Raap

I have explored the possibilities of setting up a new W3D project using a non-existing intellectual property and using my own designs (everything has been documented). Unfortunately some of the things I need, while achievable within the W3D Engine, requires extensive C++ commitments and I personally do not have the required skillset. I had hoped that I would have been able to rapidly deploy a prototype from which I could then appeal to programmers outside the W3D Hub community to work with me on this project, but even just getting to that basic stage requires resources I do not have. The roadblocks I encountered on W3D have to do with the HUD and inventory logic, which have to be partially redone to support my needs for even just a basic 'prototype'. I'm currently letting things cook a little while I explore alternative options, but should the W3D effort be concluded completely, then the assets I've shown so far - plus a truckload more - will be gifted to W3D Hub as-is for projects to do with as they see fit.

It's a mobile game made in China. That should sort of lower your expectations on the scale of 1 to 10, to -100.

Ooh, yeah, we could do that, too. Somehow I don't think the student theory would work out though!

I'm partially attempting this, but what prevents a full object-mesh cliff isn't polygon counts, it isn't client performance. It is that vertex light solve makes them incredibly ugly to behold. Just look at my initial three screenshots, the light solve is a blight on the scene, creating black smudges for "shadows". I would love a new lighting model for W3D. I'd touch people to see it happen. Touch. People.

I'd like to point out that there are subtle differences between an arid environment and a semi-arid environment. The intend with this particular scene is to border towards semi-arid, mainly to support plants and a few spots of green to break the otherwise monotone of a hot and dry true arid environment (or also known as a desert). I was forced to take a break yesterday but I hope to continue working on this. I did encounter an oversight with one of the assets - the larger rock pile - in where I incidentally applied alpha blend in regions where plane UVW causes stretching, so I'm going to have to pull that out, update it, and re-populate it in the scene, a manual process. You might wonder, what's the big deal about a bad alpha blend? Well, know that I am utilizing hand-painted application through vertex painting, so all assets look like these when viewed individually in 3DS: I no longer work with box UVW (unless the target mesh is literally a box-type object!) due to the seams it creates. The grey cliffs that are part of the main terrain for example use a separate UV channel on the main cliff mesh and the two adjacent transition meshes to create a smooth texture flow with no edges. Pushwall uses similar methods in some APB levels. Edit: Solved this already by just re-painting the merged mesh collection within the main scene, herpaderp.

Heh, if I wanted to push this into APB there isn't much there story-wise that could prevent that. We have a moon map, a map not in this plane of reality, a map with ants, a map with weird medieval cannons, and a map with a base constructed on floating icebergs. And somehow we tell ourselves I tell myself this makes sense! (Probably because I made 50% of these weirdest APB locales...) Edit: But to say it again, I have no final destination with this.

Your best bet on anything official from EA regarding C&C Renegade is when that supposed new (desktop) C&C game is revealed and you gain a line of communication to a development studio within EA that uses the franchise IP. Your contact efforts so far might as well bounce to an empty inbox because they are simply going to the wrong person. But curious things happens when you separate "C&C Renegade" and "W3D Engine", it becomes a different kind of topic then.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Renegade can be considered abandonware as long as EA still makes sales on it through collection packages.

You might notice one of them is at a significant angle by mistake. The rest is at a maximum angle of ±2+2 for aesthetic reasons; it breaks up the amount of vertical lines in the screen space.

It's still missing a few more assets but I figured I'd show the work in progress. It is already getting difficult to work on the environment, 3DS is tanking hard in performance. I've had to drop bitmap lookup down to the lowest setting or else 3DS Max simply crashes on loading the scene... Even though so far it is just one part of the environment and not even containing all assets yet. The problem comes from the fact I'm utilizing 4k resolution textures on most things, and 2k resolutions on smaller props. Also every asset is completely new and NOT just re-used assets, I've had a heavy hand in every single asset and completely re-textured everything. On the flip side, client performance in W3D, even without VIS, is smooth. This experiment shows that W3D projects could easily upgrade their texture resolutions for environments. Speaking textures, here is an older screenshot from before props were added, I've done a lot of work combating texture tiling appearances... I'll spare the technical details: As it stands there is no determined objective with this environment. There are no game-specific objects or gameplay (It is however tested on the APB client as it is the only up to date public W3D Hub client). Edit: By the way, as you can see, W3D vertex lightsolve is a blight on the scene. I'd consider a lightmap, but those also are not pretty. I've not seen a good exterior environment lightmap implementation demonstrated on W3D, I'd like to be proven wrong here. A lightmap would also require 3-pass materials on every mesh, and I don't think people's computers look forward to that.

Uncategorized, work in progress.

For some reason I thought this was a late april fools joke! Would be nice to have you guys on the launcher as a stand-alone W3D project rather than a traditional Renegade "mod". - I haven't had Renegade installed for over a decade!

