Raap

What I'm struggling with is creating a somewhat believable way of having subs 'float' on an invisible mesh to keep them above submerging-level, while making infantry able to easily get in and out of those subs, in a place where there has to be zero obstructions for ships and Naval Transports. It was easy for the ASP; subs spawned there in a fixed location and no other vehicles could reach those spots, allowing me to build mesh around that. So what will happen now is, you exit the sub in a small bay area, your character is ejected and lands below the water surface (with all the graphical problems that come with it), then the character has to walk to a stair to get on top. So here is what I'm thinking now; Bay area, sub-holder mesh, and a stair mesh for graphical immersion purposes only. Instead, the bay area gets a teleport zone that teleports anyone that touched the water there to the top of the stairs, as if the character walked out of it. I think this is the best I can do unless we somehow get infantry swimming (nope). Edit: On paper I'm running into a logic issue however: AFAIK there is no script zone logic for teleporting infantry to a nearest instance of a preset. Most teleportation logic works by teleporting to specific instances, but I want this building to be easily re-usable so anything that requires specific ID's is just a no-go. I'll delve further into it this week, maybe I overlooked a script that suits this purpose.

I guess the side effect of more parked submarines is also more opportunities to steal one.

Sub docking is untested on my part for the asset. I could add a bottom to it with a stair though, these would be purely mesh changes and nothing mechanical. I'll follow up on this, this week, @Pushwall.

With Naval Transports, ships, and helicopters. Submarines cannot dock, because their logic prevents functioning when unoccupied. However, theoretically speaking if that were to be resolved, then with a proper forward-facing exit transition and a basic 'submarine holder' mesh within the repair bay, you might be able to dock submarines at one point. Submarine docking has always been a rough spot. Ship docking as well, as the exit transition is placed on the rear rather than the consistent left side that is applied to all land vehicles (with a right side being picked if the left side of the vehicle is blocked by anything). If it were up to me, I'd have ship models be altered slightly with a clear indicator of where the exit transition is (like an emissive piece of material), and likewise apply that logic consistently across vehicles that may have some similar identification issues.

I do not think Mammoth supports Renegade and the scripts 4.x.x series. W3DHub uses sort of a branched code (still created and managed by Jonwil and the engine team), a lot of the scripts from 4.x.x are removed and instead only newer code is used in the 5.x.x branch. This is also why the W3D engine used in APB is different from stock Renegade. Here is Mammoth: If you have more technical questions, someone from the engine team will be much better positioned to answer those questions, as I might give wrong information!

Might be a Gmax thing. We don't really use that anymore around here (we also do not use level edit anymore).

Just use the water or ice setup but with more suitable textures.

Well technically you are assigning an RGB value to vertices so it does matter, but because W3D alpha blending only understands grey-scale colours it filters out the colour value and just uses the 'brightness' within those RGB values. But this is not what is causing your current issue.

I tried everything, the persistent right-click drop down 'ghosting' came back as well, and other annoying issues such as interfering with GIMP UI functionality, meaning I can never do texture work with 3DS open. If I had a properly functioning 3D development environment then I assure you that I'd gain a productivity boost of immeasurable magnitude. As it stands, all 3DS Max does for this project is ensure that it will take a very long time before I can complete it. It is frustrating to work like this.

I think that's a Gmax display thing. Granted, I haven't used Gmax since 1977 so I could be wrong.

Hope that's W3D glass logic and not 500 unique objects with attached game logic. ?

I do recognize this problem, I'm just struggling to remember what causes it specifically. Have you tried re-making the material? Sometimes when you set up the material settings you can accidentally mouse scroll without knowing you did it, and you end up bumping some setting up or down which can cause some pretty bizarre looking effects! Also double check you didn't accidentally set emissive to anything lower than 255. W3D texture emissive effects are, despite having RGB input for it, an on-off deal. 255 means off, anything else means on. Additionally, if you are using any sort of scaling noise filter (judging by your picture I assume not, but just stating it to cover it), make sure detail alpha on the shader tab is set to scale and that you correctly flagged Valpha in the W3D properties. Lastly, make sure your blending mode is either opaque or alpha blend for this purpose, custom effects are vulnerable to problems such as this one.

