OWA

Seriously? So now the testers aren't allowed to debate balancing with the outside community because some of the older blogs got heated? Nothing here was discussed that wasn't already mentioned in the blog, dude, and there wasn't even the slightest hint at shit-slinging. Sorry buddy, but if you wanted to avoid conflict this was the last post you could have made- care to rephrase that in a way that doesn't indicate a grudge against how some of the older blogs were handled? Testers should really be talking about the game balance of the test builds in the testing forum. It's fairly logical right? Seeing as the current test build's balance isn't representative of what the release build's balance will be; if someone says "X unit is broken and will kill Y unit when Z happens", it can unintentionally stir up worries over whether the final build will be balanced or not. Saying that, "sometimes debates and discussions in here turn into pointless shit slinging" is quite a bold statement to make, but the the key word you're looking for here is sometimes.

Hey everyone! It's been a long while since the last update, but here's a new one to stop those AR blues. Plus, we simply couldn't have APB and TSR releasing new updates without us! We missed the boat on posting an update last month, so here's a new one to cover January and February! We've done a fair amount of work (or rather danpaul88, dtrngd and ChAoS have) since the last time we updated! Here's what the team have been up to recently: One Winged Angel recently turned 23. He's still a handsome devil though. dtrngd has been working on AR's presets recently and there have been a lot of updates for the testers to play with, but now he's moved his attention onto Reborn, so that a playable build can be constructed. fear not Rebornites! your game is in very good and capable hands! danpaul88 has been working on loads of great new scripts; some of which are demonstrated and explained in this update! ChAoS has been rigging weapons using the new first person hands; a cool video of that is on show below. BogdanV has been modelling bits and pieces, but has a fair bit of University work that has been getting in the way. The rest of the team has been up to various bits and bobs. Beta 2 Gameplay Footage danpaul88 has recently posted this video on the BHP youtube channel which shows lots of lovely Beta 2 gameplay! Watch Grizzly, IFV and Harrier rushes on South Pacific as well as some infantry action on Rocky Pass and capturing structures on Freezing Straits! Not much else to say about this one, so enjoy the video! New First Person Rigs ChAoS has been hard at work rigging the weapons up in first person! Once we get enough weapons into the game, we can transition over from the old renegade rig to our new shiny rig! The problem with the Renegade skeleton is that it's old and quite simple compared to what we could potentially do. so what we have done (or rather what Eggman891 has done) is create a rig for a new set of hands that has a lot more joints in it; this way, we can produce better animations that look nicer. It's only an aesthetic change, but it does affect the whole first-person mode of the game, so we're going to make sure it's done right. :)In the future we could potentially create more hand types and every infantry could have their own set of hands, but that's a maybe. Check out the video below where ChAoS runs through some of the weapons that he's completed using the new rig. Conquest Mode AI As well as playing the game, danpaul88 has also been coding up a storm recently. We should have really called this the Janbruary Update: danpaul88 and ChAoS edition! Anyway, back to the news at hand. a new AI objective system has been written up so that bots can actually play various game-modes! Why is this important? It's important because it means we can put bots on any map that we want to and have them play entire games out by themselves (in the simplest form). For example, a SEAL will be able to work out that infantry are more important to shoot than tanks, but he won't be smart enough to place C4 on weakpoints. In the past, bots needed waypoints that they could follow like a trail of breadcrumbs around the map, but now we can auto-generate our pathfinding data, give a bot an objective and they'll find their own way to achieve it. This is currently how our miners work, which is incredibly easy for mappers to setup and is incredibly flexible if we want to do multiple ore fields (se the next segment for more on that). The key points concerning this new AI is that it's based on two simple concepts; offence and defence. An offensive AI will swear at you loudly and show you his arse prioritise attacking over defending and will also decide what to attack based on it's unit-type. I.e. A Rhino Tank will look for other tanks to attack when assaulting a position, whilst a Navy SEAL will always prefer to attack infantry. Defensive AIs will prioritise defending over attacking and can be assigned to defend key targets. Just captured an oil derrick? No problem; some Grizzly tanks will move in to defend it for you. This could also be used for maps where defending the ore miners are key; so each miner could have an escort of a couple of tanks when moving out into the battlefield to harvest more. Objectives are also unit-type based depending how suitable they are for certain units. To test this new AI out, danpaul88 set up a test game of conquest mode to find out if it was capable of playing an entire game by itself. The results were good! All of the documentation for this new AI can be found here: http://doc.tiberiantechnologies.org/scripts.dll/classdp88___a_i___objective.html Re-Growable Ore Fields danpaul88 has worked more magic by creating scripts that will support re-growable ore fields! You heard it right! This basically means that ore fields will shrink as they are harvested by miners. Then when the field is fully depleted, the miner will move onto the next field (and yes the AI is equipped to do this on it's own). If a field is depleted, but it has an Ore Extractor, the ore will regrow over time; so an ore field that gets depleted at the start of the game, might become a source of income again nearer the end! So now we have the potential to create maps that start with a small field of ore or gems close by that will get depleted, thus making the miner search for alternate sources later on into the game. This will give a massive C&C-feel to the game which will hopefully get everyone buzzing with nostalgia! The documentation for these scripts are public, so feel free to check them out below! Ore Field Script: http://doc.tiberiantechnologies.org/scripts.dll/classdp88___ore___field.html Ore Extractor Script: http://doc.tiberiantechnologies.org/scripts.dll/classdp88___ore___field___drill.html Misc. Other News In other news this update, here's a list of other things that we've been up to: The doors of the War Factory are actually targetable now. this means that shooting them will do damage the building itself! Dawnblaze has been working on the %5Burl=%5Burl=]Soviet Spy Plane[/url], but it's not quite ready yet. The new Rocketeer physics are ingame! This means that when you deploy the rocket pack now the Rocketeer should fly like a proper VTOL with a lot less lag! We tried giving Crazy Ivan a grenade-type weapon to make him more effective against infantry, but now we've removed it in favour of a more RA2-style small sticky bomb. We're working on getting parachuting reinforcements into the game. When you lose your War Factory, extra vehicles will be parachuted down to you. We might even be able to parachute down weapons and equipment for when the barracks is lost as well. The Engineer IFV now repairs continuously instead of in bursts. This has made it a much better vehicle! Rand00m Something for Zelda fans. Something for Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter fans. Aaaaaand something for C&C fans. Fini See you next time guys and gals!

