Hello everybody, and welcome back to the increasingly unwisely named weekly bulletin. Between attending a funeral in another city and a bunch of work related stuff, I haven't been able to write up a news post since about this time last month. On the bright side, we've got a bunch of work to show off. Morpher and I have both been making maps and we've had a bunch of multiplayer playtests. I've reworked the art assets for the Nod Obelisk of Light and the GDI Autocannon, and added a bunch of extra remap to some of our voxels, based on feedback from these tests. Morpher has been tracking down bugs and working on balance and I've continued to work on finalising a large number of terrain tiles. Morpher also uncovered some unfinished music files while going through our FTP, and has been working on finalising the AI. So far I believe the easy and medium GDI AIs have been completed.
We have four finished maps to show: Pit Stop, Island of Insanity, Murderous Atoll, and Woodlands. Pit Stop is a small 2 player map which is being used to test two cool bits of scripting. The centre of the map contains four geysers which seed Tiberium around them. This effect currently lacks dedicated graphics, but it works fine even without them and provides the central pit with large volumes of Tiberium reasonably frequently. The second thing which currently makes this map unique is the occasional localised ion storm over the pit. Aircraft entering the area fall out of the sky and ion bolts can strike any harvesters and hapless troops. Pit Stop is mostly a test map, but it's still kinda cool.
Island of Insanity is an 8 player map which gives each player a small section of beach around the edge of the island. The raised area in the centre of the island is impassable, leading to brutal skirmishes in the tiny areas between bases. Played as a free-for-all the map is totally bonkers, and even with teammates it still remains moderately insane. When playing it in multiplayer with Morpher it reminded me a lot of the tempo of the original Red Alert.
Murderous Atoll is built on the same formula as Island of Insanity, and was directly inspired by it. The circle allows for naval warfare in the middle though, and forces players to remain on their toes about cross-map APC attacks. Each player has access to two blue Tiberium fields, ensuring enough funds to respond to the frequent and urgent threats upon their base. Much like Island of Insanity it is a mess of a free-for-all and can punish even a momentary slip in concentration.
Woodlands is a more subdued map. the 4 players sit in a wooded and watery area with yellow and red Tiberium. The lower funds make for slightly slower play and make harvester harrassment a more important tactic. The rough, but nominally flat layout gives Nod player plenty of places to put strategic artillery and the numerous lakes compound GDI's hover-vehicle advantages.
That's it for maps. The multiplayer tests have been uncovering a few issues with the way some units are designed. The biggest offender was the GDI autocannon. Despite being the lowest tier defence structure and having a pretty small damage output it was one of the largest in the game. So I reworked the turret entirely and shortened the base to bring it more into line with the rest of the GDI buildings. Hopefully this art change will help to better represent the building's role.
While I was at it, I also remade the Nod Obelisk. This was one of the first models I ever made, so it wasn't actually very good. The remake has added detail where there wasn't any and has better defined the building's shape and scale. I also finally got around to a good construction animation, damage state, and charging/firing animation; all of which were sorely needed.
I've also been adding extra remap to a few voxels. In our playtests we noticed a distinct lack of remap on a bunch of the GDI voxels, so I've gone and added a bit of extra to some of them. It was a big issue because when there are 8 players all vying for control of the map it becomes pretty dificult to tell who is who without some nice, quickly recogniseable remap. A good example of this is the original Tiberian Sun's harvesters. The whole cab was brightly teamcoloured, so you could immediately tell who was harvesting from which field.
I've added remap to the GDI harvester's cab, the Orca Fighter's missile pods, and the Orca Bomber's fuselage. It's a mixed bag in some ways, because some of these units looked better with minimal remap. But in Morpher's words "I'll take that over not being able to tell what the hell is going on", and I suppose I have to agree.
And that's what we did this week/fortnight/month!
Take care everybody!
This is incredible stuff as always, Another TS mod recently moved onto the OpenRA engine, do you guys think you might port the mod over to that any time soon?
Morpher handles all the code and is quite comfortable with the TS engine. At the moment we're so close to having all our assets done that the porting process seems like a huge headache. I haven't investigated OpenRA very deeply, but if we were to lose anything in the transition between file types it would be an enormous blow.
If at some point in the remote future we discover something we absolutely can't live without then perhaps we'll investigate it, but I for one would really like to get everything finished and polished before thinking about any other big steps.
