Serge's Adventures in exe land (List on first post)

[Reier]

GK, you cant remove AGOD without removing every other glitch. Like stacking. Snapper load, effe, etc.

....K? Go ahead.

[Badnik96]

Hey Serge, is there a way to edit the EXE so that you can get a new battle type with 6-8 bots in an arena at a time? That would be cool :D

[Noodle]

I like this alot.

Mostly because its awesomely convenient, and partly because he used my music. :P

[Clickbeetle]

Ooh ooh ooh ooh!


Very simple (I think) idea that would be totally awesome.


Increase the draw distance in Exhibition.


I could make soooooo many cool arenas if you could just see further.  And some existing arenas would also be cooler with more draw distance, like the Infinity Arena and the Keznorg IGC (imagine being able to see the bottom of the pit).  And it would vastly improve the Race mode I plan to do for DSL3.


The practice arena mode has a massively long draw distance (~1000 meters) for some reason, but Exhibition doesn't.

[Sparkey98]

We need to be able to have unlimited bots in a melee, too.

[Noodle]

The practice arena mode has a massively long draw distance (~1000 meters) for some reason, but Exhibition doesn't.

Prolly 'cus the practice arena is small and you're only testing one robot.  Perhaps there's a way to trick RA2 into using the practice arena's draw distance.

[somestrangeguy]

Increase the draw distance in Exhibition.

Drawing reminded me of the Baseplate plans, could it be possible to increase the size of the grid and remove the dot limit?

[Naryar]

We need to be able to have unlimited bots in a melee, too.

As said before, lag fest... might be somehow interesting on LWs but still.

[Trovaner]

Increase the draw distance in Exhibition.

I completely agree. It doesn't seem like it would be to difficult to change but it would make several arenas better overall. Right now, it is set slightly too low and IMO would be better if it was increased by 50%.

[LiNcK]

Drawing reminded me of the Baseplate plans, could it be possible to increase the size of the grid and remove the dot limit?

Ive been having alot of problems coz you cant put the dots too close to eachother :P

[Somebody]

What is Draw Distance?

Also, I have a few ideas:

Make the distance between where the bot starts and the edge of an arena adaptable, so bots dont get stuck in the wall.

Make certain things like tribars have a round circular collision mesh in the botlab (to represent their spinning area) and have it be normal shaped in exhibition, garage, etc.

[somestrangeguy]

Make the distance between where the bot starts and the edge of an arena adaptable, so bots dont get stuck in the wall.
Could be plausible, but I think the easier way is to have all arenas start points far enough from the wall.

Make certain things like tribars have a round circular collision mesh in the botlab (to represent their spinning area) and have it be normal shaped in exhibition, garage, etc.
I dont think this is possible since the collision mesh is in the GMF file.

[JoeBlo]

its not a changing collision mesh you need.. what you need is for all components to collide.. not just with opponents ones but your your robots stuff too

[Clickbeetle]

What is Draw Distance?

It is the maximum distance at which the game will display (or draw) stuff.  Anything beyond the draw distance from the camera isn't displayed, with the effect that there's this wall of black fog in the distance.


So with a bigger draw distance you could, say, see from the start to the finish line in the Drag Strip arena, or see all the way to the bottom of the Keznorg IGC.


The reason for having a draw distance at all is to reduce lag, but you could easily bump it up to a lot more than it is now with little to no effect on gameplay.

[Noodle]

Maybe with a bigger draw distance could allow for a skybox.  That'd be hecka nice.

[Somebody]

Oh yes then we would definitely need a bigger draw distance if we killed the max sphere...

[Serge]

Alright, I'm working on this stuff again. Wrote a nice little loader in assembly to get me started on runtime modifications. It's loaded at runtime via RA2 ( so you don't need to run anything else). Here's the load chain:

RA2 starts -> the falseArena (stage0 loader) gets read -> the falseArena code launches stage1, an executable that launches -> stage2, a 64-byte assembly-loader that gets mapped into RA2's executable virtual memory. The code is ran by a thread launched by stage1. The code sets read, write and execute on all the RA2 code segments, then loads a dll to the RA2 executable -> stage3, which does everything I want it to. It has a proper  address space, but can access all of RA2's internals. Yay!

I also figured out some other internal parts of the executable.

[Badnik96]

Cool.

I hope some of this stuff gets implemented in DSL 3, it would be really cool.

[Somebody]

DSL3=RA3 with all of this.

[Madiaba]

Wow, Serge.  You've put some time into this.
1. Are you making/keeping a map of things? 
2. I'd love to be 'updated' when you get an open slot...
 
Dziekuje.