, bit by bit. Incidentally this is almost the exact opposite of how multiplayer or even skirmish games work in the same game, where you have to be rather quick on your toes and the AI or human opponents press you pretty hard.

I can only name a few campaign missions that I would call comparable to the skirmish AI in terms of difficulty, and both come from Enslavers II. One has you against several Terran and Zerg players including that campaign combo T/Z AI seen in later BW Zerg levels (however I've just watched a vid of this one played quite comfortably). And the other straight puts you against one Insane Zerg AI, which I didn't beat

The last few BW Zerg missions are also killers. As a turtler myself, I hate to play a fast paced rush game. The only thing I can manage well is to send my 12 Battlecruisers/Carriers into a suicide mission to beat the building I need to destroy (ie. like Mengsk's stronghold in the nuke mission, or the following map), but that's still a result of turtling and base building. Zergling rushes are totally uncharacteristic for me.

[Zaxx]

I may be on a different skill level because I used to play SC2 in multiplayer but there are ways to sort of exploit stuff in SC1 in order to easily get better at microing units. For example if you want to do a large attack on the enemy base a good way to manage that is to rally your units to a nice open space in a way that they will have some room to manuever when you give an attack order. You can line up your whole army this way in the configuration you want to (for example zerglings and ultralisks in the front, hydras in the back, mutas hotkeyed somewhere where you can micro them during battle) and then when you want to attack instead of hotkeying every group you just select them 12 at a time and give an attack order for the enemy base ON THE MINIMAP. This way you can send your whole army there without jumping back and forth between groups.

And really against the AI you don't have to micro a zergling rush, you just send a shitton of them (backed up by a few ultralisks) into the thick of it and they'll work the defending lines just enough so that you can move in with your other units and micro them properly. With the right strategy and tricks like this even BW is piss easy but you kinda have to learn the game if you want to beat Omega because it does have a reason for its reputation of being a hard mission (in around 20 minutes one of the enemy bases has to die there if you want to avoid major problems and that can be tricky).

Edit: And as for speeding up the game: instead of turtling a good rule of thumb is to start building up your base and spending your resources as fast as you can until minderal production gets to a point where you get enough minerals for a new command center / hatchery / nexus (always keep making worker units, those should always be in production). That's when you have to expand to speed up your production.

[MrFlibble]

Zaxx, on 28 August 2019 - 03:30 AM, said:

With the right strategy and tricks like this even BW is piss easy but you kinda have to learn the game if you want to beat Omega because it does have a reason for its reputation of being a hard mission (in around 20 minutes one of the enemy bases has to die there if you want to avoid major problems and that can be tricky).

I don't remember Omega being super difficult; I never finished it only because I lost my saved games after a patch and then didn't bother replaying from the start. The air attack waves were annoying but I managed to take out Dominion forces and was in the process of wiping out UED without much trouble, although I certainly lost a lot of units. On top of that I do realise now (all that was quite a while back) that my defensive strategies were not very efficient but the AI never attacked in such force as to permanently cripple the economy.

[Zaxx]

I wouldn't say that Omega is super difficult, it's just that a bad start and being a slowpoke can cause you serious problems because the AI is tuned in a way that it will gradually attack you with more and more significant forces. At the beginning it seems manageable but then they bring out the nastier stuff so if you don't wipe out one base you may get steamrolled if you're unlucky.

On the other hand you start with a really good base so you can build up your defenses and your army really fast and there are even options for expansion. Imo if you take out Mengsk in the first 20-25 minutes you've already won the map. Mengsk is kinda the worst there because his base is very close and if I remember correctly he starts bringing out the science vessels and the nukes after a while so it's best to get rid of him quickly. I guess that's why Omega is being regarded was a very hard mission by a lot of people: back in the day most people didn't know how to use the game's hotkey system because it was a pretty new thing + BW is a lot more micro heavy than the base SC1 was + SC1 has no difficulty settings so if you were slower you got mengsked there.

[Zaxx]

The remasters will have Grey Goo's jukebox feature:

[ReaperAA]

Some C&C modding news:

1) A new version (v 0.8) of Twisted Insurrection has been released.

2) There is a new upcoming mod of Red Alert 2 called Flipped Missions.

[Zaxx]

This looks significantly better than what I expected:

It gives off the feeling that you're looking at the original graphics, just in higher resolution. Excellent job from the artists.

[Sledgehammer]

That indeed does look good, like a remaster should. Like it better than remaster of SC (artwork-wise). The guys did better job here, IMO.

