Pros and Cons Discussion for 9D Thread - Xenoforce Reborn mod for C&C3: Tiberium Wars

All reports should go here for the 9D version. The list of things I stated earlier are in the other thread.

Anyways, I have been having major issues with the new AI lately. I have been trying to do a free for all match with all random settings on Redzone Rampage (the one that came with the DL you made.) and I set them all on hard difficulty on random everything. 5 matches in a row, all 3 AIs ignore each other and jump me. I managed to kill all 3 of them on the 6th try using GDI. When I DID kill them, I saw some wierd shit while doing so. The Scrin AA Bateries were invulnerable, the Nod Avatars with full equipment were taking little to no damage, and the Nod Flame Tanks were invulnerable. Oh it gets better, I went to save the replay and it told me errors occured. The AI is a cheating SACK! LMAO

Yes I reinstalled, and yes I re downloaded. This occurence is random, sometimes it will have no issues, then sometimes the AI turns it's hacks on. The one thing that DOES keep repeating however, is all the AIs ignore each other and come after me when I have everything on random. So far this version is cruel and unusual. lol

While I was playing as GDI, I noticed that the new upgrades you put in have missing lables. The railgun upgrade for the Juggernauts is badly made. It basicaly gives the Juggernaut a 3 barrel railgun with the same range as the Mammoth Tank. This gets it killed soooo easily because it was meant for long range, not short range. The projectiles for that upgrade are invisible as well.

I will playtest more to iron out more bugs to be fixed...

Your the first one that has mentioned invulnerable units in this version of the mod, I will try and see if I can duplicate it. I know that when that appears it has to do with modified armor and weapons, sometimes the game doesn't like the changes somehow and doesn't apply the damage correctly. Problem is tracking down what weapon is doing it, or if it's the armor on a spicific unit conflicting with a spicific weapon.

I need to go back and change the Scrin Defenses completly, I've not noticed an invulnerable issue but at the same time I know they have their "issues". I'm going to simply redo them. :p

NOD Avatars do not take a lot of damage from many different things, they are very tough opponents. However I've only ever seen this issue with using weaker class units against them, I wouldn't bother taking RGM 79's or Orcas against them, you'll lose. Hit them with a heavy weapon though (Mammoth Tanks, Heavy Beam Defenses, RGC-83's) and they will fall.

If you try to save the game replay and get an error then I'm going to think that there is something else going on that is helping to cause the issue, as that is a very odd thing to hear. I've not had any issues saving any of my replays yet.

Finally as for the AI's ignoring each other and comming for you, thats got nothing to do with any changes I have made. Or, more to the point, I didn't change the code in any way to make the AI want to target players more than AI's. They must simply see you as the weakest target and be making a push at you.

Do these things happen if you play the game on Medium?

Finally, the Juggernaught upgrade is exactly that, it upgrades the Juggernaught to a closer-range direct fire rail cannons. Its more for when a player is getting overwhelmed and need to switch the Juggernaught over to a direct protection mode instead of long range artillery. I personally don't ever use it, but it was something that I was asked to put in. As for the projectiles, I've been trying to figure out why they won't show up. It's getting annoying lol.

What other upgrades are missing the lables? I'll double check it to see what's going on.

The AI only seem to want to jump me on Hard, anything else they act normal, Irestarted my PC and it seems they do it maybe 70% of the time instead of ALL the time. Of course they would see me as the weakest person because the map just started, they all rush and kill me 1st.

The invulnerable units that appear on the game is what prevents me from saving the replay. I just tryed to save one when I witnessed it and it gave me an error.

 I know the Avatars are pretty sturdy, The one I saw a few days ago went through a wall of 12 Juggernauts like they were nothing. The one I get the most is the invulnerable Flame Tank.

When the projectile doesn't show up on something it usualy means it isn't aligned with the gun barrel.

All the new or moved GDI Upgrades have missing lables.

