The Battlefield

[Varine]

I'm revising the terrain a bit. I didn't realize how huge I made it compared to the units. I mean, it's relatively life-scaled I think, but I don't want to have the buildings take ten seconds to get across. Going to make it a little smaller so that it'll be fine with the CPU-units, but the early version with only 12 people will probably be a bit less fun. Here's an overhead of the city right now (the tileset's the same for the roofs and stuff so ignore those. I'm making new things for it). I deleted a couple of buildings where the blank places are because I'm trying to find a way to make them look different. I've got the soldier model done, I need to animate it and make some textures for it, which won't take too long hopefully. Take some pictures of myself in uniform on a greenscreen and recolor it a bit should do it.

I'm still working on the trash flying around for it. It looks stupid right now... kind of upset about it. Other than that, it should be good. I've been working on Halo and Apocalypse models a little more now, which was stupid because now I'm behind on this one. But oh well.... I'll send you the map itself when I finish redoing the city. The interiors will take a bit longer because of the overlays and all of that. I'm working on the static models right now mostly (signs, casino machines, tables, doors, boxes, ect), not the planes and boats and stuff so much.

 

[Waaaaagh]

Looks great. Glad to see you understand that there's more to a city than a repeating 8x8 grid.

 

[Varine]

Looks great. Glad to see you understand that there's more to a city than a repeating 8x8 grid.

Oh... well I guess I shouldn't show you the rest of it /sarcasm.

I just had an epiphany concerning how bad I am at texturing. I'm pretty much done with the tilesets. I need to work on the road a little bit, make the edges not so rough, fade some of the lines a little, all of that funness. I've been going around taking pictures of things to base the models after because I don't know what a lot of stuff looks like. The people at the bank didn't like it very much....

How are your new weapons coming along?

 

[Waaaaagh]

Yes.

BTW, send me the map. I would love that, so I could get a feel for it. And test in it.

 

[Varine]

Alright, it's pretty blank right now because of the revisions but most of the city will be there to play in. There's only one interior right now that I made for size reference and to see how well the interior models I'm using will work. Emailing to you, change whatever you want and send it back to me if you think thing should be changed.

 

[Waaaaagh]

The pavement is teh sex. My only complaint is that it almost seems too big horizontally. I scaled down the camera and unit move speed, and it doesn't take that long to move across a building. Maybe a Super Wallmart... but it seems too long. But I guess you are still working.

Anyway, thankyou. Now I have a good basis on which to work. Now if I could just get this map open...

 

[Varine]

The pavement is teh sex. My only complaint is that it almost seems too big horizontally. I scaled down the camera and unit move speed, and it doesn't take that long to move across a building. Maybe a Super Wallmart... but it seems too long. But I guess you are still working.

Anyway, thankyou. Now I have a good basis on which to work. Now if I could just get this map open...

I made it in WEU, I don't know if what your using will open those. I know some people have issues with it for some reason.

To big horizontally? The street's won't be going as far out as I made them, I don't know what I did that. I'm not really sure what you mean if it's not that, though. I tried to make it more of a squared shape than a long rectangle.
The buildings are what I'm working on mostly with the scaling. As you can probably tell if you used the unit inside the one, it takes a while to get across. I wanted to make it the same size as that exterior is, but I don't think that's too wonderful of an idea now. I don't want to make the exterior ones smaller because of the scaling, so I'm thinking that the interiors will just have to deal with being a bit smaller. Some of the buildings will have multiple stories though, so that will even it out a bit hopefully.

I think I'm going to get the exterior finished first, then work on the bases, and work on the interiors last, as they are kind of subsidiary to the rest of the map. That way hopefully a beta or alpha version can be released to get critisism on what needs changed in the finals.

I'm going to work on the vehicle system at the same time as the terrain so that that'll get done faster and the weapon system can be checked to be sure it'll work together. I don't know how well it'll work in GUI, but I think it should just take a few basic triggers to get it working and then a few others for fuel consumption.

 

[Waaaaagh]

I can't open my old map with the weapons system. It's cause of WEU -.-

I have to reDL it. I'll get it done eventually.

 

[Varine]

I can't open my old map with the weapons system. It's cause of WEU -.-

I have to reDL it. I'll get it done eventually.

Haha... have fun with that.

