How to Spot a Psychopath

If I'm going to waste prudently invest so much time on this game, I might as well get another blog post out of it.

First: Quick and dirty frame rate improvement tips.

SupCom has a long list of rendering options. You can manually turn off pretty much every single thing on the screen, giving you a magnificent frame rate provided you have the ability to perceive the action by mental telepathy. You access all this via a neat command-completion console, which you activate with the traditional "`" key (the tilde key on English keyboards, something else on others).

The render options all start with "ren_", and are toggles - enter them again to reverse the effect.

The "ren_decals" command is the most useful, I think. It removes static and animated overlaid texture effects, for a significant frame rate improvement without making the game hideous.

"Ren_water" removes water rendering entirely, so ships appear to levitate (and submarines are undistorted). If you're playing on a map with water but nobody's building ships, you might as well use ren_water whether you care about the look of the game or not.

"Ren_splats" affects scorch marks from explosions and such. "Ren_bloom" affects the glow effect from various landscape features, making everything darker but, once again, a bit faster.

View frame rate with keypad-slash. Turn off vertical sync in the standard video options to get the most frame rate possible - nothing moves fast enough for tearing effects to be noticeable, anyway.

There've been a couple of patches for SupCom already, the most recent of which, as I predicted, turns off the obnoxious SecuROM disc-check copy protection (well, for most countries' versions of the game, anyway).

So it only took about a week after the retail release of the game before they ditched SecuROM. I hope they didn't pay much for it.

The patches seem to have mopped up the few disconcerting crash problems the original version had. For me, those glitches amounted to the ability to play exactly one multiplayer SupCom game per Windows session. Fixed now.

And, in a credit to the developers, very few kinky and abusive game strategies have surfaced so far. Actually, there's only one that I know of, and it's rather obscure.

Apart from that, and lousy frame rates when a lot's going on, the only broken thing in the whole game right now seems to be the hard-to-see "ferry" icon, which is sometimes VERY hard to see.

(Gas Powered Games would probably get sued if they made the pale purple icon bright orange.)

Supreme Commander's GPGNet chat/matching system also has a number of points in its favour. It is, for instance, not a vast bulky reinvention of Steam, which means it's not a big deal that you have to launch and quit the game every time you play.

GPGNet also lets you easily submit your game recordings (SupCom records every game you play, though by default each new game overwrites the last) and download other peoples'. Thus may you armchair-quarterback to your heart's content.

There are a few minor hassles in the GPGNet client, like modal windows that needlessly stop you from being able to reply to a private message without closing the game list you're looking at. The SupCom matching system also, according to ancient tradition, tends to match newbies with experts in "ranked" games, to the detriment of both. That's because the matcher first tries to find you an opponent of similar skill, but then it just tries to match you with someone, no matter how more or less 1337 that person may be.

Supreme Commander is so young that the rating system doesn't have a good idea of peoples' skill yet anyway, and by far the most common ranked game is the one-on-one type, which is always a slapfest on a small map that's an exercise in Tech 1 unit rushing and requires a specialised subset of overall SupCom skills.

But I'd still like to see an option to not play at all if there aren't any opponents available who seem to be similar to you in skill.

Oh, and the Cybran destroyers that can sprout legs and walk very very slowly on the land are, for this reason, awesome. Regrettably, they also have the exact same pathfinding code as every other amphibious unit, which is to say that they do not know that they move with the speed of continental drift when on land.

You therefore have to waypoint Cybran destroyers around any island or isthmus that may get in their way, unless you want to see them lumbering across it. This isn't hard on the common multiplayer maps, but those who take the mellow and easygoing single player Campaign path will soon grow to appreciate the Cybran destroyer's irresistible attraction to even the tiniest patch of dry land.

I mentioned TA Spring in a passing link in my Supreme Commander post, but it deserves more. It kind of looks the way you'd expect Total Annihilation 2 to have looked, if that had come out in about 2001.

(That's the original TA intro music; TA had a proper orchestral score, played by a proper orchestra. And saved in a perfectly legible format, so it was easy to convert it to a 10kHz 8 bit mono WAV so it'd fit on a floppy, copy it onto someone else's PC, and set it as their Win98 startup sound. Ah, good times, good times.)

There was, of course, no actual TA2 if you don't count Kingdoms; Atari bought the rights to the TA brand and did nothing with it. Hence, Gas Powered Games straight-facedly claim Supreme Commander to be "all-new intellectual property", despite the fact that it's self-evidently a jazzed-up TA for the 21st century.

Spring lets you have a very flexible viewpoint - much more flexible, in fact, than SupCom. SupCom lets you zoom out to see the entire battlefield, but all you can do is zoom in and out and move your camera in the X and Y dimensions - you have no manual control over camera heading.

There's a good reason for that, of course; lots of viewpoints that look cool are useless for controlling a game, not to mention quite confusing. SupCom's puzzling enough for beginners without adding the possibility of moving your viewpoint inside a hill.

Spring's developers are unconcerned with such things, so the Spring engine allows you to fly your camera anywhere you like, or even use a first-person view from a unit.

The old TA units don't have nearly enough triangles in them to hold up well in close examination, of course. But Spring is all open-source-y and extensible, so prettier units, or other features, can be added to it at will.

Mmmmm.

TA was, of course, also highly extensible; people made lots of mods and tweaks and new units for it.

All of which can be seen in all their close-up magnificence in the Spring engine, too.

The old TA sounds are still perfectly decent, though.

I'm still going to be playing Supreme Commander, but there's no point even trying to play SupCom on a five-year-old computer. As long as you've got a 3D card that people actually wanted to buy back then, though, Spring should be pretty darn happy.

And you can't beat a price of "free".

Doom - The Roguelike sounds like a strong contender for Nerdiest Thing In The Entire History Of The World. And, OK, it is.

There are, however, two strong points in its favour.

1: It works. It's not what you'd call a deep game, and it has no lofty goals, but it's more complex than you might at first think. And it really does function quite well.

Thought has gone into how to translate the FPS experience into a turn-based ASCII game, and DoomRL has kept the spirit of Doom without making bad decisions like trying to translate famous levels into 80x24 screens. There are new weapons and old ones, and skills to beef up your character when he goes up levels, and things like shotgun reloading work in sensible ways.

There's even an ADOM-style tactics setting, to simulate dodging around to avoid fire or standing there pouring your own bullets into enemies. (When you pick up a Berserk Pack, you are of course stuck on Aggressive tactics until it wears off.)

2: It's got sound.

Roguelikes, traditionally, are silent as the grave, but DTR has standard DOOM sounds. And they don't seem out of place at all.

I didn't realise how deeply those grunts and snuffles and yells and scratching noises had burrowed into my consciousness until I started hearing them again. After I came to, hunched in a dark corner of the kitchen holding a carving knife and snarling, I was really impressed.

You don't have to have the sound on to play; if you're goofing off at work it's obviously inadvisable, and it's not even possible if you're running DoomRL on some ancient system or other, according to roguelike tradition. But the sound really does help. It lets you know what monsters are out there, and even uses stereo panning to tell you where they are.

There's a Wiki for DoomRL as well, by the way. Oh, and the same author has produced the going-full-circle DiabloRL, and a seven day roguelike (previously) called Berserk!.

I wonder what he'll turn into a roguelike next.

Myst? Civilization? Metroid?