Space Armarda; Testing and Modmaking #1

Those are some very nice animation previews. Especially the solar sial scout.

Well Ive got my girlfriend coming down this weekend, so I doubt I'll get any more done till monday. I always find it hard to get the motivation to work on the flicks. Even though Open FX is 10 times faster than my old program I want it to be finished already!

Toying with the idea of making the corvette not stealth, and making a stealth oneman shuttles unit. would be a good unit as they could use thier sneak attack to make sure they fight against weakend opponents, and make the most of the extra HP.

Have to try it in testing. I think I'll make one of the UUs a stealth corvette. would be good for a civ I'm thinking up for asia... the Golden Dragon Trading Kombinate.

The western born mongolian/chinese chairman of the GDTK (a group of western companies using cheap chinese labour to produce goods for sale in the west) makes a close alliance with the communist rulership of the country, promising exclusive trading agreements in exchange for cheap, compliant labour (labour unions are illigal in comunist countries). The chairman and his communist allies have a disagreement, the communists becoming suspisious of the GDTKs motives, and greedy for more lucrative deals with the west.

The chairman uses his newly evolved space program to capture the chinese National Missile Deffence Laser System and the giant "goliath" solar collector satelites (which are designed to beam microwave energy to the cities of china and mongolia.
Using the NMDLS to protect himself against the chinese nuclear weapons launched at the satelites, and using the satelites themselves as a threat (Bejing is partly roasted by the weapons after the chinese try to test the resolve of the GDTK).

The chairman begins his protracted blackmail of the country, with china now under his almost complete control. Eventualy the country (and much surrounding area) is converted to run as a giant comercial/feudal enterprise with the head of GDTK acting as director/emperor. The stealth corvette would make a great UU for this civ.

Other civs I'm thinking of;
The Americano Trading organization, like the GDTK a commerical organisation whose zone of control reaches from austrialia through south, central and north america up to canada.
The United Federal States of Europe.
The St Pauls compact, a group of small Christian counties, many african, lead by the pope in a mission to spread christianity through space and disprove the existance of aliens, and so prove the uniquness of mankind. In fact they have many, some time self contradictory aims, based upon many individual interpretations of christianity.
The Nation OF Islam, a religious group funded by the last of the middle eastern oil reserves and stretching from north africa through pakistan (partly destroyed during its ruinous partly nuclear conflict with india) and into south east asia. Their main aim is the colonization of mars, and its tranformation in to a new Mecca, the center of all trade in the SOL system.
The New Futurists a bizare group from no particular region or ideology, may have several different names, but embraces all new technology in an atempt to trancent traditional human values. They often originate from highly placed citizens of other civs, who become disenchanted by earth and the highly repressive methods needed to keep the population in line.

I like all of those, but you should think that if theres Space Catholics..there should be other Spaceborn Christians as well as other religious groups other than Islam(since the NoI pretty much represents them already)...if anything, I think religious belief would increase with the invent of practical space travel.

But please...no theological discussions....I'm not in the mood right now.

Well, the two major religions on Earth right now are Christianity and Islam, and they both have a lot of funding as it is (Islams with oil and the support of their actual governments a lot of the time, and Christians with support from their Chruches, some countries, and a lot of people in general -over a seventh of the worlds population as is). I doubt a Buddhist or Neo-Pagan country would have much power, as they wouldn't have many people and their causes are less direct (never saw a Pagan missionary, and their are only... Maybe 300 million Buddhists (?))... Aside from that, the solar systems seem pretty small from the previews, I don't think many would fit.

Although, I do agree, this isn't the place for theological discussion. And I'm gettin' kinda tired anyway.

By the way, sorry I've been gone so long. I had another problem with my computer *cursing the electronic antagonist fervently under my breath*... Back now though.

EDIT: Is there any chance this mod will be coming out for PTW also?

I was going back through, and re-rendering all the pringles ship animations (since I figured out how to get rid of that pesky gradient thing, and fix some other minor graphical glitches while I was at it), when I got to the fidget animation (the tube-section spinning). I rendered it, renamed the files, built the storyboard, pasted into the .pcx, and imported the pallete. Everything was going fine 'till I tried to view the .fxm. It screwed up, but it didn't just crash. The ship was sliced up, and there were vertical columns of dots on it. When I tried to view a different direction or export it, it crashes. Supprisingly, the transparent and civ specific colors work very well, from what I can see .

