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1
OutpostHD / Re: Introducing myself.
« Last post by Hooman on October 04, 2026, 05:28:30 AM »
Reading the first post I found myself thinking Leeor is not going to be a fan of AI generated content. Not too surprised by his response.

For code changes, I would be uncomfortable with vibe coded submission. I have a very strong preference for small change sets that are easy to understand and review. That tends to exclude a lot of vibe coded output. A lot of AI generated code can be overly verbose, sometimes unnecessarily complicated, and of highly variable quality. Combine that with how quickly AI tools can produce a large quantity of code, and it creates a situation where proper review can become very difficult. I'm generally of the opinion that code submissions should be well understood by the person submitting them, and should be readily understood by a reviewer. Mostly I want conditions where review is easy and quality can be maintained.

To be clear, my objection here isn't really about using AI tools for a research and learning phase, or a prototype phase. My concerns are more about quality and understandability when it comes time to present and review code.

There was someone who vibe coded some prototype UI upgrades. I would say that effort was appreciated. People did go over the visual changes to comment on them, and note which changes would be good improvements to make.

Those vibe coded UI upgrades were never formally submitted for inclusion. The person who made the UI changes left a link to his fork for anyone curious, though there was never a detailed review, nor was a PR opened for the changes. The focus was more on the general ideas for UI updates being presented, rather than on the code.

Given your stated background, I'm guessing you'd be more interested in code submissions. We do certainly like quality code submissions, and are generally happy to work with people that want to give it a try, or learn something new.
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Outpost 2 Programming & Development / Re: Mine Yield Formula
« Last post by Hooman on October 04, 2026, 04:37:58 AM »
Ahh, I see what you mean by multiplying by 10 now. You had constants of 1000 for common ore, and 500 for rare ore. Fold those in with the divide by 100 constants for the percentages.

The values in MINES.TXT do seem small compared to the constants you were using. I'm not really sure about the exact details of how the values in MINES.TXT are used. I don't think I ever analysed that function.

Code: [Select]
0044B010 SUB ESP,228                               ;  Function: BeaconTypes.LoadMinesFile()
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Huh, looks like you've been busier than I've noticed. I don't think I saw notifications for all those changes. Guess I have some stuff to get caught up on.
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Huh, I saw you make an SDK update a little while ago and was wondering what you were up to. Now I know. Nice.
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I spent time updating the OP2MissionSDK and Level Template on GitHub. These are the traditional C++ libraries for creating a mission. Of note, there is a newer C++ API known as TethysAPI that may be used in lieu of OP2MissionSDK or complement it. TethysAPI may be found here: https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/TethysAPI

The OP2MissionSDK may be found here: https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/OP2MissionSDK
The Level Template may be found here: https://github.com/OutpostUniverse/LevelTemplate

If you are new to making missions, Sirbomber has an excellent tutorial series that may be found in the forums.

I bumped the version to 5.0.0 with the below changes. The biggest reason for this release was to make everything work 'out of the box' with a stock Visual Studio 2026 install. Some other minor changes are included.

There are other ways to create custom missions for Outpost 2, but I think this SDK remains the most flexible, but with the downside of requiring learning C++ if you are not already familiar with the language.

Also, I added a reference in the readme to TethysAPI in case someone wants to check it out, but stopped short of adding it as a Git submodule.



Version 5.0.0
Version 5.0.0 updates OP2MissionSDK to default to Visual Studio 2026 and its toolset (v145). A new feature in HFL and some minor documentation corrections are included. Automated server builds were updated to use GitHub actions instead of appveyor. A breaking change occurred in OP2Helper correcting the name of an enum ID.

Outpost2DLL
  • Update to Visual Studio 2026 build tools (v145)
  • Automated build switched from appveyor to GitHub actions
  • Minor updates to source code documentation

OP2Helper
  • Update to Visual Studio 2026 build tools (v145)
  • Automated build switched from appveyor to GitHub actions
  • Correct EnumTechID enum identifier spelling of defensive (Breaking Change to API)
  • Correct common metals evacuation victory message text
  • Create helper functions to ease creation of map beacons (common ore, rare ore, fumaroles, and magma vents)
  • Minor updates to source code documentation

HFL
  • Add DoCargoRoute routine
  • Update to Visual Studio 2026 build tools (v145)
  • Minor updates to source code documentation
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Hello everyone. I recently updated Yukon Trail to be 5 player. It can be found here: https://github.com/Brett208/OP2MissionYukonTrail/releases/tag/Ver1.1.0

We had a 5th player join our games recently, so wanted the ability to play this mission with them. In the 5 player variant, some additional mining beacons are added to form another viable base for the 5th player. The difficulty and objectives scale linearly up with the added player. A few minor bugs were corrected as well.

