Leaderboard

Kotaku UK have featured W3D Hub in a fairly lengthy article that sheds a nice light on what Command & Conquer-related projects we are working on. A while back I met a freelance journalist who was really interested in covering the work that we do here. Over the course of a few months, I gave them some info about the community and the result was this article! A link to the article can be found right here: http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2017/05/02/the-renegades-remaking-command-conquer-as-firstperson-shooters Although it's great to get acknowledged by a major gaming publication, there are unfortunately a few inaccuracies that are mentioned in the article. I've listed the facts below to set the record straight: Renegade was a 2002 game, not a 2005 game @OWA is currently moonlighting as a Seconded Game Designer at creative Assembly, so no longer a Tester (for now) Renegade X was in development as far back as 2007, so the devs didn't all leave to make Reborn in 2011 as the article suggests @OWA didn't have much of a hand in the handing over of Reborn at all. That task was masterminded by @Wallywood, who made sure that the game was in good hands before moving it back over to what was then Bluehell Productions It's Nod, not NOD (old joke is old) MCT terminals, i.e. Master Control Terminal Terminals Reborn doesn't feature Thieves The section about 2009 graphics upgrades is uninformed. Here's the scoop straight from @saberhawk: "We slowly took over the rendering engine and rebuilt most of it a few times; the original game was D3D8 (DirectX 8), all the latest things are D3D11 (DirectX 11)" Even with these inacurracies, it's really great to see this level of attention from a major game news site (even if it's only from the UK branch of Kotaku) and get our message out there that C&C isn't quite dead yet. This shows that even though we're creating games on an older engine, it still continues to spark interest, which I think is amazing. I'm really proud of what we achieve every day here and I think we should all enjoy being in the limelight as one of the few teams still standing that is continuing to carry the banner for the Command & Conquer franchise and fans everywhere! With improvements and new site features on the way, W3D Hub is going to be a community that will be around for years to come! Stay tuned for more good stuff right here! [blurb]Kotaku UK have covered W3D Hub in an exciting news article, featuring our very own OWA![/blurb] [thumb]thumb_tsr.j.png[/thumb]

I've got a channel as well. Occasionally I'll post highlight stuff from the W3D Games as well as some shitty acting stuff, but my most recent project is a Half Life LP. Check it out, it's good stuff! https://www.youtube.com/user/TotalBunghole Oh, and Mojo, you just got yourself a subscriber.

Good to see some outside exposure as always, but I really wish the author hadn't used that Arty shot for the only picture that features TSR out of all the shots we supplied. Oh well - next time then.

Hey guys! With the success of APB Madness in the forums, I noticed that a few other W3D Hubbers create YouTube content! If you create YouTube content (Or stream for that matter), plug your channel in this thread and I'll put it in this first post so we can get a master list going! Of course I must start with shameless self-promotion of my horrible, Windows Movie Maker, and generally bad gameplay! Mojo's Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCWV7WchuJe7s45diENXk1A/featured Killing_You - https://www.youtube.com/user/TotalBunghole Pyryle - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD0z6eQbJsoiPnQ27lXdGLw Chopbam - https://www.youtube.com/user/ChopBam forg0ten1 - https://www.youtube.com/user/tratos047

Hey guys, Something crossed my mind this morning which made me create this thread, and that is, where did the talented level creators from the broader W3D community go to? Since Delta launched I've been the sole person to do the occasional level contribution. In past versions of the game, we had a number of people contributing content, so I'd like to figure out what caused this, and perhaps I can assist in improving things on this front. Is it a problem with the tools? The lack of available knowledge? Or something else? Community created content has always been a big part of past APB releases, and learning why we lost so much of it with Delta is something that might benefit all W3D Hub project teams as a learning point. So if you're familiar with content creation using W3D tools and related tools, vote in the poll for the items which stop you from contributing. And if you've never created content before, then tell me why not!

