Apocalypse Rising AR :: May 2017 Update

[Apocalypse Rising Team]

[thumb]thumb_ar.3.png[/thumb]

[blurb]According to NORAD we've got updates coming at us from all directions and renders pushing up through Mexico. I don't know how they snuck in on us.[/blurb]

Dioptic manifold clear! Unit ready! Electrodes ready! Welcome to the Apocalypse Rising May Update! This month's update features the Allied Prism Tank, the Soviet Purchase Terminal, and the Soviet Shock Trooper.

Prism Tank

It's Einstein's Prism tech on wheels. The boys at the lab call it a Prism Tank. Careful not to burn yourself!
- Lt. Eva

Deployed late into the war, the Prism Tank is yet another shining example of Allied technological superiority. Developed by Professor Albert Einstein, the Prism Tank operated as the Allies' anti-structure artillery unit. Utilising the same technology found in the Prism Tower base defenses, the Prism Tank is effective against enemy infantry and structures alike.

Powerful as it may be, the Prism Tank is not without weaknesses. It's light armour and low rate of fire make it particularly ineffective against heavy armour. Coordination with Allied Grizzlies and IFVs in the field combined with its long-range beam offers more favourable engagements against Soviet Rhinos and Apocalypse Tanks.

"Intensifying light trajectory!"
Model by @Romanov

 

Soviet Purchase Terminal

In the previous war, Allied and Soviet structures shared many similarities from external appearances to internal terminals. As the opposing sides' architecture began to take on more unique motifs, so did the individual aspects that made up the internal infrastructure. Soviet engineers stayed true to the industrial element that is the working class and designed accordingly. Putting aside the sophisticated and sleek features that their Allied counterparts possessed, the Soviet Engineer Corps set about and designed a straightforward and reliable Purchase Terminal for use throughout friendly bases.

Serving the same purpose as its previous war iteration, Soviet units may access these terminals and purchase infantry and vehicles from the Soviet arsenal. Depending on the country chosen (Russia, Iraq, Cuba, Libya), additional units may be authorised for purchase.

"(56k modem dial-up sound)"
Concept Art by @Squid Empire, Model by @Romanov and @moonsense715

Tesla Trooper

Always striving towards the next step in Tesla technology, the Soviet Union has introduced a new class of soldiers into their ranks: the Tesla Trooper. First deployed during the occupation of Washington D.C., these shock troopers are highly effective on the front-lines.

Armed with a Tesla Coil gauntlet, the Tesla Trooper is particularly devastating to enemy armour columns. Shockingly, the Tesla Trooper has proven to be equally effective against enemy infantry, due in part to the armour they wear that their Conscript and Flak Trooper counterparts lack. Wearing an insulated combat uniform that also houses the back-mounted Tesla Generator, the Tesla Trooper also cannot be crushed by enemy vehicles. It is this heavy armour and deadly weaponry that makes the Tesla Trooper a threat to all Allied units in the field.

"Commencing shock therapy"
Model by @Romanov

Screenshots

Recruitment

We are always hiring new team members to speed up AR's release! If you believe that you can help us out, you are more than welcome to help!

The following positions are open:

• 2 Artists for modeling and texturing civilian buildings and props.
• 1 Artist for making nature assets (trees, bushes, etc.)
• 1 Character Artist
• 1 Texture Artist/Photoshop User (optionally Unwrapper) to help in texturing building interior objects

If you wish to contribute to this project and believe you have the skills, give us a shout!

If you would like to contribute to the game and believe you have the skills, don't hesitate to apply! If you don't know if you have the skills, send us a forum PM and we can chat. If you would like to help in areas not listed here, that is also more than welcome.
To apply, just send @moonsense715 or @One Winged Angel a PM (Private Message) via the forums and let us know which position you wish to apply for.

End

Feel free to contact the team regarding testing applications for Apocalypse Rising and our other W3D projects and become an official W3D Hub Tester today!

[Raap]

I like the consistent stylized unit design, but the level design makes it feel mismatched. Given that you're not trying to follow APB's art style, what are your plans for a matching environmental art style?

If I had to make a 5 second guess, I'd say a more vibrant color palette should be used in your environmental textures and level assets. Red Alert 2 was known for using a lot of strong colors so applying to it W3D based levels seems like a good direction. I'd also say instead of using real world photography as the bases if your environmental textures, instead opt for high resolution hand drawn terrain using previously mentioned vibrant color palette.

