OWA

Hehe, no worries. I was tired and cranky.

Welcome to the latest AR blog. I've been off ill today, so no college for me Ah well. With coursework finally done and exams looming things are getting tense. But the blog will always prevail! <h3>Ingame Stuff</h3> danpaul88 and dtrngd have both been playing around with a few things ingame. These things include the setup of pillboxes, various map objects, a spectator character especially for taking screenshots. TheBeerinator has also been adapting the Flak Track texture for maximum leetness. Here are some images! danpaul88 has also prepared this nice video of the pillbox (obviously incomplete) for your viewing pleasure. >>Video Here<< <h3>Yuri MK1</h3> Yes, it's Yuri! This is the first attempt at duplicating Udo Kier's somewhat tyrannical mug into beautiful 3d. The results are incomplete, but as a first attempt I think it can be considered a success. Notable changes to be made include the goatee, 'stache and iconic "Y" symbol that is usually present in the middle of Yuri's bald forehead. The lack of facial hair is due to the shadow not rendering in properly from the source image. Fear not! This shall be added at a later date. Yuri shall not be included in the first release of AR, but it is something I thought would be nice and nostalgic to all of you RA2 fanatics out there! Images below! <h3>Competition</h3> The icon competition has officially ended. Thanks for everyone who entered the competition! I believe it was a great success! The team and I were really impressed by some of the entries as some forum members came out of their shells and really showed us what they could do! Results will come soon. <h3>Team Notices</h3> I've finished my coursework, but exams are incoming. Wish me luck! I grabbed some photographs from my girlfriend yesterday, in the selection was an image of me in some civilian body armour. The story behind this one is that my girlfriend's dad works for a contracting company that manages the facilities of one of the british army bases out in Iraq. So I got to try on his armour and helmet. Pretty cool stuff. cfehunter got GTA IV like a lot of people did. We shan't be seeing him for a while (j/k ) He also has a hard drive going spare that he has offered to me, since he now has a terrabyte drive. I could use some more space, since I'm down to 2gb/200gb dtrngd has gone on a trip with his school. He'll be back on sunday. Have fun mate! BogdanV and Eggman891 have been tinkering with the fake worldboxes. More news on this when we get some more definite, positive results. The website should be uploaded within the hour. Coming online soon! <h3>Crush</h3> The community support section and the project of the week section have been killed off due to lack of interest. Thus ends the blog. Shoo!

The bigger the res, the better the result.

Ryo Hazuki must hve gone away for the week without telling us D:

Yeah, the project was scrapped because it looked wierd ingame. PM please.

Easily downgraded to around 900 polys per head (whilst retaining quality).

Boo fucking hoo. I was up til 3am doing this blog and this is the thanks I get. Right... I've had 4 hours sleep because I decided to finish the blog so don't get like that.

Welcome to this week's blog. Nothing much has been done this week since it's getting into exam time. My coursework ends on friday, so I can chill out on the weekend and play Mario Kart Wii <h3>Flak Track</h3> TheBeerinator has been working on the Flak Track texture. You would have seen the description and video with the functions in a previous blog, so I won't repeat myself. I want to stay fresh here Here we go. Four nice camos and a cool rear view of the forest variant. <h3>Incredibly Cool Stuff</h3> I got a program that can make 3d models using jpeg images, cool huh? Well, I put in an image of Kari Wuhrer to create a realistic Tanya head and it came out pretty well. (This was just a test. I'll find a better picture for when I come to make Tanya for real). See for yourself. I also remade the Guardian GI's head to look more like the beefy steamrolling badass that he is. This will be great for making 3d versions of the characters from RA2 (providing that the images are good enough). Yuri is going to be fun to make when I get around to it. If you want to actualy be featured in AR or APB, send me a picture of you looking straight at the camera with a blank look on your face. A.K.A: a mugshot. (You cannot be wearing glasses and you must tie back long hair if you have it. This will yield the best results). Post them to the usual inbox; mine! <h3>Website</h3> We aim to have the website up soon! Yes! Finally! The database has been setup courtesy of Blazer and Tankmaster has sent me the website ready to upload. (Big thanks to you both!) All that needs doing is a little configuration, then Coolrock can go ahead and buy the domain that we plan to use. I'll spend a day sticking some cool content up on the site as a present for you guys; since you have waited so patiently. The time is upon us! Let the Apocalypse Rise! <h3>Competition</h3> The AR icon competition ends in 7 days! If you have an entry that you are going to submit, don't leave it til the last minute to enter! All of the details can be found over at the thread here. <h3>Team Messages</h3> I've been finishing my coursework off. Hand-in date is on monday but I'm going to get it completed for friday so I get the weekend to sleep and play Mario Kart Wii (which I'm getting tomorrow). I'm also getting a wireless router for my PC so that I can get my Wii online. I'll put up my friend code when I get it. My console name is "Shoop" at the moment. I need to think of a better name I found this picture of me and Pete from back in the Blazemods days before college. We were young and free back then, where did it all go wrong? TheBeerinator has a lot of real life stuff to attend to, so he'll be taking a break. I'll be summoning the foxmeister (or Merovingian as you know him) to do some building interiors for us. He may be ready to come back from his short break now. danpaul88 and BogdanV are bashing their e-noggins together to try and figure out shootable projectiles. It is possible, but not without sacrifice. <h3>And I did it myyyyy waaaaaaay!</h3> I'm cutting the community support and project of the week sections for this blog, since I'm just too damn tired to finish this blog. They shall return next week unless you guys actually want them axed anyway. It's 3 am and I need sleep...