Just one comment, I do think referring to these projects as 'mods of renegade' is somewhat invalid. Mods are changes to gameplay based on the engine a game shipped with. W3D launched in 2002, but when you then apply 15 additional years of community driven engine development you start to reach a point where calling it a mod is discrediting to the work of the programming team. Then there is the fact that during BHP days, EA actually gave full permission to allow these projects to be marketed as independent games (providing no profit is generated due to using the C&C IP), and even outright gave the W3D source assets they still had - the full source code was lost, not even EA has it. But according to Jonwil, everything but the AI pathfind generation has been reverse engineered and updated, with this last thing being quite complicated. So essentially, the community has code in their hands that EA does not, top that off with an incredible number of code changes over the years, and you're more looking at a W3D 2.0 than the W3D that shipped in 2002. The vast majority of true modifications offer no engine improvements due to various reasons. You can look at a mod for C&C Generals and recognising it as a C&C Generals mod. If you compare Renegade to for example, APB, you'd not see the comparison, and the few connections you do see - victory by base destruction - is actually there by design due to both games being C&C inspired shooters (to further add to my point; APB features gameplay not native to the 2002 W3D engine in various levels).

I'd really consider doing a few myself, once I figure out how to solve the very dark shadowplay recordings. I'll delve into that again eventually.

Any publicity is good publicity. Although APB's activity has dramatically improved in the recent weeks, the server is more packed than empty now and I personally believe that is due to game and server visibility issues being resolved. Frequent patches also help.

This is why I put that list in there. I designed the map to be a vehicle meatgrinder, sort of a spiritual successor to Classic Fjord, but unlike that old map, I made sure to include a lot of infantry passages because throwing infantry into the courtyard with the vehicles exclusively would be like throwing a pet dog to a den of wild lions (aww!). Hopefully now after this thread, people will feel 'inspired' to use some different approaches. The cannons can probably still do with the changes I mentioned however, since that was based on a collection of feedback from a few matches, as well as my own thoughts after having played the map a few times in larger population matches. You know I'm always in favor of map-specific gameplay. Hostile Waters featured capturable buildings using script logic created by Danpaul, as well as the obvious emphasis on naval combat, naval transportation and offensive air support (Chinooks unavailable). And Siege features a relatively lightweight bonus objective via repairable cannons, which I intentionally employed to differentiate from the HW capture logic. It sort of once again highlights the gameplay design flexibility of W3D - one of it's true strong points. However... I feel I must draw a line somewhere. Special primary and secondary objectives are great for diversity and I'd love to see more of them in other maps not made by myself, however... Modifying CORE GAMEPLAY on a per-map basis would make the game very hard to learn for players and more likely very frustrating as well. But if you'd like to see more secondary objectives then the sky is essentially the limit (or, at least ones imagination is). If we had a way to create map-specific HUD elements (this is a very long standing personal request of myself), then we'd be able to clearly communicate map specific gameplay to players. Once that layer of gameplay transparency is in place, I could talk with Pushwall about adding some to other maps. But right now I'm dependent on messages to communicate gameplay, which is not ideal at all. Speaking of the interface, the GUI really needs dynamic level maps to replace the current building health status page. If we had this, we could highlight for example who owns the abandoned Refill Pad on Hostile Waters, or if one of the cannons on Siege is manned by anyone.

This is awesome news! Hopefully this brings in more players.

Reminds me of an old pic I had kicking around If you can identify the map based on this pic, you've been here a little while

The cake is a Soviet lie.

Let me ask you this instead. Would you want to have a cake that's been under cooked or one that's cooked all the way? Because it's the same thing with AR. While it is enjoyable now, there are still many things that need to be tested, patched, textured, etc.

@Raap We actually discussed something related to this last weekend when @OWA, @TeamWolf, @CCHyper and myself met up in London. When we all started out with W3D modding the bar to entry was low because we were all finding our feet and had a wider community to lean on for feedback and help improving our skills. The required quality of assets was also considerably lower. Now the barrier to entry for creating assets for the games is incredibly high and there is no realistic "entry point" for newcomers to go into. People aren't going to practice their skills creating things that are never going to have a hope in hell of being used, and they aren't content to practice on low impact stuff like terrain details, props etc but instead want to gun straight for the big, visible things, like every day driver tanks, infantry, etc. This creates a negative feedback cycle where anything they create is passed over due to inferior quality and deters them from continuing to improve their abilities. We really need to figure out what the entry point looks like these days for up and coming modellers, texture artists, level creators, etc. We can't realistically expect Delta level quality assets out the gate, but equally we need to encourage people to create art assets and continue to hone their skills. Thoughts?

1. Get an IRC client. (I recommend mIRC) 2. Join the irc.rencorner.com server (Type /server irc.rencorner.com ) 3. Join #w3dhub-apb (Type /join #w3dhub-apb) If you need more help, send me a PM!