see_prus_prus

Just wanted to say I grew up with the Dune II (my biggest problem with Dune 2 was that every time i was explaining it I had to sound out D-U-N-E cause everyone thought i would be talking about Doom 2) and the C&C franchise all the way up to C&C 3 and it's expansion.

I remember loving all the tricks to cheese the AI out I employed in C&C and Dune. Mainly in Dune II I would love to hear your insights on this one "exploit" I managed to use. I'm a coder as well so im assuming Dune II had some priority updates going on for what only was on screen versus off-screen to save cpu time. As such if a unit I had was getting chased I only needed to keep my unit at the edge of the screen and keep the chasing unit off-screen and he would out-run them :)

In command and conquer I remember reading in the manual sandbag walls could be run over by vehicles but this was never implemented in the game. A funny by-product of that is that on particularly challenging levels I employed the "bag-em-in" tactic of snaking a line of sandbag walls from my base to the entrance of theirs and sealing them in while I took my sweet time preparing a massive army. This would cause some serious slowdowns if I let them pile up too much but I could see their turrets turn to a move assignment then turn back as there was no path and they would be doing this every second or so.

Its funny how much I tangentially learned of AI and other game dev systems by trying to figure out ways to exploit the systems in games I played.

But aside from C&C and Dune II did you work on Nox? Nox is by far one of my favorite rpg's of all time and the game I dream of making has HEAVY influences of it including Nox's line-of-sight system employed in it. I even made a small scale version of that system in a project a couple years ago (old screenshot of it here). It's awesome whacky action multiplayer (wizards, warriors and conjurers killing each other in a soccer game) and great single player campaign made for one of the most under-rated rpgs of all time. Would love to hear anything I can about the dev behind Nox!

Thanks for everything you have worked on, its been a big influence on my life!

oh man I need to try that right now, have you also seen http://play-dune.com/? The audio bugs out here and there but the game runs in a browser :)

Might also be of help to anyone looking to actually see what the first true RTS looked like without going through much hassle!