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[Ares] New Ore & Gem Types? New Drills?
Moderators: Ares Support Team at PPM, Global Moderators, Red Alert 2 Moderators
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EliteGoatBoy
Medic


Joined: 03 May 2016

PostPosted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 3:37 am    Post subject:  [Ares] New Ore & Gem Types? New Drills?
Subject description: Ore drills are a hardcoded feature, why not make them editable?
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Now I've been trying to figure a way to customize ore drills so that they can spew other ore (tiberium) types such as gems. But yet again it seems the feature is hardcoded.

With that in mind, didn't have the courage to try to implement new ore (tiberium) types, as such I'm not certain if there's a limit to the number of types that can be defined.

The idea of having customizable drill types where the ore/tiberium can be specified was brought up in the Ares blueprints about 7 years ago but was canned in the wishlist.

Don't you think it would be nice to have that feature implemented atop of other tiberium related features from TS that got removed on the way to Red Alert 2?

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AlexB
Commander


Joined: 31 May 2010
Location: Germany

PostPosted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 7:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Yes, it would be nice to have, and yes, it would have been a good idea to add this along with the other Tiberium features. Alas, not everything on a wish list can become true in real life. I considered this when working on the related features.

New Tiberium types are difficult to do, because the game has the assumption of four types hardcoded in a lot of places. For instance, harvesters have space to store four values in memory, not more. A fifth type would thus overwrite the data beyond that array. Thus, everything would have to be replaced by a system that would work.

Also, the number of Overlay types is limited to 255, and a single Tiberium type uses up to 20 of them. This should be the most limiting factor, actually. The storage issue above is just tedious work compared to this.

I had the feature to spawn different types of Tiberium ready, though, but didn't finish working on that, so I didn't include it. Maybe I can add that for the next release.

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EliteGoatBoy
Medic


Joined: 03 May 2016

PostPosted: Sun Jun 11, 2017 7:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Four types hardcoded in a lot of places. Goddamn it Westwood.
I'm going to assume that people have also been asking for the overlay limit to be expanded right? (0 to 255, 8bit limitation?)

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AlexB
Commander


Joined: 31 May 2010
Location: Germany

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 1:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

That's exactly the issue. The Overlay is sometimes stored as 8 bit value. That is, there's no way to put overlay with higher indexes onto a map, because the file format couldn't store it. And expanding the map format would be a nightmare, because no editor would support that.

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EliteGoatBoy
Medic


Joined: 03 May 2016

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Isn't there another way, like creating a second Overlay type that acts exactly like the first but 32-bit wide and append it to the end of the map files? Or is that a lot more complicated than I think it is?

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Starkku
Cyborg Commando


Joined: 28 Dec 2007
Location: Finland

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Would still require a new or heavily altered map editor which is very unlikely to ever happen.

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Graion Dilach
Defense Minister


Joined: 22 Nov 2010
Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 3:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

Visually, you can have more than 4 resources, by sacrificing the growth logic*, using debris as resource spawners and accepting that these resources will share their properties (pip, value). Since debris only picks the defined + 3 following resource overlay replacing those should work.

* I've heard that overlay slots 13-20 are never used during the growth step (the legacy of tib-on-slopes TS bug which RA2 fixed by disallowing tib on slopes) so by using those, you might not even need to sacrifice the growth logic but I never tested this aspect. I had 5 resources when I was modding YR, but I set up two as the fourth one which can't even grow.

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"If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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EliteGoatBoy
Medic


Joined: 03 May 2016

PostPosted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 4:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote  Mark this post and the followings unread

I'm going to assume that aside from Final Alert, there's never been any open source map editor then?
I wish Ore Overlays worked like that of walls, one shp file with all frames, only one overlay required.

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