Good to know it is an option for down the line. The way I always look at these things is, how can W3D assets and environments be improved from an aesthetic point of view, knowing we currently lack very modern engine options, so when I run down a list of what I believe to be high impact "bang for the buck" enhancements, then new material movements would be a major aspect of filling user screen space, since most maps contain a lot of foliage which we could finally animate properly. Next in line would be more painful I imagine; Replacing vertex lighting with a more modern lighting form, including improved terrain shadows. Dynamic object shadows already work fine but a typical "scene-killer" is having a little object sit on a terrain vertex and causing it to create a giant "shadow" post-light solve. I've so far always had to work around this by adding unnecessarily many polygons to meshes in an attempt to smooth out the vertex light solve. Naturally two different W3D contributors could have a discussion and come up with two entirely different priority lists, but when it comes to pure scene aesthetic improvements without 2018-era fancy stuff, then creating a more living environment via materials and lighting would be something I'd push for. My rationale here being that I have played some arguably dated looking games (outside of W3D!), but their aesthetic identity was carried heavily by having a strong lighting model that added a lot of character to the world in almost a stylized sort of way.

It is hard to see in the video but does your new map system include live updates on vehicle/infantry positions? Interesting to see it functional either way! I always wanted to see a map system for APB to replace the current building status page with, and instead have the buildings with health bars appear in their XY positions on a map, along with map objectives and whatever else is important to show on such a screen. I remember Saberhawk made a neat camera transition from 1st/3rd person to isometric top-down view and back again, that would have been brilliant for this.

Random question of the day: With new plugins, would it also be possible to create new mapping types (stage 0/1)? New UV movements in particular are of interest to me. Let's say Sine movement but a version that only moves the upper region of a texture - stretching it. Such a specific movement would be very useful for foliage wind emulation, something we've currently always had to do by animating the mesh, which is extremely inefficient. Animation on a material-level allows for a much greater optimization.

Something tells me that isn't the intended artistic direction of a game. Literally any game, ever.

I wouldn't know where to begin when it comes to composing music, the best I can do is mix/edit things using Audacity! Your track does fit quite well in the library of classic C&C music, even if it is a little short!

@GraYaSDF I don't know if these tools support core Renegade (the code related changes got a fork a while ago between classic Renegade and W3D Hub), so I suppose that is a good question for the team. How many people still work on Renegade and the older scripts as opposed to the W3D Hub branch? Consider me curious, I haven't really been in touch with those things.

I think it's safe to say that if W3D hub had the manpower/resources, a "redo" would have been pursued on quite a few things. All I can do is highlight my own issues as a user of the tools. The inner workings, put simply, are well beyond my skill set. But then again, this is why updates like this should occur more frequently. I doubt that there is no one out there that would be willing to contribute to W3D as a platform, as long as things remain clean and controlled. So perhaps "W3D Hub" should promote a development platform for non-profit multiplayer games more aggressively than just the games themselves. The games can be a showcase of engine flexibility, but to attract the right people, you got to change your strategies.

Having such things fixed and better documented would help, like what types of materials are affected by translucency? Not even I know that and I worked with this engine for literally over a decade.

Very fair point on the CPU usage, and I imagine we'll not see any changes there, anytime soon. I have two more comments regarding the plugins and editor. Firstly, could you suit up both the plugin and editor with as much informative tooltips as possible? If you want to attract new contributors to W3D projects, it would help if they knew what the various material settings did. Good tooltips often include examples such as saying "enabling this causes X and disabling this causes Y". Maybe make a pass on obsolete features as well. AFAIK "shininess" and "translucency" both do nothing, and in the shaders/texture tabs there is a trainload of settings with dubious purposes. Secondly, the editor itself, would it be possible to upgrade the script attachment window? Search function, easier to use input fields, the ability to link objects in reference directly instead of using ID's (meaning as well to add 'go to object' and 'add selected as reference' buttons), easier translation database references (we really should end the practice of adding strings as script parameters), etc.. All mostly to make scripting easier and allow for bug tracking from one window frame instead of script attachments on several individual objects... Hell, maybe make scripts smarter in general by detecting bad input and flagging it before you can export a level. It wouldn't be visual scripting by any means, but just general QoL improvements.

I will take your word for it! Ultimately only the end result is most relevant to me, not the road taken to get there (unless said road is a muddy trench through which traversing is difficult). I look forward to testing the new editor... The W3D plugins will have to wait since I'm still stuck with 3DS Max 8 for now.

How do you intend to solve character animation in W3D though? From my understanding using video card memory is a very outdated method and newer cards don't care for it much - correct me if I am mistaken here. As for the actual animations, well by eliminating WWskin on the modeling side, and utilizing a more mainstream solution, wouldn't that, theoretically speaking, open the door to motion captured animations? I'm also not grasping how you can make W3D understand non-WWskin animated meshes, I presume that engine-side developments are to be paired with this? As for the forum, let me show you the bug I hit consistently: Post-submission anything below certain quotes become embedded into an area within the quote that cannot be edited or touched, or not even deleted, the post is just completely broken when this happens. Using Chrome.

And this is why I hate this forum software: I cannot edit the above post properly anymore... The "Edit" isn't what Pushwall said but something I added below the quote, but this forum added it to the quote post-submission and in a form that is completely un-editable. Just to clarify, I hate miss-quoting. Try moderator editing that TLDR line... You cannot even access it because it is embedded into the quote frame itself. This is what I asked source view for a while ago! ... Anyhow, infantry models are a pet annoyance for me. I consider it the doorway into any W3D game, it is the first thing players get to see. In a perfect world, WWskin is removed and a new animation system entirely is created. With WWskin out of the way, the door is opened for much more infantry detail and mechanics.

I think Pushwall summarizes it pretty well so let me quote him on this;