[ReaperAA]

Hmm. The remastered art looks a bit rough around the edges. Some of the buildings(and sandbags) are a bit too shiny/clean and don't look gritty enough. The remappable/player color of buildings is also not balanced (player color in some of the nod buildings look more red while others looks more orange). Hopefully these things will get fixed in future.

On the other hand, I am extremely happy to know that they have the original source code available with them coz that means that the games have a good chance of having .INI modding (I would love some Rules.ini modding).

[Zaxx]

Yeah, they said that the stuff you see is not finished and what's obviously wrong is being worked on. As for it looking a bit clean I agree but then again based on previous RTS remasters I don't think we're seeing the finished overall image here: the usual added detail (like SCR's extra terrain objects and whatnot) and really any kind of lighting are missing from here.

[Sledgehammer]

It looks pretty good considering it's not finished yet. If they make it "dirty", I hope they won't implement lazy filters though.

[Zaxx]

Depends on the quality of those "filters" though, for example the fake dynamic lighting SCR has enriches the game's atmosphere quite a bit. It's not a perfect solution because somewhy the art looks a bit lower res with it on compared to how the game looks without it but nobody's playing SC with the camera being zoomed in all the way so it's not a biggie.

AoE 2 DE has some pretty robust post processing going on too and most of it is really well implemented (especially the bloom and the mood litghting really helps in that the graphics don't look sterile anymore) apart from a weird vignette filter that just makes the image look too busy (so that was the first thing I turned off when I got my hands on the beta ).

What I'm really hoping for is just better animations though especially on the buildings. For example go here and look at "teaser 1":
https://www.ea.com/g...quer-remastered

It's pretty jarring how few animation frames the buildings have with this resolution (especially the radar dish). And now that I mentioned lighting to me it seems that the tiberium crystals could really use some kind of glow effect because they just don't look good.

[Sledgehammer]

Was AoE2 DE made by the same team of artists?

As for animation, I'd rather prefer the artwork to look not lazy and low-res (now it's mostly related to filters), if we have to choose. Would be nice to have more frames as well though, at least for buildings. This is very noticeable if you look at how smoothly units are animated.

But I like the attention to detail (though some things should be improved a bit, like tiberium silos, for example). Tanks, for one, look very good and pretty realistic, in fact GDI tanks look even more heavier compared to Nod tanks that look smaller, as it was supposed to be since Nod tanks are considered medium tanks. This attention to detail is partly why I also don't want the art to look like shit due to lazy filters, I definitely want to zoom-in the game just for the sake of look alone, to make screenshots, use that shit as wallpaper for desktop, etc, since not a lot of shit is going on on the screen at the same time nor there are too much of color usage like in many games.

Honestly it's a bad thing to use cheap filters for sprites, I hope they won't do that and just work on every sprite. That requires work of course, but I have a hope since the people that work on the game seems to be pretty dedicated. C&C just deserves such perfection.

[Zaxx]

AoE 2 DE is being worked on by different companies (Forgotten Empires and Tantalus to be exact) but even when it comes to C&C the fact that Lemon Sky (the company that handled the art for SCR) is doing the art is one thing, everything else is being handled by Petroglyph.

Anyway I agree on that the focus should be on making the 2D art look as good as it can get but there is a huge downside to all this 2D stuff: from a modern perspective it's just not dynamic enough. That's why SCR has added effects like bloom and "faked" ambient occlusion, that makes the whole game feel more dynamic and flashy. So my guess is that Petro will at least attempt to do something similar with C&C, we'll just have to wait and see how it works out. C&C 1 and the first Red Alert always had a clean, sorta realistic look and feel so what worked for SC may not work here though.

[Zaxx]

Haha:

[Sledgehammer]

I always liked that the guy had good taste when it comes to video games.

[Zaxx]

EVA's voice got re-recorded but it was done by her original voice so it's all fine:
https://www.ea.com/g...audio-recording

[gemeaux333]

I wondered, is there a way to play the original CNC3 campaigns with all the advantages provided by KW, with among other the possibility to choose the subfaction you want to paly (have nostalgia for the TS version of GDI) ?

[ReaperAA]

Can't believe no one has posted this yet. The official trailer for the C&C Remastered:

[MrFlibble]

ReaperAA, on 16 March 2020 - 09:53 AM, said:

Can't believe no one has posted this yet. The official trailer for the C&C Remastered:

I didn't because I assumed everyone knew already I mean it was on Steam's home page.