I got another rather bizzare bug I encountered with the Gundam units (and possibly other factions). When a unit gets close to death, you lose control of the unit and it freezes for 5 seconds before you can control it again. This happened to the Prototype Gun Tank, he was getting pelted by rockets from a couple of Militant Rocket Squads. I ordered it fall back into my base and as it began to move back it froze in place and I had a red X on my cursor when I tried to re select it. It went way after 5 seconds after I saved it but man that was lame. This also happened to an enemy structure, I was blowing up a Scrin AA Battery and when it had maybe 10% of HP left, it became untargetable and my units ignored it. I tried force firing on it and it took zero damage, The AI couldn't even repair it untill the 5 seconds went by, then I finished it off.

Could all this be due to a bad script running on the modified maps?

With this new version, I am yet again having issues with buildings being larger than they appear. The Power Plants went from too stackable to too spaced out, the Gundam Factories are oddly shaped in terms of how much space they take up. The factories and the barracks' also seem to be made of paper like the Nuke Plant and are also getting destroyed with ease. >.< 

Valherran try playing the game one on one and tell me what happens. Start with meduim and then go to hard. make it a piont to isolate the issue that you are having. It could also be the map that you are playing on.

The invulnerable units, and the AI jumping me the majority of the time mostly happens on the new maps you guys made. The red X thing with the units becoming non-responsive for whatever reason happens uncommonly on any map. As I said before, this also likes to happen when the AI is set on Hard, I am not sure if I even dare try Brutal.

The buildings that are too big and/or are made of paper definantly need to be fixed. The power plants that are too spaced out, get the Xenoforce AI killed very easily. They often spread their buildings into the enemy base and get blown up, this makes them stuck in timeline 1 for the whole match. Even on a large map where they have tons of building space, I never seem them advance in tech for the gundams, they keep building the old stuff. If this is a bug in the AI, I would try and program them to rush to their top tech to be more effective on the highr difficulty settings.

Dude I don't when to be mean when I say this to you but I think it is just you. I have had none of the issues that you are talking about. I also have about 10 CNC 3 mods loaded on my CNC 3 game browerser. I just don't see where you are coming from with the problem. The ai is jumping you first because you game style makes it that way.

Well good for you, you dont have that problem. Not like it's a frequent occurence that your making it out to be.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you guys, my system wasn't showing that any changes have happened to the threads I was apart of. That's been fixed.

I'm going to take each issue one at a time.

First, I personally havn't been able to reproduce the invulnerable unit, but I do believe you Val when you say you have the issue. Its a bug that keeps reappearing. Have you deleted all of your old saved replays yet from the replay directory? I just want to remove that as an odd, but possible source for the issue.

At the moment for the Xenoforce AI's there shouldn't be a difference between Hard and Brutal.

The Avatar is ment to be a sturdy unit. Many things were rebalanced in this last edition, but after all the actual gametime that I've been getting with the multiplayer against and with a real human player I can see many things need to be changed. I'm thinking of tighting up the entire system for the original 3 armies / ef into a new, custom made balanced system that will loosly be based off of Warhammer 40k and the Robotech RPG system. Doug knows what I am talking about and when I have more info to share about this new balancing system I will let you all know. I will be going though and redoing all of the descriptions for ALL units (original and new) to our system along with this AND redoing all experience that can be earned to a standard system. Right now the EXP system is a mix of our system and EA's and it obviously doesn't mix well. Those harder to kill units should give out more EXP than they are for example.

I will also be going through and redoing the discriptions on all of the upgrades in the game moving them to our system as well.

The unit getting close to death and becoming unselectable is the first time I've ever heard of this bug. The only way a unit could possibly become unselectable is if the model itself suddenly lost its OBBox which is impossible as far as I know inside of the game. Thats actually messing with the W3X model. I would need a lot more spicific information to hunt that bug down. What was the map (spicificly), what was the unit, what was the unit getting attacked by at the exact moment it happened, that kind of thing. It COULD be a bad script, but I didn't edit any of the scripts on the maps I mearly added EF as a playable AI faction.

