Jerad2142

Roughly 5 years ago Bear Island was first released (roughly because I didn’t use an SVN back then so all I have to go on is the first commit to the scripts .git), since then many have claimed it was their favorite map; so, for its 5-year anniversary I’ve decided to do a massive number of bug fixes and major improvements! New/Improved Features: • The Armored car has been reworked into a supply vehicle (more details below). • Major improvements to the boss fight system (more details below). • Added a new objective, this is available before the midpoint of the game. • Added 96 voice files to the game! • Cougars now make an appearance in the fight! • Purchasing vehicles now marks their drop location with a signal flare. • Score system now tracks the last played time of players, this is used on the Stats Website (http://jeradsnetwork.midcoip.net:10025/StatsWebsite/BearHunter) for Bear Island. • AI Engineers will no longer repair vehicles that are empty, this will keep them from wasting time with vehicles that have been forgotten when turrets and occupied player vehicles are taking heavy damage. • The bonus objectives have been reordered to go closest to the base to furthest, in addition objectives that are hidden are now numbered as they’re discovered instead of being hard coded. • Wild deer now travel in herds and flee in herds to more accurately reflect reality. • Wild deer now have two 3d models, bucks and does. • Tiny Deer now have two death animations, so they don’t always fall over the same way. • Water now fades to black to more accurately follow the shoreline so players can easier tell where not to walk. • Made some major improvements to the vis system especially when inside the main base. Bug Fixes: • Fixed a single clump of grass near the main North East gate that had projectile collisions. • Fixed several objectives that were named wrong or referenced beta concepts. • Entering the water now correctly kills the player, not sure when this broke but its been broken a while, the score system also now correctly records water deaths. • Fixed a bug with the objectives system that caused players to be unable to see objective updates once they are out of lives. • Fixed two high scores that were updating for all players even if they didn’t play in a round of Bear Hunter. • Revised how the game determines of all players are dead during the final boss, this change was made because if the last player suicided while all the other players were dead the boss would derp and just sit there, making the game take forever to end. • Player now faces the direction the spawn points on the map were placed, don’t know how I missed that issue all these years. • One of the objectives had an “…” (Thanks MS Word) instead of “...” which caused it not to display. • Renamed a high score that was calling AI “ai” instead of “AI” • Fixed a bug that allowed players to leave the base and not die during the final boss fight. • Mutant aiming now ignores damage animations. • Reduced payout of the painkillers objective to 100 per player. • AI now properly targets black bears instead of aiming at the feet. Armored Supply Truck Rework: • What was once a boring armored vehicle now takes the role of a resupply truck for infantry and vehicles. • The vehicle now supports vehicles and infantry within 75 meters of it while its lights are on, the driver can see the range of this effect. • Having the lights on does attract attention of the mutants (this is old functionality, but it now serves a point to have the lights on). • Units must wait 15 seconds after taking damage to receive HP, it takes 1 minute to refill the health and armor bar with one truck. • Infantry must wait 7.5 seconds to regen ammo, it takes 15 seconds to refill the gun the infantry is holding if it has 0 ammo. This effect also refills the weapon crate weapons. Boss Fight Improvements: • Improved the AI of the final boss, it will now remove C4 if it sees it as a bigger threat than its currently target, so players, make sure to hide the C4 now. • Boss AI now thinks 10 times a second instead of just 4 to better improve its target selection. • Fixed a bug in the boss AI that allowed it to attack the President of Corporate America before all players were dead. • Boss no longer plays damage animations; this reduces the chances of its shots going wild. • Spawn system now only spawns players near PTs during the boss fight. • Spawn points are only used if no enemies can see the point (although if it plays out that enemies can see all the spawn points it will choose the one furthest from all enemies, boss takes priority in weighting here). 2.0.0 is now live on the Crazy Coop Server. Note: This requires Scripts 4.6 Update 9 (released today) http://www.renegadeforums.com/index.php?t=msg&th=41266&start=0&. MA_Bear_Island.zip [blurb]Check out the latest update to Bear Island! A co-op map for Renegade.[/blurb]

Actually Blazea58 and I were going to make an absolutely insane Renegade map where you play as animals vs the humans, unfortunately his moddling tools kicked the bucket so the terrain was never completed. The racing mechanics have actually been around for a very long time, possibly before ECW was named ECW (can't remember anymore). In the most recent update all I did was expand the system to support two race tracks. Not really sure if there is enough player desire to build an actual racing system to race two players against each other and all that good stuff.