Overal, good work!

Side note, I wish APB had an infantry character artist, @Romanov seems like a great asset to your team, a true do-it-all guy!

Edited May 5, 2017 by Raap

[devilslayersbane]

In addition to what Raap said, I think a good "vibrantly colored" world to start off with would be the recently released "Breath of the Wild." While a significantly different game, the stylized design could prove as a good starting point.

[MartinMb]

It all looks amazing!

[SirJustin90]

Beautiful to see nice new textures to accompany these units!

[OWA]

On 2017-5-5 at 4:26 PM, Raap said:

I like the consistent stylized unit design, but the level design makes it feel mismatched. Given that you're not trying to follow APB's art style, what are your plans for a matching environmental art style?

If I had to make a 5 second guess, I'd say a more vibrant color palette should be used in your environmental textures and level assets. Red Alert 2 was known for using a lot of strong colors so applying to it W3D based levels seems like a good direction. I'd also say instead of using real world photography as the bases if your environmental textures, instead opt for high resolution hand drawn terrain using previously mentioned vibrant color palette.

Overal, good work!

Side note, I wish APB had an infantry character artist, @Romanov seems like a great asset to your team, a true do-it-all guy!

 

On 2017-5-5 at 6:50 PM, devilslayersbane said:

In addition to what Raap said, I think a good "vibrantly colored" world to start off with would be the recently released "Breath of the Wild." While a significantly different game, the stylized design could prove as a good starting point.

 

To be honest, our problem lies with the fact that we haven't actually made a map for AR in many years. We've been focusing on the big gameplay features currently, so once those are in, we can turn our attention back to making maps once again.

APB doesn't need a character artist, all the characters are done.

[NodGuy]

3 hours ago, OWA said:

APB doesn't need a character artist, all the characters are done.

But they could be better. Give the Allied Medic a helmet similar to what the US Army medics wore during WWII, fix the uniforms for the Kapitan and Volkov (their ranks), make the Allied Engineer's shirt look better, etc. I wish I knew how to do this sort of stuff so I could just do it myself.

[Raap]

Character art is APB's graphical weakness at the moment. Also consider that characters are the first thing people look at when they join the game. Impressions are everything, and even two new 'basic infantry' models would do wonders... But hey, I didn't want to hijack this thread. 

I'll look forward to seeing some environments created. Hopefully your art direction is solid on them.

[Ice]

18 hours ago, NodGuy said:

But they could be better. Give the Allied Medic a helmet similar to what the US Army medics wore during WWII, fix the uniforms for the Kapitan and Volkov (their ranks), make the Allied Engineer's shirt look better, etc. I wish I knew how to do this sort of stuff so I could just do it myself.

Personally, if APB ever gets new character models, I'd like to see more variety in Allied infantry to highlight the fact that the Allies are many nations working together, with certain units looking distinctively French, German, British, even American, etc. This could be even further enhanced by having both a summer and winter model for certain units, each styled after a different nation (for example, the sniper could have a British-style summer model and a German-style winter model, etc.), although this would be twice the work.

In contrast to this, Soviet units (who are basically all serving under either the Soviet military or Soviet-supplied satellite states) would have a more standardized overall appearance but each unit would still be distinctive enough to be easily identifiable.

Awesome AR update by the way. Really liking the new models. 

Edited May 8, 2017 by Ice

[thedisclaimitory]

can AR pls come out in July  please i have been waiting   for so freaking long it feels like millions of years please  I wanted to become a tester because of the fact the freaking game won't come out

[ganein14]

41 minutes ago, thedisclaimitory said:

can AR pls come out in July  please i have been waiting   for so freaking long it feels like millions of years please  I wanted to become a tester because of the fact the freaking game won't come out

Let me ask you this instead. Would you want to have a cake that's been under cooked or one that's cooked all the way? Because it's the same thing with AR. While it is enjoyable now, there are still many things that need to be tested, patched, textured, etc.

[AZ-Stalker]

18 minutes ago, ganein14 said:

Would you want to have a cake that's been under cooked or one that's cooked all the way?

The cake is a Soviet lie.

[Raptor29aa]

On 5/8/2017 at 5:10 PM, ganein14 said:

Let me ask you this instead. Would you want to have a cake that's been under cooked or one that's cooked all the way? Because it's the same thing with AR. While it is enjoyable now, there are still many things that need to be tested, patched, textured, etc.

