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jeffnz

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Everything posted by jeffnz

  1. jeffnz

    Is this how PC gaming is like in the future?

    And not having to select the game in the system dashboard, like you do now with Xbox and Playstation. It's a game console duh so it should load the disk immediately. But no, we need to scan The Cloud (trademark) for new "content" and friend requests. **** off One good thing about game consoles is that you don't have to run your games in Windows.
  2. I haven't, but I know about the build-anywhere cheat. I'll watch this video on someone else's internet, it's long
  3. jeffnz

    Is this how PC gaming is like in the future?

    Telecom sold an ADSL-2 router to a friend of mine in 2006 but I never heard of anybody using it in Christchurch. Are you in Auckland?
  4. I just wiped out Temple Prime with some ion cannon fun. I built my base right near the tiberian field and I spam pitbulls and APCs. I attacked relentlessly, sacrificing forces just to scout for the ion cannon's field of vision. It was a new time record for me. I struggled with the Serajevo mission for a long time, until I learned to attack more often (lots of little attacks, not one big attack). Plus those bombers are dangerous if you don't stop them with vehicles and 3 AA guns. In many scenarios, the best method is to achieve the objectives as fast as you can - there's 3 ion disruptors to deal with so I get started pretty quickly. Update: what's the best way to beat the 2nd Scrin encounter in the GDI campaign? It's really hard with the patch and I don't know how I won last time.
  5. FYI: I bought the game 10 years late. Because it was via Steam I had the annoying patches that wreck the campaign by making the ai cheat. I rage quit many times but I did it. Operation Stiletto was very hard, I thought I had beat it on normal the last time I did the campaign (unsure). In Operation Stiletto I captured all of the south-west GDI base and prepared to rush north if the Scrin attacked the other GDI construction yard. It never happened. I prepared a massive force to assault the main scrin base (north east) and it didn't work. They had 10 veteran tripods which wiped out 30+ units of mine. Defending the SW base was fun. It seemed like the only thing that was being attacked. As for Kane's Tower on the 1.09 patch, I lost the first time but eventually got it to work. I used 2 bombers and a Temple Of NOD to slowly destroy the SE base (mainly to keep GDI on low power hehehe). Two other things allowed me to win. 1) I built oblisks instead of the crap base defences. The oblisk is a must-have because of its range - I saw how pro players use them heaps. 2) Limited attacks on GDI and sometimes the Scrin. I'd use 3 tanks and 2 avatars to destroy Scrin defences north of my base so that I could expand. I'd also attack a mammoth tank if I got the opportunity. To my horror I discovered how destructive the Rift Generator is. After being hit, I sent a small force to destroy the generator. As with Operation Stiletto, I never commit to any dominant strategy. I'm always ready to send out an attack to destroy a mammoth tank or a disobedient Scrin warship, should it be required. In some cases a super weapon must be removed from play.
  6. jeffnz

    Is this how PC gaming is like in the future?

