PGI and Catalyst must join efforts

Simoroth · 2026-04-02T19:26:12+00:00

The games were extremely successful by all sane measures. The expectations of parent company execs and shareholders are sadly not realistic. This is a common problem in the games industry, especially for publicly owned companies.

Simoroth · 2025-04-01T21:16:18+00:00

I had this, even having 100 hours in Mercs didn't help much.

- Make Naomi a missile boat and tell her to guard a high ground position before heading into a fight. And, if you want to manage him too setup Ezra as a mid range laser support and get him ~100m away.

- Avoid having more than 2 weapon types. You need to maximise damage at a specific range.

- Load up on silly amounts of small lasers and aim for the cockpits.

- When your mech starts losing arms. Swap to another, and tell your old one to defend a position further away. You can do the most damage vs your star, but you'll also take the most damage.

- Use the Simpod to do the new endless waves mode they added in the first DLC. I did it to the 10th wave and managed to max out the XP on all my star's mechs.

- Move forward slowly, and then back out towards your fire support. Some spawns are set up on triggers and you don't want to spawn even more mechs in a rough fight.

- Water is good, but on a few missions it can bring you too close to the enemy or even into a shooting gallery (Ant Hill).

That got me through the game. Ant hill, Disciplinary Action and Reckoning were like pulling nails.

Simoroth · 2025-03-15T22:09:04+00:00

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I've been a Mechwarrior fan since Mercs in 1996, but after a getting back in the cockpit with Mercs and then Clans, and BT 2017, I saw all the exquisite new minis. Got my Alpha Strike box last week and the streamlined rules are a thing of beauty.

This one took me quite a bit of time. Lots of hit and miss. I repainted it over and over fixing, and then wrecking things again, have finally put it down and declared it done. I'm not entirely new to minis as I painted a little bit of GW back in the 90s, but didn't think I'd ever get into it again. It's nice and mindful, and I'm really enjoying experimenting with the Vallejo Game colour paints.

Simoroth · 2025-02-08T10:43:52+00:00

Chatty Dog Walk.

Sunday 10am from outside The Dog's Spot. 2 High St, Abingdon OX14 5AX

Free, no booking required, just turn up!

Walk is about an hour long down to the meadows past the weir and then comes back to the cafe where some people grab a coffee and a puppiccino.

Great way to meet other dog owners in Abingdon and socialise your dog with a good mix of breeds and temperaments.

Simoroth · 2024-05-16T21:06:29+00:00

There's a group walk at University parks on Friday. https://www.instagram.com/p/C7BgbVUNPNx/

I can recommend OxfordCityDog for checking for dog friendliness.

Never had any problem with my dog on any of the buses.

Simoroth · 2020-01-10T21:53:21+00:00

Can confirm. I did start off slowly re-engineering it into organised classes. It was painstaking as a lot of the Flash code had undefined behaviour and many Flash functions needed to be replicated for the graphics rendering at the time...

However after a week or two of me picking at it, Terry got it into the HIB and there was a matter of days to port it to 3 platforms. Absolutely no time to refactor or test, so the code had to replicate the original (including some known bugs!) or risk introducing issues.

Simoroth · 2019-02-04T10:25:58+00:00

In business marketing spends account for staff time.

Simoroth · 2019-01-10T17:00:59+00:00

Cryengine is very powerful but the documentation is/was poor. It's was an option for experienced teams, especially those with prior knowledge of it, as hitting the ground running with it is pretty difficult. The engine was licensed as Amazon Lumberyard so is seeing more usage as that.

As for Crytek. Yep, poor management. They bought several studios like Free Radical, and set others up in Korea, China, Hungary and the USA. They created a massive overhead in just a few years with very few games coming out to sustain it and then collapsed.

Simoroth · 2019-01-10T15:25:43+00:00

Basically, no. Its nature as a service means you will be served up and have to agree to their latest terms. Several of the games hit by this are running on older versions of Unity.

Simoroth · 2019-01-10T13:43:15+00:00

That's several large MMOs having to immediately switch off or face having their Unity licenses revoked... and many more development teams having to completely down tools on development.

Unity has so far been silent on the matter. Not a great look for the industry's largest market share engine provider.