As for the buildings being larger than they appear, thats going to happen for a few reasons. The major one is it's very hard and time consuming to get it 'perfect' as the way to do it is simply try different geometry cordinates and see how it gos. The best solution was to make get it close and let it go, if that means that there has to be a "space" inbetween buildings, then thats what it means. I know it's annoying, but as time go's on it will get better. It's simply a matter of time and patience with this. Would you want me to delay the mod release for another month getting that stuff down? It seriously takes me about 20 minutes to compile the mod at it's current size and any programmer will tell you it's bad mojo to make more than 1 change when troubleshooting inbetween runs. :p Trust me, it'll get better.

As for your buildings getting blown up with ease, I have to say I don't agree with you man. The EF Barracks is a direct carbon copy of the GDI Barracks for health and armor. Same with the factorys. It's actually harder to kill because they can fight back. That doesn't mean they don't die easy, it's just that they die as easy as the other enemies buildings do. It may seem like it's not the same because the enemies weapon that they are using is better at destroying structures (a feature that I've started to add in to certain units).

Finally with the EF AI, programming the AI is a very delecate process. Its very easy to make a slight change to the code and cause the AI to suddenly not function properly. Thats what happened here. They AI used to expand (albeit only once) each time I played them. Then I found a bit of code that I could modify so that the AI would build units based off of their strength, and to forget the time costs. Think of it like a slider that in ALL ai's is always set to 50% (meaning the AI focus on the production cost half the time and the production time the other). As all units always had the same levels here (1500/15 and 1000/10 would be seen by the AI as the same thing) I wanted to see what would happen if I pushed it towards being more aggressive/focusing on more expensive units over cheaper ones. I changed to to a 75% focus on expensive units and it worked, the AI focused on building the more expensive units most of the time when on the offensive, but the unexpected side effect was it stopped building explorers which I didn't catch until the mod was out in the wild. That will be rectified in the next release, I am hoping I can get the AI to expand further but I doubt it. It seems AI Expansion is linked directly to the ammount of Tiberium left in the field, and as EF doesn't need Tiberium to work (and normally don't have more than 2 refinerys out at a time) that means it simply won't expand, but it will build outward.

Feel free to ask about anything else / post any other thoughts or concerns. Yes, there is a lot of work ahead of us, but I think we're making good progress forwards. I will be spending the next weeks working on the stuff mentioned above (along with other things that Doug has suggested to me that I really like the sound of)and then move to AW.

The description of the non-responsive unit bug is posted above. I didn't think previous replays from older games would have an effect on this, but I will give it a try. The bug is pretty uncommon, I played this all day and haven't had it happen to me yet, but I do know it exists as it happened to me a few times. Same goes with the invulnerable units, uncommon, but exists. I would like to hear the suggestions Doug has made if you wouldn't mind me asking. :-)

I havn't finished listening to the audio recording he has sent me yet and we've still not worked out the details on a lot of them, but one that he suggested that I REALLY REALLY like deals with GDI's Firehawk. We're going to change it so it's 2 weapon choices are going to be AA-Missiles and Carpet Bomb or Mother of All Bombs (yep, gonna put that back in).

This means that a player will either have the unit for it's carpet bomb while also having missiles to protect against enemy air attacks (and it's a great anti-air unit) OR fully loaded with the MOAB (which I am in the process of messing with now to make it better than the last one) for a pure Air Bomber.

Cool Idea.

I have a replay you REALLY need to see...

Where do you want me to send it to be viewed?

azuza001@hotmail.com, thanks.

Well I didn't see any issues/bugs around there when I was playing myself against the Brutal AI. This brutal AI is no match for me. I'll may have to take a look again

Ultra, I didn't do anything to thie brutal ai this time around except make it stop cheating. Try it on hard and tell me if you can see a difference, will you? Also, send me a replay video of you fighting the brutal ai, I want to see what map and how it went.

Ok, here's my opinion about current mod relase compared to original xenoforce. And yes, i already took into consideration that this is alpha relase.

1. First of all... models. I can understand how limited was Generals engine, but Tiberian Sun gives brand new windows of opportunities. And still MS and structure models are on the same level like those in Generals. I hope those are only for now, and will be replaced with more detailed and better designe ones. Thing that i like the most in this part, is White Base. I like how she looks like, and if every model in MOD would be at the same level as White Base, it would look at least good, now is little below medicore. I can help a little with modeling. I was modding in HW2 engine for some time and created few interesting models including CGUE and GINN Custom from G. SEED.