We've had trouble trying to get V3 Missiles to become targetable. It might not feature due to engine limitations. If the Soviets steal a Nighthawk, the Allies have IFVs and GGIs that'll do the job. We're planning on adding every teamed structure that was in RA2... eventually.

It got promoted by shooting the Barracks. The system is set up so you get veterancy points for damaging units/structures and not only when killing them. This prevents killstealing rages. Similar to C&C3? IIRC yes. If you have the time to test the game, you don't need additional skills, just throw an application It's mostly availability, matureness and trustability that counts when picking testers. And here I was thinking I needed to be more active on the forums, you guys are contradicting one another . That's one of the factors we look for, being active on the forums goes towards trustability and availability.

Think Battlefield-style gameplay. We're going to stop taking apps on the last day of this year. Then we'll get together an review the applicants in the new year.

We usually allow a few weeks for everyone to get their applications in. We'll meet up one of these next nights and go over them.

We have most of them them modelled, just not rigged and ingame. AR is similar to APB in the sense that it's on the w3d engine and has AoW mode as the main game type, but most of the similarities end there. AR is a step away from APB because we didn't want to make a clone and have you guys go "AMG YOU MADE APB WITH AN RA2 SKIN". The weakpoint mechanic is vastly different to what the APB dev team's ideas were at the time; only the name is the same. Their idea was to simply have a weakpoint that had the same function as an MCT, but was more believable (i.e. War Factory V2 Missiles). The AR mechanic is multi-layered. each building has two weakpoints, an easily destroyable one that disables the building and a harder-to-kill one that destroys the building. The weakpoints aren't linked to the building's main health, so the building must be destroyed with either an exterior assault or interior sabotage. There's a lot of difference to the system, even though "weakpoints have been promised for APB ages ago", saying is a lot different than actually doing. APB is still a cool game. We never said it wasn't. I don't think APB is being left in anyone's dust right now seeing as neither AR or Reborn are actually released. The way that the APB guys take the game is their vision. We give input on ideas, but APB is predominantly made by the APB team you see in the credits for the game. As for these "many ways to improve the game" you speak of. We're definitely open your questions, comments and suggestions for AR in the General Discussion forum, but pretty much all of the threads there are APB related; so there's not really much for the AR guys to take from it really. Teamspeak is usually fairly active. We are working on making the IRC channel more accessible again by looking into an IPB plugin that will enable users to join and chat while they are visiting the forums. I like to think that some of us stay fairly active in the forums, the fact that we haven't been playing recently just means that we've been busy with other things. Personally, the player count in APB at the moment doesn't really encourage me to play that much.