    Australia and New Zealand will miss out. We're further away from the servers... we're used to being forgotten. Here in NZ everybody is upgrading from ADSL-1 to fibre (we never got ADSL-2) and that will stuff up everything because every yuppie will be streaming movies in the evening. They'll need a new undersea cable which is 2 years away, even then, we may hit another bottleneck.
  7. I got bored again and played the GDI missions. The mission where you have to guide the MCV to the base is really hard but it was easier for me this time. I managed to destroy the base in the North-East before I got to the MCV. Perhaps because I moved my harvesters to a new Tiberian field when the first one ran out... I had a lot of money in that game. Just to be safe with the cheating ai, I got full upgrades on everything before attacking the infantry base. Attacking the air base went very well because I blew up the pieces of wall to give access to my tanks.
  8. dvs1 - is there a shortcut key to queue units? I saw a video where a guy puts his mouse over something in the sidebar, and suddenly it says that it's queuing 5 units for production. How do they do that? I don't think he hit f1 or f2 five times in a millisecond.
  9. It is a loosened restriction, because Juggernauts have huge range on the final NOD mission and you don't need snipers. The Juggernauts can hit the GDI base from their location on the hill. They can reach both sides of the map without a sniper. Just like Capture Ummagon when you get the 2 artillery with extra range. We all noticed that, right
  10. If there was such a feature then I have never heard of it. Tiberian Dawn causes wrist pain anyway, I prefer to avoid it I'm now stuck on Scrin #5 with no intention of beating it. I've already done the Scrin campaign on easy and that's enough. On #5 you need to use the mastermind to teleport assimilators and then capture enemy refineries, that way the ai runs out of credit. So I'm told. I didn't try it because it sounds like an extreme way of beating a normal level, but apparently the whole map is revealed and therefore the mastermind can teleport assimilators anywhere (there may be a loosened restriction on campaign missions, as there is with jugganaught range). I got bored again so I started the GDI campaign and I found an annoying glitch on the White House mission, where militia squads are not automatically marked as attackable, meaning I have to force fire on them. Strange.
  11. I can imagine I was surprised that the Scrin survived in my last game. I demolished their Rift Generator and they built another one! Usually they run out of money and freeze up, doing nothing until GDI rolls in.
  12. Noob question here. If I ever get a reliable internet connection and enough data, I'd like to play 8 Bit Armies. What is the etiquette for online? Am I expected to use a mic or can it be played without?
  13. So I'm drafting a letter to EA and this is what I wrote so far. I'm not going to ask people to agree with me, I just want to offer my opinion. Some people might say "that's controversial, man". Who cares? Alex Jones was controversial when he blamed the CIA for the September 11 attacks... immediately after the event, too! He just got new sponsors and his operation has grown massive since 2001. Also, End Of Nations was based on a controversial theme, I think it's great and more people should pitch it! Everybody's doing it. Megadeth's new album shows the statue of liberty with her head cut off - and that's an American band with a pro-American frontman. I want EA to cash in on the idea of an American dystopia. A synopsis of my draft - TL;DR version below (my PDF is two pages, don't forget to scroll) First paragraph: I highlight the failure of CnC 4 despite EA's insistence on financial estimates and "safe investment" Second paragraph: I explain why DRM is bull**** and how digital licenses reduce piracy, just like streaming and legal mp3 downloads have reduced piracy. There's no need for DRM. The rest of it: I suggest an idea of mine that would feature similar themes to Tiberian Sun, factions similar to those in Generals, and potential units that could come from anywhere in the series. In the direction the world is going I think it's only fair that we make a scenario in which America is the evil faction which tries world domination. The Russians and Chinese would be somewhere between good and evil. Justification: DARPA and the Pentagon come up with some really creepy sci-fi stuff. They really do believe that future wars will be fought with drone soldiers, or with ai-assisted humans and robotic assistants which replace some infantry roles. The NSA even wants ai to do system administration, because ai would never leak. -------- More detail --------- I'm sick of CnC stories in which the Americans are the good guys, and the player must defend the Pentagon and the Whitehouse. The only landmark in CnC I ever liked was the world trade centre towers. I laughed at that when I was 15 - stupid American game devs putting the WTC into a game, only to have them blown up in real life. At least they're still there if you boot up Red Alert 2 Bottom line: If you guys don't agree then write your own letter to EA, and debate me here. I think political reality is sadly lacking in some games - I'm looking at you, Generals. USA should have had the rebel ambush power. They could use it against Assad when Generals 2 or 3 comes out. It could be in a DLC called Generals: The Covert Operations. You play a sub-faction based on USA, but with CIA black ops stuff where you control terror cells to start conflicts and wear down your enemies by making them fight each other. Then you have to evacuate your special forces and spies, which is where conventional units would come in. If EA won't make a game like that, then I'll make it myself one day. I'll keep pitching it until someone else uses the idea. I won't even take credit for it or ask for a cut.
  14. jeffnz

