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Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 2:32 pm
by Taelactin
I know the initial reaction that the magma people think when they see posts like this, and so I'll just say that I'm not directly asking anyone to raise the 400 unit limit.
I know that there are a lot of people out there that really want to see something like Rome Total War with the Myth engine. So basically what I'm wondering... is there ANY possible way to have 1000 or more units on screen at the same time? I know that currently, with all the unit animations and everything it would be impossible, but what if all the unit animations were toned down... a lot...
What I basically mean is that if on amber, the resolution of the units are lowered, unit sprites shrunk down, and if some of the sprites in actions like a warrior's sword slash were deleted? Unnecessary actions like some berserk swings or taunts could be deleted entirely.
Would this help at all in having a large number of units on the screen at the same time? I have experience with using fear, loathing, and amber, so I would be more that willing to do the work on this IF it's possible to... if not.. then... forget everything I just said...
Thanks in advance!
(and thanks for the help with the firewall, phex!! I had no clue what port forwarding was, so i told one of my friends with the firwall in the router to port forward myth II v1.5.1 and we can finally play some good ol' myth II games on mnet!!!)
Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:56 pm
by lank
unfortunately, the myth engine allows only 400 or so units to be visible at one time. you can obviously have more than that on a map (look at mazzarin's demise), but they must be made visible through scripting.
Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:02 am
by Taelactin
Oh... I thought the number could be increased because I **thought** that before magma had increased the amount of units visible in a game... or maybe that was projectiles or something...
anyway... I'm guessing it would be too much work in the myth engine to raise that 400 number up in order to allow more units to be visible at once...?
I think, in accordance with my previous post, if this can be done, it may open up an entire new door in myth...
Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2005 6:32 pm
by lank
i'm not one of the programmers, so i don't know, but i would assume the >400 visible option was explored and found unsatisfactory (myth is an old engine with a lot of limits). i think a result may have been oos type problems, among other things.
the maximum number of objects (including units, projectiles, ambient sounds, local projectile groups, observers and scenery) placed on a mesh has increased, though, from 4095 to 8191 (or something close).
i once thought of a way to cheat the number of units problem by changing the scale of the game so that the maps covered a greater area and units that represented groups of various sizes. it would require some fancy scripting to pull off properly, though, as the stats for the units would change as they took damage (e.g. less health overall and less power, proportional to the number of men represented). i've always wanted to do something like that, but chances are pretty good that i won't in the immediate future, alas, so please feel free to do something with this idea if it pleases you. 
Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:14 am
by Taelactin
Thanks for the help, Lank. I would try to do something like you just mentioned, but I'm not sure I would be able to go through with doing it, primarily because I would have no idea where to start...
If anyone on Magma ever does increase the 400 unit limit, I would be more than happy to help out in doing whatever is needed to help in that project. I was just playing Rome Total War the other day, and thought to myself-- "this would be so much cooler in Myth," everything other than the unit limit and the strategy map on RTW could be done 10x better and 10x more fun on Myth...
But alas, I guess that day will never come... It's funny that Myth, a 7 year old game is the ONLY game that I ever come back to when I get bored of the new strategy games they come out with every once in a while.
Myth is just... different...
Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2005 5:30 am
by lank
i know what you mean. i'm still here after seven great years. that's the Tru7h!
there are no updates planned for myth beyond 1.5.1, and it's far too late in the development cycle to do anything as major as increasing the 400 units limit.
if you do wish to make the project (and you're right that it's no small task) i'll likely be on hand to help out along the way to try and overcome what problems you may face.
personally i'd start with the units. specifically, i'd use bungie's existing graphics and add pedestals beneath them to represent the fact that they're not individual men (and also include a number to show how many men each unit represents).
next of course would be tags to make the actual units, and a test mesh to set their balance and test a script template for decreasing the size of the platoons as they take damage. (oh, that's all i need to do, taelactin thinks as he reads this.)
the scripting will of course be the hardest, but i don't see any reason why it should be impossible, especially if you ask questions here.
Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 2:04 pm
by Taelactin
Thanks for the advice, Lank, but I have a serious problem with FINISHING plugins, (I've made maybe 20 ever since I've gotten Myth II and learned about Loathing and Fear, and got bored halfway through each time and just given up, only to come back at a later point in time to start project from scratch). I was hoping I would have something relatively simple® to do by just decreasing the size of units on amber, lowering their resolutions, deleting a couple bitmaps... etc. The whole task of scriping it and everything seems a little too daunting for me 
My main goal is to release something before I get bored of Myth II again, (where I will later return in 4 months or so and begin the process all over again), so I'm gonna stick with something simple... real simple...
Thanks for the help, and I will hopefully come back to this and work on it in the near future!
Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:16 pm
by A-Red
Joining a mapmaking team works wonders for your ability to actually finish what you start. Granted, there aren't many mapmaking teams left to join...
A-Red
Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 4:37 pm
by carlinho
actually I'm wandering if any...
at all...
Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:08 pm
by A-Red
carlinho wrote:actually I'm wandering if any...
at all...
Magma, FlyingFlip, Onyx Warlords (TFV), TFS, and McCoolness (although that's just two guys and very informal). As far as I know, that's it.
