B-Wing by Dope Demand video - Yuuzhan Vong at War mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
Behold the Yuuzhan Vong Army! This mod adds the Yuuzhan Vong Race as a playable faction and all units of this era. We are a community of modders working for the greater goal, so anyone who wants to help or support us is welcome!
You wanted it, you got it.
Fully animated gyroscopic cockpit and s-foil wing deployment of the B-wing Bomber.
Thanks to the amazing animation by Jedi_Clone_X2 and the ingenious scripting coding of Kad Venku, we have our 6 bomber squadrons of B-wings not only autotmatically depoying S-Foils when engaging capital ships with the Ion Canons, but also each individual fighter in the squadron will randomly perform evasive flight maneuevers on its own, independent of what other fighters in the same squadron are doing.
Thank you to all that contributed and helped with this: Sacer, Wariscool, Arccaptainfordo, Kad Venku and Megabalta for his assisting us with his laser mod produced by him and Jeroenimo and working with me to design the Targeting Lasers which can also be randomly seen throughout combat sequences thanks to Sacer's coding.
This was a true team effort, probably more time than should have been devoted to a single fighter, but the B-wing is special, it's glory was cut short from Return of the Jedi, so we felt the need to do it justice.
The B-Wing Bomber, by team YVaW.
Model by Battlefront 3 (unreleased) - edited and additional details by Burntstrobe
Texture and rigging by Burntstrobe
Animation by Jedi_Clone_X2
LUA scripting by Kad_Venku
xml coding and support by Wariscool, Sacer, Arccaptainfordo
Lasers by Megabalta and Jeroenimo
engine particles by Cheesecake
WIP Test footage, we are still tweaking weapon effects
So. Awesome.
Gentlemen, this is a goddamn masterpiece.
Thank you for the "nudge" to motivate us to do this :)
Hey anytime. Bouncing ideas is fun and will help both of our mods. Your guys' LUA knowledge though is going to open a lot of awesome doors that are...well not closed to me but my grasp of LUA is still small. Anyway, its really been fun to watch this mod develop. You've all done a lot in such a short time.
This is amazing! Keep up the good work!
The ingame test footage you guys provide us always turns me on. This is indescribable good work.
It is still really rough, we need to add proper collision meshes to ships, resize lasers, and implement proper firing rates for lasers....but we are getting there, and our template fashion for coding is going to allow newer material to be added faster
So i have a question, are fighters to scale in this video? I was a bit confused at that since some seemed bigger than normal, or maybe I just have poor perception on how the scale seems in game.
They are to scale. A nebulon b is 300 m. An x-wing is 12.5 m. A b-wing is 17 m long. 24 x-wings actually do equal the length of 1 nebulon b. DP20 is 120 m. CR90 is 150 m. All other ships have been scaled as accurately as possible using these ships as guidelines. We size every model before exporting, so there is no xml scale coding
Just took another look at the video. I see the scaling!
You guys just keep raising that bar higher and higher. Keep up the sensational work.
soo I can expect the when the mod comes out, the game may lag like that lol?
Nice one with the lovely B-wings through~
lag was due to running video capture, having 6 other art programs running/rendering and having about 84 web browsers open...
It actually plays very smooth in the game when not recording video, and when not trying to force the 'C' camera to get in front of a fighter.
We are working very hard on making this run right, please do not hate.
God, this is so briliant! xD
I started crying when the cockpit stayed on its place while turning the ship
The only issue with this is is that (assuming the cockpit is on the 0,0,0 point in 3ds max from the way the animation works) all fire will focus the 0,0,0 point of the grid, in this case, the cockpit, and not the middle of the actual fighter, meaning the fighter will be incredibly difficult to hit since the cockpit is so small, projectiles could just fly by it since 80% of all space around the cockpit is empty space, and just about 20% around it is the rest of its hull. This adds a huge amount of artificial extra health to the ship since most projectiles will flat out miss it due to all the projectiles trying to hit the edge of the fighter instead of the actual middle of the fighter. This is fixable by creating a collision mesh around the b wings cockpit so that projectiles will still "hit" it even though they technically should miss it, it fixes the artificial extra health problem. Not exactly elegant but this way you can keep the fancy animations by keeping the cockpit the center of the fire focus point instead of ditching the animation to get the fighter to get hit properly by centering the actual hull on the 0,0,0 point.
