I played JA2 1.13 and got raped by the Drassen counterattack

[Khor1255]

Please elaborate. You'd rather play JA2 without mods? Without 1.13?

I don't think I heard anyone say that.

All I meant to say, was that 1.13 and all its incarnations has afforded me a lot more ja2 then I might have otherwise been entitled to. For someone to say that 1.13 has actively hurt the development of more interesting or fun experiences, seems ridiculous on it's face.

Yes, but you are speaking purely from a players perspective. There are people who have been actively modding this game from the very start. Originally the 1.13 was like manna from heaven for modders because it externalized many things hardcoded in the exe and gave modder quite a bit of choice over what to add or subtract from their projects.

That was in the days when the development team was at least as concerned with making the game moddable as they were with adding new features.

Today, the idea is to introduce new features and leave the players to help with any bug regardless of how these bugs affect modders. Hats off to those who still plunge ahead with their mods despite this carelessness but I hope you can see where for some of us there simply isn't enough hours in a day to both maintain the momentum of our project and keep fixing the same aspect that gets broken repeatedly.
It's hard enough to root out bugs in your work when it's pretty likely you are responsible for them. Now imagine finding the same bug you had fixed three or four times being introduced by yet another careless feature.

Who wants to argue that ja2 would have been better off, from a gamer's perspective, without 1.13? Bethesdalove maybe?

From a gamer's perspective is the key here. And even that is a matter of taste when you have them screwing around with game mechanics. Some of us really love Ja2 but want new content instead of the same storyline. Others feel they have a better take on certain features and don't even care if their changes remove the possibility to play a truly vannile Ja2 game.

This is profoundly different from the approach that Madd Mugsy and co. had when they founded the 1.13.

 

[zeitgeist]

So apparently there's this newest 1.13 beta that's getting recommended instead of the usual SCI.

Has anyone tried it? How stable is it compared to the last few 1.13 releases?

 

[SkeleTony]

I tried the Drassen counter attack back in the very early days of 1.13 and managed to beat it by hiding everyone in that central building with the single entrance and waiting for enemies to come in one or two at a time through the front door. After that I disabled the counterattack. it doesn't really add anything to the game IMO, is not fun and is more tedious than challenging.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Zeitgest, I have the newest version that you can get through Turtle and have no issues with it.

 

[CrimHead]

Perhaps you should also think again if you're intelligence is really up to this forum.

you're

intelligence

you're intelligence

The fuck is this.

 

[zeitgeist]

Zeitgest, I have the newest version that you can get through Turtle and have no issues with it.

I just installed the new updated SCI that's supposed to have that beta version of 1.13 in it yesterday, and so far so good, no crashes or any other problems yet. Seems much better in that regard than the few past releases I tried.

Are any JA2 modders on Codex familiar with the Logical Bodytypes project or maybe even working on it in some capacity? There seem to be three separate projects going on according to the latest posts. I'm just wondering if they're going the right way about it and how feasible the whole thing is.

 

[Khor1255]

They are all feasible but require different levels of groundwork in order to likely be pulled off.

One of the ways involves basically changing the whole graphics engine = not likely to be pulled off and subject to the animator's tastes.

The other way involves using multiple 'layers' of animated frames in order to depict different armor, weapons etc.

This is a lot of work for animators but the code changes don't seem to be that severe = very well might be pulled off in our lifetime.

I can't really remember the third option. It has been a while since I've even been seriously interested in modding for what the 1.13 has turned into.

 

[The_scorpion]

Are any JA2 modders on Codex familiar with the Logical Bodytypes project or maybe even working on it in some capacity? There seem to be three separate projects going on according to the latest posts. I'm just wondering if they're going the right way about it and how feasible the whole thing is.

I'm wondering about that too

I'm not involved at all in that project so i don't know anything more than what's made public in the related threads.

Given so few information is available, there's no grounds based on which i could say they're going into the wrong direction

Having worked with ja2 animations before, i'm very curious about the results they can achieve. Some of the bodytypes consist of so few pixels that additional layers will necessarily be so small/ tiny that it'll be hard to get a good detailed look.