A Path Beyond Random Contributions

[Pushwall]

7 hours ago, Raap said:

Perhaps a good use of resources would be to use the concrete animated bridge and re-texture it with some other woodifications modifications, that way more maps can utilize a destructible bridge, which I think is a good mechanic to have in more maps to spice up secondary attack routes..

Trouble is the destructible bridge has been tried on Coastal Influence, Complex and Guard Duty. It really wasn't a good gameplay element on any of them.

[Killing_You]

Was it really that bad on Complex and Guard Duty? CI I understand 100%, but it didn't seem that bad on the other two.

[Raptor29aa]

Complex, Guard duty, And Costal influence both led to V2 or artillery bombardment. (Although I do miss how once the bridge was gone I could sail a destroyer into the bay.)

Guard duty’s Yaks was a definite hedge against siege/bombardment.

Sadly costal influence’s Naval is not a good counter to artillery.

If a destructible bridge did not lead to artillery bombardment I would be all for it.

 

 

[Raap]

15 hours ago, Pushwall said:

Trouble is the destructible bridge has been tried on Coastal Influence, Complex and Guard Duty. It really wasn't a good gameplay element on any of them.

Because in my opinion all of those maps lack a true secondary route. All of these maps got two equally lengthy and valuable routes (three in the case of GD).

What makes a route primary or secondary is perhaps subjective, but here are my general guidelines for it:

• The primary route is most convenient to get onto.
• The primary route is the shortest route.
• The primary route either leads directly to the enemy team base and/or passes through a critical game level objective.
• The primary route is always usable by all ground unit types.

Secondary routes are routes that lack one or more of the above aspects while the presence of such a primary route exists in a level.

None of the routes on the mentioned maps differ from these criteria, meaning they are equally valued... Meaning adding a roadblock to them can be perceived as a negative. 

I believe a good use of a destructible asset, such as a bridge, is best employed on a secondary route that fails to meet the above criteria(s), and in doing so you can have a route with differing values based on player interactions; An intact bridge on a secondary route can be an excellent way to flank the opposing team's forces or base, but when such a bridge is destroyed, you're left with an infantry-only attack route which takes longer to traverse and therefore serves the role of a backdoor sneak attack route... Two vastly different roles baked into the same secondary route and changed based on player interactions.

I think this is a persistent problem in a lot of APB levels. The lack of a clear primary attack route adds confusion and limits level gameplay creativity.

 

Edit: Anyhow, speaking of random contributions, I'm also not shy of doing a contribution for the yet-to-be-released projects hosted here. For example I got a boatload of ideas that would only make sense in a more futuristic science fiction-heavy setting...

Edited February 20, 2018 by Raap

[OWA]

If bridges were repairable, then that would probably fix the problem of destructible bridges eliminating entire routes from the map when they are destroyed.

[Raptor29aa]

21 hours ago, OWA said:

If bridges were repairable, then that would probably fix the problem of destructible bridges eliminating entire routes from the map when they are destroyed.

You mean having a repair hut with a repair terminal that uses 100% a golden wrench/ 58 seconds techie?

sounds more RA 2 than RA 1 but I could go for it.

I do agree with Raap on route being key, but my main point is was not having the bridge within artillery distance of any base.

Edited February 21, 2018 by Raptor29aa

[OWA]

18 minutes ago, Raptor29aa said:

You mean having a repair hut with a repair terminal that uses 100% a golden wrench/ 58 seconds techie?

sounds more RA 2 than RA 1 but I could go for it.

I do agree with Raap on route being key, but my main point is was not having the bridge within artillery distance of any base.

Something along those lines yeah. Battlefield 2 does it slightly differently where you actually repair the bridge itself using a spanner/wrench so that could be a possibility too. Although it might look a bit strange since our repair tools are the little keypad multi-metres.

[Raap]

Slightly less fugly bridge for Bonsai:

Bridge has a destruction animation and destroyed state, but I don't have shadowplay installed at the moment so I couldn't record it... It's nothing special anyhow.

 

Edit: The unfortunate shadow effects is a drawback of dynamic objects in W3D, vertex solve does not work on them so they never really look quite right.

Edited March 1, 2018 by Raap

[moonsense715]

Nice bridge.

10 hours ago, Raap said:

Edit: The unfortunate shadow effects is a drawback of dynamic objects in W3D, vertex solve does not work on them so they never really look quite right.

Are you using the bridge as a Tile or Object?

[Raap]

30 minutes ago, moonsense715 said:

Nice bridge.

Are you using the bridge as a Tile or Object?

All APB 'structures' are either terrain baked or simple preset objects, the latter usually if the object needs to be interacted with, and in this case the bridge is destructible. 

Tiles cannot have scripts attached, and simple objects are less resource intensive and less likely to get weird with collision detection compared to using stationary vehicle logic.

W3D just doesn't handle non-terrain light very well, but even vertex light solving is a very flawed method of generating light. But, that's beating a dead horse. 

It's up to Pushwall how he wants to use the bridge. He can terrain bake it or make it interactive, I gave him the option for either.

