Raap

I know I said I'd provide a preview of Siege this weekend, unfortunately there is a technical issue with my version of the development tools which means this will have to be postponed until next week, when hopefully this will be resolved (essentially my tools are out of date and I need the latest ones, but this is problematic at the present). For now, I'll provide a Max shot of the current raw layout of the level. Note that for image clarity, I have hidden the foliage (trees, grass, etc.). If you inspect the base layouts you will notice vulnerabilities. The land routes are well defended from ground attacks but offer no anti-air support. The air power resupply regions of both bases on the other hand, have anti-air support defenses but no protection from ground based attacks. Finally, the rear of each base has practically no defenses altogether. This setup will encourage defenders to "fill the gap" of their defenses themselves, as well as provide clear attack opportunities for the enemy team. The bases are very spread out, this is primarily to minimize the damage a single A-Bomb flare can do. I was comfortable enough keeping the base buildings this spread, since Delta added infantry sprinting. Do note that I've only started working on reviving this map this weekend, and you can expect significant changes still (especially in and around the castle, to support the secondary objective). Three more bits; - The Allies will have access to the Chinook. - Neutral castle cannons on the castle walls will be able to deal significant damage to base buildings. Once destroyed, these cannons leave behind indestructible debris that can be repaired, to restore the cannon. - The Mobile A. A. Gun might make a return in time for Siege to be released. These will be found in limited supply around the castle, they will not respawn, but they can be powerful defensive perks for your team, should you escort them back to your base in safety.

Unless you were a Gamma tester, you wouldn't know Siege. Rest assured I will be providing some preview images this weekend. I'm currently in the process of updating the assets to Delta. I'm also re-designing the faction bases from scratch since all the buildings needed to be re-placed anyhow, as well as defenses, walls, scripts, etc. all being placed in 3DS Max these days. The updating process takes some time as I need to be careful no leftover Gamma properties remain on the map. There aren't currently any crashes on map load, so that seems to be all-clear. Next up is re-texturing various parts of the map since Delta doesn't have all the textures that the map used to have. Then there is also another optimization pass (I've already cut draw calls in half by removing poorly optimized detail objects), as well as adding additional foliage around the map... Without going overboard on that. Finally, I'll be adding the map specific gameplay elements, before ultimately shipping it off to testers. Unlike Hostile Waters, testing for Siege will be minimal since it isn't a major departure from core gameplay (air to air balance might come into close view on this map, however). Well, cant wait to test it when the time comes around. Sounds like a really interesting map. I loved Hostile Waters and what you did with it, really brings out Red Alert's Naval combat, since it wasn't getting widespread use in the original Red Alert until 2, 3, and OpenRA came out.If you wanted to give some constructive (or not) criticism to the map ideas I posted, I'd love to hear it. Goes for everyone else too, I appreciate the support. Hopefully sometime soon Choppy'll teach me the basics of making maps, so I can at least get a map shell made. Might have some trouble placing objects and making tunnels... My only map making experience was on Gmax back in... cold fusion or Nuclear winter I believe..... couldnt figure it out for the life of me. Keep up the amazing work Raap. My only advice is... Get your hands on 3DS Max and experiment while learning. This is the best way to figure out what works and what does not, or more specifically, what works for YOU or not. Start simple, preferably a map that you do NOT intend to release, but simply to serve as a testing ground for your learning of the tools. It's typically a good idea to not release your first project as it is bound to be less good than your second project - and so on. Once you get into the details of things, I'm sure I can give more detailed advice. Right now you're basically looking at learning the basics, so that should be your only concern, and not how amazing your first project will be. I'm not informed on Reborn's development, but Siege has been an APB map since around 2011, it just never saw a public release.

Unless you were a Gamma tester, you wouldn't know Siege. Rest assured I will be providing some preview images this weekend. I'm currently in the process of updating the assets to Delta. I'm also re-designing the faction bases from scratch since all the buildings needed to be re-placed anyhow, as well as defenses, walls, scripts, etc. all being placed in 3DS Max these days. The updating process takes some time as I need to be careful no leftover Gamma properties remain on the map. There aren't currently any crashes on map load, so that seems to be all-clear. Next up is re-texturing various parts of the map since Delta doesn't have all the textures that the map used to have. Then there is also another optimization pass (I've already cut draw calls in half by removing poorly optimized detail objects), as well as adding additional foliage around the map... Without going overboard on that. Finally, I'll be adding the map specific gameplay elements, before ultimately shipping it off to testers. Unlike Hostile Waters, testing for Siege will be minimal since it isn't a major departure from core gameplay (air to air balance might come into close view on this map, however).