We tend to have the new players use high resources, the veterans use low, and the casual players use medium. This makes the mission scale pretty well and remain challenging for each player. If one of the players gets wiped out early, it can become brutal trying to win since the AI doesn't let up for the lost player.

Anyhow, readme is below and feedback is welcome.



Version 1.1.0
A 5 player cooperative, land rush, resource race. Requires Outpost 2 to play. Difficulty scales, so it should play well with 2, 3, 4, or 5 players.

Winning conditions:

  • Stage 20,000 * player count common metal in trucks at northern waypoint
  • Stage 10,000 * player count rare metal in trucks at northern waypoint

Change Log

Version 1.1.0

  • feat: Support a 5th player
  • feat: prevent AI from researching tiger speed modification (better chance of outrunning AI if game is close)
  • fix: prevent AI tech branching from inadvertently closing some tech options
  • fix: correct vortex endpoints (was setting incorrect y position)
  • fix: prevent 3 bar rare from sometimes being too close to a cliff to build a mine

Difficulty:
The mission is designed for play with morale unsteady and no initial tanks. If normal is too difficult, try adding initial tanks and maybe steady morale.

  • Normal: High Resources
  • Hard: Medium Resources
  • Difficult: Low Resources

To Install
Unzip contents and place in directory Outpost 2/OPU/maps/Yukon Trail. The PDB file is only used in debugging and does not need to be included unless debugging the mission.

Features:

  • Semi-randomized enemy tech tree research
  • Randomized enemy squad objectives and start locations
  • Enemy EMP missiles when they reach it in their tech tree research
  • Smart disaster mode where colony killing disasters will not occur around your main base and no disasters will occur until your base is established
  • Semi-Randomized ore locations
7
Forgive me for being skeptical. Speaking of LLM 'agents' as if they're people, thinking, reasoning or being able to 'come to a conclusion' is off-putting to a whole new level of ick for me. I'm not one to immediately dismiss something because LLM's are involved but, as Blackbox has stated, I'm seeing a lot of copy/paste directly from LLM output and it's... yeah, ick factor really is the best way to describe it.   :-\

EDIT:
So I realize where the ick is coming from. This thread is reminding me a great deal of this one: https://forum.outpost2.net/index.php/topic,5020.0.html. Specifically the second line of this message: https://forum.outpost2.net/index.php/topic,5020.msg76495.html#msg76495

Not saying this is a case of more of the same but, yeah, there's a reason I'm skeptical. -_-
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OutpostHD / Re: Introducing myself.
« Last post by leeor_net on September 14, 2026, 10:48:06 AM »
Hello and welcome!

Thanks for your interest! As a note, I really hate generative AI and refuse to allow it to touch any of the code and for sure will not allow any art assets (including sounds/music) into the project.

That stated, I've looked around on OpenGameArt.com for awhile and have some tracks other than Mars that I want to include in the game (the planet select screen is an example). I haven't added them yet as it's been a low priority and I wanted to avoid increasing the download size until it's closer to ready for real play time.

For the AI voices, I was planning on hiring local students to record voice lines for the AI using a recording studio available at the local community liberal arts college. It's a moderate fee, something I can afford but I don't have the script yet since the game isn't really finished. When I have a good idea of what lines the AI voices should be saying I'll be having real people voicing the AI lines. Side note -- in the beginning of the project circa 2016 I had some computer generated ai voices and they really sucked so I removed them because they weren't helpful and the rate of change was so high that I opted to wait until I had a better idea of what was actually needed for voice lines. :D
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OutpostHD / Introducing myself.
« Last post by larrydgraysdz on September 14, 2026, 01:13:34 AM »
I'm a developer that has been working with coding since mid 1980's. I have both Outpost and Outpost II on DVD somewhere in storage. I spent many hours late 90's and early 2000 playing these.  I found this turn based game and installed it. I like it and want to help out. So, I know C, I know Java extremely well and I know Claude Code fairly well. I think I can help. I love the turn-based genre games too. I've cloned the code, compiled it and run it. I have started a fork repo at github.com/larrydgray

My first thought when playing it was, "sound!"

