ManSh00ter

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

EMP effect is created when a magnetic field passes over a piece of metal. For example, most power plants basically use their mode of energy procurement (hydro, thermal, nuclear, wind) to spin a turbine at high RPM. This turbine houses coils of wire which spin through a static magnetic field - or spinning magnetic rotating around fixed coils of wire. The result is an electric charge being induced in the wire, which produces a pulse of electricity. String a lot of such pulses together and you g

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

It has little to do with atmosphere - it has a lot to do with the ionosphere; you need to be above it in order to knock out electrons downwards and create a chain effect which shifts the earth's magnetic field and produces the EMP effect. E-bombs, yes, those devices fall into the category of NNEMP and are fairly innefective for anything BUT knocking out radio and TV stations with little material damage. In other words, highly specialized devices with not nearly as widespread effect ra

Reply to I just spent the entire day downloading Sins mods... and none of them work?!? in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Yes, that is a very common mistake. One reason why I'll make a self-installer for my big mod.

Reply to [MOD] Sins of a Solar Empire: INVASION (new screenshots, May 28th, 2012.) in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Well, all three factions are alien, but the Clans Remnant have most in common with humans when it comes to design. So their ships will have a recognizable design, with corroded metal plating, complicated machinery, and so on. The Hegemony ships, actually Consul ships will be the most abstract of the three races. They will have a completely alien look, with lots of mixing going on between physical and energy aspects of their vessels.

Reply to I just spent the entire day downloading Sins mods... and none of them work?!? in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Yes, tell us which mods you have installed and then we can help you more. My mod probably works because its very "light" - it changes only one file in the gameinfo folder. That you are getting a 0 checksum means that something probably went wrong with the mod installation, unless the mod changes nothing in the Gameinfo folder, in which case its normal that the checksum is 0.

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

Outside of bad science fiction, no. ;) But I'm always interested in things I don't know. As far as I know, you can have two ways to generate an EMP - a nuke going off and a specialized device producing what is known as a NNEMP - non nuclear EMP. As far as I know, these devices require a LOT of power and have a very limited radius of action.

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

How much weight - none. Hell, I can make that kind of EMP, just give me enough juice, a giant capacitor bank and a big antenna. And again - EMP attacks are useless unless executed as a strategic gambit to throw a stricken nation in even deeper disarray. A terrrrrrrrorist or rogue nation attacking US would not waste its nukes on an EMP attack - it would try to blow up as many cities as possible. Also, the famed missile shield - doesn't work. Never will. Its a play on sucking mo

Reply to [MOD] Sins of a Solar Empire: INVASION (new screenshots, May 28th, 2012.) in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Back from vacation, and here are some shots of the upgraded and reskinned models for the Seeder Pos and Spitter Drone. The seeder was reworked because of its high poly count (which would interfere with the idea of having to send a LOT of them if you want to punch through defensive lines and deliver the slow-sapping planetary diseases and whatnot to your enemy) and the spitter drone because it had an atiquated design which stood out from the rest of the Xin ships. Total time spent on i

Reply to Sorry to Ask Again, But What is the Mod Tool Used to Edit Meshes? in Sins Modding Sins Forums

You can't edit .mesh files. You can import them in Max via that script JasonFJ mentioned, but you lose all the UV mapping, you just get raw geometry. As for textures, I would advise against using Nvidia's plugins at least for normal maps - they tend to lose a lot of detail while compressing normal maps especially. Use DDS Converter 2 - its better at compression, and it's also faster. Plus, it can do batch jobs.

Reply to Fixing Polygons in Sins Modding Sins Forums

As far as I am aware, you are not required to triangulate your models - the Sins engine can handle quads just as well. You need to get rid of n-gons (polygons with more than four sides) though. I also prefer to do that manually, as I usually can avoid creating too many n-gons and the add edge tool is simple enough to use. You can also avoid odd shaped triangles that way, which comes in handly later when you're UV-mapping and want to avoid texture distortions.

Reply to Star Wars The Old Republic: Great, or Horrendously Awful in PC Gaming Sins Forums

I make judgements based on my previous experience as a gamer and based on my observations on how the AAA title production works. No, I don't think that the Bioware folks are stupid... game developers rarely are, its a creative job after all and you can hardly mix creative with stupid. But I don't think they are the ultimate masters of their title. There are bigger "pencil-pushers" above them who call the ultimate shots. Now they can be stupid. From a game design perspective. F

Reply to Star Wars The Old Republic: Great, or Horrendously Awful in PC Gaming Sins Forums

It can muck it all up the same way SWG managed to do it... you ended up with the "A New Hope" setting where you couldn't move from all the lightsaber fights breaking out in the streets. It was the Force Sensitive fiasco which ultimately ruined SWG, not NGE. New Game Enhancements came only after Sony tried to bring back subscribers by opening the Jedi/Dark Jedi class to everyone... but prior to that the same unbalanced profession was the main source of complaints about the game. First

