The crazy part is that some of the players who dominated the multiplayer scene in 2000 are still playing…and dominating. TheViper regularly streams his matches. Surreal watching them cause I remember playing against him (and losing) 20+ years ago.
Wow! I looked him up and he was already a competitive player at 10 years old? That's pretty insane.
I must've been around 12 myself. This game has been a part of my life since before puberty.
I ascribe part of my deep love for history to this game.
I was wondering about how this could affect gameplay. Like disguising your buildings by looking like other buildings.. That example of all the buildings being made of books. How can I tell the difference between a barracks and an archery range.. or just a patch of empty grass? I used to play a text based MUD that had a high level spell that let you create illusion spells that just output text of your choosing onto ot…
it'd be interesting to make a game where the units aren't hardcoded either - and to play against someone, you'd have to "figure out" what their units did and what weakness it would have (i imagine it would work by a point system, where for example, if you put more into health, their attack would be weaker etc).
SMAC let you do this. The components all had costs, and the reactor upgrades increased their power, and IIRC reduced the costs. So as you advanced you picked and chose what frames, reactors, components, armor you want. It let you do things like Colony pods with orbital insertion, or submarine probe teams. Very fun.
Am I imagining things or once-upon-a-time did Firefox give you the ability to advance GIFs frame by frame?
I thought this was a feature for a while because image hosting sites like Imgur convert animated GIFs into videos because the compression is better, and you can adjust the playback. Some of them will even keep '.gif' in the URL despite serving you a video instead.
This is particularly infuriating when you're trying to use google image search to find a gif to embed in an html frame that doesn't accept videos and all you get are gifs that turn out to be videos.
The Real Time Strategy (RTS) genre more or less died in the mid 2000s with Age of Empires II, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft being the ones that left a mark. Since that time: Warcraft 3 died; Starcraft was supplanted by Starcraft 2 and both eventually died outside of the lucrative Korean pro scene. Age of Empires II also died until it saw a resurrection in the pro scene in the early 2010s which has lasted to today. The RT…
C&C is another hugely popular one. Though I was in the minority of not enjoying Westwoods RTS so much. I much preferred Warcraft and StarCraft. But my favourite was The Settlers. This was also an era when business simulation games (you could argue as another “style” of RTS but not combat based) were popular too. Like Transport Tycoon, Theme Park, etc. From past conversations on here, it sounds like City Builders are…
I wonder what is the legal aspect of this. Whether it would be possible to use this to create alternative assets for a game which would be unencumbered by copyright, for instance for Quake 3 where code is open source but assets are proprietary.
Wow that was a treat. The author makes everything seems so easy. I fired up AUTOMATIC1111 recently and making good AI generated art (or whatever you want to call it) is way harder than it seems.
It’s really not that hard to make good looking stuff with these AI image generators, you just need the right models. The reason you struggled is because the basic stable diffusion model creates really ugly stuff by default. Try using a model from civit.ai and you’ll get much better results… or for even easier results, just use midjourney where literally everything that comes out of it looks fantastic.
Is there anything that runs local? Any particular model you like?
Funny you mention space stations, because the Genie engine that powers the Age of Empires line of games was also used for Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_Engine#Games_using_the_G...
I didn’t know that! Just googled and was slightly disappointed - that looks just like AoE with the sprites swapped out, down to the same trees. Well. Still interesting to know this happened!
I've played this game and never played aoe2. As I understand it, aoe2 has no aircraft while swgb has classic star wars ships (x wing, y wing, tie fighter, etc).
If you like star wars and aoe2, I'd recommend it. Goes on sale for like 2 bucks on gog