Raap

I find A-Bombs to be rather detrimental to gameplay, especially in lower population games. There is nothing you can do to defend from it when your entire team is on the attack, something which you have to do in the spirit of the game, due to the focus on teamwork. Bonsai and Zama both punish you for doing a team effort assault, and almost always the flares are placed in cheesy locations. I'm up for a revision on the whole A-Bomb concept rather than an outright removal. They can be salvaged to be more fun content and see addition to more maps for it. My proposition: Change the flare into an item that can only be placed in a designated "Base Center", this would be a simple patch of clear terrain in the middle of a base that is visibly clearly the center of the base (or the center of relevant base space). This eliminates the fact that flares can be placed in cheesy location and instead makes it so they can only be placed in this designer-designated location, meaning it becomes defensible. This location should always be covered by at least one base defense that needs to be destroyed before placement can occur. To compensate for this difficulty, should the A-Bomb land, it should be enough to end the match in defeat for the A-Bomb target about 10 seconds post-impact (to allow for the bomb animation to play in-game). Flare timers: To eliminate flares ending good matches too early on low population games, flare timers need to become dynamic based on the population at the time of placement. The curve would mean that lower population matches (1-6 players) result in a two minute timer, and slowly creeping back to the standard 60 second timer as the population rises towards 14 players. This is not a random number, as I find that most typical forms of team assaults revolve around 5 or so players. Having the timer scale towards the normal 60 seconds at 7 players per team means you on average have two people in your base capable of attempting a defense. I'd recommend not touching the flare purchase cooldown time for consistency purposes, given that it currently is already rather confusing to figure out when it is available or if your team took it, or if a spy reset it. If possible, add a message stating the cooldown time remaining on approaching the flare terminal. Just my thoughts.

Oh I'm not going to vanish, I hope I didn't give that idea with my post. No, when Delta launched last year, I told Pushwall and Generalcamo (as well as publicly, I'm sure) that I'd be doing three contributions; HW, Siege, and a map I had to cancel to do a HW revision (so technically it is HW 3.0). I'd have finished up by now if I had the same working environment as I did earlier in the last year, but alas I do not. Once HW is done (again) I will see what I could do. I do believe it is the end of APB levels for me given that the project has reached a point of having enough maps and adding more would simply add maintenance pressure for Pushwall. My two cents on APB maps is, spend more time improving and adding to existing maps rather than adding entirely new ones.

Hello, I'm the creator of said cancerous map. I do apologize that my creation gave you cancer, I assure you, killing you was not my intent. Nevertheless, I'll answer your bullet points with my reasoning: You came to that conclusion by looking at the map scale, but not the actual play space, and certainly not the relevant play space. The relevant play space isn't any significant amount larger than standard Tech 5 maps. The Ore Truck takes a while in order to provide an opportunity for Infantry to destroy it and have it be noticeable. If the path was short like more commonly the case, destroying a truck only delays the income less. This is proportional to the travel time. To prevent economic blackouts, the dual Ore Silo keeps the game going until a team decides to take them out... If that occurs, an economic blockade becomes a real threat, and this is how you're most likely going to win the match. So first you complain that the map is too big, and then you're asking why some space is inaccessible by normal means? You're weird. Siege once offered about double the available play space than it currently has. The castle roof and interior access were axed in order to trim down the map. A lot of play space got axed to leave mostly only the relevant play space. Initially a bonus area (map secret) made the cut, but was eventually also axed. All this axing was for this triple purpose: To utilize a smaller development budget. Creating assets to occupy space takes time. To improve performance, less areas to render means more frame rates. To streamline the map, so that players do not get lost in areas that have no meaningful impact to gameplay. The purpose of APB is to destroy the enemy base, not to play hide and seek. Adding more space simply isn't an option unless gameplay changes demanded it... In Siege's case, that is unlikely unless @Pushwall gets drunk one night and decided, in blood, that Siege needs Naval combat, for... reasons. As for ghosts... They are a byproduct of inhaling toxic gasses. You don't actually believe ghosts exists? Man up soldier, and go inhale those gasses of illusion! I happen to enjoy a good rain, especially during these hot summer days. Weather helps set the mood in a map to be sure, but rain being a cause for depression? You must be of fragile mind to get depressed by some water. You'd best avoid places like, you know, lakes, oceans, even your home water tap. A common point of feedback in APB is uninspired or identical base layout design. While the Allied base on Siege isn't really special, a bit more work went into the Soviet base layout. The result of attempting to make it stand out was the lowered War Factory, expanded base tunnel, and compact building placement. The helicopter landing pads are an extension of that idea, and makes Soviet aircraft climb while clear from the base (you don't take off in an aircraft near a building, typically, due to the hazards caused by flight malfunction), and further more, the outward layout serves as a supportive extension for an adjacent Airfield, should that be enabled on the map. Naturally I'd have put more detail into the map, but even with visibility culling, the performance is absolutely pushing the current limit of W3D. Either way, if people truly wish to remove the map, then it is for @Pushwall to decide. I delivered the level, and he maintains the entire APB project. Suffice it to say, Siege was my last "new" contribution to APB. The upcoming HostileWaters revamp is my final contribution, it always was. I feel that I've lost touch with what players of W3D games want, and it'd be a waste of my limited time to continue creating undesired assets. Whether or not this will also mark the end of my working with W3D entirely is still up for me to determine.