If anyone could help, that'd be great. I had the frame number, size, and offset right too, by the way.

Would that work for the Superconductor tech?

Looks similiar to the anti-gravity tech by Ukas....what is it an image of?

When I modelled it, I was think of those floating magnets (though there's no blue-haze around 'em, just thought that'd look cool). Don't think I've seen Ukas' anti-gravity tech icon, have to check it out sometime.

I made another for the quantum computer tech... It's designed after the superconducting ion quantum computer (since that one looked the coolest )... Tell me if it's alright when ya get back.

They look prety good, have the glowing balls in the quantum computer tech got the glow post pro from Open FX? If so how about setting them to the cool colour setting.

That would make it blue, and then we could use blue as the background colour for the ancient era civlo icons, green for middle ages, yellow for industrial and then red for modern.

Yeah, the glow does come from Open FX post pro. I don't know of any way to change the glow color, and I've looked a lot too... Not sure why there isn't, seems like that'd be pretty useful.

I thought Quantum Computers were only theoretical?(And based on unprovable theorys at that)...What effect would they have in the game? Just curious.

A quantum computer hasn't been made yet, but sets of quantum logic gates have (guess I should've specified that)... Currently, the best method seems to be NRM (I think that's the acronym), but they're coherence time decreases exponetially with their complexity (and they're really hard to model ), so I went with the ion/superconductor one.

EDIT: Also, a theory can't be unprovable. A theory is a hypothesis (testable idea, based on evidence), that has tests supporting it. If it's unprovable, it can't be testable, and therefore can't be a theory or even a hypothesis.

Also you may like to know that there is a theory that your brain is a quantum computer (of a different kind), So as you can imagine, designing a working quantum computer would be prety usefull in designing artificial intelligence, or if you wanted to record human personalities.

In the Open FX glow postpro there is a temperature setting, setting it to hot makes it white, warm is yellow/red while cold comes out kinda blue, the radiating setting surrounds every object with halo, while the objects themselves glow a slightly yellow colour (set by the two percentage settings).

Ooooh, I see what you're talking about. Thanks for telling me about that, seems cool. I got it changed for ya. Preview below. I also uploaded the superconductor one too, just in case you wanted it.

BTW: That theory sounds really cool... I'll have to look for that on google or something some time.

I thought Quantum Computers were computers that did their computing in other diamensions? I think it would be pretty hard to prove Quantum Theory if you couldn't prove the existence of these other diamensions.

Well, actually quantum computers use an odd thing called entanglement, where two or more particles can have instantly correlated properties over any distances. Also, particles (at an extremely small level) have undefined properties until observed, and are in two states at once before observation. So, instead of having one logic gate in a computer, you can have that one be two at the same time, and with entanglement, computing power can grow exponentially. Some problems are coherence times (time that they stay in the proper condition to be entangled) and "state-dropping", where like... A stray photon for example, hits one particle in the computer, so they are technically observed and all drop into a set (random, but with a probability) state (i.e. spin up, spin down, et cetera)...

Wether this implies the manipulation of particles in other dimensions (or the dimensions themselves), is somewhat irrelevant. Though extremely interesting, and definitly worth looking into, they don't really affect the computer. As long as the computer works, it doesn't matter wether or not those dimensions are provable or not (thought Super String theory would predict the next level of atom-smashers to create mini-blackholes -something like that- and would support the multi-dimensional theory superstring theory has postulized)...

In any case, it sounds cool for a future mod ...

YETI: Oh...I thought Quantum Computers were something completely different than what they actually are...Interesting...How fast could Civilization run on one of those?....

Oh and Smoke...Neomega is diffinitely something else to get for help..have you talked with him yet?

TO SOG: Civilization... You could run like... 10 or 20, and still be posting here . Assuming it had as many logic gates.

Yeti: I wonder if Bill Gates and company will attempt to monopolize on those next? Only from Microsoft: The Quantum Computer.

How would Quantum Computers exist in your mod Smoke?