Raap

Looks quite alright, but consider using higher resolution textures!

It makes more sense when you look down on it from above or the side. They aren't far apart and there is no gaps like in the old "bridge", what you see here is simply my style of making things, I like to have contrasts, it makes certain model parts stand out more while on a limited polygon/draw call budget. The planks are placed there for gripping, they aren't part of the bridge foundation structure. The whole bridge is around 10 meshes only. Go ahead, take a look: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xV3GJE1yqFA5BBEKwsMLLhQdYCfPvMF0

I mirrored the setup of the concrete bridges in my tests, they use a few different scripts. Perhaps it can be done without them, but that's for Pushwall to decide. I just made the assets.

All APB 'structures' are either terrain baked or simple preset objects, the latter usually if the object needs to be interacted with, and in this case the bridge is destructible. Tiles cannot have scripts attached, and simple objects are less resource intensive and less likely to get weird with collision detection compared to using stationary vehicle logic. W3D just doesn't handle non-terrain light very well, but even vertex light solving is a very flawed method of generating light. But, that's beating a dead horse. It's up to Pushwall how he wants to use the bridge. He can terrain bake it or make it interactive, I gave him the option for either.

Slightly less fugly bridge for Bonsai: Bridge has a destruction animation and destroyed state, but I don't have shadowplay installed at the moment so I couldn't record it... It's nothing special anyhow. Edit: The unfortunate shadow effects is a drawback of dynamic objects in W3D, vertex solve does not work on them so they never really look quite right.

Thanks for reminding me that I'm getting old.

You'll also want to mess with the texture details. Go to Customize -> Preferences -> Viewports, at the bottom select "Configure Driver" and then select "Match bitmap as close as possible" twice. I wouldn't touch the rest since 3DS Max 8 is rather unstable on modern operating systems, but having textures warp around meshes or look inconsistent is pretty annoying to work with, and this fixes that.

What you want to do is go here: Then add a new path to your texture directory. But here is the magic trick: to make this work, you have to select a bogus directory within your actual texture directory. 3DS Max 8 for some reason saves the folder above the target folder, rather than the target folder. The target folder could be empty and deleted once this is set up, but you can easily verify what path you have selected on the list of paths.

Because in my opinion all of those maps lack a true secondary route. All of these maps got two equally lengthy and valuable routes (three in the case of GD). What makes a route primary or secondary is perhaps subjective, but here are my general guidelines for it: The primary route is most convenient to get onto. The primary route is the shortest route. The primary route either leads directly to the enemy team base and/or passes through a critical game level objective. The primary route is always usable by all ground unit types. Secondary routes are routes that lack one or more of the above aspects while the presence of such a primary route exists in a level. None of the routes on the mentioned maps differ from these criteria, meaning they are equally valued... Meaning adding a roadblock to them can be perceived as a negative. I believe a good use of a destructible asset, such as a bridge, is best employed on a secondary route that fails to meet the above criteria(s), and in doing so you can have a route with differing values based on player interactions; An intact bridge on a secondary route can be an excellent way to flank the opposing team's forces or base, but when such a bridge is destroyed, you're left with an infantry-only attack route which takes longer to traverse and therefore serves the role of a backdoor sneak attack route... Two vastly different roles baked into the same secondary route and changed based on player interactions. I think this is a persistent problem in a lot of APB levels. The lack of a clear primary attack route adds confusion and limits level gameplay creativity. Edit: Anyhow, speaking of random contributions, I'm also not shy of doing a contribution for the yet-to-be-released projects hosted here. For example I got a boatload of ideas that would only make sense in a more futuristic science fiction-heavy setting...

Perhaps a good use of resources would be to use the concrete animated bridge and re-texture it with some other woodifications modifications, that way more maps can utilize a destructible bridge, which I think is a good mechanic to have in more maps to spice up secondary attack routes. Regarding runway stripes, I made them bold and light up in-game for GAMEPLAY purposes. Now you can have night time airfield level and the players in the planes can actually see the runway now. Obviously a real runway has some more details... But real runways are also a lot longer and have the space for it. This particular setup was calculated for optimal space usage on the usable runway space (each segment is the same size). I look forward to a night time snow level with air units enabled... @Pushwall Yes of course. But when you export a DDS file from GIMP all layers must first be merged. Sometimes I save and close the file at that point, losing the layers... When instead I need to undo the layer merge, save, and then close. It's an annoying extra step, I'm thinking of sending them a feature request for solving this, because otherwise GIMP is a good tool to have.

Sorry, peasant people like me use GIMP, since it's free and for me it gets the job done. Terrain materials are a few layers at most... The only thing I hate about GIMP is having to merge all layers before being able to produce a valid DDS file. Happened a few times that I merge the layers, export, and close the file... Losing the layers permanently. It actually occurred on the airfield runway files as well, but fortunately those were 'done'. Speaking of the runway, specifically the snowy one... Does APB even feature air-enabled maps with a snow environment (besides HW)? I only seem to remember grassy maps with aircraft enabled... Edit: For what its worth, I created the dirt on the Gem Silo 'trim' texture using two separate sub-layers (using one at a time) and utilizing mask editing to blend the layers, and then topped it off with some shading via alpha layer drawing with a large painting tool (black) using low coverage strength... And a few more things like that.