I hate bot spam so never.

[blurb]Just a little polishing done to the map and the message in a bottle system.[/blurb]Just a little polishing done to the map and the message in a bottle system. • Added missing light emitters to the racetrack. • Added 3 more hidden teleport phone numbers for the bottle system that go to the ski hill, Santa's Workshop, and the Speedway. • Fixed a pump jack that had an incorrect ID at the speedway. • Fixed an exploit in how Oil Tycoon is unlocked. • Fixed a bug in the message in a bottle cypher system that caused numbers to be incorrect until you had the language completely unlocked (basically all the digits were off by one). • Fixed a bug in the message in a bottle system that would cause it to be completely unlocked one letter later than it should have. • Improved the message in the bottle cypher system for numbers, basically unknown numbers show up as symbols now instead of other numbers, symbols can show up as numbers, this should make it possible to decipher numbers where it previously was just numbers scrambled which made it excessively difficult. • Added 22 more new messages to the message in the bottle system. • Updated 28 messages in the message in the bottle system that had out of date info or typos. • Renamed the in menu perk name for the Hawkeye's perk from Radar Operator to Sensor Master (match the unlock text).

While digging through some of Blazea58's old assets I stumbled across a 3D model for the San Casina Speedway, which I've decided to add! Additions: • Added the San Casina Speedway which has a racing system similar to the Race Track that already existed. • Added the Enhanced Pump Jack perk which doubles how long pump jacks operate before breaking down. Bug fixes/Improvements: • Pump jack payouts have been doubled and the Hard Worker Perk now applies to them. • Fixed the exploration system, you now get money for discovering Santa’s workshop as well as the San Casina Speedway • Made a performance improvement in how vehicle PTs work. Originally the PTs had kill zones that existed at all times on the map, now they only exist when a vehicle is purchased from the PT. This brings the script zone count for San Casina down from 1104 to 905, a performance improvement was noticed on my personal laptop and hopefully will carry over equally well to the server! • The wander distance around Santa’s workshop has been increased. • Added new ambient sounds and placed them on the old Race Track as well as Hell Island. • Relocated some of the hidden PTs. [blurb]While digging through some of Blazea58's old assets Jerad2142 stumbled across a 3D model for the San Casina Speedway, which he's decided to add![/blurb]

I think there was a bit of a management shift over the years and the new guys don't want to sign off of new standalones on new engines.

Last time I missed with Unity was 6 years ago, so its possible the netcode situation and object ownership has been resolved, I just know back then it was a mess. I have touched unreal since back when unreal tournament was still a big thing, I will say I enjoyed that more than unity lol.

EA actually won't let a new C&C game happen, it'd have to be built on Renegade X.

Either way I don't think an engine move is the way to go, Renegade X runs like 2x the players of original Renegade at peak times and its free, putting years of work into a new engine to get potentially double the players doesn't sound like a very good trade.

Unity's netcode is garbage and would need a lot of work to have a stable passenger system and proper client controls.

