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Soviet MiG-29 Update Hello everyone! I'm excited to bring you another update on the MiG. Fabian has been working very hard to detail the MiG to be one of the best looking models we've ever had in Red Alert: A Path Beyond. He still has more to do, but we're too excited to share progress with you! Check it out below! The MiG is currently going to be a hard counter to the Allied Cruiser in the future. The team has been doing a lot of discussion on how to handle and balance it. We think everyone will love it once it's finally in-game. Stay tuned for more exciting changes coming soon! [blurb]Check out this exciting new update on the MiG-29![/blurb]

Author: Threve Skill level: 2 Good Evening all. Ever wanted to change the color of a Tank or create the V2 Missle into a Carola Crayon? This is the tutorial for you! Give me 20 minutes of your time and I will show you how to change the color of anything easily along with giving you knowledge skills in editing APB. I will also be including an advanced tutorial that will show you how to go further in-depth and really create some crazy cool shit if you'd like. I will also do my best to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible so you're not here forever. But first thing is first.. Part 1 (Introduction and Tools) Part 2 (Getting and extracting the shit that we need) Part 3 (Editing the actual file and uploading it to your game) Part 4 (The Finish) Now do keep in mind that there is an endless world of possibilities to editing textures. If you would like to make one part yellow and another purple you can simply select half the picture and paint it purple then the other half yellow. To make specific part a different color you just simply select that part on the texture and paint it like so. It may be a bit difficult to tell whats what on the file because everything is sort of just exploded so you make have to make a part yellow then test it out in-game and see where it lands or what part was colored. However, working with paint.net constantly will allow you to experiment new things and also do it alot faster. This may have taken you 15 minutes or so but after a while it'll be cut down to 2 minutes. Practice makes perfect. Part 5 (After some basic practice. Let's turn it up a notch and make some really crazy cool stuff) APB_Editing_Tools.7z

The only thing we could feasibly do this for is the SAM Site. W3D projectiles don't care about how much something is trying to retreat from them; their maximum range is always the same, no question. If the destroyer's missiles had enough range to chase MiGs to the edge of the earth, they'd also be able to fire base-to-base and hit buildings (though sometimes they'll just go drunk once they exceed the target box range). AI-controlled stuff is different though as they will only attempt to fire at things that are within the range that their script tells them to fire at, which doesn't have to be the same as their projectile range. What's actually going to happen though is the Destroyer's missiles will get a simple velocity boost. You're not going to be outrunning many 200m/s rockets in a 50m/s plane.