I wasn't really informed on how it is supposed to behave. Anyhow, while I could try to work on it, I'm not going to be able to promise a guaranteed good result. Texturing an unwrap of this complexity is unexplored territory for me. One potential deal breaker though: I presume a layered working file exists? If this is in Photoshop, I cannot help as I do not own it, I use GIMP for all material work. And if all you got is a DDS file then it will take awhile to pull it apart to make sure all changes I apply properly link up seamlessly. I still recommend moving this to someone with more experience however since I cannot guarantee anything.

The advanced pen for one, but I corrected that already by reverting to the old texture.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does that vehicle not have a shader covering up most of the actual mesh/material anyway?

Texture swaps isn't something I like to risk doing. I'd need to know where exactly this material is used besides those walls. More sensible would be a War Factory update if the consensus was that it needed one (not for me to decide). As a note, I would never texture a building with just one material.

You got to scale the material UVW coordinates according to the most likely angle of view. A roof in this case is mostly viewed from an air unit or from a nearby mountain looking down. This means you need to scale up such locations a bit more, otherwise they will appear to be extremely over-tiled. Also note that, when you edit a texture by renaming and overwriting it, you actually affect all of the meshes in the game that use that texture. This is something APB already had an incident with with recent electronics changes; The textures were replaces across the game and in a lot of locations they no longer looked right. You're right about the War Factory door needing a polish pass though, the current live version uses a texture that itself has a shading problem that the creator did not resolve (the darker spots on the door).

I confess I'm more of an environments guy. I can do buildings (touch them in ways you cannot even imagine, yes), even more difficult tasks like additional foliage isn't something I'll shy away from if I can give myself the time I need to get them right. Vehicles, and specifically unwrapping them, is something I prefer to leave to people either more experienced or have better tools for it. I don't think there is a shortage of environmental assets that need a revision though... A quick run through all the various levels makes you bump into objects that date back to 1977. Perhaps what I need is a big list of em' and I can run through each of them at my own pace. Example: Those wooden "bridges" on Bonsai always bothered me, so making a new one would be something I could do... The downside is that, as the airfield has shown me, even if I do not edit the overal shape of an object, individual map alterations to correctly apply the changes are still required. So I am not sure how to best handle something like this. Remember, I do not do this for a living. My knowledge and experience is limited to what I know of W3D development (and the occasional experimentation in other engines). To put a number on it, let's say I do the top 20 "most dated looking environmental assets". If the interest exists on @Pushwall's end, anyhow.

Crazypersonthoughts: Create a modular rampart/bridge set that connects the various building roofs, with gatehouse hubs in various places that contain team-locked gates? Yes, it might look silly, but then again, some silly ideas occasionally have the best gameplay pay-off. Randomly google'd images:

Personally I'm a believer of learning on-the-go via transparent gameplay communication. It is too bad that the first-purchase pop-up information windows got axed, or that the GUI has a limitation that makes it hard to expand upon it, so adding something like purchase menu unit information is currently impossible.

That's the idea. Pushwall ran into a few small problems though, but nothing he cannot solve. One of the problems is perhaps worth mentioning as a curiosity; W3D building controller logic only has a limited range before it stops to look for meshes that are supposed to be part of a building. The airfield being quite large, actually could not fit within this check-radius. It has been resolved now by extended some of the runway meshes underground... Not a very elegant solution but it seems to work.

Most buildings start at a 90 degree wall which means things like snow doesn't usually stick to it unless it's some extreme environment. In case of sand, it means you don't really need a special material for walls. The airfield being mostly flat however, doesn't follow those rules... But we only got one desert map and that one might not even receive air units. regardless, I might still produce a 'sandy' texture set for airfields not located in either a grassy or snowy field, it probably wouldn't hurt to have, regardless... I'll look into it another day however.

Hey guys, Since I'm officially done with APB level contributions, I'm more or less free to pick up the occasional small tasks. The first thing I've worked on today was an updated Soviet Airfield, since I really did not like the existing low resolution single black asphalt texture that was on it. I've had to make sure not to modify the existing geometry much, else complications may have surfaced in various levels. The screenshots below are 100% material/texture work with no geometry changes outside of vertex coloring. The runway stripes glow, making them easy to spot in night time maps. The runway consists of 11 new textures and ~13 new 3-pass materials. Snow version: Grass version: I may do a desert version if @Pushwall requires it, but keep in mind none of the current buildings even have a desert version. If I end up doing any additional contributions, I'll post them here.

It is satisfying to see that finally after all these years, Siege finally got the airplanes it was designed for.

The hill gets my vote since there are no objects there and all you need to do is reshape the terrain. You might want to add an extra SAM Site near it however. It will give the Allies a neat primary target to focus their attacks on, one not covered by the Tesla Coil. It's like having an objective on its own. That being said, I am also still in favor of adding the Mobile AA vehicle to the Allied vehicle roster for high-tech airplane enabled maps... Of which Siege would be the first. It'd be the fair counter to MiGs.

Seems my maps often get the dump! That's the risk for trying to stray from the core gameplay formula, I suppose.