[moonsense715]

Tiles can be destroyed, if that's the only "script" that's needed, the bridge can be turned into a Tile and still have a destruction animation.

Also, in most w3d games, all building parts that are constantly animating or are animated based on health/destruction (and do nothing else) are Tiles. They are detached from the Terrain part of the building (which proxies in these animated Tiles). Tiles get the same lighting as Terrain as far as I know, if that is what you you're looking for.

[Raap]

I mirrored the setup of the concrete bridges in my tests, they use a few different scripts. Perhaps it can be done without them, but that's for Pushwall to decide. I just made the assets.

[Ice]

That new bridge definitely looks better, but would you be willing to add more boards and have them much closer together? That was always the biggest thing that bothered me about the current/old bridge, just how absurdly spaced out the boards are and how no bridge in existence is built like that. This new bridge is the perfect opportunity to fix the old bridge's problems like that.

[ChopBam]

I agree about the spaced-apart boards. They should be closer together.

[Raap]

It makes more sense when you look down on it from above or the side. They aren't far apart and there is no gaps like in the old "bridge", what you see here is simply my style of making things, I like to have contrasts, it makes certain model parts stand out more while on a limited polygon/draw call budget. The planks are placed there for gripping, they aren't part of the bridge foundation structure.

The whole bridge is around 10 meshes only.

Go ahead, take a look: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xV3GJE1yqFA5BBEKwsMLLhQdYCfPvMF0

Edited March 2, 2018 by Raap

[Pushwall]

Stop putting VAlpha on things with no vertex colours whatsoever  

And stop putting noise passes on props that are too small to warrant a noise pass. I don't know about the unnecessary VAlpha, but extra material passes = extra draw calls.

[Raap]

There is an applied noise filter because without it the meshes are too bright compared to other terrain, so no, Valpha and the noise filters were there intentionally.

It's also not an extra material pass. A pass can consist of two textures (stage 0 and stage 1). It should not require an additional draw call as I understood it from Saberhawk.

Believe it or not, there is logic in the way I do things... Sometimes!

Edited March 3, 2018 by Raap

[Pushwall]

You probably would've confused Chop/Ice less about the gaps in the bridge if the ground in your test map wasn't using the same texture as the bridge's gravel filler.  The gaps look fine ingame! Though the bridge seems like it was designed for rivers whose beds are much further below ground level than Bonsai's ones. I had to make the riverbeds around the bridges about a metre deeper and raise the ground around some of the bridges in order for infantry to be able to walk under them at all.

Also, kicked it down from its original mesh count of 12 to 10 by just expanding the collision mesh around the whole thing instead of having separate "dark wood that collides", "dark wood that doesn't collide" etc.

TTC and Canyon River are using the Bonsai bridge too, and Complex also has some similarly old and bad bridges, so they'll all get this new bridge as well as Bonsai. Might stick one on Coastal Influence's river too since the upper land route should actually be worth using for units other than phase tanks now. And it'd be more aesthetically appropriate for the Siege back route than the concrete bridge but I have yet to check if it's the right size.

e: wow, it's exactly the right length to replace Siege's concrete bridge (I just need to make the base a little taller). I think I've figured out Raap's original intent for this.

I doubt any of these maps will get destructible versions of this bridge. On all but Siege, they go over shallow rivers where if the bridges were destroyed, people who wanted to take those routes would only be delayed like 2 seconds in driving around the bridge, so destructible bridges' impact on gameplay on the non-Siege maps would be negligible and therefore not worth the performance drop, and on Siege it'd knock out half of the land routes on an incredibly stalematey map - not a good idea. Not having destructible ones means I can merge them all together on maps that have multiple bridges and cut down on draw calls even further.

[Raap]

The bridge uses the same X and Y dimensions as the old Bonsai "bridge", but I made some changes in terms of height, mainly to allow for easier placement in more common locations. Bonsai was not the testbed for this and my apologies for having to alter terrain to make them properly usable.

[Pushwall]

I wonder how high up the piers (particularly the ones on Pacific Threat) are on your list of dated assets that need replacing? Well since I was doing some updates to that map I decided to strip down some parts of the new wood bridge to make a slightly less awful substitute for the old piers, so you can probably put them a little lower on the list

And no, having the supports stick out like that shouldn't intervene in any LSTs deciding to land there for whatever reason; the supports that aren't in the shallows don't have collision over the water, but they do have collision intersecting with the piers themselves, preventing infantry from accidentally walking through them and subs from ploughing through them, while at the same time not preventing LSTs from getting as close as possible to the piers.

[Raap]

Yeah I made those wood plank sets with some re-usability in mind. They have a lot of individual UVW settings which took more time than you'd think.

As for the bridge, the shadows are caused by the grass overlapping on a vertici. The problem is that you can never provide 100% guaranteed a lack of shadow issues, when different levels have different sun positions, alternate light sources, or have the bridge at different rotations. Kinda wish we had a mesh-specific setting for being affected by light solve but not generating shadows itself.

Edited March 6, 2018 by Raap