Nice... cant wait to see how the map plays. I always loved Fjords, even when the V2/arty spam across the map was real as fuck... Just to be clear, this will not be Fjord. I need more time for Fjord, so I'm finishing up Siege as a mid-term solution... The alternative would have been nothing at all.

Small update: As a mid-term solution to Fjord not being ready for a while, I have decided to delve back into Siege and finish it up. Two hints of what to expect: 1- Two possible victory conditions. A: Base destruction victory condition. B: A to be determined victory condition where the castle plays a primary role. (Unfortunately, Dominion mode had to be excluded due to technical limitations with scoring in a traditional map.) 2- A very heavy air combat focus, as well as the first Delta map to feature both aircraft and Missile Silo's (worry not, the bases will be designed with it in mind).

Merge the (bottom) sub spawn bay collision mesh with the normal underwater interior mesh so all normal collision rules apply to it. I think it will look less interesting to have subs spawn right on the surface of something however, but that's a very minor visual concern. Just don't move any of the collision meshes, as you can see, they are set up in a very specific way in order to funnel out the subs (same reason a part of the interior doesn't have camera collisions). It took quite a few hours of fine tuning. If only I was able to set up a spawner proxy in Max for the subs, but there is no way to copy positional data (XYZ distance from the origin point of a specific mesh) from Level Edit to Max, then the whole thing would be a one time setup process.

But it can be bypassed on maps without Gap Generators, similarly to how I made stealth crates work on HW (prior to their removal)... Not an ideal solution, I know. Teleporting into submarines on purchase seems like it would break gameplay consistency. Unless I'm mistaken, you can set up teleport scripts to only teleport players from a certain team? In which case the fail-safe teleport zones could be set up for Soviet players only, solving the easy entry exploit from Allied players. One last way to make teleporters work is to use the 'Advanced' Sub Pen interior and make the sub spawn bays inaccessible to infantry that walk into it from outside the big door, by adding an infantry-only collision blocker or other creative terrain changes that don't interfere with the sub spawn bays themselves.

I missed this topic. The Sub Pen interior took a lot of tuning. It's not perfect, the Missile Sub can still let you walk off into the water if you stand on it without pressing E, because the model's collision mesh is smaller than the Attack Sub, but I couldn't raise the spawn position any further due to a few reasons related to the water logic and Sub Pen itself. Adding a ramp is possible but it would make the interior more confusing. A backup teleport zone directly below the sub spawn points might be the safest route to do. One more thing to note is that on some maps, freshly spawned subs don't stop moving (even if you don't see it, the game still considers them to be moving), which results in players sliding off the top of the subs at high speed, leaving you with milliseconds to quickly press E to enter the sub before falling off it. This particular bug is hard to reproduce in local test environments as it depends on network latency and a live server environment, neither of which can be emulated via local testing. Either way, Pushwall knows that if he wants to use the 'Advanced' Sub Pen interior for all maps, he is free to do so. My opinion might be biased, but I prefer the HW interior to the default one, it is more logical and less camp-able. The only problem is, the Allied Naval Yard cannot receive a similar treatment without tripling the size of the building like I had to do with HW, and very few current naval maps can support the 'Advanced' Naval Yard design's scale.

I think we'd want to avoid setups like that to prevent player score data issues. There is also consistency concerns with something like that, and not to mention balance concerns. Designing a level with those things would be opening several cans of worms with very negligible payoff. The wish you have can be broken down to a basic request; The request of more unit and map variation. This can be achieved with other means (see Hostile Waters).

New maps are the second most requested feature from players. The most requested is Cruisers... But those cannot happen due to gameplay limitations. I'm actually surprised people gave up on asking for airplane physics, that used to be very hyped up back in the day and looked like it would become a reality at one stage for Gamma, but it never worked out. I think most of the W3D project development teams have a different priority list themselves however, one where accessibility and marketing are most likely at the top. But you should certainly give map design a try. I don't know when APB's tools will get released, but nothing is stopping you from starting work on 3DS Max designing and doing some tutorials on the web. A word of warning however; Expect learning the tools to take a while, as it's not as simple like building a map in an RTS level editor.

AI Ore Truck. The way it just keeps on driving after it crushes your soul you is extremely traumatizing.

Frozen Wasteland, another one of my old trashcan maps. It had damaged bases and vehicles, it was a weird idea, like so many of my old projects. The concept didn't really work since starting a game and having to repair your base first isn't very fun. The map itself wasn't exactly grand in design, mostly a re-use of assets. That's the extent of my memory of it. SnowHills and Ivory Wastelands are both different maps (present day APB Wasteland is actually an updated SnowHills, some level files might still refer to it as such). SnowHills is one of my trashcan maps, Ivory Wasteland is a map made by tweekbee, afaik. And no, it's not Ack's Glacier.

