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Introduction Welcome to our brand new update format; W3D Weekly! This won't replace our larger project updates but is designed to give you guys more of an idea about what we're working on. We discovered a while back that although we do a lot of work on the projects, we're not actually very good at showing off all the cool things that we're doing. In these updates we'll be looking at each project as well as what the W3D Engine Team have been up to as well. We've got plenty to show off this week in our first edition, so take a seat and have a read! Expansive Civilian Warfare Big news for ECW fans! @Jerad2142 has just announced that ECW has been moved from the older version of scripts (3.4.4) to the newer version (4.X) which means that players should encounter less compatibility issues (goodbye black screen bug) and benefit from smoother performance! If you haven't had a chance to check out ECW because of these issues, now is the time to go and check it out! Read more below: Red Alert: A Path Beyond @moonsense715 has been working on some improvements for the Ore Trucks and Harvesters across all projects and these updates have made their way into APB! While driving an ore truck, the HUD will now indicate how full it is. Every yellow pip counts as two "scoops". The pips don't tell you if you've harvested from gems or mixed fields yet. Also, the per-map mine limit now appears on the HUD. No longer will a command be needed to display the mine limit from the bot! That's all from @ChopBam and APB!Red Alert 2: Apocalypse Rising We've recently been working on improving the V3 Rocket Launcher in Apocalypse Rising. It's always been a unit that has been tricky to use, so this batch of improvements should make it much easier. The first thing we've added to the V3 Launcher is a limited weapon traverse. This means you can move the rocket from side to side when adjusting your horizontal aim, like on a regular tank. This angle is limited, but it does offer the vehicle more flexibility when aiming at a target, because you no longer have to move the entire vehicle when correcting your horizontal aim. The other big change is that we have completely redesigned the aim helper. We had previously implemented this feature as a toggleable 'Q' ability, but we found that quite clunky in practice. Now the aim helper is a secondary fire mode that compliments the trajectory of the primary fire mode. this means you can hold down the right mouse button to perfect your aim and them hit the left mouse button to send the rocket flying in that direction. You can also cycle between two different rocket trajectories (long range and short range), but we haven't quite figured out what keyboard button should do that yet. On top of that, the aim helper is only visible to the player who is driving the V3 Launcher, so other players won't see it at all. Check out the video below to see how it works: Other Game ProjectsNo updates from @Kaskins and the Interim Apex squad this time around. But Interim Apex continues to do really well, so go check it out if you haven't done already! No Battle for Dune updates from @TeamWolf and co this time, as a bigger update for BFD is currently being planned; so look out for that one in the future! Without a team to work on it, Tiberian Sun: Reborn is currently shelved for the time being. We've begun talking about who would be interested in picking up work on it again and it looks like we'll have a team to do the job once other projects have had some more work put into them. It's going to be a while, but we will eventually return to the Second Tiberian War. @Killing_You has been hard at work on set filming Dead Legion, so there's not been much movement in the Ground Zero department recently. Keep an eye out for future updates though! Also, if you want to check out Dead Legion, head here!: https://www.deadlegionseries.com W3D Engine Team In amongst all of the development on the games, the engine team has been hard at work making our lives easier. We don't really talk about what the engine team do much, so here is a good opportunity to showcase it on a weekly basis. Overview The current public version of the W3D Engine that is being used in projects such as APB is W3D 5.0 (formerly known as Scripts 5.0). Though the name "Scripts" has served us well for so long, the ambition and scope of the project has expanded to the point where major engine changes have become necessary to push the projects further than the restrictions that came with supporting Renegade. W3D 5.0 is not backwards compatible with Renegade as such, so it made sense to change the name of the project from "The Renegade Custom Scripts Project" to something that was more appropriate. Fast forward to now, and the team is working on many exciting new things, which you can read about below and in future updates. W3D Engine 5.1 @Yah-Nosh reports that work on the next version of our W3D Engine project is underway, with a focus on fully overhauling the rendering engine. What this means is that whilst the games running on 5.1 will look similar to how they do now the fidelity and performance of the engine will be increased, along with more tools to help developers make cool stuff. we touched on this briefly when we did the Q&A as part of the 19th Renegade anniversary event, which you can check out on our YouTube Channel. Some of the big features to reasonably expect as a part of W3D 5.1 are full dynamic lighting, GPU skinning, instancing, better lightmapping and better shadows. GPU skinning has recently been completed, which will allow higher resolution animated characters to have a much lesser impact on game performance. The next item on the development agenda is particles (explosions, fire, weather etc.). Stay tuned for more W3D 5.1 updates in the future! Weapon Ammo Visibility Improvements have been made to the weapon code to allow ammo that properly hides/disappears when fired. Right now this works in the game with stuff like the V2 Launcher, but it is done via an animation, which makes it quite inflexible. For example, if we wanted to give the V2 a cool animation (like a deployment animation or a radar dish that spins), we wouldn't be able to, because any other animation we give the V2 won't be able to figure out whether the missile should be visible or not. @CMDBob has begun to move the ammo hiding tech into W3D properly now, so that we will be able to use special ammo bones to hide ammo that has been fired, which frees up these animation requirements. This will be especially useful for aircraft, which require both ammo hiding and landing gear animations. New Data Format for Developers Until now, developers had to use a stock Renegade data format (objects database) to save game data such as balance changes to infantry, weapons and vehicles. But the team has been working on converting this into a text-based format. The way Renegade's data is structured is efficient, but it has it's downsides; the biggest of which is that multiple developers cannot make edits to the file at the same time. The new text-based format allows multiple people to work on the main data of the game at once and then merge all of their changes together at the end. This makes collaboration on the game projects much more effective, as it's a lot easier to search for errors that may have been made and compare future versions of the data against past versions. All in all, this won't affect players in the slightest, but it will make our lives a lot easier. Other Stuff! Here's a quick round up of other things that are happening around the team! - @Nodlied made a big financial mistake after visiting a hobby shop. Though he's not that sorry... - @OWA has been playing a bit of bass guitar. Maybe he'll record something at some point. - @TeamWolf just bought some golf clubs. We're off to hit some balls tomorrow with @Eggman891 - It's @Yah-Nosh's birthday soon, so we're going to eat some BBQ food to celebrate! - @alphoca is starting his content creation journey! Please ask for the link when you see him and support him!!! - @ChopBam just returned home from a trip on the East Coast of America! [blurb]Welcome to W3D Weekly! In these updates we'll be looking at each project as well as what the W3D engine team have been up to as well. We've got plenty to show off this week in our first edition, so take a seat and have a read![/blurb]

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