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Dragon Towers
06/13/2014, 05:00:11

    Ramillies writes:

    In the game we are told that they are supposed to shoot at flying monsters, but since they can't recognize which targets to attack, they shoot at everything that flies.

    Now it seems that rather than shooting at everything that flies, they shoot only at the player that flies.

    Will the reprogramming of the Towers make them shoot monsters? Or will they just go silent?

    P. S.: Now I have a lot of time for playing, and when playing many questions pop up. So this is why I've been stirring the usual local tranquility the last few days.





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I'm afraid the game is a bit misleading there.
06/13/2014, 08:38:20

    Peter2 writes:

    The only thing that the Dragon Towers shoot at is your party, because IIRC the only thing in the air where there's an active dragon tower is your party. If you have a look at Kriegspire, there is a non-functional dragon tower there, but Kriegspire is the home of the dragon riders, and apparently the tower cramped their style to the point at which they wrecked it.

    They're not dangerous as long as you (a) don't get too close and (b) fly in a zig-zag path. But if you fly either directly towards them or away from them, they'll shoot you down.





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No, there is one place where there are flying creatures AND operational Tower together.
06/13/2014, 08:53:18

    Ramillies writes:

    I was battling Harpies near the White Cap town and the fight moved above the city. The Tower of course interfered. My Harpy adversary was nearer to the tower than me; nevertheless it was I who was shot at. (I hoped the tower could serve to something useful at least this single time and kill the harpy so it doesn't annoy me. But this hope failed.)




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You're absolutely right.
06/13/2014, 10:14:42

    Peter2 writes:

    I forgot that one. The one I thought of was Blackshire, where of course the drakes are shielded by that chain of mountains which separates the north from the south.




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Interesting. Blackshire-Air Elementals, Frozen Highlands-Harpies & Silver Cove-Gargoyles. Other three don't have flyers.
06/13/2014, 19:05:32

    ragwort writes:





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I shall obviously have to play this game again. I'm forgetting it . . .
06/14/2014, 02:05:29

    Peter2 writes:





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Only your party (slight spoiler to answer qn)
06/20/2014, 19:28:56

    Ossie writes:

    Aye, there are a few dragon towers where it is possible to get into an aerial battle with flying opponents. However (despite what the story dialogue says) in reality it is only your party that will get targeted (although I believe the spell operates as Fireball, so being hit can actually also damage close enemies).


    *Slight spoiler below*

    Once you complete the Tower Keys quest, the story dialogue is again that the towers should now recognise & only attack flying "monsters" (ie anything not you), but again in reality what happens is the towers are basically turned off & no longer attack anything. Guess the distinction was too hard to programme in 1998





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I suspect you're right.
06/20/2014, 20:42:09

    Peter2 writes:

    The games programmers use a whole slew of features which form no part of the documented abilities of the chip. In the days of DOS programmes I used to know a few of the undocumented DOS calls, but that was a long time ago, and chip architecture has changed beyond all recognition. But such is life . . .




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It is possible to use the towers for attacking your enemies as well.
06/24/2014, 14:32:50

    Ramillies writes:

    In aerial battle it nearly cannot be done (although I managed to make it once or maybe twice, it was a sheer luck). If fighting walking monsters from the air, you can do it if you 1) do your battle reasonably near to the tower; 2) fly just above the ground. Then the fireballs will hit the ground where you are flying and this way some hits can be scored.

    I'd bet it wasn't very hard to discern. This is the way I see it: there is a big difference between the party and the monsters -- they use another data structures, and are stored completely differently one from the another. It is not hard to check whether the party is flying and to send a fireball towards its position if it truly is.

    Monsters, on the other hand, are probably in some kind of array, separated from the party. So you need to iterate over all monsters, check whether they are flying, if they are, calculate their distance from the tower and choose the nearest one. Then shoot a fireball at it. I don't recall when MM6 was released -- 1996? Or 1997? Maybe the programmers didn't dare to lay another burden on "weak" computers working already at their full? Who knows today ...





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Flying (or is it frying) tonight.
06/24/2014, 16:14:39

    Chandor writes:

    Hmm, not sure about that. I notice that there is a limit to the number of active monsters that there can be at any one time (there can be more monsters, but only a certain number will actually do anything, you have to kill some of the active ones before more become active)
    Not actually counted the max #active at any one time, but I'll go with 64. I doubt it is more than that
    For each, check to see if a flying flag is set. That flag gets set if when the monster moves it moves to a spot that's above the ground, and reset if it moves to a spot on the ground. But that check is done at monster move time, not at fireball time. At fireball time we just check the precomputed flag, so cheap.
    Calculate distance: We COULD use pythagoras and newton-raphson to calculate the square root needed which will take a bit of time, but why not use a crude approximation such as:
    Take difference in X position between the monster and the tower and the difference in Y position. The distance between the monster and the tower is ~(the larger of the diffs + 3/8 the smaller of the diffs)
    Crude, not at all accurate, but no-one is ever likely to notice. It's quite good enough and fast. You can even short-circuit it. If the monster you are looking at has an X diff or Y diff thats greater than the minimum distance then there's no need to calculate the rest.
    All of that has got to be far far cheaper to do than calculate and display the game-world. All of that was apparently done with no HW acceleration. All software. Quite impressive on hardware that age.
    I suspect either they just didn't think of it, or they didn't want people to use the towers to kill monsters they were too weak to kill themselves




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Towers
06/25/2014, 05:40:43

    Ramillies writes:

    I also think they could do it, but since the game was released the same year I was born (or the next one), I don't really know anything about computers of that time ... so I can't tell whether it could pose some problems which I, a programmer of today's computers, do not see.

    But even computing 64 sqrts can't be so exhausting ... As you say, they probably didn't like the idea of towers fighting monsters and players drinking coffee on the ground while watching monsters being shot down





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Might & Magic VI was issued in 1998 . . .
06/25/2014, 07:40:54

    Peter2 writes:

    . . . and was probably optimised to run on computers with one of the Pentium processors operating under Windows 98. It still runs best on a computer like that. When the unpatched game is played on the much faster modern computers, two flaws very obvious to the old hands are:

    1) – if you hover the pointer over the NPCs within sight in, say, New Sorpigal or Free Haven, some of them will not be named and no trade or profession will be assigned to them. On the old computers, all NPCs will be named and will have a trade, even if it's only "Follower of Baa", and

    2) – if you search the pews (i.e. click around on them) in the Chapels in the Silver Helm Outpost (Misty Islands) and the Silver Helm Stronghold (Silver Cove), you won't find anything. Playing the game on the old computers, you will find a spellbook in the former, and a top-line staff with a moderate enchantment in the latter.





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WIne
06/25/2014, 14:58:41

    Chandor writes:

    Interesting enough, running under Wine on Linux, these bugs don't appear even on my quad code 3.5ghz machine. They must emulate a pentium very well




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That's excellent — nice one!
06/25/2014, 16:57:16

    Peter2 writes:

    It obviously does better than the "Virtual Machine" programs.

    I thought of trying a Linux system at one time, but I was warned off it for the sake of one of the custom-designed programs that I need for my work.





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+1 for wine. No trouble like that with it. (At least: not in this game. )
07/03/2014, 17:12:32

    Ramillies writes:





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