BTW, what do you think about the neurally upscaled FMVs?

[ReaperAA]

MrFlibble, on 17 March 2020 - 04:54 AM, said:

BTW, what do you think about the neurally upscaled FMVs?

Well they look okay to me. I know they just upscaled/interpolated which doesn't sound that impressive. But then again, I don't think they could've done much about it. The original FMVs are so low-res and pixelated that it might be pretty much impossible to make them look more higher res.


The only way would be to re-make the FMVs, which unfortunately is not only costly but also has a high chance of ruining the original atmosphere.

[MrFlibble]

The clip Jim Vessella shows in the FMV reveal video made a very odd impression on me. Suddenly the upscaled video started to look like some homemade VHS tape or something -- an effect that was oddly missing from the low-res originals. The actors also somehow stand out more against the digitized background, making it obvious they were filmed against a green screen. No idea why the upscale produced these effects, or maybe I'm just making this up. Perhaps some further post-processing can be done yet to mitigate this and maybe make the videos look more natural.

[ReaperAA]

MrFlibble, on 19 March 2020 - 01:41 AM, said:

The clip Jim Vessella shows in the FMV reveal video made a very odd impression on me. Suddenly the upscaled video started to look like some homemade VHS tape or something -- an effect that was oddly missing from the low-res originals. The actors also somehow stand out more against the digitized background, making it obvious they were filmed against a green screen. No idea why the upscale produced these effects, or maybe I'm just making this up. Perhaps some further post-processing can be done yet to mitigate this and maybe make the videos look more natural.

Well now that you mention it, the remastered FMVs do feel like VHS tapes (possibly due to smoother frames/interpolation I think). But I feel that the VHSness has a weird retro charm of its own.

And as far as the green screen issue is concerned, yeah I agree that maybe more post-processing should have been done to make the background more natural. But then again, even in the original low-res videos, the background looked obviously fake/CGI to me.

[MrFlibble]

ReaperAA, on 19 March 2020 - 10:02 AM, said:

Well now that you mention it, the remastered FMVs do feel like VHS tapes (possibly due to smoother frames/interpolation I think). But I feel that the VHSness has a weird retro charm of its own.

It does, but it felt rather unexpected to me that such an effect would be produced by the upscale. I mean, its essentially the same video.

[Mike Norvak]

Coming soon...

[Mike Norvak]

https://youtu.be/SUIudXMDiwk

[MrFlibble]

C&C and RA1 will be "partially" open sourced under GPL 3.0:
https://www.neowin.n...remaster-launch
https://www.ea.com/g...-update-modding

Quote

Today we are proud to announce that alongside the launch of the Remastered Collection, Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license. This is a key moment for Electronic Arts, the C&C community, and the gaming industry, as we believe this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL. It’s worth noting this initiative is the direct result of a collaboration between some of the community council members and our teams at EA. After discussing with the council members, we made the decision to go with the GPL license to ensure compatibility with projects like CnCNet and Open RA. Our goal was to deliver the source code in a way that would be truly beneficial for the community, and we hope this will enable amazing community projects for years to come.

So, what does it mean for Mod Support within the Remastered Collection? Along with the inclusion of a new Map Editor, these open-source DLLs should assist users to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic, and edit data. The community council has already been playing with the source code and are posting some fun experiments in our Discord channel. But to showcase a tangible example of what you can do with the software, Petroglyph has actually created a new modded unit to play with. So we asked a fun question – “What would the Brotherhood of Nod do if they captured the Mammoth Tank?” Well, one guess is they’d replace the turret with a giant artillery cannon, and have it fire tactical nukes! Thus, the Nuke Tank was born. This is a unit which is fully playable in the game via a mod (seen in the screenshot above), and we hope to have it ready to play and serve as a learning example when the game launches.

It is not really clear to me how far the open sourced part extends though, e.g. if it will be possible to export all game logics and behaviours into let's say OpenRA to create a stand-alone "port" that will be accurate to the original in how it plays.

[Mike Norvak]

A new remix every week

https://noisebrec.ba...emix-conquer-ep

[MrFlibble]

So I played Remastered a bit. The high-detailed units and structures are nice, albeit I felt they contrast a bit with the terrain that looks kinda "soft" blurry (reminded me a bit of the "photographic" style maps in Panzer General II). However I had the odd feeling when units move, it feels like the sprites are "gliding" over the map -- something I never noticed with the original graphics.

The best part of the remasters s far, to me, is the soundtrack, but I never really doubted Frank K & Co.