21 replies to this topic

[JediPanther]

I've gotten a new-ish laptop for the holiday. New as in new to me and since I'm currently poor as heck and unemployed I'll take all and any tech I can get.

Here's the specs on the new(not really) laptop:
Presario CQ57
win ten pro
64xbit
amd E-300 APU Radeon 1.3ghz cpu?
8 gig ram with 7.60 usable
180 gig hard drive
cd-rom drive
three usb ports

I'm planing on using it for job hunting and making a ms-dos,snes,genesis and c64 retro emulation machine. I've found most of the earlier Mechwarriors and then I found another robot shooter series called Metaltech:Battledome and Metaltech:Earthseige. It looks to be fun and not a clone of mechwarrior.

Any one else remember playing the first Mechwarrior or Metaltech? Have you emulated them? How similar and/or different are they? I never did play them back in the day but then I had the Commodore 64 and games on it like stealth. My first ms dos games were x-wing and doom.

Link for the ms dos mechwarrior: http://www.myabandon.../mechwarrior-p8

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Interesting factoid: Dynamix, the developer behind the Battledrome, Earthsiege, Starsiege, Cyberstorm, and first two Tribes games (all of which share a continuity), was also the developer of the first Mechwarrior game back in 1989. "Metaltech" was their attempt to create their own big stompy mecha series, and it did pretty damn well despite never quite competing with BT. There was even a tabletop miniatures game based on Starsiege. The physical game flopped hard but you'll still see the minis pop up from time to time. I have a couple of box sets and a few of the add-on minis; they're all white metal castings with good detail, and I've seen a lot of them masquerading as BT minis over the years.

Earthsiege and Earthsiege 2 are very good games. They're a bit weaker on the narrative front, not having the depth of worldbuilding that Mechwarrior had in BT, but the gameplay is phenomenal. Complex damage model, interactive freakin' cockpits, a power draw system where your "Herc" could suffer brownouts if too much strain was put on the reactor... the whole nine yards... as simulations, they're deeper that MW2 (which was released around the same time). ES2 even had an attack flyer included as part of the regular vehicle lineup.

Starsiege, released around the same time as MW3, plays more like MWO. It lacks the earlier games' interactive cockpits, and the collision physics are wackier than MWO, but it still has a robust damage model with internal damage states that puts any of the MW games to shame. The SP campaigns are also fantastic. It can also still be played online, on the rare occasion that there are people around to play with, as there are community-run master servers keeping it on life support.

The Cyberstorm games, which are set further down the timeline, are squad-level strategy games akin to MechCommander. Tribes, of course, is a jetpack-based team action shooter, heavy on the multiplayer component.

If you can get them to run, I'd heartily recommend the whole series.

Edited by WrathOfDeadguy, 30 December 2016 - 12:50 PM.

[Y E O N N E]

Hunter Hunted is also in the same continuity as Earthsiege/Starsiege/Tribes.

[Frosted]

RIP Dynamix

[Paigan]

WrathOfDeadguy, on 30 December 2016 - 12:49 PM, said:

[...]
Earthsiege and Earthsiege 2 are very good games. They're a bit weaker on the narrative front, not having the depth of worldbuilding that Mechwarrior had in BT, but the gameplay is phenomenal. Complex damage model, interactive freakin' cockpits, a power draw system where your "Herc" could suffer brownouts if too much strain was put on the reactor... the whole nine yards... as simulations, they're deeper that MW2 (which was released around the same time). ES2 even had an attack flyer included as part of the regular vehicle lineup.
[...]

This
Earthsiege has better and more balanced combat than BT or MW ever will have.
- Actual different damage types (Energy weapons being generally good against shield, ACs being devastating against physical structure)
- Proper ACs (vulcan-style), not some cheesy Sci-Fi-Howitzer
- Active and passive radar, whose competent usage played a MAJOR role in gaining a tactical advantage (flanking unseen etc.)
- Real roles like scouts, artillery, shield killers, armor killers, etc.
- Not to mention proper hardpoint locations (HIGH! not at the hip, ffs)

Cyberstorm had AWESOME tactical gameplay. No Mechcommander ever came close to it.


Sadly, people buy emotions, not good quality. So BT with its ultra crappy gameplay but deeper story was always ahead.

An, nostalgia. Nice .

