Star Warfare: Alien Invasion - (by Freyr Games) - Universal App

[ThePowerofLava]

Originally Posted by undead.exe

Good grief, well done you hardcore tech-head

It runs Planetside 2 on full graphics without a hitch, and everything seems to be working perfectly

Not to mention its my own personal computer, so no more having to get off when my brother throws a tantrum about it...

[Peewhy]

is anyone still playing this?

[Drummerboycroy]

Originally Posted by ThePowerofLava

IT'S DONE!!

After an entire night of loading bars, error screens, and odd responses, I have windows installed and my computer is complete!!

Please tell me I'm not the only insufferable compu-geek that noticed the obligatory can of Mountain Dew in the background...

Re the new compu-box: It's ALIVE!

DBC

[Drummerboycroy]

Originally Posted by Peewhy

is anyone still playing this?

I play it every so often to remind myself of why I stopped playing it, but generally, no.

DBC

[ThePowerofLava]

Originally Posted by Drummerboycroy

Please tell me I'm not the only insufferable compu-geek that noticed the obligatory can of Mountain Dew in the background...

Re the new compu-box: It's ALIVE!

DBC

It played a vital role

[Enjoo]

Nice computer. Wished I had that kind of power.

[Sheinfell]

Originally Posted by ThePowerofLava

IT'S DONE!! After an entire night of loading bars, error screens, and odd responses, I have windows installed and my computer is complete!!

Congratulations! Hope it runs good for a long while.

Originally Posted by JediKnight

Undead, you talked about the level of programming that explosions not going through walls would take? Based on what they are doing you really can't. It is just an animation not any projectile actually blowing up.

Hhmm, even it is just an animation, can't you still do a check if the explosion graphics are hidden from view by an obstacle? Similar to z-buffering? But then I do not know what exactly the PowerVR graphics chip is capable of.

Originally Posted by undead.exe

That's more of the game's programming, right? If an explosive projectile collides with something, a spherical hitbox is generated where anything touching that hitbox incurs damage from the explosion -- the explosion going through walls is because the sphere's hitbox overlaps with and passes through nearby walls. I would think you could program the hitbox's shape to change depending on whether it's touching anything else, but to do that, the game's going to require a higher quality of programming which seems beyond SW's current standards -- and it'd probably cause some serious framerate/processing issues for the game to handle those sort of calculations (imagine what happens if the game had to frequently modify the hitbox shapes of multiple explosions if you're firing the Trinity at the ground, for example).

I don't know enough about graphics programming to say if the "check and reshape the hitbox" approach is something that is generally done. Jediknight, maybe you can provide more info here?
But you are right, undead, anything in that direction requires alot of processing power, relatively speaking, and most likely is beyond even an iPad4's capabilities.
Using a physics engine for particle computation would be the best and most excessive approach, but I am quite sure you cannot do that on any iThingie today. There is a reason why the first PhysX engine from Ageia was in hardware, as a separate expansion card for your PC. When NVidia acquired them, they integrated the separate card's hardware into their GForce graphics cards.

Originally Posted by undead.exe

The explosion is a preset graphic which won't change according to what's around it, I know.

Now, that is sloppy programming I'd think even on an iThingie you can do better than that.

Originally Posted by JediKnight

Back to Sheinfell: Also you used unity? I thought you were a web developer and a harddrive manager but I guess you're just plain awesome! What other game engines have you used?

Misunderstanding here I never got my head around programming, past the most basic concepts. So no, I never used Unity to do any development, and didn't play around with other engines, either.
I guess the misunderstanding comes from my comment that "I need to check my games list" . By that I meant I will have to go through the games I have on my iPad, as I cannot remember off the bat which ones the developers used Unity for.

My girlfriend is the web developer, not me
And harddrive manager is one of the most boring IT jobs I can think of, just managing storage space all day.

Okay, brief job history of mine here:
After getting my techie education (something quite unique for Germany, afaik. I don't know any other place where you can get a practical education - as opposed to university - for being a systemadministrator; "information technology specialist systems integration" is the closest translation I can come up with) , I worked many years in onsite support (hardware & software) for different companies.
After that, I spent like 2.5 years in the European IT Servicedesk of a worldwide company, supporting a boatload of branches all over Europe, which was the most demanding job I had so far. Simply because we were responsible for everything (at least to get things started), from network infrastructure, to systems monitoring, iSeries, web portal, you name it.

For over a year now, I work for a company providing iSeries and mainframe modernisation tools (e.g. giving you a framework that allows you to transform your greenscreens into fancy window applications), in technical product support. Quite demanding as well, because the products are extremely complex, and again I need to know a lot about everything

And, well, I am interested in a lot of things, not only in the IT field. But to keep it to IT for now, I at least try to be up to date on a basic level on anything I come across, from graphics programming, to high-performance computing, network technology, new hardware developments, CAD/CAM, whatever; well, everything I can think of, basically


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UPDATE: I just read that Unity3D also supports PhysX physics engine technology.
Quote from the Wikipedia article: "Built-in support for Nvidia's (formerly Ageia's) PhysX physics engine, (as of Unity 3.0) with added support for real-time cloth on arbitrary and skinned meshes, thick ray casts, and collision layers."
Now all I need is more time to dig around and figure out if the PowerVR chip also supports that.
But after reading this NVidia Physx FAQ I'd say no.

[Arrow0x]

Originally Posted by undead.exe

I'll have to take a look at that when I'm back from camp, thanks Sheinfell :P

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Think I found a free US-based VPN which SEEMS to work, though I don't know about its relative internet speed. If anyone from Asia is willing to try them out to see if that helps them get past the player segregation, please let us know if we can help, or how it goes

USVPN "New Free" -- scroll down and look for the instructions for either the iPhone, iPod or iPad. Where it's telling you to enter a username and password, you can find them on the homepage of that site (i.e. scroll to the top of the page and click "home", you'll find all the details you need just under the "Welcome" banner).

For players in Asia who are able to use this, there are basically two ways to confirm whether this method can break the geographical segregation: you're looking to either be able to play with people from outside of Asia, or you're looking to be UNABLE to play with friends within Asia (since you should now have a U.S-based IP address when you're connected to the VPN).

Arrow0x, Fro5tClown and ExactPsience, if any of you guys read this, please consider giving it a shot if you don't find it too troublesome

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Update: okay, that VPN seems to work properly when I'm using it to access websites, but I'm getting a lot of "can't access server" errors when I'm trying to run the game. Going to try using a different VPN to see if the results are any better...

Update 2: that's three supposedly different US-based VPNs I've just tried which seem to work for surfing the net via browsers, but end up giving me a "cannot connect to server" error from Star Warfare itself. Hmm...I get the impression we're on the right track though...

and I see it. maybe I'll try.

[Arrow0x]

and I get... "You were disconnected by the communication device. Try reconnecting. If the problem continues, verify your settings."

LOL

[Arrow0x]

well actually, I think I'm going on a trip or something. I'll check out some Wi-fi connections if I do.