Hot Lap - Cool Overlay

[🜲 PoLiX]

1 thing I gotta give Trench Wars, they're great at finding and exploiting bugs. Some I have seen them use to their advantage in the dev zone for events ideas.

 

We have found many unfinished parts of continuum / subgame.

 

Not saying this is another case, but that screenshot sama posted really makes it hard to believe it is just black pixels.

[🜲 PoLiX]

Wow, I feel stupid. I just made a cool transparent weasel

 

And if I recorded it, bet it'd smooth it out, and it'd look transparent & unpixelated

[🜲 PoLiX]

recording it actually smoothed it out pretty well.

 

So all it is is the lanc with every other pixel blacked out on the whatevershipitreallyisroll, and then in the ships.bm2

[★ Xog]

interesting! ^____^

 

So can this be done to tiles too?

[🜲 Samapico]

Yeah... it's a technique that's been around for ages.

 

Also, say you want to have tree leaves semi-transparent, you can have a fly-over graphic with no black pixels, and a fly-under graphic with the black pixel grid. The image stays visually fine, but when you fly under it, part of your ship is visible. I think Mystic Kingdom used it a lot.

[Dr Brain]

Hyperspace used to have something like that with clouds in the hypertunnels. One set of fly-under clouds were completely opaque, and one set were half transparent.

[Corey]

If you notice in the video, when he does the first lap in the Lancaster, the ship rolls. (when you are actually flying it)

Then, when the ghost is being presented there is no ship roll. It makes me wonder if they do it the same way Hockey Zone does their 'playbacks'

Edited August 3, 2011 by Corey

[★ Xog]

yeah, i was gonna say, powerball zone has the feature that replays an entire match with bots. this could simply be a copy, with the player going over a certain tile that enables the recording and then stops it when it's touched again. Edited August 3, 2011 by Xog

[🜲 Samapico]

... You don't see enemy ships roll do you? Why would you see the ghost lanc roll?

[Resol]

ASSS can record player packets, when the lap is started, it starts recording the game, then when the lap is completed, it stops recording, and plays the recorded game

I'm not 100% on what they are doing for the transparent effect, unless they just move an image with the ships movement, which is not ideal and uses a lot of bandwidth.

 

So I am thinking that lancaster is the fake ship playing the game recording forced as another ship using the overlay.

 

I bet I know how the game menu is created also.

 

Remove the chat, and add commands like ?up and ?down and ?select

 

Unless...

 

Not sure if its possible to modify the right functions to capture page up and page down, like it F2 menu. And use the ctrl button that you can also use in the F2 menu to select the target.

Edited August 4, 2011 by Resol

[★ Xog]

we already figured out how the race happens and the transparent effects.

and the menu can used by the server identifying player position packets. it can only be used in safe zones. this is very complicated but:

the player sends a gun fire packet

server identifies location of player

player moves up or down, (and up is up, down is down, left is up, right is down)

sends gunfire packet

server identifies which direction the player went

moves menu arrow in said direction one menu item up.

firing bomb can select a menu item, a mine goes back a menu item

 

but this method wasnt used for this. the video was made using a patched client (outside program). i assume the menu was done with that program.

[Resol]

That sounds crazy... Is that what the programmer said, or is that something as the way you think its done.

 

I can see triggering the menu when a player enters the safe zone, because there is a callback for that. And even using the ctrl (fire) button to select items in the menu.

 

But I couldn't see tracking which way a player moves for a simple menu, its doesn't doesn't make sense to me anway.

 

I'm wondering how the menu changes colors. I would guess all the text is are lvz server controlled screen objects? Unless like I was wondering if someone could use something like the F1 menu and move it to the center of the screen, seems possible to me.

 

Sorry if I bring up anything already solved, the topic was interesting, but I too lazy to read all the replies. Pretty cool video.

[★ Xog]

the person who posted the video on tw forums said it

[🜲 Samapico]

Not exactly a patched client, as I understand it...

 

Could an external exe mess with the display layer?

An external app can certainly catch the keystrokes from the client, and if it could throw back some display as feedback, you'd be able to make a lot of cool stuff... I guess the external app could then send ?commands via the client, so with ASSS you could turn lengthy/complex ?commands into a simple menu.

 

That would actually be pretty awesome. The second best thing after a fresh client, imo

 

 

Can anyone see what he actually does in these menus in the video?

[★ Xog]

yeah. he is moving back and forth and pressing some offense button to select menus cuz the safe "catches" him.didnt i suggest this "decal" program like a few weeks ago and was basically told the continuum client would basically need to be hacked to intercept the memory and packets? its right here on the forum.. Edited August 5, 2011 by Xog

[🜲 Samapico]

I mean... what's in the menu? What is he selecting?

[★ Xog]

You can't see this?

 

He goes down to "Enter Hot Lap Mode" and presses a button to select it

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/6513/menu1f.png

 

Then he selects "Start hot lapping!"

http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/1310/menu2xj.png

[Corey]

Man I really want to try this out...

[spidernl]

Everspace has an in-development GUI similar to this. Or well, not similar in looks, but similar in how it uses trackable 'keys' like decoy, brick, thor, , etc. to navigate. Edited August 6, 2011 by spidernl

[Corey]

No one knows where this arena is yet?

[★ Xog]

It's a private zone. The arena is originally from ?go F1spirit in TW. Please read thread.

[★ Xog]

from the secret underground:

 

http://vroomclub.imgur.com/old_screenies

[Corey]

wow... Different view in that last picture O_O

[★ Lynx]

from the secret underground:

 

http://vroomclub.img...m/old_screenies

 

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v240/lostinthought898/2m671wljpg.gif

Another build up for nothing.

Edited August 13, 2011 by Lynx

[★ Xog]

it'll never be implemented for regular play..

 

Polix, do u think that guy would mind if I told them the details about it?

Edited August 14, 2011 by Xog