    I'm drafting a letter to EA

    I've seen conflicting information. According to Plokite_Wolf's link to Wikia there was a single-player campaign but I read else-where that there wasn't one at all. Hmm anyway. Because of the blunder of Generals 2 the entire game will go to waste. Even so, I think Generals 2 should be the next CnC, but they'll be spacing it out and it won't come within the next 3 years. They'll need to make another one from scratch. I would love to see another Generals. After all, the original Generals came out when CRT monitors offered the best colour and contrast. I would've been about 12 at the time of the original Generals game. When I was 14 I ran it on a Dell with an Intel Celeron and integrated graphics. It was far better than my neighbour's PC at the time - their PC could barely handle Tiberian Sun! Happy days. I look back now wondering how I enjoyed the game when the framerate was so slow, and scenes took 3x longer to run their course. Haha.
  15. That's where everybody begins isn't it Teamwork + debugging.
  16. I hacked together a simple program* to show folks how to create objects of a class, then apply a function to each object. Why use C++ you ask? Because it isn't controlled by Microsoft ... certainly, C# (Microsoft-friendly) and Java (Oracle-friendly) are used for most commercial things, but if you want to be independent then C++ is the best. Some features um... don't exist in C++, you will have to code them yourself! Why SDL? Because I hate the layout of the Pygame website... wtf were they thinking! And besides, Python is for noobs anyway . Pygame is an SDL wrapper but I say, why bother with a wrapper when you can download raw SDL .lib files and build them into your C++ project. Doing so cuts out the middle man. Enough about my biased opinions... do any of you bother with programming? I admit it's a frustrating adventure but worth it in the end. If one of us ends up making strategy games, we might not bring back Westwood Studios, but someone here could potentially start a company one day and make strategy games. It just won't be CnC. I'm going to continue on this path and study programming because everything else in this world sucks. * This pastebin file will expire in one month. I'm already making adjustments that's why I don't put a "keep forever" option on my pastebin stuff, because it becomes obsolete within 24 hours anyway. Ps. Blitz Max is made by a New Zealand company and they've released it with no charge (free as in beer) they also released the source code. It makes programming games heaps easier, assuming you're on windows. The IDE is a little dated and the fonts look a bit odd, besides that it's excellent.
  17. I wish I had played the originals. Though, Tropico 5 had brilliant characters that I really liked! Leon Kane and Lord Oaksworth especially. I use Oaksworth as my avatar on Kalypso Media Forums. Instead of going back to the past I will wait for T6 I owned it on PS4 and I don't plan to buy it again for PC.
  18. Some of you will hate this and think it's tacky but if you have a sense of humour and low expectations then this is pretty cool. There may still be a demo available so check that out if you're on PS4 or Xbox One. I played Tropico 5 with a controller and it wasn't bad. As the grand El Presidente, you have the power to stop time itself within the game I've made a playlist on Youtube for CNCNZ forum members. Most of my videos are 30 seconds or 2 minutes long. I don't do commentary, I prefer to let the game speak for itself. Main website and English support forum http://www.worldoftropico.com/en/ http://forum.kalypsomedia.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=72 The game is so damn confusing it's best for new players to do the tutorial first, then play sandbox missions in certain eras, before attempting the campaign.
  19. jeffnz

    I'm drafting a letter to EA

    They were making a new Generals which had different sound effects, and I presume it was multiplayer oriented. Did it have blood and people being vaporised? Did the troop crawler still say: "twwwwoop craarlar signing eeeeen"? So apparently they cancelled it to save a bit of money, but officially they said it was cancelled because the community didn't like it. That sounded dumb, they should have released it. Alpha... ALPHA? And they have no intention to release it?! Maybe it did suck. I never played it, I just read about it. Apparently it didn't include a campaign.
  20. jeffnz

    I'm drafting a letter to EA

    I still want to mail something about strategy games. I reckon EA should do another Generals that has a campaign and multiplayer, but not as goofy and cute as the original Generals. They could make it under the CnC trademark though I think they should make new IP. Imagine Generals with blood, and people being vaporised by lasers
  21. jeffnz