Sourcing space-ambient music without licensing headaches

OpenGameArt.org ? filter by "Ambient"/"Space", most tracks are CC0 or CC-BY, made specifically for games like this.
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) ? huge catalog, CC-BY (just needs attribution in your credits, which this repo already has a spot for).
Sonniss GDC bundles (sonniss.com/gameaudiogdc) ? free, no-attribution-needed SFX/music packs released for GDC each year, heavily used in indie/fan games.
freesound.org ? best for one-shot SFX (mining, construction, alerts) rather than full ambient tracks; check each file's specific CC license (varies per upload).

I am thinking Mars maybe fading in and out. Maybe timed with certain events or just randomly sometimes. But adding a few others that theme well.

And definitely female AI voice. Kokoro-82M is what Claude recommended. Why it fits best here: both the engine and all 54 voice presets are Apache-2.0 licensed ? one license covers everything, so there's no per-voice license auditing needed before you commit generated files into a BSD-3 repo. It's tiny (82M params, runs fine on CPU, no GPU needed) and currently rates highest quality (MOS 4.2) among lightweight local TTS models, with several American/British female presets (af_heart, af_bella, bf_emma, etc.) that would suit a game advisor/CMO voice.

And some beginning prioritized UI sound effects and event sound effects.

Let me know your thoughts. thanks.


10
Hey all -

So as I started out with the LLM-decompile idea, I thought it would give me a better starting point. But at some point while working with the agents we came to the conclusion that the gain we could get from that path would be marginal - and that is after an optimistic estimate. So I figured we better start the reconstruct now. For after all that is the main goal, right? To reconstruct it - to get back that lost code. At least that was the dream I set out to accomplish.

Small side note - I did not forget the decompile LLM. I still plan to investigate that branch. The idea of a decompilation engine for old games still sounds very exciting to me. But I need to think about it more. We are not only talking about pretty C or C++ out of a decompiler; we are talking about decompiling whole proper game systems. That is different stuff. I even thought maybe diffusion models somehow - but those are just thoughts in the wind, you know.

So we had this decompile stack: the Ghidra pseudo-code, the asm, and of course the community notes and the Olly and all. And I have to say I am very thankful and grateful for the work you guys did. It is short of a miracle to have such a map, and it is a clear sign of love and devotion. As they say - I stand on the shoulders of giants.

So we (and by we I mean me and my agents) took this decomp stack from the original PE and started to refine it function by function, cross-referencing it with the community knowledge. We called it "hanged code" (don't ask why). And once we hanged all the known addresses from the PE and the DLL, we started to rewrite.

The idea is that the hanged code is this huge blob of reworked pseudo-code. It is much closer to source, but it is still a heap of just functions - it is no game by any means. So the idea is to chunk it up with some sort of heuristic of which game system it is, and module by module rewrite it proper.

In order to actually know that the rewrite adheres to the original, we introduced the idea of streams. A stream is like a value over time - like a movie or video stream - where we record the commands given to the original Outpost PE, and we record the memory values over game ticks. We then use that as a baseline and compare it with the stream from the reconstruct. If they match, we can say with some amount of certainty that the reconstructed module is like the original - at least in a behaviour sense.

We also developed a harness for both the original and reconstruct: boot it up, issue commands, create units as needed - integration tests like in any other game.

In the beginning we wrote just simple "unit test" like scenarios: create unit -> order it -> see it arrives, or do whatever it was ordered. But as we recreate more and more modules, the plan is to create longer and more sophisticated test scenarios and run them through (at x40 speed or even more).

For now the repo is a mess, and there is a lot of old code from the dataset creation and LLM training tests and the QEMU Win2k box I used to cross-compile. So I would like to streamline it first - keep only the reconstruct and the harness stuff around it.

Once I do that and finish at least a first pass, I plan to open it to the public. You would still need your own vols / original assets to play; I am not shipping those. Off-day project, so figure a couple more weeks.

Questions welcome.
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