any updates? its been a while sorry im soo hyped up about it
:dstar:

Nothing much is going on with the map right now. This week has been a bit hectic, and quite stressful, so I haven't been able to really do anything in the last few days. So far, I've simply added in the Rebel version of my DLT-19, did a little barrier work, and added part of the MonCal bridge. (Nevermind swapping the teleport scripts out several times over for reasons I'm not even sure I understand. x_x) I tried finding something to act as a ceiling for the ISD bridge, and found everything but. heh I have the BF1 tools again, so I should be able to find those lego pieces suggested earlier.

I'm also settling in with a new HD, so I have to check something before I do any real work. For some reason the drive letters appear to be switched around on the old HD.

Update:

-I've switched out the rocket launchers with my own version. It's a nasty surprise for some, but I tweaked the accuracy so firing while moving will make the rocket go way off-target, unless you practically shoot at your own feet. I've also reduced the explosion damage radius a bit while I try to add in a non-lethal push when caught at the edge of the blast. Also, I've made it so the explosion now slightly damages vehicles.

-I also finally took out the health packs I'd given pilots for testing purposes. At the moment no unit has them. I'll put them back in if I can make it so the unit using it can't self-heal/self-rearm.


I've also noticed my Imperials are particularly deadly...even moreso than the Rebels when attempting to board. So far, they seem to easily nade the LAAT into oblivion compared to Rebs vs. the Sentinel, are more difficult to fight in the open, track me down like a dog, and that's if I can even make it out of the hangar. O_o It's not a bad thing, but I'll be investigating this a bit more to see if anything is actually unbalanced, or if it's just my perception. For now, I just think it's because the Imps seem to hang out in the hangar more, so they usually catch me from all sides.


Edit: One other thing.. Trainmaster has brought a very nice ISD bridge model to my attention. From what I've been told it just needs a skin. It's currently in 3ds format, so I'll need a volunteer (maybe two) to export the model and give it a skin.

Yet another update: I finally got around to tweaking the pistols. They now have accuracy modifiers for stance and movement.

Also, as far as I can tell, there's no effect for the thrust from Lambda-type craft. So, I'm kind of stuck on giving the Sentinel a thrust effect.

I did throw in the lascannon model as a additional Darktrooper weapon, but, of course, the weapon is a little offset. I also see there are some unused animations for it. As is, I will have to remove it, because it looks that bad, nevermind the other problems. I was hoping to use the model as a T-21.

Then there's the Imp. officer, and that sonic blaster. I'm thinking of finally getting rid of that thing. Really, I think he's a little overequipped, since all I did was add the DH-17.



Edit 12/16: Finally got some work done with the barriers. I'm about 80% done with the main ISD barriers, then it's just a matter of putting in barriers for various objects. Well, whenever I add objects..heh. I don't have any droids, crates, or anything like that setup yet.

I tried to see if I could get the interior defense turrets to fine-tune their aim more quickly, but I'm at a loss. I have a slightly enhanced version, but the changes only seem to affect how quickly it tracks to your general direction, but still fine-tunes it's aim slowly. I did a quick search for the parameter I need to alter, but i've found nothing so far.

Oh, and I found a reference to a hintnode in the docs that supposedly makes transports land. (So, that's why I thought I could get them to land.. I knew I wasn't totally crazy! )

Yeah, everyone nose that those hintnodes were put in and that they don't work

What did you ever do about the little gaps that don't match?

They don't work? Arg! Well, there goes my plans. I might just try it out anyway to see if I can perform a miracle. You never know. I was really hoping they were actually functional, because I wanted a dynamic battle.

The gaps that don't match? Just about every gap is covered by a prop door. I've tried to use a flat 4-sided object for as much as possible, though some gaps look better with a door, or I need the surface area. Like in the pics of the DS hall leading to the Shield Gen. and Engine Room, I used a group of non-animated blastdoors as a coverup for the gaping hole at the end. It's really ugly, and probably won't help the FPS, but I've yet to find a good replacement. It's all noticeable, but I've tried to make everything I could as seamless as possible as far as placement goes.