Each project has it's own staff forums and each team member tends to focus on the project that they are working on. Sometimes people cross over to give input, but the split teams tend to stick to their own projects.

There's more to talk about in terms of APB because as you said, it is released. However, I always welcome questions on AR and am fairly transparent with my answers. We don't choose to take ages to release our games, we are limited on the time we can spend on developing the games due to work, school and other commitments; we do try our best. Although we are all Bluehell Productions, there is a three way split in our team. This way we don't end up making 3 clone copies of APB that play the same. AR is pretty different from APB in the sense that the buildings are a lot larger, the combat is a lot faster, the weakpoint system is much more complex than the MCT system, the veterancy system spices up the gameplay and tech buildings place more focus on engineers. There's a lot more reasons AR is different from APB, but I'll spare you the list for now. While it's true that the devs and players don't mingle too much outside of the forums, there are places such as the IRC channel and Teamspeak server where the community can interact with each other as a whole. Hopefully, the way we've designed the building will give a fairly equal time for both routes. The old rig allows for dual wielding, the problem is getting it to display correctly in third person. With enough research I suppose an extra pose could be created for it. The same goes for other weapons. The missile travels fairly quickly at the moment. It hasn't proven itself to be unbalanced just yet.

Checking the forums and occasionally posting does count as being part of the community.

We judge our testers on how active they are, so as long as you are actively part of the community and willing to test, we will consider you. Also, we don't know when we'll next be hiring. If your computer can handle APB, then you should be fine to test. If it isn't then you can always read up on what the other testers have been doing and give your two pence.

We're taking most of the original sounds and modifying some of them so that they're better. We have some original sounds in there too, but it's mostly RA2listic.

The ore and gem field idea could actually work then. That's interesting. Proof again that I should always ask the coders first. However, there would need to be a way to dynamically check how much ore was left at each resource field. Perhaps a bound key that links to an overhead map with a list of percentages. The paradrops do work well; but when I was talking about mechanics, I meant how paradropping fits into the gameplay and other extra bits such as how to select where you want to paradrop to.

There's a couple of things I have to do before we can release screenshots of the new Beta. I'll let you know when I'm done.

It'll probably come with a new Level Editor.

The Flak Cannon works like none of the weapons in APB. It's a bit of a beast.

Cheers Coolrock!

Currently it is visible to all players because the aim helper is actually just a weapon that's setup with the same firing arc as the main weapon, but shoots green projectiles that do no damage. We'll need to talk to the coders, but hopefully we can do it.

Harriers are really easy to aim, so they won't need it. Kirovs pretty much need to be above their target to hit them, so they're gonna be easy to aim too. The Siege Chopper will be tricky to aim, so that'll probably need the aim helper.

Currently the V3 aim helper is viewable by everyone. We'll look into getting it client-side only though. If we were to use the original RA2 icons (like we are doing at the moment whilst our PT icons are being made) it's look terrible because the icons would need to scale up to a size that they weren't meant to go, resulting in heavy pixellation. We could possibly try and recreate them in the same style though...

We'll put out a news post that we are hiring with all of the details and such. Usually what happens is that people PM, Me, Chronojam and Wallywood their applications and we discuss them in a big team chat and decide which people we want to hire and which people we don't need/want at the time. Application time will be soon. Keep checking the updates as they are posted.

We won't be able to get ore and gems to diminish over time without some wacky code. It's safe to say that it's not planned currently, but if it's possible in the future we could definitely implement it. Paradrops will be on a timer like in RA2. We haven't worked out a lot of the actual mechanics and limitations just yet, so we'll be developing that as we go. The Rocketeer won't have a lower flight ceiling, but this won't be an issue because Flak weapons are really good at taking down air units. They are kind of like long range shotguns that only work on air units. All the super weapons will eventually make it into the game. It's just a case of time.

We're allowing the CLeg to walk in AR, since it would be completely silly if he didn't. As for shifting back in, the unit needs extensive testing before we decide on a lot of these factors. We like to get a unit in game and test basic functionality before we make our final decisions on exactly how it should act.

Let me know if you have any more questions. I'd be happy to answer them.

Yes and yes. while you are choosing where to chronoshift to, your character will be vulnerable to attack. This is to stop the CLeg from becoming overpowered.