ASM Community

If you follow the same rules as for nt/2k, you should be fine.

oh ok
thank you
i think i might eventually upgrade to it

If you play by the rules, yes. This means preserving ebx,esi,edi (if
you use them) in callbacks, clear eax in dlgprocs if you don't process
the message, and not trying to go ring0 in unconventional ways.

XP possibly requires a bit more "initial horsepower" from your machine,
but it should be able to utilize "additional horsepower" a lot better
than the old 9x systems...

Speaking of really cool games, have you seen "Red Faction"? The
engine is sorta plain (except a detail I'll be raving about a bit later),
the plot is a ripoff of Total Recall (with a few added thingies), the
persons have no personality (would have been better to do it
half-life style where at least you have your own "feelings", not
being forced to look at the person you control behave stupidly
in cutscenes). The textures are okay, the level geometry is boring
(indoor areas at least - even good old halflife had more variance).

But it has GeoMod. Realtime deformation of the level geometry.
And not just some fake bull, as far as I can see it's true boolean
operations on the level data. This is pretty fun when you fire a rocket
after someone, unless you hit solid steel, it will usually leave a hole.
You don't like the look of that tank that's going over that bridge,
heading the same direction as you? Blow the bridge :P.

Too bad they put a limit of 128 geomods in the engine, seemingly
fixed. The have a LOT of cheesy excuses. I messed around a bit,
and set the explosion radius of the rockets "pretty damn high",
and made some pretty marvellous craters. It's definitely not a limit
on the "amount" of damage you do, it's the *number* of modifications.
If you go too far, you hit the edge of the level, so to say. And then
something weird happens. Everything goes black. The level is still
there, with the same geometry and stuff, but all the textures go black.
I think it's a bit cheesy... if they put a check for this (or had a default
indestructible box JUST at the edge of the level), I can't see any
reason for limiting the number of geo-mods.

The larger the explosions are, the more time it takes to do the mod.
On my athlon700, the *DAMN* large explotions took about 1/4th
second I guess, enough to give a little lag, but pretty okay taking
into consideration the amount of changes that are being done.
Now imagine what you could do with unlimited geomods... TRUE
BULLET HOLES :P. With a heavy machinegun, you could make
smallish holes in rock, which would look absolutely cool, and be
fast enough that there's no lag...

too bad those volition guys have no visions :/. And they have so
many zealous fanboys that questioning the geomod limit will get
you flamed off their boards, by people who are too incompetent
to even know why the limit is there in the first place.

So you're left with a mediocre game, that is OK fun though...
I'm considering reversing the game to try and amend the 128-limit
on the number of geomods, but I'm afraid it might be something
like "GeoMod *geoMods;", which will be "pretty
damn hard" (at best) to fix.

Too bad the bullet holes aren't real but just sprites. GeoModding
allows *true* bullet holes.

Actual modification of the level geometry. Like if you have a gun that's
big enough (or the rocket launcher or the detpack), you can blow
holes in walls and actually walk through. Or blast a hole in the floor
of a skyscraper for a quick route to the floor below. The geomodding
in Red Faction becomes slower as the blast radius increases, but
I noticed no slowdown when using very small holes. Too bad they
have the 128-mod limit :mad:. Phukers.

Oh yes, of course it should be possible to turn off "real" bulletholes
in favour of sprite bulletholes on slower machines :).

Let's move this discussion to the heap. Look for a post about
Realtime Level Deformation (weeh, sounds fancy). After all, this
thread start being about windows XP compatibility ;).