OWA

I mean I'd like to hear the farcical reason for it too! :v

Very cool update guys. Nice job! Just trying to understand, what was the reason behind the SBH removal?

I don't necessarily think that's boring, though if you look at it, there are more classes in APB and Reborn with multiple weapons than there are ones with singular weapons. Keeping weapons exclusive to classes allows for less blurring of the lines when it comes to defining the roles that infantry have in the game. Being a "Left-Click Champion" pretty much describes the large majority of FPS games. The other variable is how much you need to use the mouse wheel or number keys to cycle through your arsenal of left-click champion weaponry. In both of those games, there are only four or five character classes, which makes the weapon and gadget spread important to those characters. In APB, those roles get distributed across a larger number of infantry classes, a bit more like Team Fortress 2 was before hats were introduced. There's not much that can be done to prevent a Rifle Infantry from playing out it's intended role, as more weapons would add un-needed complexity, make their role more homogeneous when compared to other characters, alter the balance in potentially unintended ways and also be pointless in some cases. i.e. Rifle Soldiers have unlimited ammo, so why would they ever need to use a Pistol? You can damage lighter vehicles quite well in APB using a basic Rifle Infantry. Just don't expect to be taking on a Mammoth Tank and coming out on top. That's not what we have observed. We actually see new players struggling with units that have multiple weapons, such as the Rocket Soldier and Volkov. The issue of homogenisation has always been a discussion point in our community because we don't want our games to be "just Renegade again but with a different aesthetic". If you gave infantry Grenades in APB for example, that would devalue the Grenadier. Adding new weapons also throws the balance off and with APB it's in a fairly good spot right now. The numbers don't lie: https://www.w3dhub.com/ranks/apb/#/mapstats These are fair points. These elements seem to work well for Renegade X, though it would be interesting to see IF they translated to games like APB and Reborn. Although C4 has a Renegade stigma hanging over it and with it being harder to disarm in APB, I don't see that being a particularly good fit. I'm not entirely convinced on your last point. You have units like Gunner and the Rocket Soldier Officer which are really just the same basic unit but with certain stat differences. The same goes for Havoc and Deadeye, though both of these examples are inherited from Renegade, where the same rang true. Aside from Engineers who have a unique role in the game, the other infantry can easily be grouped into around 4-5 key roles with the only real deciding factors being "what role do I need to fill" and "do I have enough credits for the best character that fits my chosen role". i.e. If someone has enough leftover credits for Gunner, what makes the Rocket Soldier Officer a viable alternative? I have to agree but also disagree here. You're right about the Thief, since all he has to do is get to the Refinery and stand in the right place to steal the money; that's a one-trick pony. I think you're a bit wrong about the Spy though. The Spy has a few different layers of gameplay that make him one of the most intriguing units to play. You can play the spy in a subversive way to chat the enemy team and provide them with false info. His disguise allows him to sneak past base defences, which makes him the best unit for hijacking enemy vehicles, his ability to turn off the power and radar in the enemy base allows for excellent synergy with base rushes. A Spy played correctly at the right time can win games and the fact that he has hardly any combat effectiveness isn't a factor when doing so. At best, a Spy can steal a Demo Truck and kill a building, that's a lot more than simply being "annoying for the other team". I mean when your vehicles do interesting things like lay mines, self-destruct, jam the radar and create shroud bubbles, I think that counts as more features. There's also naval units and fixed-wing aircraft which expand the engagement options. I'd have to agree with you that the Ants aren't being used in the best way just yet though. See above for infantry stuff. I disagree with your generalisation that the infantry are "one-trick", when most of them are actually multi-role. e.g. Sergeants/Starshinas are actually really good vs buildings. The only vehicles with alternate fires are the Mammoth Tank and V2 Launcher, so I'm not sure what you're referring to there. As I said in my previous post, it really boils down to what you define as a "feature". I'm not sure what you mean when you say "Ren-X wears more of its features on the outside". Could you elaborate please? Aren't buffs and nerfs just part of the balancing process, or are you talking about a gameplay system that has been introduced? I haven't tried the Commander stuff properly yet, but it sounds like a pretty good set of controls that help focus the action during pub games. I'm not sure I agree there, due to things I've previously mentioned like certain infantry being largely similar but at different prices. Rocket Soldier Officer = Discount Gunner etc. To be honest, one of the major reasons that I personally don't play Renegade X that much is because I feel that the map design stifles the vehicle combat by restricting the movement to lanes and chokepoints. This was also Renegade's problem though, so it's inherited. We have Phase Tanks in APB and the open map design isn't a problem, though the balance of these units is tailored to their role with the map size in mind. Your point about service depots is only true if you play as the Soviets or on low tech maps (which are generally small, so returning to base isn't really much of an inconvenience). As the Allies you have the Mechanic which allows you to make repairs in the field. Tank combat in APB carries a lot more consequence because players are inherently less likely to have an engineer class following them to mitigate any damage from fights at range. There's also a lot more room to manoeuvre on the maps which allows for a larger array of movement-based tactics to be utilised. Flanking is the obvious example. My statement was more general. If a person enjoyed Renegade a lot, it's logical to say they will probably enjoy Renegade X a bit more than APB. Though saying that, there are still a bunch of people playing the original Renegade, so there's clearly enough difference to create diverse opinions.

