One of the things that has annoyed me playing strategy games, is unit grouping, and while programming a strategy game,

such elements are fundamentally involved in a lot of far ranging systems. As such in this post I take a look at unit grouping

from both the users point of view, and from 'the game' to compare and contrast how a 'from the ground up' flexible grouping

scheme can improve gameplay, and performance.

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One of the objectives I set for this game is that violence is not always the answer, cunning can be employed just as

successfully in achieving objectives–better prepared, however, are those with a plan B, so being able to set up an effective

defence scenario quickly, and effectively, needs to be a central game play mechanic.

In this design spec cum blog post I show my initial concepts, how my prototypes developed, and how the final system

provides what I believe to be a rather unique approach to co-operative strategic game play.

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It sounded so simple!

I have a Sony STR DH800 AV receiver, which does HDMI switching - I figured, great, I'll plug my laptop, xbox, etc into the back, then go HDMI->DVI into my monitor, less cables, less fuss!

But no, no, nothing is ever simple when the letters 'HD' are involved - the following buggerance factors apply:

# The receiver expects people to only use it with TV's and DVD players, and so exclusively (and forcefully) supports only 'TV' style resolutions, 480p, 720i/p, 1080i/p.

# Though allegedly only 'passing' through the video data unchanged, it fails to pass back the EDID data from the screen.

# My monitor is a 20" 1680x1050 panel, so the only 'HD' formats it supports are lousy 480p and 720p. Come on TV world, 720p is not high definition, I had a bigger screen resolution on my PC 10+ years ago.

# My laptop's GFX card (GeForce 9300m) does something stupid with the EDID information that means it only thinks I'm allowed to use 480p. (The Xbox 360 for comparison quite happily bangs out 720p).

Luckily, after much searching on the net, I have found a solution to 'buggerance factor 4', which makes the setup at least partially useful. It turns out that it is possible to create a monitor.inf file that can tells Windows, and the display driver to explicitly override the EDID information detected from the display device (Thank you Microsoft!). You can grab my version for the Sony DH800 here:

EDIDOverride-SONYDH800.inf

This basically forces the driver to expose all the resolutions as supported by the AV Receiver - I tried a hybrid version using the EDID from the monitor, but it turns out the receiver just cannot transmit 1680x1050, which is a shame, as it means I can plug my laptop into my bigger monitor but only have a lower resolution than the laptop.

You can find out more information from the original post on the AVS Forums:

EDID Override Thread - AVS Forum

[singlepic id=26 w=500 h= float=center]

Sooo many pictures, I filled about 1.5gb per day on my SLR, and a good 1gb on my compact (once I'd charged it) - its going to take a while to upload even my favorites.

I am officially completely and utterly jealous of anyone who lives near to such a wonderful place, every time I looked out and thought 'Wow, that's the most breathtaking thing I've ever seen' you round the next corner and BAM there's something even better, that was when I was still driving into the place, walking 4 mile trail and up to Nevada falls was an amazing experience, it was just a shame I was only there for 3 days, I could have spent a month and still feel torn away.

So many places in the world left to see, but I can tell you now, I am going there again for a proper go! Sadly I didn't manage to do Half Dome, which I would have loved to have got to the top of, its a long hike, and from the guide books suggestions would have required pretty much every hour of sunlight available at this time of year unless you were a crazy person, I was game, but a bit unprepared and knackered myself on the first day with a 9 mile round trip to Glacier Point via 4 Mile trail (its actually 4.6 miles these day, my maths skills are fine!).

Instead, I cut it short at Nevada Falls, and made a gentle go of it, then topped off the day with a wonderful second trip (by car this time) to Glacier point for an attempt at night photography. I don't have a remote yet so I was limited to 30s exposures, but I had an attempt with using the manual shutter release and mirror lockup but its nigh on impossible to stay still enough to hold the button down for a few minutes at a go so I didn't come away with what I hoped - again this was a real shame because I have never in all my life seen such a clear sky, it was a truly satisfying experience, not a sound but the breeze, 6.5k ft up, lying on the ground with a sky so perfect that you could see the dust cloud formations along the belt of the Milky Way, I never realised it was possible to see such things with the Mk1 eye ball.

I've got a couple of shots handy from my small camera, I'll sort and upload some more shots from my main PC later.

[nggallery id=8]

Saw this game featured on GameDev today, looks pretty impressive, I shall definitely be keeping a close eye on this.

http://www.novawar-game.com/

In the never ending quest for useful content, some people Page2 turn to the dark side; where by pages such as TestPage are filled with mindeless bullshit of the nth degree.

Mumbling

Mumbling is an artform in itself, being able to spew infinite amounts of text with minimal thought or effort is incredibly useful if you have nothing better to be doing. Sane people would probably have opened some file already on their computer in order to fill this example TestPage.

Mad

Inflicted with a higher degree of intellectual freedom

Madness of King George

This is just some crap so I have another heading level. WHoop!!!

Blackadder

Edmund Elizabeth Blackadder

Whoop!

Some Nice Data! Page2 and some other crap. TestPage will show you how.

Blah blah blah

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Whoop!

Some Nice Data! Page2 and some other crap. TestPage will show you how.

Blah blah blah

# Item 1

# Item 2

# Item 3

* Item 1

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* Item 3