A-Red
Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 10:05 am
by Pistol_Pete
lank wrote:there are no updates planned for myth beyond 1.5.1, and it's far too late in the development cycle to do anything as major as increasing the 400 units limit.
lank explained it clearly there. Any more tinkering with the Myth engine could result in it constantly bleating out llama sounds; she's come a long way, but Project Magma must strike a balance between adding features - which tends to add bugs, and ensuring the game is stable as possible.
Since I play all of the Myth and Total War games, I'll state the utterly obvious: they are different types of games. While an orange-health zerk can march across the map for 20 minutes, and still beat up a lowly warrior - who has been sitting in his tukus the whole time - in Myth, if you did a similar move with a unit or arcani against hastati in R:TW, you'd end up with some dead arcani. The Myth engine does not support features like morale and fatigue, which leads to a vastly different set of strategies for gameplay. I see Myth as a great game based upon mostly small battles, while R:TW seems to be more adapted to show massive battles, where personal heroics are lost beneath the push of men and horse, where the tide of battle depends upon whether a unit of spearmen hold the line or not.
In a similar comparison, I felt that Medal of Honor:Allied Assault was a solid bootcamp for small squad-based combat, and Battlefield 1942 was an introduction to mass warfare, where my bad-ass SMG ways can't be of much use against a dive-bomber or a predatory tank. Both experiences have their vailidity and greatness, but the skills and overall themes in one game do not perfectly extend to the other.
Side question: If you love the Myth universe and seem to enjoy R:TW, why not try to mod up R:TW to include a Myth based campaign? That'd be very interesting to me....
Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 11:20 am
by Taelactin
That wouldn't be such a bad idea, making a RTW mod with M2 units... :: thinks it over :: The only problem with this is that, basically, I love Myth II, the physics of it, the versatility, the ability to do nearly anything you're heart desires with the help of Fear and Loathing....
R: TW is great and all, it was fun for about a week or so, but... I continually used the same strategy, over and over and over again. Kinda got old. The implications of fatigue and morale were cool, but sometimes things just got wierd (like having 1000 roman auxillary routing because of 3 elephants, or when routing units would run away for 5 feet, then stop turn around, take a look at their enemies, then run off again, and then there was the friendly fire that you could never do anything about, difficulty of controlling archers...etc) Other things got me pretty angry and just plain frustrated, however, once I was able to cope with these problems, (even after the patch they released which didn't help the situation too much:P) I still just couldn't get used to it, and I had to just drop it.
That's about the time I got to thinking that it would be so much neater if Myth II physics were augmented into RTW, and how much more REAL it would feel because of it. Morale and fatigue could even be scripted and made more accurate than the way it worked in RTW, body parts flying all over the place, arrows ripping through the air as they do in Mazz IV... :: closes eyes and visualizes it for a second ::
I know that Myth and RTW are COMPLETELY different types of games, Myth II being a game where every unit counts, and that the strategy of every unit is crucial to victory, whereas in RTW, just click on a roman cohort and click on the enemy at the imporant time... but the reason I thought about this at all, was because IF Myth were changed into a total war type game, (like a huge conversion) the fan base would probably go up. A game you can get for a quarter off of ebay versus a 50 dollar game, in which the two game types are virtually similar (except the Myth version would just be cooler 
) would probably bring more people into the Myth II community (since it doesn't seem to be getting any bigger, but it may as I have witnessed on the thread that's going on at Bungie.net right now).
The only possibility of a REAL Myth IV (not dissing the Myth Vengeance folk right now) is at the hands of the magma folk in my opinion. Bungie doesn't seem like it will ever do anything related to a strategy game again since it's all into xBox stuff, and take 2... well maybe...
I've been rambling on and on for quite some time now so I'll just stop here
Thanks for the help, btw!
-Taelactin
Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 12:15 pm
by ChrisP
I played the RTW demo. Some elements of it were very polished, but yeah, after Myth, it was like driving a tractor trailer after getting used to a Ferrari. The precise handling just wasn't there.
On the other hand, Myth gets pretty clumsy too when a player has to control too many units or too many types of units. I can't imagine any new methods for unit control that wouldn't also take away from some of that precision handling that we all love about Myth. As is, 1 vs 1 on most big team maps are hectic enough as to be no real fun.
Nevertheless, many of us still yearn for a truly awe-inspiring scale of warfare, with, instead of scores or hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of units clashing in epic battles. We've seen Peter Jackson's LotR films and turned our gaze back to Myth with a new hunger and yearning. :surprised:
While it wouldn't be compatible with Myth as it is now, what I'd really love to see is a Myth that was more of a MMPORPG but without the RPG. A MMPORTS mb? 45 minute games, bigger maps, up to 64 players (each getting their own little unit trading instead of a captain distributing units) and a limit of at least several thousand units at once. Man, would that be fun!
Posted: Tue Mar 08, 2005 1:08 pm
by Doobie
Just a side note, Myth II 1.5.1 added support for morale as it existed in Myth III.
Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2005 8:33 pm
by skrew
what does morale involve and how would one implement it?