Hi everyone! Now that 2018 is in full swing I'd like to just take this opportunity to recap on what we managed to achieve last year as well as what we are aiming to do with W3D Hub this year! 2017 Retrospective 2017 was a productive year for W3D Hub! We outlined our roadmap in this thread last year: As you can see, we pretty much achieved everything that we set out to do, which is great! Work was started on fixing Tiberian Sun: Reborn and is proceeding as planned. Development work on Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising continued at a great pace (especially in the latter half of the year) Expansive Civilian Warfare saw a release on the launcher, which has been mostly a great success! Red Alert: A Path Beyond saw a plethora of updates that steadily iterated and added to the gameplay over the course of the year. The stats system has been significantly upgraded since the beginning of last year, but the new stats website hasn't been pushed live just yet. We didn't put together the planned media pack that we talked about, but I feel that we are slowly building the player-base up to a good number. The download manager went live, but hasn't seen too much use just yet. Hopefully this will change over the course of this year. Discord has been running for a while now and has been a great success! Integrated chat via IRC was implemented into the launcher! Hopefully we'll look at tightening this up a bit more this year as well! The bug tracker is back up and running. If you have issues to report, please submit some bugs for us! We'll be making this more visible in the coming months. Advanced Tags and Prefixes was reinstalled and works as intended! So with 2017 being a success as far as our plans were concerned, here's what we have planned for 2018! W3D Hub Roadmap 2018 A New Look First off, we have decided that the W3D Hub logo was due a freshen up for 2018, so we've updated it a bit. the layout is still the same, but it is now a lot crisper with flat colours on the text that make it look a lot more contemporary. Here's what we have decided to go with. Over the course of this month, we shall be updating the logo across all of our games, services, and channels; so keep an eye out for it! New Development Tools (SDK) Mammoth Tank Assembled We're proud to announce Mammoth; a brand new tool that we're hoping to develop and build on throughout the year. Mammoth is a full replacement for the venerable Commando Level Editor (that shipped with Renegade) that will allow for a much higher degree of flexibility when creating mods and maps on the W3D Engine. Here are a couple of screenshots: It may look a lot like level edit and that's because it is currently being developed as a reverse engineering of that piece of software, however once that is complete, we can then begin adding some more outlandish features. The viewport controls have already been improved, allowing users to use the RMB and WASD to navigate the viewport and LMB to select objects without changing between view and select modes! Special thanks to @jonwil for spearheading this project as well as @saberhawk for laying some of the initial groundwork. If you're a mapper and would like to help us develop this new tool by providing feedback on all aspects of the functionality, interface design and user experience, please get in touch with us. (@Raap and @Timeaua we'd especially like to hear your thoughts!) 3DS Max 2017 W3D Export Plugin After years of using Gmax and 3D Studio Max 8, a new 3D export plugin is finally within our grasp! With this new plugin anybody will be able to export their models and animations from new versions of 3DS Max that are 100% compatible with Windows 10. This is really big for all of us, because it allows us to make use of software that has newer features that are much more powerful (than Gmax and Max 8 are) and easier to use. Here's a screenshot of the new plugin in Max 2017. It's not quite ready, but we hope to release it sometime this year! Also, because the new export plugin has been built from the ground up, we can consider the possibility of porting it to other 3D modelling programs. We know that not everyone can get their hands on a copy of 3D Studio Max, so we are also looking at integrating the plugin to work with Blender, which is a popular free software package for 3D modelling. Big thanks to @cfehunter for making this pipe-dream a reality! Launcher Updates The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the W3D Hub launcher has been receiving a steady stream of updates! Here's what we're looking at this year! As always, big thanks to @danpaul88 for fighting OpenReach in order to help us improve our lawn chair! User Interface After the addition of the Chat tab, work began on re-vamping the launcher's UI to make it more user-friendly and generally nicer to look at. This project is still ongoing and we hope to improve the user interface further over the course of 2018. Here's a shot of our latest internal mockups: The final design won't look exactly the same, but this is just to show you the direction we are moving forward in. If you have any feedback on the UI, please let us know in this thread or make a new one in General Discussion! Single-Client Packages Currently W3D Hub is the only download source that the launcher connects to when downloading packages. This is problematic because if we suddenly go viral, our servers will get rammed pretty hard. So to counteract this, we will be working on single-client packages! A single client package is simply the launcher bundled with one of the games. The installer will install the launcher and the packaged game, then the launcher will update it to the latest version. There are a number of free game websites on the internet that frown upon the use of launchers, so another reason to do this is so that we can get more players into the games as well. Hopefully we'll be able to accomplish this task this year too! Renegade Support Even bigger news is that we've been talking about the idea of Renegade support. Since Renegade isn't free, we'd have to get the launcher to detect a Renegade installation and then manage it that way. With that done, we'll be able to update Renegade with the latest community patches through the launcher and offer a full comprehensive listing of all currently hosted Renegade servers. If we can pull it off, it will mean that the W3D Hub Launcher will truly be the one and only Renegade launcher to serve the C&C community, which is quite exciting! Please bear in mind though that this is a pipe dream, so it may not happen. But we figured it's good to tell you guys that we're playing around with the idea anyway. Infrastructure Updates You guys may also be interested to know that we have been updating our infrastructure as well! Here are