Bout the actual video the targeting lasers look pretty cool with the moving wings, though I'd think that an actual b wing wouldn't be able to rotate its hull at that speed, I'd slow the animation by at least 200%, that'd make the transition between stances look a lot more fluent than the near instant rotation.
You may be right about the cockpit being the center and so making the fighter less destroyable. But as always you can reduce its health to compensate for this in the case it happens.
You can also just keep the collision mesh centered to 000, rather than linking it with the body of the B-wing itself. Granted, this would look odd in-game, with projectiles seeming to collide with nothing...
In reality, the current solution is better.
That said, if you could animate these faux-combat maneuvers with every fighter, thereby providing a measure of balance in regards to the increased health, it may prove to be a cool addition to fighter combat. For example, use the ability to fake barrel roll maneuvers or juking. Split-S and Immelmans are already simulated through the default locomotors...Hell, you could even simulate flares or foil by linking particles to a dummy animation. That's what's so damn cool about what this team is doing... The possibilities are nearly endless.
Could be cool.
I think an extended col mesh as I suggested would work better than recentering the current col mesh, but yeah, same concept. Animating maneuvers for all fighters would be a lot of work but that would be very very cool for sure. It would make fighters and bombers survive for a long longer though, and this might upset balance by a lot. Though as GenF mentioned you could half the health of all craft to fix this.
The entire fighter, all parts have individual collision meshes that rotate. As seen in the video, many b-wing squadrons were indeed destroyed, and at the end of the battle (not shown in video), only 1 out of 10 squadrons survived...
We thought of this, and it does indeed work well in the game. The X-wing had a much higher suvivability rate, I can only assume thanks to its increased speed.
Half the health and bingo. However, fighters were capable of taking down entire ISD's when in well-trained squadrons. I think a slightly higher survivablity wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.
During implementing this I've probably destroyed about 1000 B-Wing squadrons.
At no stage of development I noticed an increased lifespan of the squadron or survivability rate due to more or less hits caused by animations. If anything I always had trouble keeping them alive for proper test runs.
It might in fact be a factor in theory, but I wasn't able to notice it during "normal play".
Actually, I'm not quite sure EaW's hit detection is good enough to make a difference.
You made a totally new game. You guys are beyond awesome.
this looks so awesome! i know this may shake up the balance of the game, but it could be so cool if all the fighters randomly rotate on their axis like that =)
Ok that is really cool! Didn't even know you could do that and you're making me wish I had more free time to get into stuff like that. Would be cool to see Frigate's or even Destroyers make dodging maneuvers instead of flying a straight course. I do that every now and then in a smaller skirmish when I can micro manage and get corvettes to dodge shots by making them change directions frequently. Would be cool for the bigger ships to change elevation or rotate like if an ISD has enemies on one side it can rotate enough that the other heavy turrets can also get a shot. You can get them to do stuff like that micro managing and setting their roll rate higher but it would be cool if capitals would turn towards a target to give them their strongest volley on their own or jink every now and then to dodge some enemy shots. Would be cool at least to get rid of how every capital ship turns a broadside when ships like SD's have their strongest volley in the forward arc. Just wishing out loud hear and I don't even know what's possible but you guys keep breaking down the barriers.
That would be really sweet, true.
But keep in mind that this is a dated engine. We're doing lots of stuff we're probably not supposed to. We sadly have to keep the balance. Each script that is running drains performance. And we want to make sure to put the overhead we have to good use. And there is more to our mod than just such neat gimmicks. Have a quick look at our news posts. We have to save computing power for more important stuff. When that stuff is running sufficiently, we can start dreaming about the fancy stuff again. As Burntstrobe said, we probably spent too much time on this fighter, but isn't that what defines being passionate about something?