 

[Varine]

Okay the movement system just got all fucked up. Probably because I tried to do it in GUI, but oh well. They move, but not how they should. Anyone that's played that map Combat Zone, it's kind of like now... not much fun.
I'm going to look at games that have a better system and work on it from there.

The weapons on them will probably mostly be revamped parts of Waaaaagh's system.

Did you ever happen to make something like the JAVELIN or Stinger, Waaaaagh?

Drivable vehicles include helicopters, tanks, jeeps, humvees, civilian cars, and some missile-launching things. Artillery things will hopefully also work I'm not at all good at JASS, but I'm doing the best I can to get a workable system for the weapons in it so that they're actually useable. I'm trying to make it seem pretty realistic as far as the feel is, so with the long-ranged artillery and things I'm trying to set up a satellite-like system with the camera looking straight down and color effects will hopefully work out as planned.

I'm trying to work on everything all at once, although I'm a little busy with classes, although less busy as I'm no longer in the Army, and my main goal is still to get it playable first and foremost before working on the look of it. The interiors are not a necessity right now, so I'm not doing much with them. Hopefully, unless I get more aid with it, I'll be able to finish it over the next few months.

Planes will not be useable by the player, but instead will be used when air support is called, or if your team holds the airbase then planes will come and drop off supplies. The naval base will have cargo ships come with supplies.

To keep the item count down so that guns aren't thrown around everywhere, they'll probably disappear after a few seconds without use. There will instead be armories that players can go into to get supplies, which will restock every time a drop comes, or will only be available for that minute or so while the supply drop is there.

I'm considering making a way for the units to drop in onto the map via airplanes. How I'm going to do this I'm not sure, however I'm thinking that it would be cool if the players could call in a plane or something to pick them up and I could make a little system like the artillery will be and they can drop out somewhere.

Any thoughts, comments, critisism, or just general douchebagism?

 

[Waaaaagh]

For dropping units, you can just create a dummy unit out of something like the wyvern cage (basically a box), set it's height to ~2000, and make it an object (or if you don't want to do it, I will). Then, in the 'onBounce' event, check to see if Zspeed is less than whatever, and, if so, destroy the box, create a unit, and clean up the object.

 

[Varine]

For dropping units, you can just create a dummy unit out of something like the wyvern cage (basically a box), set it's height to ~2000, and make it an object (or if you don't want to do it, I will). Then, in the 'onBounce' event, check to see if Zspeed is less than whatever, and, if so, destroy the box, create a unit, and clean up the object.

Yes, that would be what I was considering, although perhaps with more terminology than I was thinking about. I'll figure it out later when we start getting the map working.

 

[Varine]

Waaaagh: I sent you an Email with some questions about how to do something as it was done in a map that I included. Did you ever get it?

 

[Varine]

Waaaaagh did you ever get the projectiles open again? I'm trying to get the units and everything made still, and working a little bit on the models. I'm working on a customized UI as well as screen cover fader things for some things like the satellite views.

 

[Waaaaagh]

Yes I got it open. I am working diligently to make it much less.... buggy. I am going to need to come up with a way to raise the fucking instance limit too - I guess we could just wait for the new Jasshelper, which should be out soon...

 

[Varine]

Yes I got it open. I am working diligently to make it much less.... buggy. I am going to need to come up with a way to raise the fucking instance limit too - I guess we could just wait for the new Jasshelper, which should be out soon...

You can do whatever you want to. I'm just trying to make the integral parts of the map that I'm doing work out, so I've been using the normal attack options until you finish with the projectile/weapon thing so that I can get that into it.

 

[Varine]

Bumpsies....

Also, the driving system = cause of my suicide. It's getting closer... but now whenever the car turns the camera just stops. I don't know why. And I don't know how to make it shoot. So... when we release the beta, there may or may not be a driving system. I may just replace it with normal unit commands.

 

[Waaaaagh]

Great news! Laziness has once again payed off, and I've bumped the instance limit of our weapons up from 54 to 5400! How? Well, I waited... and then I replaced this line:

struct Weapon

With this one:

struct Weapon[1000000]

Hooray JassHelper9.9.9!

 

[Varine]

Wow. Pretty impressive, mate. So is this going to make it lag like a douchebag if we have 55 weapons?

 

[Waaaaagh]

Nope. It's just a couple of extra ifs and thens, and simple subtraction.

Actually, I've never seen a douchebag lag... But you should know I tested it, and you simply cannot break the new instance limit. It's too huge. Yay!