a few points of interest. Stats & Ranks System Work has continued on our W3D Stats system this past year, with a new website being developed to display all of the awesome data! This website will be mobile compatible, so that you can check your ranks on the go! Big thanks to @rantanplan, @Silverlight, @moonsense715, @danpaul88, @triattack and others who I may have missed for making this happen! Here's a small preview: We'll also be looking into the general presentation of achievements at some point to see if we can make the requirements more visible in-game. Watch this space! Forum Skins The APB skin is well underway now and should be finished fairly shortly! Here's a small work-in-progress shot. There's still some colouring to work out, but it is nearly ready! Keep your eyes peeled for the classic look around the forums soon! We're also aiming to develop more forum skins in the future for the other mods (starting with ECW) and then also one that mirrors the theme that's featured on Renforums (just for those people who love a bit of nostalgia!). You might also see that there are two new buttons for H2 and H3 on the post editor. If you highlight some text and click one of these buttons it will turn it into a cool heading, just like the ones featured in this thread! Keep posted for more news on this! Confluence After a few emails back and forth to the good folks over at Atlassian, we have managed to secure ourselves a licence to their documentation tool, Confluence. What does this mean? Basically it means that we will be able to port all of our scatted design documentation into one centralised location so that we can work much more effectively as a team. We might be able to make parts of it public in the future so that you guys can keep up with our design decisions as they happen, but we'll be evaluating it closely first! Downloads Sadly C&C Files isn't coming back anytime soon, but over the course of this year we'll be uploading some more files to our very own download system! This includes some old mods for various C&C games that we've been hoarding along with some, Renegade-specific files, rarities and more! Hopefully we'll get this stuff online as the year goes on for you guys to play around with. More news soon(tm)! Freelancers Do you want to work on content for any of our games, but don't want to have the responsibility of being a full time staff member? Then our new Global Freelancers Initiative (GFI) is right up your alley. What we want to be able to do is open a more fluid communication channel between mod leaders and people who enjoy making cool stuff for the games, so that any content that's made by fans can be picked up by us and made official even easier than before. What we aim to do is setup a channel on our Discord server for Freelancer and Devs to collaborate with no expectations or pressure. Just nice environment where you can share images and files of what you're working on, as well as collectively pool knowledge, so even if you don't know how to mod the games, we can give you some tips and tricks! Check back for more info on this soon, once we've ironed out the details! Events & Prizes This year we want to try and run more events and competitions! We have stockpiled a number of C&C posters in the W3D Hub vaults that need winning, so we'll have to organise a way for people to win them! Hopefully we'll scratch our collective heads and launch something soonish! Big thanks to our printing comrade, @CCHyper for these wonderful prizes! Game Roadmaps Here's a brief rundown of how the games are doing currently! Battle for Dune: War of Assassins More updates for Battle for Dune: War of Assassins are on the way! @TeamWolf recently posted up an update on BFD's new Emperor Worm mode map where you and several others take control of masterfully well simulated Sand Worms! Check it out below! Keep an eye out for more exciting updates! Expansive Civilian Warfare With ECW's release last December as well as launcher integration, @Jerad2142 is looking to expand on the game and add more features! He's currently working on a new mission system into ECW due to multiple player requests. It's going to be pseudo-random and be mostly assassination or fetch quests with some branching objective paths (like save the person instead of killing them sometimes). Keep an eye out for that in up and coming ECW updates! Flyin' high in San Casina! Also, if you're getting lost in the sewers, our new pal @Veyrdite has your back. Red Alert: A Path Beyond Nothing too big is planned for this year with APB. Updates will continue to roll out with @Pushwall at the helm which will further tune and refine the experience. There was an update posted last Saturday, so go and check that out! Infantry maps should be getting some overhauls at some point and there are still a few units to implement, but that requires artists that we currently don't have spare. If you are a 3D Artist or know other 3D Artists who may be interested, please get in touch! Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising Apocalypse Rising had an incredible second half of last year and we're hoping to keep this up with more gameplay iteration and more of a conscious thought about what maps we actually want to release with. To quote the Chinese Dozer from Generals "We have big plans!" Here's a quick shot of some Tesla Tanks playing in the snow! Stay tuned to the forums and Discord for more info as we progress through 2018! Renegade: Interim Apex Interim Apex (previously Imperial Age) is set for a new and updated release this year as well as some other big news so stay tuned! @Kaskins has been working hard on some new maps as well as a full compliment of naval units! Check out the latest update from this massive project here! Keep your eyes peeled in the coming months, because the new release will definitely be something to watch out for! Tiberian Sun: Reborn Reborn 2.0 is coming along steadily and is due out this year! There are some changes to a couple of GDI buildings that are being worked on currently and a major re-balance is planned, pending spare time to work on it. Also, Nod's very own femme fatale, Oxanna Kristos, posted in the forums at the start of March. What can this all mean? 2018 Is A Go! That about covers it for what we have planned this year! I know it's been said a lot in this thread, but stay tuned! There's even some stuff that we aren't brave enough to mention just yet, so there are plenty of irons in the fire, as they say! Thank you everyone for continuing to support us and may 2018 be a year to remember! Bring on the future! :D [thumb]thumb_w3d.0.png[/thumb] [blurb]Big news for this year! Come and see what W3D Hub's plans are for 2018! Read about updates to the community, infrastructure, tools and of course the games![/blurb]

