Aldebaran 2: Smax

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim
The terraforming discussion, which led to things like you mention, was really interesting. We worked out that the AI will plant forests if they can't make mines.

I really would've liked to have been involved in these conversations.... Regardless, absolutely brilliant approach to "convincing" the AI's to building forests!

Likewise, the AI's won't waste former turns on sensors early. This has the nice co-benefit of making players really think about what initial techs to research.

A different initial tech path. I agree wholeheartedly.

I haven't played in far enough in my first SP game to ask too many questions yet, but I am sure they will come. Do you think I should post them here for feedback, or do you think it better to E-Mail you directly as far as feedback?

D

[smacksim]

Would you maybe start a new thread or perhaps put them in the Strategy Guide? I think a new thread would be nifty:

First Ever Aldebaran2 Game, as told by Darsnan

(well, besides me).

-S

Edit: Also, did you use the installer or copy 'by hand'?

And Blake, if you come by, it's still called 'The Blake'.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim
First Ever Aldebaran2 Game, as told by Darsnan

(well, besides me).

-S

I have no issues establishing a new thread. But understand I am capable of looking at a game from a players perspective, a Chairman's perspective, as well as a Creator's perspective. Is all of this information you want immediately available to the public? Let me know if you want me to parse my feedback out, and to what degree you want my feedback available to the public.
And of course I would like to state that I am only looking at a single game, which is influenced by the dynamics of the game engine itself. My feedback may not necessarily fall within the 80/20 Bell Curve your looking for...

D

[smacksim]

Originally posted by Darsnan


I have no issues establishing a new thread. But understand I am capable of looking at a game from a players perspective, a Chairman's perspective, as well as a Creator's perspective. Is all of this information you want immediately available to the public? Let me know if you want me to parse my feedback out, and to what degree you want my feedback available to the public.
And of course I would like to state that I am only looking at a single game, which is influenced by the dynamics of the game engine itself. My feedback may not necessarily fall within the 80/20 Bell Curve your looking for...

D

Good point. And did you use the installer? I just have to know if it's swapping files for anyone but me.

I think you should feel free to post anything about the game, from all of your possible perspectives, if possible. Think about how we discuss SMAX, rather than how we discuss a particular scenario. Knowing all the game dynamics doesn't make a master necessarily. Besides, there are some scenarios for Aldebaran, which I'll re-release soon. Those are a different story of course

-S

[Kassiopeia]

I had forgotten we even had a Creation forum.

I see our project has a sequel. I'll have to try it out first thing in the morning*. At a cursory glance, I could at least help with (re)writing the backstory.

I'm not that sure about finishing it - the thought of that has crossed my mind every now and then, but I'm not sure if after all this time... I'll have to read it through again and see. I'm equipped with a lot of more tools (and my old ones are better) writing-wise so it could be fun.

* Yes, it's morning here, but by "morning" I refer to the time of day when I wake up from a long period of sleep, which is usually about 1900 hours in summer.

[smacksim]

Ah, glad you got my note...er...hint . I'd tried to PM you a few times, but always had server bounce, which I took as a sign to wait. I'm very superstitious for a scientist. Anyhow, don't feel any pressure Kassiopeia. Just enjoy it if you have the time, and perhaps the story will come about. Am really glad to see ya though. Those were good times with Aldebaran-1. And I have new skills too.

-Smack

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim
Good point. And did you use the installer? I just have to know if it's swapping files for anyone but me.

I used a workaround to get the game up and running. I'll see about doing a reinstall of SMAC(X) this evening, then load in Aldebaran and see if your installer works properly with a fresh install of SMAC(X). FYI.


D

[Darsnan]

OK, I completely stripped out my subdirectory housing SMAC(X), reloaded SMAC and SMAX, but did not load in the No CD Cracks (just to eliminate this as a possible issue with what I was experiencing last night).
The installer works (and it may have last night as well), however archiving tool is continually looping as I commented last night, but it appears to be from not finding a specific file when archiving. I'll see about providing a screen shot later of the issue.
I started setting up an SP game, and was able to load the 7 new Factions, however all of them have the picture of Lady Dierdre. I tried loading a couple of Factions, and they all have their own unique initial social settings, so other than the graphics, why no issues so far.
I am playing Lindley in my first game (being a Gaian how could I not? ). I am picking up considerable amounts of NL's. Sorta wish I'd researched Industrial Transports first so I could pick up some IoD's!. The aliens landed 4 years after I did, right on queue, so no problem there. Thats about it for now.
As far as starting a new thread and documenting my observations, why I will probably start one later tonight, and I plan on keeping my posted observations to a Players perspective (although I will be making notes from a CMN's and Creators perspective as well). FYI.