[blurb]The San Casina Christmas update adds new terrain, weapons, items, and jobs![/blurb]Christmas has arrived in San Casina, and with it Santa’s workshop in the North Pole! This location features several new weapons scattered about for the player to find. From left to right: • Stamp Pistol – This weapon uses compressed air to launch highly adhesive stamps at high velocities. • Bells and Holly Shotgun – Used for decorating the hard to reach places, the bells and holly shot gun fires off… unsurprisingly… bells and holly! • Repair Gun – Just your normal C&C Renegade repair gun with a Christmas theme! • Confetti Cannon – The confetti cannon uses compressed air to spray tons of confetti at a location – Caution: Confetti can cause severe paper cuts if sprayed at people. • Present Bomb – Although designed as a present for Saint Nick’s theme, the present bomb is actually a high explosive used for clearing the woods around the workshop for further mining of needed resources. • Ice Jet Rifle – High pressure water that is cooled rapidly is launched at extreme distances to create a decent anti infantry sniper rifle. • Coal Grenades – Although almost a normal lump of coal, it may have been left somewhere soaking up some gasoline over the years making it a tad… volatile. • Bow Rifle – This rile is used to pin bows to packages, needless to say don’t fire at people. • Candy Cane Launcher – Although designed to be used for long range decorating, it was quickly found to launch the candy canes far too fast and thus was quickly determined useless for this practice. Oil has been discovered in San Casina! 17 pump jacks have been established across the land to mine this valuable resource! The pump jacks are simple enough to use: • Ownership is granted by pressing the action key on the control box, once owned the player gets a steady trickle of money from each one they own. • The condition of pump jacks slowly decreases over time, generally they last from 30-40 minutes and can be maintained by pressing the action key on them. • Pump jacks above the 25% health mark make up to $66,000.00 an hour and ones below 25% condition make up to $52,000.00 an hour. • Players can call 555-0017 (U.S.A. Oil) to see owner ship and health status of each pump jack. The Military has been working on a new Super Nutrient Capsule to solve world hunger. This capsule fills the user’s stomach and quenches their thirst! DISCLAIMER: Side effects may include hallucinations, viral infections, and sudden death. Bug Fixes and Improvements • All cervines now have alt death animations for falling right, so now they have left and right fall animations. • Removed initiate behavior from all animals which should keep them from twisting weird. • Removed the placeable teleporter, it added a lot of complexity to the code and was only causing crashing, being no one had discovered it until last week it was easier to just remove. • Neuro-Toxin gun no longer spams players with kill messages if the target has less than 5 health and tons of armor. • Kezlarbo kill messages now show up cleaner if you kill yourself with it. • Objects are now position synced to clients when they are created. • Reconnaissance Master Perk has been fixed and now unlocks, previously it was unlocked for everyone from the get go. • Unstuck key will now attempt to turn your collisions back on, this is an attempt to fix some players falling through the ground after exiting vehicles. • Added several hundred sound emitters to the snowy parts of San Casina. Check it out now!

Woops sorry I over looked this, its pretty basic stuff, I decided to store all server data with flat files due to wanting people to be able to host things in LAN, otherwise I might have attached a small database for everything. Weapon favoriting works by holding out a weapon and pushing period, the server then adds your name and the weapon name to a file which is loaded on server load. Its pretty much the same for everything else that saves and loads. I'm lucky that ECW hasn't been super popular, if there had been more than the max player count on the server at a time I'd have to set up some shared database between the servers so all player data would persist, luckily I only needed one server.

This patch fixes the M12 and also adds some more config settings to the config file and a fix to the performance tab in config.exe! • Fixed config.exe's Performance Tab, you can now change the Texture filter and Lighting Mode. • Fixed the M12 Gun Motor Carriage so it has to deploy to fire. • Player cat character now only has 25 health. • Minor AI fixes that should improve some performance losses. • Added a bunch of new configuration settings for weekend events. • Added a bunch of new config settings: JOIN_MESSAGE - If this setting is in the config file GRANT_PERK_ID - If non-zero the perk will be given to the player after 1 hour of play PLAY_WITH_PERK_ID - If non-zero all players that join the server will be given the perk on top of their other perks. • Pet AI now ignores players that have spawn kill deterrent turned on. [blurb]This patch fixes the M12 and also adds some more config settings to the config file and a fix to the performance tab in config.exe![/blurb]

Most important thing is that they be easily moddable, that way we can fix it ourselves if its wrong.

Don't worry, that's just the dog model I bought for ECW and Bear Island, I'm sure APB would come up with their own doggo model if they decide to have one, I'd just give them the animation set.

You must remember a different model, this one was by Kavkling. Dogs should be AI pets, and you should have to be a handler and lead them around 😛

Yeah its a pretty cool tool, I was surprised back in the day when it popped during a tt patch and started updating files.

Back on-line

The server is down temporarily while I upgrade the hard drive, shouldn’t be down more than 2 hours.