2. Textures. The weakest part in whole MOD. Those on GM's, and guncannons look awful. Some of them look worse than in original Xenoforce mod. And yes, i remember that this is early alpha. Just pointing what hurts my in this modification. I know for myself that to create good texture or UV maps takes a long time to gain anticipated effect. Try to look at sunnycatss models in gundam seed mod for homeworld. I dont want You to copy their work or ideas, just to take some clues about how it should look god mecha texture. In this part i cant help, im lame in texturning ;P

3. Animations. Stiff and unrealistic, some units doesnt have any shootning animations/poses. For now, they look worst than those in Generals Xenoforce (Valkyries had best animations in whole mod, especially transforming ones). And i have a clue for You. Try to copy animations from infantry units like riflemen, tweak them a little to add some "weight" to their movement, slow them down a little and voila! Should look better than those, quite innacurate hand-made moves.

4. I personally dont like idea of calling "motherships" to drop few units and run away. Would be better if they stay on battlefield and give some extra research or production options. They dont have to have extraordinary firepower. And make those aperances to cost some money. Thats only mine suggestion.

5. The good thing are sounds , i like those gundamish targetting sound ;-) and this climatic gundam music should play during game too , like in original Xenoforce.

I noticed that after upgrading RX gundam and few other ones with beam rifle , they didn't give any damage to oponnents. Also some gundams got shoot down in no time after engaging in combat. And the battle wasnt something big, got shoot down by weakest GDI units.

Thats all what i would like to write about technical stuff. Everything else looks fine, this mod has a potential, great potential. I wish it could not be wasted.

ps. Sorry if i made mistakes in writting, i havent use english for a long time.

Thanks for your input. Unfortunatly, I'm not really a modeler myself. I can do limited editing myself to exsisting models, but doing 100% custom work is beyond my abilities. I'm really a coder, so thats why the models and textures don't look very good. As far a textures go I am VERY bad at it. I've only got the most basic grasp of how to texture the units.

Most of the animations are actually done by the in game system for turrets. The only real animations we've got going right now are the legs when walking and a bit of arm swaying. Overall I agree it needs work, but like you said this is an alpha, a proof of concept. Things will get better over time, but I really want to get all of the armies/units into the game before we go back in the beta and start working on induvidual units to make them better. Is this the proper way to do it? I don't know, but thats how I plan on doing it. That doesn't mean things won't look better as time go's on, right now I'm rebalancing and working on putting new, custom projectiles into the game so that the special effects look more like what you would see in an episode of gundam (like the beam weapon effects).

Your not the first person to mention the carrier ship issue. The White base was actually done by Smoth, he is a very good modeler/texture person and has given us a few models to use in this mod. We have some other units with more detail (like the RX178) but due to the high detail and the lack of a texture with the unit the overall quality isn't as high as you would think. Again, as I learn more I hope to go back and fix these issues.

The music in the game levels is an interesting issue. First I have to compile the MOD with the new music in the mod, then I have to load each map up and edit the music inside the maps. This means that there isn't a simple "change this to this" code issue but each map must be done on a case by case basis. This will take a lot of time to do, so has been put on the back burner for the moment. It is an issue we hope to get back to at a later date.

I understand. Like i said before i can make some quite detailed models for You, maybe some textures but im not too good at it. I have already complete model of CGUE from gundam seed, halfway textured if i remmember good. I use sunnycat textures as the blueprint for mines. But enough of that. You could do single unit, for example basic GM who will be a "visiting card". I mean, get him some great animations (yes, leg animations aren't halfway bad, just improwe little timing with movement speed to make a better feel of actuall walking) , complete his sound effects, upgrades, fx. I mean get this unit the best You cand with textures and modelling. This will give everyone a blink of "what You can pull with this engine" to make game more gundamish.

I dont know how things with turrets look like in Tiberium Wars, but in HW2 moders took an idea of joint turrets. One "turret" connected to another simulating joint in ankle or elbow. Dont know code so i cant say anything more than just conceptual idea.

With music You are right, that is not something pretty important, just makes game more climatic. Can be left for now.