You would be best to console the devs of Crystalized Doom in regards to how the porting process went, Theyre the only ones to have done it yet I think.
i also thibk openRa would be a good move, the online lobby and stuff works well =)
*ontopic*
Awesome progress again, following your mod nearly from start, so waiting for it :)
For TS Release I would play it in skirmish for OpenRA, I would play it in Multiplayer :)
Rampastring has provided us with a fantastic multiplayer client which works with CnCNet, and also gives us a bunch more control of various internal settings - without it I doubt many of our gamemode concepts would have been possible.
As good as OpenRA is, Rampastring's client (Which Dawn of the Tiberium Age and Twisted Insurrection both use a variant of, I believe) suits us fine for the foreseeable future.
Island of Insanity is likely going to be one of my favorites, I always like a good 8 player maps. Great update as always.
that laser tower :O it's awesome, nice work!
Oh come on! Just give us a demo !
Paishence, grasshoppa.
i didnt know you could make localized ion storms i thought that was a map wide thing only, does that mean you can make other localized weather/event effects like tornadoes, hurricanes or blizzards for example?
I chuckled at the title image :P But no matter, I like the update. I do however wonder how large the test team is, since you keep mentioning you have done testing with testers.
Just Morpher and I most of the time, unfortunately :(
I would definitely be interested in helping you guys test. =P
Maybe you should recruit some testers...? Or are you really just trying to keep it secretive for now?
A couple of bad experiences with testers in the past has sort of soured things, but the bigger issue in my mind is that Morpher is in Australia and I'm in New Zealand. We can jump on CnCNet and have a game after dinner because I'm only 2 hours ahead of him. Other people have to get up really early, stay up really late, or skive off work, so we don't get to have frequent games.
Hmmm, yeah that is a good point. I'm like, 8 hours ahead of you. =P
Though I don't have something that takes a whole lot of time and I have a very off sleep schedule (I often wake up way into the afternoon and stay up all night).
Just you two... Damn, and I thought TO has an entire team like TI has =/
I have some questions:
What do you think of OpenRA?
Are you at all considering porting over to it once the TS mod is finished?
Do you think it'll replace TS or do you think it'll fail?
Finally, if you were to port over to OpenRA how much do you think it'd slow you down while you try to learn the engine and how it's modding works, and furthermore do you think you'd try to adopt coders to work on completely custom things for your mod (If it was on OpenRA)?
OpenRA is pretty cool.
It'd be pretty interesting, but I'd be hesitant to do so given the sheer amount of assets, maps, and code that would need to be converted; and the number of bugs and balance issues that would probably be introduced.
I think it can easily improve upon TS. The voxel rendering looks really cool and the engine seems pretty easily extendable. It's up to the users to keep the project above water though, and so smaller projects like DTA and TI can stay relevant more easily.
8 - 10 months, at a guess. Maybe more. It'd be cool to get a proper tesla effect into TS, and both GDI and Nod could be improved by making their top tier units a little more special I guess. Off the top of my head I can't think of too many outright logics that I wish TS had. As with any engine or development environment I think there are certain walls you come up against, there's always going to be stuff you wish you could do but can't.
We'll be sticking to TS for the foreseeable future I expect.
So I'm guessing like, get a working more final product out to the public then if you decide to work on an OpenRA port you'll have more time to do it as Odyssey will be mostly done in the TS engine?
Exactly. There's no need to bite off any more then we've already bitten off so far.
This comment is currently awaiting admin approval, join now to view.
In regards to OpenRA, if I / we were to ever go to that engine I think it would be for something new entirely, TO has taken up enough time just getting it right on the TS engine so spending another chunk of my life porting it and testing it to OpenRA (without a huge benefit as of yet) is a low chance right now. I am however quite excited at the thought of using OpenRA for something entirely new though, I would like to sink my teeth into that engine.
Totally understandable. Thanks for your thoughts. =)
Since it's like this, is it viable to leave the porting to another modder (team) after Odyssey is done?
The assets in TO are very high quality, comparable or higher to the original game and it would be a shame if they were not available for reuse in OpenRA (since it's probable that OpenRA will be the engine of choice for future C&C mods).
Hey there,
I must say the moment i saw this update my mind exploded :D really good work the maps look awesome, may i ask if you could load up larger imges of them i really like to see all the details of this brilliant work <3
the new autocanon looks very fitting to the rest of the gdi structurs also the new oblisk give me the chill so beutifull so deadly :)
keep up the work guy cant wait for more you guys get me hyped like fallout4 ;)
Very nice, hope to play it soon :D It will work with 1080p res ?
It should work with pretty much whatever resolution you feel like.