Fun fact: The Shadow Cat looks pretty much like a Herc.

Edited by Paigan, 30 December 2016 - 01:36 PM.

[SuomiWarder]

I enjoyed the Earthsiege line a great deal. Although in No 2 when you could pilot a flying Herc, it was too powerful and the scenarios never challenged it.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Heh, yeah... Get dual Plasmas on the Razor and you could pretty much just solo the campaign from that moment on.

I used to use EO missiles to scout over hills, more than I ever used them for killing things- running in passive all the time, the missile camera was more useful than the warhead since it was the best way to spot big baddies coming before they shredded you.

ES1&2 also had multiple campaign paths (each mission not flagged as critical would lead to either an attack or defense path based on the outcome), and some persistent mission states. Fail to destroy something in one mission and it would come back to haunt you later. Or, a few times, blow up the wrong thing and it'd turn out to be mission critical for a later scenario... something I've seen in a few space sims (FS2 comes to mind), but never another mech game. With just a bit more story fill, ES2 in particular would have been about the best giant walker game ever made because of that. If Starsiege's story had been built around ES2's gameplay... ah, what could have been.

[Anjian]

Wow the memories.

Another factoid.

Earthsiege and Starsiege universe is the same as the Tribes universe (yes that FPS). Earthsiege and Starsiege occurred at a much earlier time line in the same universe.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Starsiege: Tribes and Starsiege were built on the same game engine, then called Darkstar- which developed into the Torque engine used for Tribes 2 (interesting note: "skiing" was a gorram exploit that just never got fixed. Goes back to the wonky collision physics I mentioned interacting weirdly with the jump function). Battledrome, Earthsiege 1, and Earthsiege 2 were built on an earlier version of the same engine (I forget what it was called at that point)... and in the early 2000s there was an aborted community-developed sequel called Starsiege:2845 which in its final form and only playable build also ran on Torque. So, every mechsim in the series was essentially built on the same foundation (compare to Mechwarrior, which has run on a different engine with every release).

I really, really wish Dynamix was still around. Tribes is basically its own thing now, and HiRez doesn't seem interested in adding to the universe it's set in, so... yeah. Siegers die hard, though. We've managed to resurrect Starsiege half a dozen times or so from total abandonment, so it'll probably happen a few more before gaming history finally leaves us behind.

BTW, I've seen a lot of old Siegers playing MWO. You know who you are. And I can still kick your tank's *** in a Talon.

[Y E O N N E]

Skiing was actually covered in the tutorial missions for Tribes II, if I recall correctly. So, maybe it started as an exploit, but it became officially accepted as a core mechanic.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

It was. The skiing glitch became so popular that Dynamix decided not to fix it. Irrational and HiRez both decided to incorporate it as a core feature. The trouble was that it made the vehicles in Tribes 1 totally obsolete, as there was no speed cap... Tribes 2 took the 'mechanic' into account and reworked the vehicles so they still had a place in the game, but skiing still changed the landscape. Tribes could have become the first successful combined-arms shooter (predating BF1942 by two and a half years) , but skiing killed that.

The more you know... and knowing is half the battle!

[Cerulean Knight]

If I recall the story correct, the reason skiiing was found in Tribes was because many of the play testers where used to Quake 2 at the time and exploiting the jump=speed mechanic in that game. Dynamix did fix, but found the game moved too slow after it was fixed, so they left it in. Or, so the story goes.... (gah! info blocked by WrathOfDeadGuy )

But, yeah, The Metaltech universe of games are awesome. ES1 and ES2 are excellent games. Starsiege has some balance issues (for example, a weapon called the PBW is suppose to have a damage drop off the to it's max range... this was never put in. Not even hyperbole; the script files that control weapon damage don't have the mechanic built in for it). So, some weapons are better than others. But, in Singleplayer, that doesn't matter much. If you can, I would highly recomend getting the Pilot guide and Compendium that came with Starsiege. They are both excellent primers for the game and the universe (each are about 300 pages long).

Fun fact: my favorite HERC in SS was the Minotaur.
Fun fact 2: if you search for "Earthsiege Apocalypse" the 3d render with all the crappy watermarks is something I made (I should really sit down and remake it in Blender....).

Edited by Cerulean Knight, 31 December 2016 - 04:24 PM.