Rebuildable defences are a definite. We'll see what happens about rebuilding main structures. There are certainly a lot of ideas flying round that we'll have to take into account.

Yeah, like I already said

Engineers can repair bridges, repair structures faster and capture tech buildings. It hasn't been tested yet.

You do know that nothing is final right? The IFV hasn't been balanced into the game properly yet.

Yes, 10 seconds between turret change.

Welcome to this week's blog. This is kinda rushed since I've spent nearly a whole day on coursework today <h3>Ore Extractor: Textured!</h3> The ore extractor is usually seen extracting ore from the ground in the middle of rich ore fields. The drill activates every 45 seconds with a claxon to warn any passers by. No doubt you have seen this in action in the videos. Next time you see it ingame, it'll look like this. <h3>Flak Track: WIP Texture</h3> The Beerinator has moved into the Flak Track from the V3 launcher. This anti infantry/air death machine is the workhorse of the soviet military. Uncharacteristically fast and lightly armoured, it speeds into battle carrying five infantry units or two terror drones. Flak them down comrades, for the union! (Now with new camo patterns!) <h3>The IFV</h3> I asked danpaul88 for a description on how the IFV works, but he did us all one better and made a video illustrating the script in action in it's current state. Check out the video below! >>>Video Here<<< <h3>Soviet Vehicles: Updated Camoflage</h3> So, our camoflage has been normalised by cfehunter and TheBeerinator. This means the soviet vehicles will roll into battle in a colour coordinated manner. Which is cool. <h4>Rhino Tank</h4> <h4>V3 Launcher, now de-giraffarigged!</h4> <h3>Dune Patrol: Now With Bases!</h3> I gave dtrngd a load of untextured assets to see what he could do with them, so he shoved them ingame and we get the first glance at what an AR base will look like geometry-wise. Pretty cool eh? Testers will be getting their hands on this in the coming weeks to test it hard. <h3>Team Messages</h3> Coursework I'm free from it a week on friday Next blog, I'll have my devised drama exam piece uploaded somewhere so that you guys can watch me make a fool out of myself and hopefully scare you a little as I act out my psychopathic role cfehunter had a week off college last week because they were moving the entire network to a new building at his college. Welcome dtrngd back from Austria! He's been away, but he does so much AR work you would never have known ^^ <h3>OWA's Community Support Gelnika</h3> Let's not crash in the sea this time mmmk? Nothing seems to be happeneing as things stop for exams/coursework. Oh well, you get a nice picture of Piccolo for your trouble. <h3>Project Of the Week</h3> This week's coveted project is Trackmania Nations Forever! This game is truly rather epic. Nations Forever is the new, updated version of the original Nations game and guess what? It was released today/yesterday depending on your timezone! Visit the homepage for a download link here! <h3>Yawn</h3> I relied on pictures waaay too much this time. But that's what you guys want eh? Now scat! >

You can now stream the video from moddb. http://mods.moddb.com/6670

AR isn't an RTS. If we were making a RA2 RTS conversion then yeah, every detail would apply. But as this is an FPS environment, we have to take in some consideration to balancing. Our aim has always been to make the Conscript and the GI the basic spawn characters (although I think that spawning as technicians would be our only real alternative). Although your point about the veterancy is a very valid one, as the conscript doesn't have the benefits of sandbags and a heavy machine gun. We'll see how it turns out in testing. If the GI trumps the Conscript too much, we'll lower the promotion requirements for the Conscript. It's all about tweaking the game to make it playable in the FPS perspective as well as resonating some good vibes from the source material and we hope to make a compromise with this issue, if we can. Finally, an unrelated thing that I forgot to mention earlier. I found a pack of RA2 idle sounds that were hosted somewhere which have come in extremely handy. I'll make sure to add you into the credits list, EVA-251

Since Conscripts and GIs are both free in AR, the Conscript loses it's edge of having two of them to every one GI bought.

