Raap

I don't know when this was introduced, but since it's occurring right now; Mobile AA Guns are incorrectly rigged, causing them to drive backwards when unoccupied after someone initially enters one. The front wheels seem to be the problem but I don't have the source to verify. Also, shouldn't it be called "Mobile A.A. Gun" instead of "Mobile AA Gun"? Unrelated note: I read Cargo Truck in one of the recent patch note threads. That vehicle was never designed for in-game use and was terribly optimized since I made it for a mock-up. I hope that model has been optimized for in-game use because the original model was made out of 67(!) unique objects.

Here is an example of the continued effort of breaking up the screen space. This is a part of what the castle balcony area looks like, but there are various other props as well, just not in this picture. Note that, the map has been downscaled considerably in an effort to improve performance, as well as allowing me to focus my time on a specific set of areas that are most relevant to gameplay. Among the various places rendered inaccessible to ground units are the rear castle ramparts, the castle interior, the rear beach passage, and the castle tunnels have been reduced to a single hallway. This all ensures that the playable space becomes more concentrated within the castle itself, and one short infantry-only beach route. Air units remain available. If an enemy team holds the castle and has it locked down, you can still infiltrate the castle using infantry through the ore mine caves, or one of the side entrances.

Three big green arrows above the vehicle when you target it should appear if you can get in. If this doesn't work, then something is broken. That tells a player very little. In fact to me it means "I can approach this vehicle as it has a green arrow pointing at it", and I wouldn't initially affiliate the arrows with passenger slot availability. A lot of things in the game are very counter intuitive, and if the HUD was more easy to enhance, a lot of QoL improvements could be made.

A bit of a counter argument to my previous post perhaps, but I also believe consistency is important so that (new) players don't get confused. Why can they enter a Ranger but not a Light Tank? Perhaps for that reason - and it's a solid reason to be sure - all vehicles should perhaps enable a single passenger, or none at all besides for dedicated transportation vehicles. The problem with the latter is the lack of an armored Soviet transport, and the lack of an Allied air transport (unless the Allied Chinook becomes a standard unit, and I'd be fine with that). Perhaps if we had a way of more clearly informing the player if a vehicle can hold passengers such as an icon for crew size on the purchase icons, as well as icons on the targeting HUD highlighting occupied and unoccupied passenger slots (little human figure icons below the vehicle health bar). Then consistency concerns would be resolved, and then you could proceed with delegating transport to a limited set of vehicles.

I think size should play a relevant role. There is no reason a Mammoth Tank shouldn't be able to 'fit' a passenger (Yes, I'm well aware real world tanks have crews of several people, but this is a game). But beyond that exception, I do think transportation should be delegated to vehicles designed for that; 5-player capacity Supply Trucks, APC's, and Chinooks. Which then leaves two exceptions: Single passenger Rangers for the Allies, and single passenger Mammoth Tanks for the Soviets.

Hey guys, I'm on the tail end of my surgery recovery right now. This took a lot longer than anticipated but I'm slowly becoming more capable of doing things at a computer. As I have just informed Pushwall, I delved into Siege last night and after inspecting the map, I concluded I will have a test version delivered to our lovely QA departement by mid november. Sparing you guys the boring details, what this means is that Siege should actually still be released this year and not in 2019. I'm putting a careful date (not a real ETA) for a release somewhere in december. There are reasons as to why this can still take two months, but I'm simply being careful here primarily because the map has to go through a truly wonderful process called VIS implementation, and I confess that there are knowledge gaps for me in this specific field. TLDR: I'm still alive, and you can actually expect to play this map this year.

I'm pretty certain that a pink submarine can be considered an unfair in-game advantage.

Looking solid, if I had more time I'd test it first-hand. One point of concern; Is it the same Antlion CJ created using the heightfield editor in LE? If so, firstly, yuck. Secondly, heightfield terrain has a lot of problems and I don't believe any of those got fixed due to the general consensus being that it wasn't a supported method?

Just letting everyone know, yes, I am still alive. I'm still in the process of addressing my planned real life hurdles, and I still have a very intensive surgery coming up as well. Once everything is done and without unexpected complications, I can finally get back to work on the map. Once that happens, I'll provide a reasonable ETA for delivery as well. After Siege is delivered, I'll have a chat with Pushwall and see what else can be done. I'm not currently promising any more contributions past Siege until then.

Your company is starting to have a pretty big toolset. The main thing missing is seemingly an actual 3D modeling software that ties it all together, and can compete with 3DS Max (some lower budget competition would be very welcome as well...). There is still very little competition in the 3D design software market, with Autodesk nearly having a monopoly on it.