Yeah I do plan on adding in the terrain from "The Assault On Christmas" when it gets closer to winter. Otherwise no real plans on how to expand the map yet. As far as Renegade goes I am planning on making a map for Renegade for Halloween, plan is to start on that shortly.

I'm kind of torn on replacing huge parts of the city, if Blazea58 was still around to do it (he was the graphics guy when it comes down to it) I'd be all for it being this was his baby and all. But right now without a good graphics guy with a direction in mind how to improve the city that end of development has stalled.

New Features: • Northrop Grumman E-C2 Hawkeye has been added to the game, this vehicle can spot players for the driver and passenger (much like the sensor twinbow). In addition it comes with a new reconnaissance job, simply fly to the points marked on the radar and then land to collect money for your recon flight. In order for the sensor markers to show up the Hawkeye must be in the air. • Added 31 new scores to the high score system, 95% of them are for tracking job earnings and time spent in the jobs, you can now show off just how long you spent grinding at the cash register! • Added a setting to force team the players on join, say good bye to the pointless team selection screen on join. • Added 32 street signs to the industrial area and removed the static street in the nuclear power plant. Tweaks: • UFO Disaster now has 25% more health. • The delay to repair a street sign now starts after it was repaired instead of after it was damaged, this allows the player to repair it once instantly before having to wait to repair it again (better for team working the street sweeper job). • Stripper job now pays 1/4th of what it used to. • Street Sweeper job now pays 4x as much. • The mutants on MA front lines now die after 2.5 minutes of trying to hunt the player, this should resolve the game getting stuck and the player being forced to hunt them down. • The Mech’s health on MA front lines has been corrected, it well not stay invulnerable and suddenly die all at once. • Added a shiny pass to the X7-32 to make it look more futuristic. • M12 Gun Motor Carriage rounds now have way more range (shouldn’t die midair anymore). • M12 Gun Motor Carriage now needs to deploy before it can fire, this takes about 5 seconds. • The new WWII vehicles rounds don’t blow up min air if they run out of range anymore. • Objective Markers and Sensor Bow Marker now shows up through the fog. Bug Fixes: • Fixed a checking system bug that would cause you not to check in if you checked in prior to midnight and then the time rolled over to the next day. • Fixed some vehicle entry markers being rotated to the side. • Fixed a minor weapon selection bug with cops that caused them to have weak weapons when chasing people with a high wanted level. • Fixed some issues with the druggy screen effects that could cause them not to happen at all. • Fixed an issue with visiting Mars and the spawn screen fade, basically if you went to Mars and then respawned the spawn screen wouldn’t fade blue anymore. • Fixed a bug in the Nuclear Strike Disaster that allowed players to collect money in areas where no nukes could hit. • Fixed the DJ light effects board not working, players can now change the lighting in the DJ room once again. • Fixed the weather service control being also triggered by the DJ booth. • Stolen debit cards system no longer will report “0 cards returned” if you press the return card button when you have no cards. • Fixed possible crash with the DM spawn point code. • Fixed a bug that could cause some planes to be able to fly backward, this should also fix the AI flying backward on the main map  • Scud Missiles are now type flying, which might help with their network synchronization. • OGEL Cat will not die on creation anymore  • Mountain Lions Skin type has been changed to one that doesn’t take falling damage, it shouldn’t kill itself by jumping off cliffs anymore. • Leaving the Night Club will not cause the screen to fade blue for a second anymore. • Wheels on the Mobile Flak Truck now turn as it drives. • The attack of the Quadrupedal Abomination is not called “Antlers” anymore. • Canada Buggy now is created in its spawn zone. [blurb]This patch adds a new aircraft, job, records, and tons of bug fixes and tweaks![/blurb]

If I had a guess I'd have to say the ECW client side scripts aren't running. But I'd think a repair should have fixed that, maybe delete the dlls and try the repair again.

Nah, black screen started on my main PC months if not years after I'd had ECW already installed on it without problem.

Yeah I have also noticed that it works fine on all fresh installs of windows for me as well, makes me suspect a bad windows update or some program that I installed.