    I'm drafting a letter to EA

    Good point, after they shut down Victory Studios I wonder wtf is left to write to anyway?! It seems they will assemble a studio when they have a project. I wasn't aware of the game doing well, so that changes it for me. I won't write a letter along these lines seeing as I've got the facts wrong. Good comments from folks here thanks everyone Check out Tropico 5 for some fantastic multi-polar world stuff - they insult everybody (US/Russia/China/Saudi Arabia) it's just fantastic it feels like a half-baked game to be honest but the humour was great. It was like mad magazine but more subtle and less obscene. I'm going to check out other avenues too, and see what's on Steam... when I have money and a proper internet connection. I'm not confident that the best strategy games of the future will be CnC. Surely they cannot remake Tiberian Sun or Red Alert. They could make another Generals but would it even have a campaign? ----- I haven't been following the CnC community that much these past 10 years. In 2006 I recall being hostile toward CnC 3 and last month I actually bought it and I agree that it was good, besides some stuff in the cutscenes, like Killian going from being a sulky bimbo to being a vindictive whore. The gameplay itself was good. I hope that I'll find other strategy games (besides CnC 3 and Tropico) that will be worth buying. CnC 4 sounds weird with the base building change (if you can call it base building). I doubt I'll ever play CnC 4 considering it has DRM. In New Zealand our internet is such trash that download/uploading to Australia is a million times faster than to the US. I'm waiting on the new undersea cable before I go depending on US or European servers. That's why I'm more interested in doing development of my own. Fun fact: I wrote to many members of Parliament re the US-ISIS alliance against Assad and encouraged others to write to their MPs. Also, in New Zealand's capital city Wellington the 9/11 truth movement handed out 8,000 DVDs (if I recall) and thousands upon thousands of flyers (in a small city of about 300,000). Everybody in Wellington talks about politics so the activists there carved up, even though the mainstream media branded us as terrorists (just kidding ). So that collapse of the "official" narrative is dead in so many ways, and in so many countries. I didn't even know anything about Sputnik until this week, it's a Russian govt media platform in several languages... on top of their TV network which is in several languages too. Every forum I'm on, whether it's here or gamedev or anywhere else, there are people from all over the world playing games, and not everybody has English as a first language. Hideo Kojima did really well for diverse opinions in Metal Gear V. You don't play as an America hero who greases A-rabs, you play as an American but for a private military which does humanitarian things, like rescuing child soldiers or animals from war zones. Plus there are at least 3 characters with various nasty effects of combat (injuries of sorts). I don't know what the translated versions of MGSV are like but I think that MGSV and Tropico are more interesting to a foreign audience (I use the word foreign loosely here). What I'll do is I'll rework my ideas into a series of short essays.
  22. I'm in no position to help, but I like the initiative you have If I were making a CnC, the plot would end up something like End Of Nations: a group of international bankers bring ruin to America, to establish a one world government. They invent life extension technology to enable immortality (trans-humanism) and they enslave the masses with the aid of high technology. It would be like Alex Jones' Endgame: Blueprint For Global Enslavement. Funny you should mention "new CnC" because I am thinking of posting a letter to EA about making more strategy games, though not necessarily CnC. I believe there's more potential in games like Tropico.
  23. I'm looking into C# and Microsoft's XNA Game Studio. Sadly I can't download it on my current connection My thought is that if you want to develop professionally, then you're going to work with Microsoft... eventually... little choice in the business, really! Of course, for phones C++ would be great as there's less burden on CPU and RAM (manual memory allocation, no garbage collection in CPP).
  24. I've been playing Red Alert lately and I would agree that it's among the best. Though, I'm biased because Red Alert was the first CnC game that I really got to understand. Then it was Tiberian Sun (at age 11). Then I got The First Decade in 2006 - Yuri's Revenge didn't work but Tiberian Dawn was cool. I actually remember playing TD on console when I was about 7. Anyway, because I never really got obsessed with RA-2 I'd say that Red Alert is my 2nd fav (behind TS). RA-1 offers slightly higher resolution than TD and the missions feel possible to win, unlike TD where on a certain GDI mission I always run out of resources and can't launch a large enough attack to over-run the NOD base. TD maps were too cramped - in RA-1 I feel like I have enough room to build a base and I always manage to hog the ore on campaign mode. Red Alert was better implemented than TD, especially because of the different units. As Soviet I use v2 launchers for a variety of tasks, and as allies I make use of artillery, rangers and light tanks (rangers are best for hunting the vulnerable v2 launchers). Playing on Easy yesterday, I managed to capture the command post that controls the missiles, by using that sneaky path that runs along the north of the map. I used half medium-tanks and half light-tanks, the mammoth tanks at the front of the enemy base didn't bother to react to the sneak attack. I think the RA-1 Allies faction is really good if you play them as you'd play NOD in CnC3 - sneak attacks, opportunistic territory control etc. Lots of attacks and retreats in a way that tests the enemy's strength. Unrelated: back in '01, when ignoring the teacher in class, I recall drawing laser fences blowing up vehicles
  25. I have only one skudef file that is cnc3_english_1.9.skudef Version 1 exists in 'SP' but not in 'Kane'.
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