Dev Diary: Clockwork 10/13/2022 news - Ultimate Apocalypse Mod (DOW SS) for Dawn of War

Clockwork! Where you been bud? .... WELL! have I not a story to tell anyone! All in all it has been fun getting a LOT of the groundwork out of the way. But you may say what ground was needing work? "yes" is my direct answer if you answer me directly in the discord. However here I can detail exactly what has been changed:

First and foremost Cylarne went on hiatus for a while which means that a re-structure of leadership was needed. Devs are now split between "Devs" and "Sub-Devs", what is the difference? Sub-Devs are devs that specialize in one major aspect of game development like coding, map making, art or other various categories. Devs are the ones that pick-up (develop) anything that isn't picked up by a sub-dev or assist sub-devs in anything they are working on if possible. This design will hopefully help those that have limited time or capability to contribute in the best way they know how. The leadership is now split into a three-way design that seems to be the most efficient for making updates and managing the after-effects of when they are released. First is ME, I am essentially THE DEV as far as pioneering the team initially. As the sub-devs have been filling out; I can then focus on more unique things that need my attention. Next is Goose, the main guy who fixes anything I break on the balance side of things; essentially whenever I release a content update he is there to make sure it is playable. And finally Maverick, who is in charge of the community and is your voice. (for instance I tried to release the last update on an 8 hour timer, we negotiated down to 45 min)

What have I been working on these last few updates was entirely focused on performance, bug-fixing, and crash mitigation! Adding content would be nice and all but that can't happen if our mod crashes all the time. Right now with the XD version I have eliminated a significant majority of performance/crashing issues. There are a few left that I know about and some that are caused by the limitations of the engine right now. HOWEVER! that isn't going to stop me as we have been hard at work also to look at the source code (with reverse-engineering tools) to find a permanent solution; sadly we have no results in this endeavor and no guarantees it will work.

Next update then will be the next milestone for me personally because right now our installation is in two parts. You install UA on top of soulstorm, then the Tyranid 5b3 on top again. This is tedious and also causes errors because the tyranid mod was never designed to be properly integrated with UA. So with the release of the public roadmap:

the next update will replace the "Tyranid Mod" tyranids with our very own in-house ones. This will also not only clean up a bunch of unsavory files, but also consolidate our installation into ONE INSTALLER. Visually some changes may be noticed and while I am at it will change how they work entirely to be closer in line with lore. I envision tyranids always raining from the sky unless they were already on the planet to begin with. Another quirky idea I had was removing the builder unit entirely from the tyranid faction and have the player focus more on horde tactics and spreading their influence on the map. The models I am ripping what I can from dow2, however I have been downscaling their poly count and consolidating their textures in the single image 512x512 format for performance reasons. Some models don't exist so I will have to make them from scratch. Others I can thankfully kit-bash and add custom parts to them. More updates down the line the closer we get to that vision. Have some eye-candy in the meantime:

You may have noticed in the last few updates quite a few features were removed. These were removed for performance, crashing, don't-do-anything, redundant, or not realistic to the vision. Some removals are permanent, some are possibly temporary, and others are being re-visioned. For instance we have pvp players and pve players generally. The former category has gotten quite the attention the last few updates but the latter seems to need attention and we have had a few ideas, BUT a few sub-devs have beat us to the punch-line and this is what they have been up to:

Both SheGaft and TheBlast are working on the side of our major development plans to get a working version of The Last Stand Gamemode like the one in dow2. The flesh and bones are there and is SUPER alpha and not even close to release let alone testing for the tester team. This is what they have to say about it:

SheGaft:

"Hello boyz! i and blast have been working on a new game mode for ua (last stand) it will be like the last stand in retribution but for ua . you and 2 friends will face waves of enemies and defeat them . To do so you have a hero at your disposal and buildings to train troops from and upgrade them
that's is all we planned so far , we are looking to do a gameplay showcase soon!"

Blast:

"The idea of Last Stand and how it works were all Shegaft's (deleting hero will make it spawn, capture points so you get buildings etc.). Heroes were just there with no plans before I had that idea of "lets make heroes unique", so I suggested classes instead of disorganized random heroes. For example Main Hero, Secondary Hero, Anti Daemon, Support etc. and replaced them in order.
For heroes we needed "squad groups" and "entity groups" which then can be used in scripting like "make this squad group do this when this happens". Shegaft told me to do them because he was lazy. And he had to give me an extract of Soulstorm units for Dark Crusade (mission editor only works for DC) so I can place Dark Eldar and SoB units. An interesting thing about the entity groups, they are only used for buildings. And for some reason Dark Eldar and SoB units are considered as buildings. So i had to use entity group on them. I mostly map so I wait for Shegaft to finish his scripts."

CONCLUSION:

Some changes were made. Some structure was redesigned. Progress is happening. Sub-devs are making projects successfully without me :(. I no English American good. I look forward to see what the next few updates bring to the community as a whole.

-Clockwork