Then I haven't played this game properly since that got patched out, or just didn't notice it. Apologies. I guess that makes my point about weapons a pretty moot one, though my point about the fact that repair guns still being buy-able de-values the Engineer classes still stands.

This discussion looks fun. @yosh56 It's all very well saying that something is "boring", but if you can't say why it's "boring" other than the fact that certain Infantry match-ups vs Tanks are unfavourable for the Infantry then you may as well be stating the obvious; that's the way the game is inherently designed, with counters in mind. It's not an unknown point that basic infantry don't do well against tanks. They didn't do well in Renegade, they still don't do well in Renegade X (even with C4) and they don't do well in other games in the FPS genre; for example, try taking on a tank in Battlefield using a class that isn't the Engineer and you're going to have a bad time. I can see that the idea of "more variety = better" sounds good in theory, but that isn't always the case. More variety adds more complexity to the game, which in turn drives up the skill ceiling and makes the game harder to grasp for newer players. It's very important that when you are considering to add something to an established game ecosystem that you introduce features that have strong reasoning behind their inclusion. On the subject of APB though, I think the main difference here is that APB isn't trying to be Renegade, whereas Renegade X IS. Obviously you're going to enjoy Renegade X more if you prefer Renegade, but the fact of the matter is the choices made in APB are made in order to give infantry clearly defined roles that have strengths and weaknesses, which makes team composition a LOT more important in rushes and such. In Renegade X, there's not much consequence for picking a single type of infantry class and rolling with it, because: Every infantry has C4, which means they can combat vehicles to a certain extent and attack structures effectively (this is true with Renegade as well). Every infantry has the option to buy a repair gun, which really de-values the role of the Engineer classes. Every infantry has the option to buy additional weapons, which conversely powers up Engineer classes and allows them to do fill in the gameplay roles of other classes (which, in-turn, de-values other classes). It's almost as if there's an active discouragement in infantry unit diversity because the intention is to let all of the classes buy weapons to fill most of the gameplay roles, apart from more specialist units such as Snipers, the SBH, Anti-Tank specialists and the more expensive versions of them. There are no truly specialist infantry classes in RenX (like the Spy or Thief), who can do unique interesting gameplay things that place them outside of the arbitrary roles of: "Anti-Infantry", "Anti-Tank", "Generalist" or "Engineer". Every character class has a gun that is good at shooting a certain type of thing (which is inherited from Renegade) and the buy-able weapons blur the lines across those four basic class categories even more. Basically, if you make everyone special, then nobody is special. @vandal33 I'm not sure what you mean when you say "Renegade X has more features". In terms of vehicles, APB has a LOT more. Granted Renegade X just introduced that commander view feature which seems cool, but I couldn't get it to work properly last time I played, so I can't form an opinion on it. It's very hard to say that one game has more features than another without establishing a baseline of what a feature is and then counting them up. Though both games have a good amount of features, I'd say. @yosh56, @vandal33 More weapons for vehicles won't change the fact that several of Renegade X's maps are box canyons with no real space to truly manoeuvre your vehicles into cover. APB has 1 type of weapon for most of it's vehicles, but the maps are large enough so that vehicle positioning becomes a lot more important than sitting in a tight lane/chokepoint firing your weapon repeatedly whilst your personal army of Hotwires backs you up (see: Mesa, Walls, Field, Under, Hourglass/Whiteout). I'd be really interested to see how Renegade X plays out on a map that is designed more like an APB map, with less of a focus on lanes/chokepoints and more on open spaces. That would be the true way to test your theory on whether vehicle need more weapons or not. tl;dr - Variety is the spice of life, but it's not always the answer.

Quick question. Are you guys going to be doing building interiors and MCTs? I don't see any doors (apart from on the WF) on your buildings.

Alright, that sounds good to me. I'll make a mental note to package up the files and send it over.

I have a Battle Fortress with basic diffuse, spec and normals. That'd be quite an entertaining one to see in the game. However, maybe it'd be a better idea to use something a little simpler that you guys know your way round for a tutorial. All of the Red Alert 2 stuff is pretty madcap.

No worries Havoc, it's totally fine. If you want to have a play with some AR assets feel free to ask. Keep up the good work!

Not trying to start anything here, but as far as I know, the Reborn team was not consulted about this. Both Reborn and Apocalypse Rising both left Bluehell Productions at the end of January, so any permission you have obtained has not been granted by "the guys over at Reborn". What you guys have done is really cool, but please understand that if you want to ask for permission to use the assets of other mods, please ask the correct people. This took a few of us by surprise and a few people including Wallywood, the leader of Reborn was a little disappointed that he wasn't kept in the loop about this. Not trying to dig guys but that's how it is. Keep up the good work!

