Raap

You may want to change the staff moderator image into something else. If you have to ask why, then clearly you haven't looked at it for longer than 3 seconds.

I'm not sure, probably to nerf backwards sailing since that now no longer serves any purpose. Still, since the charges now drop from alternating directions, it will involve more luck to hit submarines with them (especially since the proximity detonation only works half the time even when directly on top of a sub). That being said, in a straight up engagement a Gunboat can destroy an Attack Sub with its main cannon, as long as the Gunboat doesn't miss, which can happen with the camera position blocking your view.

Please delete this map and any of my other ancient trash from your hard drive asap!

The only thing to consider with air units is the placement of two aircraft landing point daves arrow objects for each team, and face them in the right direction so the aircraft come in from outside your map. This is no different from previous APB versions. New infantry models, skeletons and animation sets, which is what giant ants would require, is no small task. Good luck.

Well honestly when it comes to APB Delta specific stuff, the main thing is to place the tech level and game manager daves arrow objects. The rest is standard W3D stuff you can follow a number of tutorials on. A set of sample files should cover any doubt. As for naval, well, it needs a bunch of proxy'd script zones, again, best handled via a sample file so people can see how it is set up. Besides that, you need a water level daves arrow that is placed 3 meters above the actual visible water level mesh. Last but not least for naval, you need a series of tile meshes proxy'd from the main level file and be assigned special collision group settings in Level Edit, to handle what units collides where (this is how naval transports get to go onto the beach but not ships). A helicopter killer mesh as well, if a map has water and air units. As long as you're making a standard C&C mode map you shouldn't run into any problems... Naval is harder to add and recommended only for experienced W3D developers. Just to warn mappers in advance, Hostile Waters uses 8 different W3D files JUST for the water logic alone (out of 32 W3D files in total).

All my Delta knowledge for HW comes from you and Generalcamo. At best I could do a very quick write-up of what shit you need to place in Level Edit specifically for APB Delta maps to work... But to delve into all the details of proxy'd script zones and what not... It would require a small book.

Alright folks, my work on Hostile Waters has officially concluded. It's now up to Pushwall and the team to decide when the map goes live, and if they want to make any changes themselves or not - they are of course free to do so. This map, and the custom buildings, took quite a bit longer to complete than my original estimation (these things happen). I hope you will enjoy the gameplay offered on this map when it finds itself in the standard map rotation. Here is the change log for this version compared to the public test version. Keep in mind that additional changes could be made by the APB team if they so desired. Gameplay - Added crate powerups on the icebergs, using a custom Soviet themed loot table. - Added infantry tunnel on the Refill Pad iceberg, as well as a wall for extra cover, which also provides some protection from the abandoned SAM Sites for Allied Longbows. - Removed the Soviet Schock Trooper from the purchase list, as it had a too easy time wrecking both ships and aircraft alike from the icebergs. - Removed and moved some base defenses on both teams to reduce the stalemate effect in larger player matches, as well as make early infantry rushes a little harder to pull off. - Made the abandoned buildings harder to capture, by raising the amount of Engineer "ammo" required to capture them. (Service Depot/Refill Pad from 30 to 52, Silo's from 30 to 36.) - Slightly raised fog density, to provide better cover for Allied ships attempting to flank the Soviet base. - Made the free start-up Naval Transports spawn as spawners without re-spawn, rather than vehicle presets. - Soviet Sub Pen - Expanded a blocker, preventing newly purchased subs from moving to the sides and being left in areas where they are hard to destroy, while still occupying the production spawn zone. Visuals - Redone the ice effect and textures. - Soviet submarines clipping their camera through the icebergs will no longer be able to see through them. - Separated underwater surface mesh in order to apply Underwater Dirt as material setting, for water splashy footsteps. - Exported the mission accomplished/failed EVA messages with higher volume. - Made cloud layer more dense, and added distant thunder storm. - Corrected map-wide wind audio effects playing at too low volume. - Iceberg ice material type changed to Glass. - Re-textured iceberg rocks. - Allied Naval Yard - Fixed window frames. - Allied Naval Yard - Fixed a few extreme cases of vertex light solve uglyness on the upper platform exterior. - Allied Naval Yard - Added missing edges to the upper area of the interior support beams. - Allied Naval Yard - Fixed interior staircase pointy bits extending higher than the first floor. - Allied Naval Yard - Newly purchased Naval Transports no longer bump into the edge of the platform while falling down. - Soviet Sub Pen - Fixed light bleeding through the SAM platforms. - Soviet Sub Pen - Re-textured barrel props like on the Naval Yard, to remove multi-materials. - Island bases - Re-textured barrel props like on the Naval Yard, to remove multi-materials. - Island bases - Corrected a texture seam in the Allied base. - Added a new loading screen, with a modified background image from Vuxlort. Thanks for your patience while I worked on this map.