Well the video is encoded using ffdshow and it is of the mpeg format. @r34ch and Harble, the track is called Black Wing Metamorphosis and is a remix of the track 'One Winged Angel' from Final Fantasy 7. It is on the fourth disc of the 'Voices of the Lifestream' OC remix album.

It's explained in the video. Edit: First person to guess the names of all the songs in the video gets a cake!

Testing the script.

Welcome to the AR blog, brought to you today by Bluehell Productions: This is why we can have nice things <h3>Alpha 4 Patch 1 Video</h3> I got home from college today and decided to make a video for you guys It came out at a whopping 23 mins so there's coverage for you. It is now available for download! Download it here! <h3>Veterancy Scripts</h3> danpaul88 has been on fire this week as he has optimised the veterancy code as well as playing with the IFV scripts (more on that below). Here are the changes that have basically been made to the veterancy code, straight from the coder himself: Here is what the script variables look like in level edit. These scripts could be potentially used in any mod when they are released. Here are a couple of screenshots of the scripts in action. We are also going to add a keybind which allows you to check your veterancy at any time you want. See it in action below. (Take a look at the guys going down the hill on the top right picture. Boogie down that hill yo!)[/cravendale] <h3>IFV</h3> Here is the IFV in all it's unwrap-applied, disco disco glory! As you can see below, danpaul88 has been working on the scripts and has gotten the IFV to change models when a differant infantry unit enters. In the screenshots below you will see that the IFV has "transformed" into a Rhino tank because a certain infantry unit has entered. We will be implementing out cool scheme of cooldown times and such for the turret changes which will be demonstrated in a later blog. <h3>Competition</h3> That's right folks, the new Apocalypse Rising competition has begun! The aim is to make a game icon for Apocalypse Rising. All the details and rules can be found in this thread! Remember, the closing date for this is April the 30th, so you have just over 20 days left! <h3>Team Messages</h3> I'm back at college for six weeks now. But hey, after those weeks are over I don't have to go back there for any more lessons a.k.a I will have finished! cfehunter hasn't been to college because they had to move an entire network of computers into a new building in the tech college. danpaul88 has been working on the mod like a worker ant on steroids for the past week or so. Go Dan go! BogdanV posted up a staff tutorial on how to rig using fake worldboxes. Yay! TruYuri has been learning how to rig using fake worldboxes. Double yay! As a result of this, trees now cast proper shadows. Triple yay! Lord_Kane used his Monolith to buy me enough time to destory the Space Marines with my hellhounds. Epic match. But LK sacrificed himself to buy me the time <h3>OWA's Community Kidnap Helicopter</h3> Stealing pretty girls since 1996. Well I didn't get anything from anyone so you get a picture of Cheggers himself. I'll be recording my lines for the FF7 radioplay later in the week. Providing that Deadpikle and Lord_Kane are still up for it, I have one more role left. I can confirm that TagDaze will be playing Cloud and I will be playing Barret. <h3>Project of the Week</h3> Project of the week this week is the Armageddon Steel Legion mod for Warhammer 40k Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. This mod introduces the Imperial Guard regiment of armageddon known as the Steel Legion into the fray. This is a great mod and I advise anyone who had Dark Crusade to try it out. It has tanks that make C&C's Mammoth Tank look like a plastic army toy. (I think I now know where EA got their inspiration for the MARV from.) <h3>Take care now!</h3> Ya'll come back now y'hear!?

Cel shading is a comic book/cartoon style of 3d graphics which focuses on blocks of colour edged with big black outlines.

If it's not doable via 3dsmax materials, it's doable via textures. This will have no affect on FPS as it will not use any graphics scripts.

Haha Steppo. I'm kinda thinking of putting forward the option of having two differant clients that will work with each other. One with the cel shaded textures, one without. So people could choose what they wanted.

Tau ftw.