All in all, the coverups don't match in all cases, because the textures between the walls and doors are often different. I've been thinking about trying to put together a new texture or two to match the walls, but it's not going to be easy for me. I'll have to somehow get a matching pattern that will actually line up when I place the prop. That's if I even have the skill to piece together a texture that will look ok.

The greatest concern with gaps are the bridges. They have the largest holes, and I haven't tried covering them up yet. (Yeah, I'm still using Dragonum's model. I'm not one to really beg people to convert stuff for me.)

Well, for a first go at this (second, if you want to get technical), I'd say I'm doing way better than expected. I may have to extend into Jan. (or possibly later) before releasing this beta, but it's going to happen, even if I have to leave things out for the time being.

MercuryNoodles wrote:They don't work? Arg! Well, there goes my plans. I might just try it out anyway to see if I can perform a miracle. You never know. I was really hoping they were actually functional, because I wanted a dynamic battle.

You may have already seen these, but here are some tidbits of info from the docs:

That's an interesting piece of information there. But I'm sure someone else must have known it and tried it by now and found that it doesn't work or we'd all be having dropships in every space map. Who knows.

MercuryNoodles wrote: The gaps that don't match? Just about every gap is covered by a prop door. I've tried to use a flat 4-sided object for as much as possible, though some gaps look better with a door, or I need the surface area.

You mean to say that you are making a box shape with open ends with the doors?

What I was actually referring to was how the open ends of two different doorways often don't match. Like one hallway is a skinny rectangle and the matching one has a slightley larger rectangle.

The greatest concern with gaps are the bridges. They have the largest holes, and I haven't tried covering them up yet. (Yeah, I'm still using Dragonum's model. I'm not one to really beg people to convert stuff for me.)

You should get someone to convert it

Did you ever consider the teleporter option?

Thanks for the info, AceMastermind. Hopefully I can get around to playing with that soon.

@trainmaster: No, no. Actually, yes, in a way. (I only make a shape for the animated doors to fit in where I have to.) There's a flat doorlike msh that I use whereever I can to improve framerate. It's like the lego pieces described earlier in the thread, but already present in the assets I had put in. Everything else uses a door minus the animation bits. For example, the gaps between the MonCal hangar and Tantive halls use three blastdoors placed cleverly to cover the gaps on the Tantive hall's side. The square openings on square openings are not too hard. The ones that look ugly are those where the opening doesn't match the shape on the other geometry where both meshes have only one side, like the DS halls set near the Engine Room, which has a huge gap on one side. There I used like 6 blastdoors to cover the DS hall side, and two of the flat meshes to cover the Engine Room side. I'll have to take some screens of what I did, if it's still not making sense.

I might try to find somebody to bug, though I really hate doing it. Honestly, I'd rather use the new model, because what I have now looks off from what's in RotS. Well, that, and I found a texture with part of the name labelled "sjc", which is short for Sith J-Cull, who is a well known Jedi Academy modder, and I don't want any issues arising from it.

The teleports are in place to get to both bridges. You just can't go back right now. I just nade the wall, or splatter myself on the ship.

hey, heres an idea for the AI. Why dont u put an enemy transport in each hanger right in the start. it is called boarding action. and the ai cant land. just an idea lol

I think that that is an interesting idea, but that would take the fun out of boarding a ship.

No longer would it be boarding action, but "already boarded and being owned action"

Yeah, you know teleporters only work one way? That would mean you would have to set up a pair to make them work both ways.

If you noticed in that other model I gave you, there's two alcoves in the back, one to the left and the other to the right. You can place the teleporters there and make one coming and the other going.

And yeah, show us pics of your patchwork.

I have a thought. Rather than trying to get the hint nodes to work, you could place splines that lead into the hangers. Then, create a region near/in those hangers that check to see if an enemy transport has entered the region. If so, either force it to land somehow (dunno if it's possible, but I've seen it in Renegade Squadron - an auto - dock feature) or simply create a command post inside the hanger with the geometry of a transport. You'd have two transports in the hanger if a human was piloting (unless you checked to see if there was a human pilot inside). It wouldn't be pretty, but it might be functional for your purposes. Personally, I like the idea of just having a space battle, then have humans land in the hanger when they feel like boarding, but I can see why you would want the AI to be able to do that.