If You want a sample model just give me a call. Ill do basic GM for this purpose. Just give me some info about max polys, vertex and other limitation stuff. With shaders you must play yourself.

Anyway i admire You spirit of reviving this mod, lets make our best to make it really good piece of code.

Sorry I haven't sent my Replay yet, I have been very busy with work, I will send it before I go back to Korea.

I would love a basic model, if you could do a GM3 that would be great. A poly count of around 7000-12000 would be for a very high deteailed model in this engine. Our current GM3 model is actually VERY VERY detailed (our powered GM model too) but there is so much detail that my ability to texture isn't good enough to do so I had to do basic color textures to get it to look sort-of right. Any help you are willing to offer I would gladly take. Currently I use 3DSmax 8 for my modeling work. Let me know if I can be of any help to you or if you need something.

The turrent system works by making a small "bone" that connects 2 polygons. This bone is named Turret0X where X is any number you want. Also another poly/bone is named Pitch0X. The idea is these settings can be modified inside the code to control things like moving back and forth and up and down. What I do is set the waist as the turret and the arm with the gun as the pitch.

It's cool Val, just send it when you can.

I suppose it should be easier to You to model in wings 3d. SMall freeware program with ability to make UV maps and export projects into lots of diffrent formats. Personally i lik ewings 3d more intuitive and easy in use than 3dmax. Ill make base GM for now, the first model because i started it some time ago and im in hlf way to complete it.

Well, I used to work on models for a week with the Google sketch-up because it can allow to draw lines. So I didn't have to worry about wasting time for figuring out. Its easy.

Now back through the Xenoforce about the brutal AI and weird things. I found some of the obelisk lasers that didn't kill the basic aircraft includes EF fighters, and storm riders. Its just like these have way too much armor vs obelisk lasers. Also, EF units did not gained exp when they destroying the enemy EF units. A few Nod militant infantry squad always come from the bottom left. Nods Militant should be nine infantry per squad instead of five. The reason of that when I sell a Nod building, four nod rifleman always come from on the bottom left corner of the map. More of that, when I purchase the Nods avatar upgrade equipment it goes double like 2000 instead of 1000. I'll take a look on the other issues.

Edited by: KiroXeiApex

I can vouch for that, I have all that in the replay I am going to send soon.

The only issue I have with using another 3d program Aki is that you can only export from 3dmax 7, 8, or 9 into the proper 3DX format that CNC3 uses. As such, I have found issues with people giving me models that work great in their version of whatever they are using but when they export it to a 3dsmax format and send it to me 3dsmax can't read it right and it doesn't show up properly. As such, I prefer to do my work in 3dmax even if it does have a higher learning curve because it is garunteed to work in the end.

The obelisk laser issue again will be fixed with the total rebalancing that I am working on, but thank you for bringing that spicific issue to my attention as I had not noticed it.

Infantry squad issue, I'm not sure what is causing that. I didn't change the size of Nods squads any bit at all. I will have to look into that.

Avatar cost issue, again I have no idea why it would be doing that. How many Avatars do you have selected when you upgrade, it's done on a per-avatar basis so if you have 2 selected and click the upgrade it will try to do it on both avatars. Other than that, I honestly don't know what would be causing that.

Thanks for the input, keep it up. Val I will watch that replay tonight.

That Obelisk Laser bug was there since 09b, I mentioned that when the UC Main Battle Tanks (blue double barrel tanks) were steam rolling my Obelisks. Asked if it was intentional but I guess you missed that. lol

The replay was sent, I am flying to Korea as I type this.

Did you view the replay yet? O.o

azuza001 wrote: 1. I'm not sure what I was watching there, just looked like a game to me. Yes, I saw balancing issues but I won't go into them simply because I already know about them and plan on changing them. Was there something spicific I was watching that for?

If you watched in my perspective and free roam camera, you will have noticed the following:

1. Nod Soldiers spawning on the bottom left corner of the map.

2. Nuclear Power Plant at the end of game dieing and exploding AFTER I had won the match.

3. AI turret spammage

4. AI lack of advancing tech

5. Balance issues (which you already saw)