Also beware of mesh corruption when importing W3D assets, which can potentially cause a region of polygons on a mesh to not render in-game. You can fix that by editing the mesh a little and then re-exporting.

I'm curious how an APB match would play with shared team credits... It would probably involve a lot of team chat rage about wasting credits... Yeah, never mind, it'd be pretty terrible to share credits if you don't want people to rage quit every match.

I'm not saying "APB GOT TO DO THIS NAOW!", it's just a thought I put together in 5 minutes. It's pretty much what I do, come up with concepts which need some more time to iron out potential problems. Interior defenses as an upgrade for example could end up being a big departure from regular gameplay, and turn into a gimmick that just ends up reducing gameplay fun factors. But at least having a second pool of resources besides credits, does allow for quite a few new options to be developed upon it... And that's something to keep in mind; None of this exists within the current functionality of W3D gameplay, to my knowledge, and would require substantial work. Enough work to make you wonder if development time isn't better spent elsewhere... Especially considering the limited time W3D staff programmers have. With that said, a generic resource pool logic has a very wide range of usable applications, for a number of W3D projects besides APB. So it'd make a strong case for being "worth the time", providing there is enough interest.

Hostile Waters does use scripted gameplay as well, but unlike Seamist it does so with balanced teams and more traditional base layouts. The reason you don't see too many of these maps is because it takes a while to set up (Hostile Waters using about 40 or so scripts for the end game logic, not counting the bonus objective scripting). Back between Beta and Gamma, the APB dev team was tossing around the idea of making most maps have some objective of sorts, or at least a more clear plot. This never became reality due to various reasons. I personally still think that each map should have something more unique to it, to help make gameplay more varied. This way Zama and Bonsai don't end up playing more or less exactly the same like they currently do, and it allows maps to play differently not exclusively by their layout alone. The problem is you can't just add objectoves or bonus objectives to every map and have it make sense... The maps need to be designed with it in mind, or greatly modified. In truth, possibilities would greatly improve if we had an additional in-game resource besides credits, with different uses, and possibly map-specific. Right now everything is tied to one resource, or existing building functionality. Edit: Expanding on that idea, if we had a new resource pool (let's just call it "Resources" so it becomes more general-purpose), and have this resource be team-shared and not unique per player like credits, then you could have teams work towards building up a pool of "Resources" from map-specific objectives (securing and holding a lumber yard on The Woods Today, holding a warehouse on Metro, etc.), and then a team member could spend these resources on a special terminal to activate a team buff, purchase a special unit, upgrade buildings (gain interior defenses), or build additional structures... You name it. By not tying this or map objectives to the regular credit-based economy, you don't mess up regular gameplay balance, but still achieve interesting results that can spice up map gameplay variation. If enough upgrade options exist, then a sub-game of technology racing is added to the game, to make sure your team has more things unlocked.

The destroyer was refusing to fire sometimes (both the depth charges and the missiles). Usually when it's close to land, which it has to be to hit certain buildings on certain maps. Not sure why but granting full rotation to the turret fixes that. I believe I mentioned that this is how I fixed a similar problem back in the day. No idea why it happens either, just some typical W3D weirdness.

THIS! MAKE THIS A THING! This would require me to actually have, like, a factory level of sorts... We will see what happens around April, that's when I anticipate having more time for another project.

Seems like Naval might finally be close to equal balance now. Of course, we're missing a certain map to verify that completely... (my fault, got hit by a slight delay).

Certainly doable since Hostile Water's buildings are baked into terrain like regular base buildings, but use a duplicate hidden mesh for in-game targeting and game logic. The big question is, would you want to do that? I think not. Besides, that's really threading into AR territory, and base capture is their thing. "Tech buildings" (I don't like that word or the concept) rarely make sense. Abandoned, map-specific capturable objectives make more sense, but only if the map setting supports it, and even then, only if the gameplay benefits from it. I didn't add the abandoned buildings to HW for a laugh, they tie into the map gameplay plot and do impact gameplay immensely. Would I use the same buildings on other maps? No, that'd be cheap and make less sense. Would I design new capturable objectives for maps that make sense for this? Sure. Why think so small, though. There are plenty of other things you could set up for Engineers to do, such as toggling withdraw bridges in caves, repairing elevators, opening different passages in a map, etc.