D

[smacksim]

I look forward to reports Darsnan, on the game or installer. I hope you downloaded version 2.0.3, after I took the 2.0.1 offline. It fixed some Dos problems that Endgame let me know about.

A couple weird things that have been bugging me. If you'll notice, the zipped download of the Smax files, without the installer, is like 4 megs or something, while the installer version is 1.x megs. I can't figure out why the installer is able to compress the files so much better than a zip. It makes me worry that it's not picking up some files and that I'm not able to see this because it's referring to files that I have. It's just one of those annoying things about trying to deploy something and only having one install of Windows to test it on.

And a reminder to people that download: Please let me know:

• What OS you are using
• If the Dos files worked for you
• Any details if things don't work for ya.

Don't be bashful. I'd like to get it working for everyone!

And in other news:

I think that the files will soon be up for anyone running just SMAC. The installer does point to terranx .exe, so I'll have to make a Smac-only version of that. But the files include alpha.txt and the factions are mostly unchanged. But they are a bit changed. I took advantage of the Smax faction abilities, like freeproto, etc., so I'll have to re-bundle the original Aldebaran factions for the SMAC version. I have all the files, so expect a zip of them sooner than the full installer for Smac.

-S

[smacksim]

Originally posted by Darsnan
{...}
The installer works (and it may have last night as well), however archiving tool is continually looping as I commented last night, but it appears to be from not finding a specific file when archiving. I'll see about providing a screen shot later of the issue.
I started setting up an SP game, and was able to load the 7 new Factions, however all of them have the picture of Lady Dierdre. I tried loading a couple of Factions, and they all have their own unique initial social settings, so other than the graphics, why no issues so far.
D

Ack! So it does seem that the installer is, for some reason, not picking up the graphics. That would cause a bad loop, perhaps, though I do have some bug control. Hmm. I'll get back to you when I solve this disturbing behavior. Also, when you say 'installer' could you be sure to specify either the .exe, or the DOS installer, as it is in two parts. I'm pretty sure you mean this by 'archiving tool', so I think I'll take up calling it something along those lines myself, to distinguish it.

So the 7 custom factions display the proper names (which would indicate that the text files made it), but not the proper graphics? This would make sense to me, as you have already reported that a 'regular' Smax faction worked for you initially. Even the regular ones are customized to make them compatible with Aldebaran, so that's a good sign for the text files. Now to figure out why it's not picking up the graphics.....Ah, I have an idea.

-S

[smacksim]

I did a test: I added a modified .pcx picture to the installs, compiled the installer, then deleted that file utterly from my system. When I installed Aldebaran the picture was there! So the installer really is just compressing the **** out of the files. Go Inno-Setup. Nice program.

On the other hand, I have more questions than answers, and will have to wait to hear back from users a bit more, and hopefully in some detail.

Here is the step that is crucial to the install, on the users end:

[COLOR=orange-red]Install Aldebaran to the Smax folder. Do not create a new folder for it. It will create it's own folder[/COLOR] This has to do with little Dos tricks in getting the finnicky terran.exe to run from a shortcut.


The following is just my notes on the above. Read for your amusement:

This is for a really weird reason, which I'll try to explain, for those of you that play with these things for fun: The installer program creates a key shortcut to terran.exe. This shortcut is made 'on the fly' so that it can actually pick up the directory of Smax that you've chosen. That's normal installer stuff. On the other hand, I had to get it to point to an application in the directory just above it's directory. This is usually represented by '..\' in dos. However, Smax, at least on my machine, will not run from a shortcut without the 'Start In' field of the shortcut being exact. I have no idea why this is. Also, phrases like '..\' are not allowed in that field of a shortcut. They work fine in the main shortcut field, but not in the absolute path field. So, I had to 'install' Aldebaran into the Smax directory directly, so that that directory would be easily referenced by the shortcut without using a '..\'. Long story! I do think I see a simpler way now. We shall see.