Based on my conversations with Jon and Romanov, I essentially needed a rewrite of W3D's inventory system to be able to include functions such as continuing reload times after swapping the 'active weapon'. Essentially I needed it to function as a skill/ability hotbar rather than purely a weapon selection menu. This was the main challenge and I could not find anyone to meet it (for free). The engine by the way has no real problems rendering any of this. The real hard points come from per-object triangle limitations which behaves extremely inconsistently, for example I can have very massive objects export and render without problems, but when you try and mesh merge a bunch of rocks, both the export function begins to stall, as well as W3D just crashing upon attempting to render said object. But what takes the absolute crown in terms of trouble creating this, is 3DS Max 8. Gigantic export times, incredibly poor viewport performance, and with each Windows 10 update something new crashes (like loading it up gives me a specific dll file error but it still works). We might have a nicer editor now but the dependency on Max 8 is a bottleneck... Unfortunately newer 3DS versions function via monthly payments (~350 euros a month per individual licence!), and we also do not have a modern W3D plugin... And I tried Blender, but my God that program is a mess, nothing functions intuitively in it.

Not more MiG?

I've played Fallout 4, not any of the other games. As to where I did get my inspiration, from my cancelled Unreal project, which was going to be a fantasy team combat game (magic, melee, archery combat). I got relatively far into a prototype before I had to can it due to financial limitations to keep pushing it. A portion of the art I painstakingly updated for W3D usage, and all texture work is hand-drawn by myself (both terrain and props). Before I decided on making this an APB level, I was still tossing a coin between doing so, or creating a new W3D project using similar designs as my Unreal project. Unfortunately I ran into a programming resource bottleneck and was unable to find someone to fill that void.

Maybe bold and italics wasn't enough?!? Okay lads, HANG ON! CORE GAMEPLAY

Hey guys, I figured that it is time for a new thread since this is no longer an "uncategorized" project! This is an upcoming Red Alert: A Path Beyond core gameplay level, and for the first time, this is a mission set on US soil. But as I do not wish to spoil everything in advance, I will keep the remaining information such as the background plot close to myself until release... But here is what I CAN share! The level features a large number of 4096x4096 diffuse textures, created from real photography and edited by myself. All photography was paid for, as I could not have taken them myself given that I live in Europe! The level features a lot of experimental graphical effects, the bulk of which could not have been rendered in older versions of the W3D engine and game tools. The level geometry uses some of the most complex meshes that W3D can presently support. Everything you see is still a work in progress! Here is a video demonstrating some of the environmental effects, such as periodic overhead dust storms, persistent distant dust storms, full screen colour filtering, full screen dust particle animations, and some decrepit old windmill, because reasons! [NOTE: Unfortunately, YouTube murders the image clarity a lot, so the smaller details are hard to spot, but in-game these will be much more visible!] As always, let me know what you think, if you have suggestions, or whatever. Post words!

I think if the entire game was just variations of Red Zones, as well as feature PLANT-based Tiberium flora and fauna, the rest could have been sufficiently explained via the intel data. The Blue Zones were just... They didn't belong, at all. But beyond that, it was a solid game.

Speaking of big numbers... And speaking of downright terrible things...

Delivered art and logic to Pushwall. It is now up to him to decide when this is added to the game. Note that I created this building in a way that it is easy to implement in any map, so even if HW cannot be saved with it, it will still be a useful asset for level designers to spice up naval gameplay. Edit: In-game shot for those interested.

Stop injecting Red Alert pixels into the APB client, you cheating bastard.

It is why many people, especially in recent years, started to acknowledge C&C3 as a proper C&C game that we all should have been a bit more relaxed on back in the day. Everything that came after C&C3 was simply a mess. EA was most unlike its typical self during C&C3/KW, hell you could say they were a decent company. Unfortunately upper management stepped in and demanded changes and the people that made that time period good were let go or they moved on themselves. Unfortunately Rivals acted as a confirmation that we'll never see that face of EA ever again. Edit: C&C3's biggest flaw was the lack of continuity from TS/FS. The mission intel database only did so much to bridge those gaps but at least the intel database existed... In later games they made absolutely zero effort to explain continuity gaps, hell, in RA3 they hit the bloody reset button and pretended nothing happened prior to it.

On latency, there is no miracle cure for this. The network code has been tinkered with in the past and I'm not sure much more can be done to improve it. All games have latency issues, the trick lies in knowing how to hide it. Rubber banding remains a true engine problem that most other engines managed to largely "fix" with more advanced prediction systems. If you guys want an NA server, know that this costs money. A hardware mirror copy of the EU server will cost around 80-90 dollars per month, and more than that if you want to try running on more advanced servers, which by the way, have not really been tested for actual effect, to my knowledge.

Hit a slight delay due to the insane tropical weather in my country, it is record-breaking heat and it hasn't rained a drop in three weeks, all of which is not normal for my otherwise rainy country! I can likely deliver tomorrow, so this should be up for testing in a near-future patch. Lets see if increased naval staying power is the thing that pushes the gameplay more aggressively forward. Worth noting is that this is my personal last attempt at solving the issues with HW. I've stated to Pushwall that I'd rather see the map put out of active rotation than to spend a lot of time changing the level geometry.