ChopBam

At the bottom of the page in Chrome, hit "full version" and you can see the version of the page that's in the desktop browser.

Oh don't be so condescending. Your sometimes obscure reasoning isn't always some obvious truth, and this is one of those cases where you're not covering the whole story, as explained below. You're assuming here that the Allies have a complete lack of scouting and foresight to see an attack of this magnitude coming. The Soviets have confined at least three of their precious players to slow-moving, expensive vehicles that are trying not to be discovered, blasted away by AT mines, or met with an opposing rush. It takes a good amount of teamwork and sheer luck to get all of those MAD Tanks to sit near the Allied base for a bit, immovable, announced, and fully alive. Phase Tanks aren't the only counter to this. Allied players can use light tanks and rocket soldiers to quickly intercept small-medium Soviet rushes, which in most games, are everything you'll get accompanying a 3-player MAD rush. The Allies get faster vehicles and AT mines. What were they even doing the whole time that the Soviets were amassing such a thing? I'm not even arguing for the removal of friendly fire. But the success rate I see with MAD Tanks is incredibly low, unless "success" just means "doing some reparable damage," in which case any unit can do that.

That sounds fine to me.

What if friendly fire damage is just reduced?

Voe, it would require 3 MAD Tanks to actually destroy anything from full health, not to mention it has a timer and an announcement. That said, I say keep the friendly fire because that's the very nature and definition of a Mutually Assured Destruction Tank. My lack of using them isn't related to friendly fire, but rather that it requires teamplay to be effective and I'm a lone wolf.

Some great games today.

Very useful tutorial! I've always manually extruded tunnels, which can take a lot of time.

It's easy enough to make your own UVWs if somebody dumped something on you. But what do you mean by "perfect alignment"? Did the cracks in the rock/cliff texture line up with cracks in the terrain model, and you didn't want to mess that up, or...?

Yes. At the very least they should be instanced.

None of this is a problem for me. We use standard 1k textures for our terrain in APB, so I have a standard scaling method that I use for ground and cliff, easy to remember because it's typically universal across three UVW channels. I don't typically collapse my UVWs just before closing, because I collapse with the intention of reapplying after I'm done doing whatever edits I need. Another reason to collapse and reapply is because stacked modifiers can become corrupted and crash the program or even cause file problems. I keep UVW channels the same across all terrain objects. If there's a custom unwrap, it doesn't need to be on my standard channels 1-3. It's very fast once the habit is formed and I can reapply my three UVWs and one smoothing modifier with all their params in under a minute. It is quick, easy, and solves a host of other problems before they even form.

I've experienced problems in the past with centering all the gizmos to fix seams. What ultimately solves my non-3d seam problems is collapsing the modifiers and reapplying the UVW maps to the group of meshes as a whole. It's actually a lot faster than centering the gizmos, too, especially with keyboard shortcuts.

*reads Einstein's mind* Yep!

I like to be a sneaky (see the radar). Holding this hill could be worth it for the Allies. ITT I'm a decent sniper but only when nobody important is watching. Camos Canyon Shenanigans Cargo truck racing! Reaching out, into other worlds! *queue weird Eastern yodeling*

I can sympathize with the question regarding alternate servers, because I'm on the other side of the world and suffer a higher ping, but it's playable, and I side with the idea that we shouldn't split up the community beyond what is necessary.

The left side of the perspective viewport looks like it's shaping up! The rest of the sides resemble my first test map. You might want to try your map out ingame, even in its early stages, to see how well the terrain in W3D will work as you desire. You're welcome to apply a quick texture, UVW map, and collision settings; followed by a LE export with only the basics needed to test what you want. I do this every time I'm working on a map. The reason I do this, is that sometimes things look a lot different in 3DS Max than they will ingame, so I'll check often to make sure I don't waste a lot of time building things around a mistake.

I used to think the same way, but considering how easily a single player can exploit most defenses, I've distilled this issue down to preference. If players are lazy in defending and repairing, then they'll lose their defenses, and subsequently, their base.

I also got a screenshot of the clone truck but clearly you got to posting it first.

True enough. In a perfect world, VIS would be able to set itself up automatically, as it does in newer games.

If ALL meshes of the same material were merged, VIS would be much less effective.

I look forward to seeing how it pans out!

Yeah that can be real tricky.

Hi sniper12345.

As far as I know it creates some registry entries too, so...

HI GRENDIES!!!

"Adding definition to terrain that's already there" covers things like fixing lightsolve problems, areas with too low of a poly resolution, and traversibility issues. I would argue that extrusion is the best way to create well-shaped terrain, and fixes all sorts of problems before they occur.