Just fyi I'm going to be out of town all day tomorrow (won't be home until evening at the earliest) so I definitely need to finish up the battle tonight.

YIKES well ummmm no need to worry Dratini! We... uhhh... got this! maybe Use MOVE 2!

Hey Threve, good write-up! Allow me to present two alternative tools: GIMP for image editing is a free tool and my tool of preference when it comes to doing anything texture related. It can do a lot of things and is as good as one can expect from free software. It lacks the shiny-shiny from expensive software like Photoshop, but it gets the job done. GIMP is primarily useful for pixel based scaling, making it ideal for game development. Get it here: https://www.gimp.org/ XCC Mixer is the tool most commonly recommended by W3DHub staff and it is the tool currently used for always.dat management. You can download XCC Mixer along with the APB development set (including W3D 5.x's new development tools, such as Mammoth), over here: https://gitlab.com/w3dhub/a-path-beyond-sdk As an extra note, DDS files require exports of a single layer (as Threve mentioned), but also keep in mind to ensure that your layers - all of them - always fit the canvas size. What your eyes see on screen is not relevant, if a layer does not match the canvas size then your exports will be faulty. Further more you do not want to keep your source file (be that a paint or GIMP project file) to remain as a single layer because doing so will make future revisions very hard. Convert to a single layer -> export to DDS -> UNDO LAYER MERGE -> save project! Lastly, one more important note; When opening DDS files in any editor you will be prompted to import MIPMAPS; do not do this, for editing you do not need mipmaps. On EXPORTING DDS files, it is of critical importance you generate new mipmaps with the export. These are embedded into the exported dds file, so there isn't anything extra to look for, file-wise. What are mipmaps? Essentially they are scaled down versions of your normal texture. They do something very important in-game however, and to keep the technical talk to a minimum; They ensure that image quality does not degrade significantly based on distance. If you've ever seen a texture in APB that looks very "grainey" at a distance and when moving (like the leaf piles on ToTheCore at this time of writing), it is because that file did not have mipmaps exported.

could it be that both Shade AND Orange are C H I C K E N ???

Do you enjoy any games yourself? If so, or despite that, have any other game soundtracks caught your ears?

If you could, how would you destroy contemporary country music?

Questions from a fan: 1) Did you ever think joining Westwood Studios as a composer way back then would have left such a legacy on the gaming community, particularly the community surrounding the Command & Conquer series? 2) It's amazing to see that you are still creating new music to this day! Are you already working on the next album? 3) Any prominent video game composers catching your interest these days? If so, any chance of music collaboration with them?

Killing_You's Question: What is your favorite non-C&C game that you've done music for?

Favorite C&C Game, and favorite C&C unit?

What projects can we expect to see from you in the future? Also ask him if we can get a high quality stereo version of Act on Instinct without the lyrics. The official soundtrack only came with the lyric version if I recall correctly. I'd also love this song without the ingame sounds.

Hey, what's Retaliation doing here?

My question, is if this is gonna be a hard counter to the cruiser what counters it? Red Eyes already have trouble reaching yaks before they beat it by range. The destroyer is gonna need some wicked fast missiles in order to keep this bad boy from sinking the whole Allied navy

Looking really, really good. I'm excited to see her in Soviet colours.

The character concept update is live! Go check it out when you have the time. http://www.indiedb.com/games/tiberian-dawn-the-first-strike

We're actually just about to release our website, there are only a few more finishing touches to put on. It won't have a lot of content (because we don't have a lot of content), but it will have a forum and that's still pretty good.

I feel like he should have the beret, but I'll pass the request down. It should be ready soon.

Sorry, allow me to clarify. I don't have the time to both manage the game and learn how to 3D model while being in college and working toward applying to medical school.