[Cerulean Knight]

Oh! And for those curious, you can download all the games for free from the current IP holder here: https://www.tribesuniverse.com/

I recommend giving all of them a try! Save for maybe CyberStorm 2... or Tribes: Assault. They are both below average in my book in terms of game play in my book.

Wait, they don't have the Cyberstorm games on there.... slackers.

Edited by Cerulean Knight, 31 December 2016 - 04:30 PM.

[WrathOfDeadguy]

Beam weapons actually do have damage falloff in Starsiege, but it isn't in the weapon stats in the vehicle lab. You can test it out by firing a PBW at very close range, then out near 1000m- the falloff starts at half of a beam weapon's maximum range. There are a whole bunch of hidden mechanics like that- stuff that did make it into the game, but was left out of the manual and tutorials. For another example, DURAC armor takes zero normal (non-boosted) ramming damage, while Ceramic takes double, but nowhere is it mentioned that armor type affects ramming damage at all. Despite the quality (and size!) of the manual, there's a lot just not in there, and much of playing Starsiege well was experimenting to figure out all the little quirks that Dynamix either didn't get around to patching or for some reason just didn't document. The result was a massive climb of a learning curve that makes MWO's look like more of a speedbump.

[Koniving]

Paigan, on 30 December 2016 - 01:35 PM, said:

- Proper ACs (vulcan-style), not some cheesy Sci-Fi-Howitzer

On this one note: MW 2/3/4 had "ACs" in burst forms.
The lore of ACs though is that they are large machine guns... PGI's the one that screwed this up.

The rest, yeah. Damn I miss Star Siege.

[Paigan]

Koniving, on 01 January 2017 - 03:46 PM, said:

On this one note: MW 2/3/4 had "ACs" in burst forms.
The lore of ACs though is that they are large machine guns... PGI's the one that screwed this up.

The rest, yeah. Damn I miss Star Siege.

Fair enough. Good point .

[Anjian]

WrathOfDeadguy, on 30 December 2016 - 12:49 PM, said:

Interesting factoid: Dynamix, the developer behind the Battledrome, Earthsiege, Starsiege, Cyberstorm, and first two Tribes games (all of which share a continuity), was also the developer of the first Mechwarrior game back in 1989. "Metaltech" was their attempt to create their own big stompy mecha series, and it did pretty damn well despite never quite competing with BT. There was even a tabletop miniatures game based on Starsiege. The physical game flopped hard but you'll still see the minis pop up from time to time. I have a couple of box sets and a few of the add-on minis; they're all white metal castings with good detail, and I've seen a lot of them masquerading as BT minis over the years.

Earthsiege and Earthsiege 2 are very good games. They're a bit weaker on the narrative front, not having the depth of worldbuilding that Mechwarrior had in BT, but the gameplay is phenomenal. Complex damage model, interactive freakin' cockpits, a power draw system where your "Herc" could suffer brownouts if too much strain was put on the reactor... the whole nine yards... as simulations, they're deeper that MW2 (which was released around the same time). ES2 even had an attack flyer included as part of the regular vehicle lineup.

Starsiege, released around the same time as MW3, plays more like MWO. It lacks the earlier games' interactive cockpits, and the collision physics are wackier than MWO, but it still has a robust damage model with internal damage states that puts any of the MW games to shame. The SP campaigns are also fantastic. It can also still be played online, on the rare occasion that there are people around to play with, as there are community-run master servers keeping it on life support.

The Cyberstorm games, which are set further down the timeline, are squad-level strategy games akin to MechCommander. Tribes, of course, is a jetpack-based team action shooter, heavy on the multiplayer component.

If you can get them to run, I'd heartily recommend the whole series.

Dynamix was already making a Mechwarrior 2 when the franchise was given to Activision to do MW2 instead. So the game that they were making was converted into something else, so not to waste the project, and it became Earthsiege.

Earthsiege is much more similar to Mechwarrior 1 than MW2 is to MW1 especially on the way the garage is handled. The displays are almost like copies between the two.

Edited by Anjian, 01 January 2017 - 05:42 PM.

[Anjian]

Koniving, on 01 January 2017 - 03:46 PM, said:

On this one note: MW 2/3/4 had "ACs" in burst forms.
The lore of ACs though is that they are large machine guns... PGI's the one that screwed this up.

The rest, yeah. Damn I miss Star Siege.