Mod aboose.

How are you getting stuck on Siege? That exact location is the 0,0,0 origin point of the level, which means some script or server logic is putting people there, which didn't happen before.

Those models were created after I left BHP. If I am not mistaken, @Synaesthesia worked on them. I do not know if they got any further development beyond that. I believe that if buildings are ever updated, they'd have to strictly follow their existing exterior shapes and sizes (AKA the footprint size), otherwise you'd be looking at a lot of work to manually update every level to match the new building scale. Updating APB's buildings is something I gave consideration a year or so ago when first working on HostileWaters, since I did a completely new Naval Yard and an updated Sub Pen back then for the naval building requirements, along with some modified prop buildings for capture logic. It's not a lack of time that deterred me, but rather the player expectations to handle such iconic features with a level of care and strict reference work to abide to.

I really like where this more-sense AI from @moonsense715 is going. Some more refinement and hopefully progress on client and server stability and these things could be a good addition for any W3D project in every level. I have two questions about them though, does the AI currently feature hooks to support custom map gameplay objectives? Capturing buildings for example, or holding a certain point until the point is captured? And what about attack lanes, does this new AI have the capacity to use some lanes only with certain units or pick a lane based on a designer-given lane priority rating? For example let's look at Under, say I wanted to tell the AI to only bring infantry units to the beach route with 90% priority, until the falling rocks flag that route as "removed"? Or StormyValley, where the rear mountain route only gets used by faster moving ground vehicles and aircraft at low priority? I'd love to see support for exactly such options with the AI, if that isn't currently the case. Later, once (if) W3D ever supports dynamic level maps, I'd like to integrate the concept of attack lanes more closely via naming each attack lane "Route A/B/C/D", with the AI hopefully understanding a similar concept. Added note, such terminology would help a lot with new voice commands, instead of "Enemies coming from the east" we could have radio commands for "Enemies spotted on Route A/B/C/D", a more universal way of communicating map layouts and enemy movements in one swoop... But that's a subject for later, but perhaps @Pushwall can look into reserving 4 radio commands for this purpose should APB adopt this concept officially. (Edit: So when a team mate says the command, "Enemies spotted on Route C", I would then just open the map to quickly remind myself where Route C is. I also do not expect to ever see a map with more than 4 distinct attack lanes, so no need for reserving more than 4 commands.)

I'd like to see future previews in a W3D scene rather than a 3DS render. It'd help provide any feedback on the assets when they are displayed the way you would find them in-game alongside a level environment. You could create a "preview only" mini-level for the purpose of this, so no need to do any major terrain work.

Wellp, you asked for information, I provided what you asked.

Well, since you asked for a screenshot, here you go! But since you probably don't speak Dutch, what it says is that the connection isn't private, and potential attackers may wish to steal information. The browser used is Chrome, in case that wasn't clear from the picture. The first time I hit your website I also got a popup of a similar sort, but a reflex reaction of mine closed it immediately (I get pop-up warnings pretty regularly usually regarding websites asking permission from me to do things). I haven't gotten that since, but it very likely was about the same problem.

Getting several red flags on attempting to visit CNCNZ such as the website connection being too insecure, so something is up, figured I'd mention it.

That A-bomb just vanishing was hilarious. I wish we could change cinematic effects mid-flight sort of, so it'd still land but not detonate and just kinda stick out there looking silly. Perhaps this can be done though if the default animation is in fact the one that just lands the bomb in the ground, and successful detonation removes it? Random thoughts!

Was about to say that. I personally opt to usually hand-draw the shadows though. But in this case the light preset used is simply too large and bright, CMDBob should really create a new one that can be placed with more control. Another issue with using big light sources is light leaking into other spaces. Adding filler mesh between spaces eliminates a lot of that, but in-game characters will still receive light drawing regardless as long as they are in range... So say you're in a dark room, the next room is 0.5 meters away and is lit, if your character is close to the lit room while inside the dark room he'll light up as well. It's a W3D problem you won't be aware of existing unless you actively used light presets at one point. Otherwise, nice progress, you've just completed 10% of a standard APB level! (Funny note: People often wonder why games take so long to produce these days compared to 15 years ago; The answer is artistic requirements, which only gets larger as people expect things to look better and better.)