Reply to No LAN for Starcraft 2 in PC Gaming Sins Forums

Ads... yeah, I can buy that (excuse the bad pun). But I don't buy the "anti-piracy measure" argument, because its just dumb. But I guess it doesn't sound as bad as someone from Blizzard saying "yeah, we would like to force everyone to connect via Battlenet because it makes us richer." Though it would be somewhat cool to see someone with an in-your-face attitude like that instead of various PR stunt-monkeys crucifying poor pirates on a daily basis and using them basically as a cover fo

Reply to Star Wars The Old Republic: Great, or Horrendously Awful in PC Gaming Sins Forums

Hey, but if it does suck from the beginning, maybe there's a hope that the next batch of New Game Enhancements endorsed by Lucasarts will actually improve the title! :p My next big hope in MMO genre is actually Mortal Online . SW:TOR seems too much like a classic "done to death" MMORPG, with an abundance of scripting involved (and in my experience, overuse of scripting makes MMO worlds seem fake and small. What would be great i

Reply to No LAN for Starcraft 2 in PC Gaming Sins Forums

Actually Gerry, I pretty much played every single title Blizzard released, all the way back to the original Warcraft. And I did not say their games suck, though whether SC2 will be a shiny AAA rehash of things already seen or something actually new an original, remains to be seen. Personally, although I love the works of Blizzard's CGI artists, cinematic movies do not define content for me. An intriguing storyline, interesting gameplay, those things are important. And as I sai

Reply to No LAN for Starcraft 2 in PC Gaming Sins Forums

Actually Gerry, I pretty much played every single title Blizzard released, all the way back to the original Warcraft. And I did not say their games suck, though whether SC2 will be a shiny AAA rehash of things already seen or something actually new an original, remains to be seen. Personally, although I love the works of Blizzard's CGI artists, cinematic movies do not define content for me. An intriguing storyline, interesting gameplay, those things are important. And as I sai

Reply to No LAN for Starcraft 2 in PC Gaming Sins Forums

[quote who="Dyranum" reply="16" id="2283910"] And the release as a trilogy is just the same as releasing one game and then two expansions. Means: first they'll release the core game which includes the Terran campaign and then they'll make two EXPANSIONS. It's like buying starcraft 1 and then buying two brood war expansions (not relating to price).[/quote] No... nope, I don't see that one at all. It's like buying one third of a game at full price, the

Reply to No LAN for Starcraft 2 in PC Gaming Sins Forums

Actually, the only fair way to hold a tournie is to host it over a LAN. That way you make absolutely certain everyone is playing on equal ground as far as ping goes. With all the micro that the pro players use, you want the best possible connectivity, especially if its a tournie with a prize at the end. Personally, I don't care... I won't be buying SC2 because they won't have all three racial campaigns available from the start. Now, if the asking price for each part was 1/3 of the usu

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

No, what you do is let a few of them in, give them food and drink, arm them and turn them into your henchmen. Then, you use them to raid for food and supplies, and use *that* to recruit more from the desperate mob, also strenghtening your position. Rinse, repeat, conquer the world. Muahaha. :p

Reply to [MOD] Sins of a Solar Empire: INVASION (new screenshots, May 28th, 2012.) in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Heh, sorry, I'm on vacation so I haven't checked the thread much. Thanks for the offer! I actually do plan on getting a team together when I start the production of Episode II sometime this autumn, so if you're still interested by then, we'll talk. :)

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

Yes, but in order to get a spark, you'd need to induce a fairly large amount of electricity. I have adoubts about the EM pulse being able to generate that in such a small length of conductor as would be present in a, say, claymore mine. This sounds like one for Mythbusters. They like big explosions anyway. :p

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

Well, I actually have bothered to read materials which go beyond Wikipedia. So stow your accusations of ignorance. That you even consider an EM pulse capable of destroying the functionality of a car only exposes your own lack of even basic understanding of the physics involved. I won't even comment on the level of ignorance necessary to state that an airplane would crash because the onboard computer has the date wrong. As for the power grid, as was stated before on several occ

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

Yeah, I'd like to see goverments harden stuff against a 50 meter rise in ocean water levels. :) Again, the problem is that people don't know exactly what an EMP is, and how it works, or think they do but are wrong. Tactically speaking, an EMP is a useless side effect of a nuclear detonation which was experimented with during the Cold War and found lacking compared to the kind of damage a conventional nuclear detonation could do. If anyone had nukes off the coast of US

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

[quote who="Moosetek13" reply="15" id="2281122"] So let's trade one doomsday for another? In case you haven't noticed yet, the earth has been on a cooling trend for the past few years. All the hype about 'man-made' global warming is just that, a bunch of hype. The global temp has more to do with solar cycles than it has to do with us producing CO2.[/quote] No, let's trade a fictional doomsday for a real one. An EMP strike wouldn't have nearly a profound effect as globa

Reply to What would happen after an EMP attack? in Everything Else Sins Forums

*sigh* People, an EMP won't knock out your car. It won't knock out radios, computers, cellphones, laptops. It won't magically erase data storage and it certainly won't erase civilization from people's heads. Yes. It would knock out the power grid. This sort of thing has happened before, you know. Solar storms regularly cause disruptions in the power grid, and major storms have caused major disruptions. Civilization survived somehow. Yes. There would be looting and riot