True enough, miss having a giant walker that tears them up with six massive vulcans.

When I am traveling or out of the home, I do reach for my smartphone or tablet to find a reasonable substitute.

[Koniving]

Anjian, on 01 January 2017 - 05:33 PM, said:

Dynamix was already making a Mechwarrior 2 when the franchise was given to Activision to do MW2 instead. So the game that they were making was converted into something else, so not to waste the project, and it became Earthsiege.

Earthsiege is much more similar to Mechwarrior 1 than MW2 is to MW1 especially on the way the garage is handled. The displays are almost like copies between the two.

Explains a LOT of similarities...
Cybrids to Clans
Human forces to IS..
Overall arching plot and the like.

Anjian, on 01 January 2017 - 05:39 PM, said:

True enough, miss having a giant walker that tears them up with six massive vulcans.

When I am traveling or out of the home, I do reach for my smartphone or tablet to find a reasonable substitute.

I pitched for them back in the day.
Didn't realize this but it's got 39 likes despite the fact that I haven't passed it out in ages.


I've developed the concept a LOT since then... but have also given up on it being for MWO and instead I'm working on it for a short youtube animated series of what Mechwarrior 'could be'... also known as Battletech Sim (I'm not good with names).

(A short bit on the improvements...
"Weapon damage classifications" are considered to be "loose categories" by Battletech itself, in numerous publications, meaning some variants do more and some do less.
For the video itself...
Chemjet Gun works out to be a 4 shot weapon rather than 3.
A single shot AC/20 does not actually exist for either side, however for the record the IS's largest AC/20 up as far as 3065 (at which point I stopped reading/caring) is 185mm aka the Chemjet Gun. The Ebon Jaguar carries a 203mm UAC/20 and on ultra mode it fires four times... which means on standard it fires twice [once from each barrel and many of the tabletop figures depict two barrels for its UAC/20]... thus two shots to get 20 damage. Its squat design makes it one of the few to be able to carry a gun that big without losing balance...(supposedly.)
If one were to exist, it would not be able to achieve the full 20 damage by process of balance.

For the concept...
A damage classification isn't just a loose category for damage, weight, heat and expected ranges for the typical gunner to be able to hit something 12 meters in height or length... it is also a unit of time, typically ten seconds tabletop though 5 seconds is more suited to something that is real time and works better with 'larger' ACs too.
Meaning if it does approximately 20 damage, it completes that damage within 5 seconds or less and in most circumstances, is ready to use again by the end of that 5 seconds. Example, if the average ML requires 3 shots to get its 5 damage, those 3 shots and all of its damage can be done within 5 seconds with the weapon ready to use again for the next cycle.

The average AC caliber is 120mm, where AC/5s and AC/10s cap out at in lore (I have yet to find an AC/10 of a caliber other than 80mm, 100mm, and 120mm.) The shot counts for 5, 10 and 20 ACs are 3, 6 and 12.
The largest AC/2 is 90mm and it is apparently very slow to fire.
150mm is the size needed for a single AC round to do 2 damage.
ACs are based -- according to lore -- on the big guns carried by aircraft such as the A-10. These rarely get above 120mm, as such 120+ sizes are rare, meaning there is no "single shot" AC in existence. No "Howitzer" shells to be found. That's reserved for Mech Rifles which were phased out in favor of smaller, cheaper, significantly faster firing and exploding armor piercing high explosive rounds (APHE), aka your typical autocannon. (Note the rounds don't usually pierce enough to be true armor piercing, just enough to explode and pull armor away with it.)
ACs favoring DPS (more shots, less damage per shot) will favor slightly exceeding their damage class within their given time..
ACs favoring FLD (fewer shots, heavier damage per shot) will falter slightly below their damage class within their given time.
The greater they extend in either style (DPS or FLD), the more they will push or fall behind their damage class.

With slight mods this can still favor MWO with weapon variants. Or the variants can just be dropped and ACs can be 'automatic' weapons firing like machine guns, UACs can fire in faster bursts, and LBx will still be LBX.

Edited by Koniving, 01 January 2017 - 06:19 PM.

[Anjian]

I suspect MWO doesn't implement massed vulcan like fire because it can be laggy and create a massive server load on hit registrations.

Any hit on a game eats bandwidth and processing load. A lot of small hits would be crazy on the server compared to a few big hits.