Maybe he's asking for a cup cake, lol. I think he wants to see a playable demo like an infantry only bot map. (Of course that wouldn't happen till all of the infantry are in game. And who has time to script bots?) 

Anyways I waited for Reborn and so I am not too worried about AR. 

 

 

 

[delta]

Well I guess with a underbaked cake, you eat it, it's bad, and the cake is wasted. With an underdeveloped game or mod you could always release it as an open beta and then enlist the help of the community to help weed out the bugs?

[moonsense715]

We don't need testers. The game is incomplete. It needs devs.

[Jeod]

12 hours ago, moonsense715 said:

We don't need testers. The game is incomplete. It needs devs.

This. I can tell you by experience that when tests are called they're few and far between, and TSR tests are more common than AR, and it's all because of the lack of hands. When an update blog says the staff is hiring, they mean it. You want AR to come out faster, learn to model infantry units or design artwork/textures, and then apply for a staff position. Otherwise, don't beg for an earlier AR release or an open beta from a small number of devs who work on this in their free time without pay.

[moonsense715]

I'd be more than happy to release an open beta of the game if it was in a better state, but unfortunately it is not. Hell, everyone could be having fun even just playing alone in the server, because ALL of the maps are bot-filled with my latest AI upgrades and base attacking/repairing/C4 explosive setting mechanics.
Those bots also do most of the testing right now and produce a lot of balance feedback by just looking at them.

I mean these are fun things, but at the same time you can also clearly see how really underdetailed the map is looking:

 

[Invader_Zim]

Speaking of prism great model btw, in an interesting note I got a sort of preview of a prism in renegade there are a few servers (gsa) or maps that have ALLOT of inf and vehicles to choose from in renagade, red alert 1, 2  and  tiberian sun it is trully massive and there is a version of the prism in there (romonovs model is better) 

[Raap]

20 hours ago, moonsense715 said:

I'd be more than happy to release an open beta of the game if it was in a better state, but unfortunately it is not. Hell, everyone could be having fun even just playing alone in the server, because ALL of the maps are bot-filled with my latest AI upgrades and base attacking/repairing/C4 explosive setting mechanics.
Those bots also do most of the testing right now and produce a lot of balance feedback by just looking at them.

I mean these are fun things, but at the same time you can also clearly see how really underdetailed the map is looking:

 

Why not look for an environmental artist as well then? According to your blog that's not something you are specifically looking for (modeling and texturing civilian buildings is just one specific part of environments). Edit: Same applies to foliage.

It'd help if you also were more specific in what you're looking for (besides naming civilian buildings and foliage). A sample or example of the preferred art direction for environmental assets is missing.

Edited May 20, 2017 by Raap

[Raap]

I was messing around with the idea of creating a stylized grass texture, a proof of concept and first iteration, if you will. The attached file was created using 4 different grass images as a base and then heavily stylized using an extensive list of image altering effects and filters. Similar logic could be applied to any material type although the process of creating textures like this is quite time consuming - this one took me about an hour. The flip side is, you won't be needing 10 grass textures, just two or three, since the point of stylized textures is easy to recognize features without realism.

Click a few times to see the full 2048x2048 resolution image.

Edit: I'd show the non-filtered version but a max file upload size of 5.86MB is too little, and imgur doesn't like such big files.

Edit2: Grass foliage would then be hand-drawn grass "sprites" to blend in well with the ground material. Already experimented with this a little bit on APB's Siege; the shore orange ground plants are not real pictures of a plant (I bet nobody noticed)!

Edited May 20, 2017 by Raap

[FRAYDO]

4 hours ago, Invader_Zim said:

Speaking of prism great model btw, in an interesting note I got a sort of preview of a prism in renegade there are a few servers (gsa) or maps that have ALLOT of inf and vehicles to choose from in renagade, red alert 1, 2  and  tiberian sun it is trully massive and there is a version of the prism in there (romonovs model is better) 

Sounds like you're talking about @dblaney1 and @Kaskins Imperial Age.

[Invader_Zim]

Why yes....makes more sence to me now, was allot of fun to play until Nod used those cloaked missle launchers

[Madin]

Really outstanding work with both the prism tank and Tesla Trooper !

[rm5248]

On 5/18/2017 at 4:46 AM, moonsense715 said:

We don't need testers. The game is incomplete. It needs devs.

Hah.