Another way (if we're throwing ideas around here) would be to just animate props over to the enemy hangar. You could do a quick check to see if the shuttle props had been destroyed when they got over to the hangar, and if they haven't been, you would, as jangoisbaddest said, spawn a CP with transport geometry. (Actually, if you did it this way, you could just go ahead and not even need to spawn actual transport vehicles, and you could have more starfighters).

Whatever you choose to do, I would recommend having some way to force AI onto enemy ships with more frequency. The fact that AI won't land probably played a large part into why Pandemic made the cap ships interiors so small.

Sorry about the delay. I just now got a new system up and running after my old one died about half a week ago.

Yeah, I know the teleports are one way. I'm just saying there's no way back beause I haven't finished work on the bridges.

I'll see if I can get some screens of my patchwork soon. Just be warned it's not all pretty.

By all means, throw away. heh I'm probably going to at least test out the ideas that can give me a dynamic battle first. If those fail, then I'll try to work with the others. I'm actually avoiding scripting, since I don't really know enough to do much with it, for now.

I'm attributing the landing problem to a lack of time, because they did try to include ways to have AI do so. It seems like the plans for space were so much greater than what we were given.

Glad you're still working on it. All the best for this map! Happy New Year MercuryNoodles!

Alright, I finally got those patchwork screens. Some of what I did looks ok, but I focused mostly on problem areas.






Oh, and here's a little treat: I'm going to begin setting the ammo limits for spacecraft, though that also means I'm making new odfs and reqs. (I have to change the odf name for all craft to separate them from the stock versions.) This affects missile/torpedo weapons only, for now. After all, having to dodge salvo after salvo is a bit rediculous (and Luke surely didn't decide to torpedo Vader instead of finishing his attack run ), so I'm doing this to put emphasis on using the cannons and cut indiscriminate firing.

This one I've set to four salvos.

looks very good

You may want to just tweak it so that the ordnances are closer in salvo count to actual canon ordnances (i.e. perhaps 3 or 4 missiles to an interceptor). I did this when I made Abraxas Platform, and I really liked the result. Of course, to go along with that I made each individual warhead a little more powerful (concussion missiles never stopped homing but did little damage, torps were quicker than normal but didn't home as long and I differentiated between regular torps and advanced torps, and proton bombs fired straight rather than down due to no gravity in space). Regardless, remember to make spots to recharge ammo in (I made hidden vehicle ammo droids for the hangar areas that recharged vehicle ammo once in the hangar). If you'd like, I'd be happy to share some assets for warhead setup.

And re: patchwork. Some of the patches look really nice, but others are pretty out there. I would go ahead and just use simple legos for door patches rather than other door pieces, or at the very least make sure that your patches are fairly mono-color and -texture.

It looks like I'll be doing that, now, too. Will the list ever get shorter? lol With the proton bombs, I'm thinking about making them move straight "down", like we see in ESB, if it's possible. If you could show me what you have as far as warhead assets, it'd definately be appreciated. That could save me a lot of time. In case nobody can tell , I can spend a lot of time just making something, then tweaking it, tweaking it some more, and it feels like you'll die before anything gets done. That's just how I work.

I do plan on using the old R5 droids for rearming. I have a certain fondness for them.

As for the patchwork: A lot of those are like that because I never came up with an alternative since the last time I worked on patching the gaps, which was probably around the time I first posted this thread. At the time, I wasn't worried about coloration, because I'd planned to go back and fix everything up later. I still have to go through the legos to find what I need. I believe all of my big problem areas are shown in that series, so everyone knows what needs to be fixed on that end. It'd be so much easier if I could tweak the models, but I haven't touched 3D modelling in years and I already know it's going to be another headache to learn some of it.