Hello there internet. It has been a little while since we made the effort to publish something, for various reasons old and new. We have spent a good portion of our time these last months finishing the core snow terrain, producing maps for it (and a few more for temperate too), working on the AI, and testing for balance, completeness, and to improve said AI. I've also spent a bit of time investigating other interesting avenues which may make an appearance later on.
First up are some neat things which may see a lot of use or close to none (depending on a bunch of circumstances): High-poly unit graphics. They've cropped up in news posts before as I slowly crept towards finishing them, but now I've largely put them to bed. These things would make inter-mission cutscenes a bit more viable, but even if that's not something we find the time, energy, and skills to work on they might still make for good loading screen art and similar.
I've mostly been adding to my portfolio of TO units for fun in my spare spare time, so really who knows.
We've also got a few more skirmish maps since last time we checked up on that sector of things, which explore some new and interesting environments:
Erosion takes place amongst a network of sinkholes, forcing players to navigate a mostly flat, but nonetheless treacherous area.
Fracture boasts high volumes of the relatively resource-poor Yellow Tiberium.
With the snow theatre finally in a usable state, we've begun to see playable maps use it in the roster. Flurry takes its cues from old-school RA layouts.
One of the many other things I've been making is a set of assets for a Nod mission which Morpher pitched. While thinking of ways to introduce naval warfare and naval units early in the Nod campaign, Morpher suggested a disused oil platform as a possible setting for a mission. And so that evening I put together most of the basic art required to set up a Nod Pirate Enclave on an oilrig with a Piranha Dock and waterborne defensive structures.
Here it is mocked up and almost ready to be converted for in-game use.
The specifics of the mission still need to be worked out a little bit, but the assets are interesting enough that they already suggest some natural layout possibilities. It seems only fair that there should be some special Nod structures and environment assets to go with the various special units.
We have also spent a good portion of time playing online via CnCNet, as Morpher works to round out the AI. So far, numerous bugs both small and large have been sorted out; from oddly priced units to surprisingly strong helipads, unsellable War Factories, and tiny animation mistakes. It's nice to have things coming into line and feeling relatively well polished, at least on the GDI side of things. Once we ramp up our forays into the Nod AI, we'll begin to see some parity there too. Multiplayer testing has been a useful way of squashing bugs, and most importantly it seems to be fun.
And that's all I can think of right now. We will doubtless have more to show at some stage down the line.
As I haven't seen the Nod Conyard (Even though it might just not be finished...) could it be possible that you're still working on the 2 CY Workaround?
And as always, superb work. I do honestly believe that I'll cry once I lay my hands on this :p
Both sides have functioning conyards, with all the graphics (vehicle, deployment animation, building, active animations) working and ingame.
In the first of the four testing screenshots at the end of the news post you can see the Nod CY taking damage from purple player.
Visuals are pretty amazing! Hoping for some download content soon
Your models are amazing. It's kinda of a waste seeing them turned into voxels.
Nah, the voxels came first and the models are extrapolated from them. I have to give a lot of credit to Muldrake, the guy who did the GDI units, for defining the appearance of the project early on and giving people who joined later (like me) a strong style to work from.
Well Done ^^
sweet :) keep it coming, still tracking and hoping for this <3
Looking great!
Just wondering: how many people are actually working on TO nowadays? I know Orac and Morpher do, but anyone else?
Possible return from Muldrake, that's about it at the moment.
Would nod still gonna have his cyborgs?
Because this is the after the firestorm campaing has ended,i was wondering
And maybe we can sneak a little bit the forgotten and some sort of scrin? :D
Cyborgs are CABAL, so they're out of the Nod Roster - replaced at by the Hellspit (Flamethrower) and the Elite Cadre (Directed Energy Weapon).
The Forgotten have been thoroughly fleshed out with more units, a larger role in the story, and more well defined motivations.
The Scrin Ship, the Tacitus, and all the other materials related to them continue to be a mystery..
Well, you guys rock. Keep up the good work.
looks really good!
e: been following this since 2005/2006 I think so I'm patient. even before I got my ModDB account.
Yet another good bulletin guys, plenty of information without spoiling any story nuggets. That oil rig looks awesome though, I'm looking forward to playing on it. :D
Will you guys do a Open beta of just GDI? thatd be nice imo, lets us have something sooner :)
To **** it looks very sexy and exciting.
Why are the MLRS vehicles almost as big as or bigger than the ships?
Because we have two other options:
1) scale the MLRS down so that it's the correct scale, and also scale all the other vehicles to match (because otherwise it'll look weird to have a teeny tiny MLRS next to regular sized everything else). We'd need to make the infantry one pixel tall, and bring the buildings into proportion too, since we're following this scaling system.
or
2) Scale up the ships to be the correct size. They're still only be able to take up a single cell for gameplay though, so that's going to look weird. Then we just have to work out a way for the graphics not to glitch out, since ginormous objects come with a whole host of drawing issues.
So instead we just went with the simple solution of it just being a game. Units all need to be well sized to remain readable in complex situations, and this means there needs to be compromise - unit sizes get a bit weird, and there are giant patches of bright colour on them to differentiate their owner. (There is also a subtle size increase in units as we progress through the tech tree. Bigger unit tends to equal scarier unit).
The same reasoning is what has brought us to retaining the Tiberian Sun infantry size. For a long time we used smaller infantry, but when we came to overhauling infantry combat (so that it wouldn't be totally irrelevant) we found that differentiating dull brown blobs was difficult in circumstances where snap decisions were needed.
It's just a headache to aim for realism, and doesn't actually make things more fun in my experience. What it does do is introduce a whole new layer of difficulty in making art assets, and sometimes actively makes playing the game less fun.
Will a smaller vehicle graphics setting be available like in Twisted Insurrection?
Given the number of assets we'd need to rescale and the fact that I'm ambivalent as to how much it'd really add, I don't personally intend to implement such a thing. We've got many hundreds of voxels and I'm not going to go through them all and resize them down for a purely aesthetic tweak.
I did some quick mockups for how 'corrected' scale would look if we're playing the realism game. Obviously its pointless to go for 100% realism, because it makes the game literally unreadable, but if you're not aiming for that 100% then why make the token effort at all?
This: Media.moddb.com
Becomes this: Dl.dropboxusercontent.com
This: Media.moddb.com
Becomes this: Dl.dropboxusercontent.com
If we use the ships (probably the largest units if we're using real life as a guide), then almost everything else becomes smudges. If we use anything else, the scale issue that prompted all this still stands and all we've done is wasted many hours of tedious effort for an effect which is close to meaningless.
I couldn't help but notice the temperate color scheme on the GDI units in the snow pictures. Are you still planning on having snow skins for the units to go along with the snow theater?
Yeah, we're still tweaking colours. We'll convert them all in as close to one go as possible in order to keep them unified. We're still trying to get the colour right though.
That's great to hear! Can't wait to see the snow skins. That's one of the things I love about you guys, the attention to detail.
That oil platform reminds me of the Starcraft art style.
Say data release ?