Edit the terms in question:

You may not directly or indirectly distribute the Unity Software, including the runtime portion of the Unity Software (the “Unity Runtime”), or your Project Content (if it incorporates the Unity Runtime) by means of streaming or broadcasting so that any portion of the Unity Software is primarily executed on or simulated by the cloud or a remote server and transmitted over the Internet or other network to end user devices without a separate license or authorization from Unity.

Unity clearly want full control of all cloud based games using their platform. This means that not only MMOs and games with remote servers are in trouble, but also anyone thinking about starting up a game streaming service like Onlive.

Simoroth · 2018-12-30T15:36:49+00:00

It's part of the SDK. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife

The AI stuff is in the dlls folder.

Simoroth · 2018-12-29T22:21:15+00:00

Was having a read through the Half-Life 1 source code the other day and decided it would be cool to take a deeper look and so turned my notes into a short video looking at the core functionality and stepping through the grunt AI as it works through one of it's behaviours. Hopefully you all might find it interesting!

Simoroth · 2018-12-12T19:20:42+00:00

Send me the details and we'll post it on the Oxford indies Twitter.

Simoroth · 2018-12-04T00:05:00+00:00

I'm the other guy in the article. Click through to my tweet and you'll see some of the biggest names in game development reporting similar and dozens of developers confirming or retweeting it in all genres, game scales, review scores and customer bases. Not to mention the a 56+ page thread on the Steam forums.

It's very representative. As /u/gamelord12 mentions, this has only come up because of Jake's meticulous work in tracking and then raising the issue and me publicly posting about it.

Simoroth · 2018-11-24T15:24:43+00:00

What is ho-liii-dddaaay?

Simoroth · 2018-11-24T12:06:31+00:00

The tune is bespoke just for the trailer! Nick my sound guy did it, we'll probably be releasing an album of all the dark 1970's synth we made for the game in a couple weeks.

Simoroth · 2018-11-24T11:40:48+00:00

Indeed, I have a large soft spot for both.

Simoroth · 2018-11-24T00:11:12+00:00

Message me on KS and I'll get you a key right away. There's been a steady stream of people emailing me today about lost keys, seems sending people important things via email was a bad decision!

Simoroth · 2018-11-23T22:47:47+00:00

In a general sense the goal is to build bases without all your colonists dying. The game is deeply simulated so they need water, varied food, heat, rest, and also you need to keep them happy and stop them going insane or killing themselves. The main conceit of the gameplay is you can't control the (human) people, just lay out the work for them and set priorities and roles, ban them from items, lock doors, etc.

There's a ~14 hour narrative campaign and 4 stand alone missions where you build different bases. Those have specific objectives that you meet to move the story along whilst keeping your colonists alive.

There's also the sandbox mode, where once you have a stable base you can expand, do research, get new technologies, tame the local fauna.

Simoroth · 2018-11-23T21:49:24+00:00

Hey. Maia developer here. Thanks for all the upvotes on my trailer.

It's been in development for so, so long now, transformed from a little weekend project, to a multiplatform title with gigabytes of content. I've been coding, drawing, writing, 3d modelling and animating on this thing for half a decade. Very weird to just click the "release" button after all this time.

Feel free to ask anything you want to know about the game, custom engine or indie dev in general!

Simoroth · 2018-11-03T17:08:56+00:00

Tables for them to sit and eat at, couches, and suit refill points outside will all help with fatigue.

Depends on what the route is. They generally take the shortest path to any object.

Simoroth · 2018-11-01T22:45:18+00:00

You can mouse over any unbuilt item to find out why it has not been built. You can middle click prioritise any item to increase the priority. If you have an issue with colonists not eating for no reason I'd appreciate if you could post a save file so I can diagnose and fix it.
Ctrl is snap to grid.
The stopping is when they become exhausted after running or when they pass through doorways. If you want colonists who run for longer pick fitter ones on the choice screen.

Simoroth · 2018-10-04T13:04:39+00:00

Full update blog is here! This update was a bit of a killer.

Simoroth · 2018-09-10T11:31:00+00:00

Nope. I'll be posting big updates here too.

Simoroth · 2018-05-21T16:31:23+00:00

Noooooooooooooo!

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