Hey guys, I've been overloaded with other priorities as of late, certainly nothing I could have planned for. I'm down to very little spare time in my days and for me to put out a map worth playing, I need more time than I have right now, if I do not want to turn it into a rush job. The Fjord remake still very much is on my mind, I will get it done, but I'm going to avoid giving any further ETA's since I do not know when my RL schedule clears up. What I may end up doing instead however, just to fill the gap, is release a smaller map - not Fjord - within the next few weeks. A smaller map simply takes less time to create, so I can work on it in the time I got and still feel like it might go somewhere. No promises, except for the fact that I'll try my best.

I don't think the little computer screen will make a huge difference, but I suppose that, since Thieves look for them to steal from Ore Silo's, their absence might be sufficient a hint that the particular Ore Silo is question cannot be stolen from.

If it turns out to be a problem, we can always randomize tree positions at the start of the map >=D Careful with that, W3D is still sensitive about the use of objects of any kind. A fully randomized forest sounds like a disaster unless you depend on a few pre-created "forest templates", in which case you will still run into both light solve and pathfind issues. Nice update though. The vehicle designs and textures share similarities with the design style for the newer APB assets, was this intentional or just chance?

Shock Trooper Hinds on icebergs were murdering Allied ships during testing, so I removed them. Shock Troopers can camp the Advanced Naval Yard spawn exit from the nearest icebergs and basically fully block Allied attempts to do anything. This is the same reason why the crates do not contain Shock Rifles (I added a rare stealth crate instead, but this was removed last patch). So I don't think this was a good idea. Good work on the patch though.

U wot m8 A map concept so terrible, that you actually want to see it. The scary thing perhaps is that in my mind I can actually see ways to get the flying part working. Just have Yaks pumping machine gun and autocannon fire every few minutes into the battlefield. Solved! You know, making fun of the magnificence that would be Fissure_Flying only motivates me to put it in line after the Fjord remake. I'll make it work and it will be amazing. AND NONE OF YOU TWATS CAN SAY OTHERWISE!

U wot m8 A map concept so terrible, that you actually want to see it. The scary thing perhaps is that in my mind I can actually see ways to get the flying part working.

Something tells me naval transports need a self destruct timer after nobody uses them for 3 minutes. Edit: *

Dominion mode doesn't have to be gone forever. If I got time for it, I plan to use it to create a hybrid Domination/C&C mode gameplay for Siege, once I wrap up my current plans for the new Fjord. If I had unlimited time, I'd have both those maps ready by now already. Unfortunately, I do not. Edit: No map has to be gone forever. Both FoI and RockTrap can be turned into small base maps with some development... FoI being easier for that due to the modular design. Also, Fissure_Flying_Flares.

That would be me I never leaked Gamma though. Whatever the case may be, I'm not getting involved into it. Just know that the new Fjord will be 100% my own work and not feature work of other artists besides APB's core gameplay structures.

There is enough demand for as classic WoW server. I'd imagine that, with a well supported petition, Blizzard will consider hosting their own "progression server". It makes sense since it would bring a lot of emulator players back into their official servers (and therefore redirect revenue back to Blizzard). However in doing so, they would also admit they made a lot of bad decision post-vanilla, decisions that alienated a large portion of their player base, and I don't think their ego would allow them to admit to that. Meanwhile in MMORPG-land, I'm playing .

I would greatly encourage you guys to try and create such levels yourselves. You can already design your environment in 3DS Max right now, as you don't need the SDK for that.

Except that the AI is too bad to really pull that off. Which is what we've already said a few times. You can replace the AI with actual players instead, and design a level accordingly. Unfortunately my plate is now full. I am working on this Fjord remake, and it will likely not be ready this month as I'm a lot more busy now compared to when I was working on Hostile Waters. Nonetheless, I will finish this level sooner or later... Just don't expect another one during the same time period.

When I wrote that post I did not consider AI in the level. I should probably have mentioned that. So yeah, expecting a non-retarded AI in W3D is in fact, one of those outlandish ideas that won't happen unless you re-write the AI from scratch yourself (good luck). You can do pretty much anything else, though, including the concept of a moving, objective-orientated battlefield. Edit: To be clear, when I say moving battlefield, I do not mean "The battlefield terrain is literally moving, like holy shit it got legs and started running", I mean that the playable space and game logic can shift from one level region to another within the same game session. For example you can have a convoy escort level design where attack and defend objectives move and are enabled and disabled based on level progression.