Modders Logbook - September 2016 news - Lost Dragons mod for ARMA 3

Modders Logbook - September 2016

It has been uncustomarily short time since my last log. Must pace myself.. :D

This time Id like to bring together how our walker vehicle concept has evolved since we first introduced the idea for it.

The concept of robots in Arma is not new, there has been all kinds mechs and mecha as addons before but they have faded into the archives of Armaholic as they were never kept up with the updating Arma engine. Encouraged by the accomplishments of those before us we too wanted to take a jab at the unconventional vehicle type since Arma 3 engine offered interesting features to support developing such a versatile walking vehicle.

Now our technique is simple. We have the Legs built on the base of Man class, so that the legs can have .rtm animations and so it can utilize the man like moving. On top of that we attach the Torso that is derived from the Tank class so that it can have crew and turrets and other vehicular features the engine offers.

Little scripting magic and the ManTank was born. First we tested it by simply attaching static turrets on top of regular man and saw that it worked. The turrets could fire and the "leg-man" could be remote controlled via new commands A3 introduced.

The first test with real model took place in our first project with our take on the Titan walker in Command & Conquer universe, and while it looks hilarious, it convinced us that the direction was worth pursuing. Then came the MANW competition that sparked us to start Lost Dragons as a mod of built in a universe of our very own design. In that the first iteration of the WK-209 was born.

The first design bore the distinguished silhouette that has carried over with slight changes from the first version to the last. At one point it was determined that the size of the machine was far too small to house the crew it needed.

So we scaled it up a notch. We also reached a important developing milestone when the walker took its first steps with its own animations and rained destruction on our firing range. And while there were some minor issues it was a great victory for us.

At that point it was suppose to be a 2 men crewed vehicle, but our internal testing showed it could use a 3rd person in there to properly use the varied weapon systems. The design was again altered to house the 3 men cockpit and on the same time the weapons were also given new look as the loadout possibilities were considered with more detail.

The new design took couple of iterations to become satisfying, but it really started to look like a proper fighting vehicle and we again took it to another spin in the firing range. One more thing came out of it for consideration when we blasted away at eachother with WK-209s counterpart, the Blufor "ANUB-90 Combat Walker" or Anubis. The guns were too low.

The WK-209 was first concepted as a "frontal assault" vehicle, with thick armour and front facing weapons. Cool sounding idea, no problem there, but in the end it did not feel efficient enough to actually be a viable in combat. I mean sure in a game sense there could be anything, but we wanted to approach our design as if the use was real. And all the pondering on the matter came to the same conclusion. Walkers need to be agile and they need to have 360 torso traverse so that they can properly utilize their movement capabilities and weapons.

It was again time to get back to the drawing board to give the WK-209 the same basic features we ruled as what all walker designs should follow. This led to some more drastic changes as the low hanging guns were brought up for better reach and the new gun arms provided far more agile aiming.

Satisfied with the new design I began testing the firing mechanism and weapon grouping with the 3 men crew and realized a new approach for the weapon handling by utilizing hidden AI crew members that operate each barrel as a individual turret that are all part of the turret the main gunner operates. This led to eventually reducing the crew size back to the original 2 as it became evident that the third man was not needed after all.

Which brings us to the current state of the WK-209! The fist of the latest upgrades to the design was to implement a entry system for field operations without hangar gantries. (And also a power up/ power down animations for the legs)

And also the latest of the latest. Properly fitted internal structure and internal systems. Now all this internal stuff has been in my mind and partly on paper when I've been sketching up the overall outlook of the walker, but now I took it a step further and actually made the parts in 3D that make the whole thing work. This again brought to attention some issues the design had. For instance when the ammo feed was built to the arms it became apparent that the armor covering the arms and the internal feed was far too thing to offer any protection. This and few other issues like it were then remedied taking the whole concept to a whole new level.

Im eager to bring this same design approach to all our vehicles since it makes them so much belieavable and also it will greatly assist in both damage handling and hitbox modeling and damage modeling, not to mention all the map assets that can be derived from a vehicles that can be broken into pieces!

Thanks for reading the long wall of text! Until next time!

-Goat