[botchlax]

Because I gave it a go and I have to say I much prefer it. It's personal preference of course, but for me it reduced the messiness, gave me a bit more control and actually covered up a lot of the smaller cosmetic faults I had issues with. Overall a success

[ScrinLover]

nice. I do gotta admit a walker taking up all the space on a screen is abit annoying.

[Thundertactics]

ScrinLover, on Dec 17 2007, 06:21 AM, said:

nice. I do gotta admit a walker taking up all the space on a screen is abit annoying.

I guess they decreased the zoom so that the walkers would be like that and look bigger...

[botchlax]

Thundertactics, on Dec 17 2007, 03:33 PM, said:

I guess they decreased the zoom so that the walkers would be like that and look bigger...

Ishmael-PG explained the reasoning behind the zoom:

Ishmael-PG, on Dec 16 2007, 05:20 PM, said:

As for zoom, console had nothing to do with it. We decided on the current zoom level long before we started on the console version. It came down to making a game that really is centered on the abilities and powers of the individual units. If we had put in sup-com type zoom, half the time you'd lose a battle and not know why, since you'd miss the visuals of it at some extreme distance. Generally, max zoom is where most players actually "play" the game, the rest of the time they zoom in only to watch the eye-candy, which in many games all the visuals are just that -- eye candy.

Since U@w has so many visual things that aren't just for looks, we require a deep visual language (virus, mind control, burning, slowed, EMPed, radiated, etc.) to communicate these states. We wanted to keep the view where you'd be able to see all of that stuff and understand what was going on, hence the zoom level. In many ways, we're more like a really fast playing RPG than other RTS games.

As I said in another post, we're going to re-eval the zoom level down the road (i.e. not right away). I can tell you that you'll never get it at supcom levels from us, simply because that's not the game we made nor wanted to make.

I happen to disagree with him, I don't have any trouble viewing the unit state information with the zoom that I use, but it is up to the individual I suppose.

[the_hunger]

Looks great. How did you mod this? Is it a simple tweak in the .ini. file?

[botchlax]

the_hunger, on Dec 17 2007, 04:41 PM, said:

Looks great. How did you mod this? Is it a simple tweak in the .ini. file?

No, but it's not that hard at all. Lord Alderaan gives an excellent how-to here: http://www.petroglyphgames.com/forums/inde...st&p=115047

I actually did it a different way from him however. I had trouble with FinalBIG and so I just hex edited the file config.meg found in the game's data directory. I also changed the file in a different way, I modified:

<Distance_Default>550.0</Distance_Default> to <Distance_Default>870.0</Distance_Default>
<Distance_Max>550.0</Distance_Max> to <Distance_Max>870.0</Distance_Max>
<Distance_Spline> 0.0, 300.0, 0.5, 425.0, 1.0, 550.0 </Distance_Spline> to <Distance_Spline> 0.0, 300.0, 0.5, 425.0, 1.0, 870.0 </Distance_Spline>

So basically I just made all the 550's to 870's. Don't ask why I picked 870, It was completely random, but I love the results so it must have been for a reason

The downsides to doing this are:

1. It causes live initialisation to fail because the game thinks it has been tampered with (which it has.) This has the effect of disabling multiplayer.
2. There is a performance hit, since you are asking your PC to render considerably more objects. That is why I chose a more sensible value than Lord Alderaan (870 vs. 3000)

When the patch comes that enables us to properly make mods and to extract parts of the .meg files and have them be recognised by the game, this will become much easier.

[the_hunger]

Thanks for this. I've actually used FinalBig before (for BFME2), but I don't believe I've every hex edited. Can you give me a brief explanation for how to go about doing this (hex editing the file)?

[botchlax]

the_hunger, on Dec 17 2007, 06:20 PM, said:

Thanks for this. I've actually used FinalBig before (for BFME2), but I don't believe I've every hex edited. Can you give me a brief explanation for how to go about doing this (hex editing the file)?

If you already know how to use FinalBIG I would stick with Lord Alderaan's method.

I used hexplorer (http://sourceforge.n...ects/hexplorer/) to open the config.meg file, and then just searched for the occurance of:

<Distance_Default>550.0

<Distance_Max>550.0

550.0 </Distance_Spline>

and changed the 550's to something bigger. There are more than one occurance of those strings in config.meg, but the ones you want to change are the first ones so that makes it easier. Also a very good idea to make a backup of your config.meg beforehand.

[Nightdragon]

heh in the patch they are going to let you zoom out farther just enough i think for a very comforting lvl, at least what the screenshots look like