I'm interested to know your reasons behind that opinion. Keep in mind I am not part of the current APB team so my opinion is my own. Sometime after Beta launched, an effort began to improve various art assets. Different design methods were created, and the template for future designs started to become more firm near Gamma's launch. This overal design style has not changed since then, so to change it again now, would in my opinion be compromising the present art direction. Hope that made sense, writing this post with a tired mind. That's an interesting viewpoint, but it has little to nothing to do with the art direction because the artists didn't decide how they wanted the camouflage to be implemented. The ability to choose your camo in the game is arguably a decision that was made by the game designers and leads at the time with little to no foresight on how that would affect the look of the game. My counter argument is that being able to choose your camo isn't a topic of the art direction at all, but one of how the designers and leads have chosen to implement the art in a way that allows players to compromise the art direction when playing the game. As for maps where more than one camo would be useful (i.e. Stormy Valley = forest + Urban) then yeah sure! If it fits then why not. My argument is against stuff like snow on forest and desert on snow combos. What is an art direction or game design choice ultimately matters little when APB never had, and never will have, a firm development structure. There is no design document or anything of that nature that declares anything about anything. What we're left with is just what we think of something as it currently exists. I merely gave a brief backstory into how the current state of things originated, as an argument towards claiming that changing anything about the current game, might change what the game actually is... A game that doesn't take itself extremely seriously. By making camos map specific, you make a step towards changing APB towards a game with a more serious tone. This is normally a design change and not an art direction change, but since the very subject covers art, is sort of would cover a grey area... If there was actually a design document, anyhow. Did I stop making sense by now? Good, that means we can drop this subject and get back to the more important subject; Snow camo Technicians on Pipeline.

Well, I said my piece. It's all just a matter of opinion, and mine is that the varied colour schemes is part of the art direction since developers stopped taking the game as serious between Beta and Gamma.

I'm interested to know your reasons behind that opinion. Keep in mind I am not part of the current APB team so my opinion is my own. Sometime after Beta launched, an effort began to improve various art assets. Different design methods were created, and the template for future designs started to become more firm near Gamma's launch. This overal design style has not changed since then, so to change it again now, would in my opinion be compromising the present art direction. Hope that made sense, writing this post with a tired mind.

It's not really about APB taking itself seriously, it's more about keeping the camouflages stuck to the environments that they were made for, rather than compromising the art style of the game by allowing it to look like a patchwork quilt of contrasting colours for the sole reason of "player choice". I would argue that not allowing players to pick their camo, is compromising the art direction.

I don't think that APB can take itself so serious to not allow players to pick their camo. Demo Truck horn sounds would be the next thing to go when you go on that path, and then more things will follow. Entire maps like FoI would need to be axed for the same logic.

I don't think player choice should be removed, but at least default selections could make more sense.

Take your crazy logic and get out of here! You will not stop me from having my snow camo Technician on Pipeline.

My original intent was indeed to make the islands themselves much harder to penetrate than the naval buildings, this to encourage hitting the naval buildings. It just falls apart a bit too much in 12+ team matches, so I'll be shuffling a few defenses around, and removing a hand full. Also keep in mind that Naval Transports will no longer be able to sail past defenses and survive... They will properly need to be escorted, and a landing area made clear from defenses... Or take the long route and land on the island where chance of failure becomes larger.

The test period has ended, the event was a bit of a failure since most people were not aware of it. The limited testing that did occur, provided me with a list of things I will be changing. Expect the final version of the map to both play and look even better. Despite the low participation rate in the screenshot part of the event, I am a man of my word; I will review the submissions I did receive and pick a winner... Even if I ultimately may not use that screenshot for the actual loading screen. You can expect Hostile Waters to become part of APB Delta's official map roster near the end of the month!

Except the Tanya camos, which were already a part of the game but were just never used. (Check the always.dat for Beta and see for yourself. ) That's probably the only decent infantry model in APB, so yeah, I suppose you might be able to add camos into Delta for it her. Certain other models might not need to be redone, just updated and re-textured at higher resolutions. Volkov's overal shape is fine for example, but just needs some mesh corrections and a paint job. Some infantry models got animation issues as well, such as extreme neck stretching under some conditions.