Hey! He found out that paranoia and conspiracy theories, when both are collected in large quantities and stored in a single location, can take a physical form and beat the shit out of you for being a first class muppet.

The IP.Board chat module costs quite a bit more (all their individual modules cost more). And such a chat box always looks messy on any website, but more importantly, it will become a direct conflict when the launcher chat lobby is eventually added, since you really would prefer people to hang out in that.

Nearly all art assets used in W3D including terrain can be ported over to any game engine due to everything being made in 3DS Max, although texturing will have to be redone. The main exceptions are particle effects/emitters because those are made using a tool specifically designed for W3D. Other things, such as riggings and character animations, would have to be updated to function on a different engine and the use the logic of that engine. Now take for example an RTS map created in some sort of a world builder tool specifically created for said RTS game, such assets can almost never be ported over due to being very specific to one game in their nature. But make no mistake, porting over the quantity of assets used in for example, APB, is no small undertaking. More importantly, it ethically isn't possible, due to past artists not having given consent for their contributions to be used in different projects.

Engineers can be quite useful, and undervalued. I don't have any real favorites however. Each unit serves a purpose, some more significant than others to be fair. I do have a least favorite unit; the Soviet Grenadier. I tried to use it, but the way the grenades work now pretty much guarantees your target can dodge the explosion in time. It is essentially only good at damaging buildings from a distance, something nearly any unit can do for less cost.

Heh, I see no reason why promoting your own Red Alert-inspired project would not be allowed! I'm not personally familiar with "Garry's Mod" or what game/engine it uses (A mod of a mod?!), so I can't comment on much of this. It looks like you got a long way to go still for sure.

I don't see the harm in giving this a spin. The unit clearly needs a boost in some area before it becomes more commonly used, outside of the few maps where terrain allows for gimmicky tactics. I'm normally of that opinion in other games, but on W3D, with the horrible network code, I would say that friendly fire from everything would just result in a lot of team-kills due to latency, rubber-banding, and de-syncs, and it might even make all of those things worse due to adding extra load on the server to calculate additional damage.

Recommendations have always been a confusing and dated system, not to mention spammy and feeling out of place. Same applies to "platinum medals", I don't even know what those are. That's an entire line to be removed from those rank images as well, less text is good. Highscore and achievement points should be the stats that matter. Edit: I'd also remove the highest registered player count, that's not a number that players need to be bothered with all the time. Simply stating "player X is ranked #Y" is sufficient.

Crouching while in a bush isn't to be underestimated, either. I still believe people don't know it hides your name and radar dot... The game could do a better way of letting people know they are hidden, ideally by making their own name and radar dot grey out while the hidden effect is... in effect.

Those tunnels would also not be able to have proper looking light solve, due to the lack of polygons. It's better to have more polygons in your mesh than too little. At least on W3D. I do prefer to hand craft my terrain, personally.

What a nice face you got there, mate. But really, you're on a tutorial-making spree it seems!

90% of my work on APB in BHP was on assets created by other people. Perhaps surprisingly, of all the issues that came with it, material management was not one of them. I don't really know why, but APB assets always were relatively consistent with things like this. I could open up a 2008 asset right now and not have much difficulty seeing where things go. The only problem is the texture file paths.

I personally avoid instancing since I find it awkward to work with. Also note that I largely merge objects that share the same material unless they are far apart (100+ meters), which cuts down on the overal UVW modifier overview.

That's pretty much how I solve it in most cases, group applied modifiers or copy pasted from the same source. As Chop says the channels are a non-issue. I personally have a standard; 1- 1024x1024 resolution UVW scale, typically 5x5 2- noise filter - interior/buildings (shrink wrap) 3- noise filter - exterior (plane UVW) 4- Larger tiled texture, for example on cliffs. I often remove channel 1 UVW modifiers to preserve UVW coordinates for man-made type objects. The only time I've used more channels was for special 3+ pass material effects, but those modifiers are kept separate.

Servers are first are foremost a budget issue. The second issue of splitting the player population can be eliminated by setting up the EU server and an NA server to automatically alternate every 12 hours based on peak play times. This would require some development however.

He means to say, things always look different. Especially materials since 3DS isn't capable of displaying all W3D material settings. So it's a solid tip to get a feel for how your work is actually going to appear. I do it all the time as well, make 3DS changes then test them in-game. It's a time consuming process and one of the reasons I work with several W3D files for one level, to speed up export times (If I were to merge all Siege files into one, a single export would take like 3 minutes).