Good to see someone took over. Too bad Sonic didn't try reaching out first. As an FYI, CNCNZ has been suffering from a 'broken' front page for many months, I occasionally visit it and it always has a forum redirect on the main page. I don't know if page hits still matter for a website like CNCNZ, but I'm sure it didn't help,

Referring to application performance, responsiveness, and 3rd party support. I have not first hand experienced the differences on unwrapping functionality specifically between these versions, since I'm neither a student or a company employee with access to the software. Truthfully unwrapping isn't something I particularly enjoy doing either.

I know how it works, but I can't justify the time it takes in Max 8. The software is too old so I create the results I need via UVW mapping instead. Note that I only do environmental assets, so I can get away with avoiding unwrapping.

The shiny metal is too dominant here, especially near the base of the coil. You could probably do with some pipes having a different shade of metal or adding some supports that are not made of the same material. Right now such a structure would suffer from team identification because the largest area of visible mesh is in neutral color tones, something more typically attributed to environmental assets - a fact true for both RTS and FPS games. I'd say this is one of those cases where the reference material doesn't line up with gameplay requirements, so not really your "fault" in all likelihood (I haven't seen your reference images). Beyond that, good work as usually. I wish we had shiny metal shaders for W3D. Edit: Something like this, since it wouldn't require model changes (disregard the orange tone instead of red, I didn't set the color correctly):

That's a better curtain effect for sure. I don't think employing a 2nd pass for an affect can be triggered via in-game events though, but it's not like this is intended to be for an actual, functional, Iron Curtain. Just to be picky though (be sure to return that favor to me): You really should make a new, high resolution ceiling texture, and not an over-saturated, borderline neon colored Renegade texture, it diminishes the work you've done elsewhere. You should add a trimming around the platform and room edges to pace the color transition and smooth out vertex solving. I personally am a fan of warn-stripes in such locations.

3.2.0.0 patch notes leaked: - Keep of the Grass central area is now a ship graveyard, where ships go to die.

Out of curiosity, care to apply that same effect to an inverted, upscaled-by-element mesh? I'd like to see how your bright red animated material would look as a vehicle outline rather than a "full body" effect.

Very goot computar, yes!

As with all things, yes. The only thing I've unwrapped in Max 8 was that small crate you now find in every map and building in APB, and that's because it is literally a box! If I tried to unwrap, say, the icebergs on Hostile Waters, well... NOPE. I've even taken it one step further with an asset created for the upcoming HW revamp, it was created purely using UVW mapping while using a unwrap-like texture, to result in a single mesh - something I needed to do for this specific asset. For me, this process was faster than fighting the 3DS Max 8 unwrapping tool (with no plugins). @Madin 512x512 resolutions eh? I think the last time I worked with that was around 2008. For APB, all regular materials are 1024x1024 and quite a large and growing number are becoming 2048x2048. A lot of low-res textures I still use are old and for building interiors or man made objects. They are OK to use for small objects without repeated tiling though but I'd rather re-create many of them, and often I do, but it's not like I got the time to remake every single texture in the game (and simply up-scaling is pointless since you fill all that extra space with absolutely zero extra detail!). I'm not aware of any unwrapping plugins existing for Max 8, but even if they do exist, I doubt it works. Max 8 on Windows 10 is a barely functional application. Sluggish performance, strange graphical anomalies, unexpected mesh behaviors triggered by unknown factors at random, plugins not working properly such as the FBX importer or polyboost requiring a re-installation every single session (I'm surprised the object painting plugin works), and the list goes on and on. Yes, this is akin to a pet peeve of mine, a daily annoyance that triggers me whenever the tools throw shit at me.

I don't use Photoshop (I'm not spending money on subscription locked and corporation-priced software that I intent to use for non-profit!), but I'm curious, does it offer any direct integration or support for the concept of 3D model unwrapping and texturing? I currently do all my texture work in GIMP and it's completely a manual job, but given the rate at which you seem to throw out models for your RTS project, I got curious as to what time-savers you got access to. Side note: I typically don't do unwrapping because I have 3DS Max 8, for the reasons of W3D compatibility and licensing... Limitations. I find the whole process incredibly time consuming because the initial unwraps are a giant puzzle, and for environments I get quicker results via manual UVW mapping.

This is correct. @Madin What tools are you using?