Side Note on the above: Well, firstly, I had to eliminate some 'environment variables' from the Dos programs, because I was running outta memory. Dos has very small default memory for these things. So I couldn't make a nice global variable for the install directory. This prevents me from making a very handy 'config' file from the installer that would feed all this directory info back into the batch files. At least, it would be very very inconvenient as things are now. I do have hope that I can further learn the Pascal scripting used by the installer and maybe make all these issues dissappear.

-Smack

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by smacksim


Ack! So it does seem that the installer is, for some reason, not picking up the graphics

Every Faction's flags are clear. Is this intended? Also when I pull up the diplomatic contact screen, why all of the names and diplomatic status are very pale and hard to read. Finally, every Faction has cities that are Gaian shaped, with a white flag around the number of citizens in them.
It is now MY383 and am researching a tech every 5 turns. I have yet to be attacked, nor have I changed from my initial SE settings (other than garnering the Ascetic Virtues). Finally, playing on Transcend why I have not had a Drone Riot yet!?!
I also see that you have activated the altitude bonus for artillery. Nice!
I'll see about sending you some pics tomorrow night. Right now I've gotta work on an overdue PBEM.


D

[smacksim]

Two quick things:

1. The Aldebaran factions that show up in the main menu by default are Super-AI versions. They are to play against, which is why you havn't had drone riots with the Planetlover-AI. I definately should have made that more clear! You'll notice that the little faction blurbs for these factions all have an (AI) in the text somewhere, letting you know they are the super-charged version.

2. The faction graphics go clear* when there isn't a proper graphics file for the faction. For instance, if you uninstall Aldebaran after having just played with Aldeb factions, they will still be the default factions that show up in the 'Start New Game' menu. But they don't have names or faces. Weird. This is part of the Alpha Centauri.ini file as:

Custom World=3, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2, 1,
Time Controls=1
Faction 1=GAIANS
Faction 2=HIVE
Faction 3=UNIV
Faction 4=MORGAN
Faction 5=SPARTANS
Faction 6=BELIEVE
Faction 7=PEACE
Latest Save=
Latest Scenario=

I've been planning to add lines to the file-swapper that will swap the .ini file along with the rest, so this shouldn't happen after swapping out of Aldebaran when I make this file swap as well.

*Clear: And the text is smudgy.

Darsnan, could you tell me what files you did install? Did you install both the .txt files and the .pcx? To me it sounds like there are no .pcx files.

-Smack

Edit: More notes. The regular Aldeb factions are part of the install, but I believe Smax only likes to add 10 custom factions to that list in-game. With 2 sets of 8 factions in Aldebaran, I decided just to have Alphax.txt load the Super-AI factions in that slot. The other factions have to be added 'by hand'. Though I think I have room for adding 2 or 3 player versions of the factions if the total is 10.

To add them by hand edit the lines in the Alphax.txt near the end that refer to Custom Factions. The player versions have the same name, minus the 'AI' bit. So:

PLANETLOVERAI should be changed to PLANETLOVER for instance.

There are issues with this confusing naming scheme, I realize . They are holdovers from not having even developed the faction names fully in Aldebaran-1. Surely the Super-AI versions should have distinct names to avoid the confusion. Will do something about this pronto.

[#endgame]

Smacksim,

An install script DL would also be handy for testing the installer batches without needing to redownload the mod each time.

[smacksim]

I try to update 'Fileswatter' each time I make a change. I'll repost both the 'with Smax files', and just Fileswatter here each time, for those who have already downloaded the mod.

As endgame has pointed out, we are currently trying to figure out how to make Fileswatter work on all machines. Apparently it's getting stuck in a loop for both Darsnan and Endgame. It doesn't for me, and I can't replicate the problem. So it's a little hard to debug directly.

Rather, after some nice help from Endgame on Dos, I'm rewriting the whole thing concurrently with just trying to prevent that infinite loop in the current version. It will be several hours before I have made progress on either front. There's PBEM and ACDG drama going on. Heh. Thankfully this thread has avoided too much of that!

-S