Apocalypse Rising isn't out yet since there a few infantry characters, vehicles and buildings still to make. There's a tab on the BHP launcher for testing purposes. Our launcher hooks into our forum, so different game builds are unlocked depending on which member-group you are in. UnrealScript is based on Java. You can find many similarities between the two languages. If any of your programmers use Java, then they might do fine with UnrealScript. You can read this wiki page for comparison of UnrealScript and other languages: http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/UnrealScri ... _languages Your mod/game is great. It looks pleasing and your team has done a pretty good job so far. But seeing that the Reborn team has worked hard on their mod/game and not get a lot of players was a bit of a shame... (Same for APB) And I'm worried, as any other Renegade community member is, that this can also happen to AR. Since Renegade-X saw a lot of players and downloads, it's bound to succeed. I believe that since Renegade-X has so much attention (hopefully it will get even more attention soon), the team members get more motivation to develop this game even further. You've seen what happened to TT right? The TT team did a great job, but the player count of Renegade went down in the years of development and after the release. Now there are people who are quitting the team because they believe it's useless, for lack of a better term, to keep developing. You guys don't wanna go there. It would be a wise decision to start developing with UDK. This is only my opinion. I'm sure that for you, as a leader of the mod/game, it will be a very difficult step to make. It is sad that nowadays people judge the game on its graphics first. I believe that gameplay is the most essential part of them game. Graphics come in second place. That might be the reason why standalone W3D games don't get as much attention as Renegade-X did and does. If you think about it, Reborn and Renagade-X are kinda the same. Same gameplay, same strategies, and familiar characters and vehicles but unique in their own way. The only difference is graphics. And that is what drives more people to Renagade-X rather than those great W3D mods/standalone games. For the record, I've used uScript in the past and found it to be pretty bad in most cases. While our programmers may know Java, I think they relish the challenge that scripting the Renegade engine with C++ still brings. I can't blame them really, because I still enjoy developing for the engine myself. But I do hear you out about moving on; my biggest gripe with the w3d engine currently is that the export tools haven't been updated since LotR: Battle For Middle Earth 2 came out, so it's miles out of date by current pipeline standards. Reborn had plenty of players when it was released, and it still continues to get players; nowhere near the scale of players Renegade X has currently, but that's because the amount of publicity that Renegade X has gotten surrounding it's release has prompted a lot of people to check it out. Keeping the players playing will be the real challenge. The TT team pretty much work exclusively for us now, because we are the only team that dares to push the boundaries of what the Renegade engine is truly capable of. You can change Renegade's back-end all you like, but it's not going to create a better game because if anything like balance is touched, people would complain. Because APB, TSR and AR are created by us, we have the power to truly innovate C&C mode in a way that even the Renegade X developers cannot do. Making a game that is faithful to Renegade still limits you to Renegade, whereas we are free to create more interesting gameplay features that wouldn't necessarily fit into Renegade at all. We have talked about moving to UDK, but we tentatively waiting to see what UE4 is like, since it makes use of C++ rather than uScript. The other main problem we have is the amount of effort we'd need to spend just porting all of the assets over to UDK and re-rigging everything. The default UDK animations are hideous and we are currently without an animator, but I guess that working on a better engine would make us attractive to a new audience of artists. You are right in saying that games are judged by graphics alone in this day and age, which is sad; but the main point is that you can draw people to play your game using graphics, but to keep them playing requires a lot more. In my opinion, A Path Beyond was at it's best when there was a global stats system installed with achievements and all of that cool stuff. My belief is that to keep people playing, you need to give them a reason to play; so if there are achievements and accolades available, people will play to get them. Reborn and Renegade X are kind-of the same if you strip both games down, but then if you build them back up, you will realise that Reborn plays very different ly. One notable example is the choke-point gameplay that Renegade and Renegade X seems to suffer from. Reborn doesn't suffer from this simply because engineers cannot repair vehicles and both teams have unique ways of breaking out of their base (underground units for Nod, EMP mines for GDI). Although some of the key strategies such as APC rushing still remain, the game is a little different. We are working diligently to provide the community with something different that's more of a twist on what we think C&C-mode should be like, but in the end you are ultimately right; a smart gamer knows that gameplay comes first, but unfortunately we can't all be smart gamers.

The main problem with moving to UE3 at the moment is the fact that our programmers all use C++ and don't want to learn a scripting language that is soon going to be obsolete (uScript). We might consider it when Renegade X releases an editor pack though. We'll see.

We have a moddb page with tons of info here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/red-alert- ... pse-rising

Back in the old lands of w3d total conversion mods, a little known project that aims to produce a Red Alert 2- inspired shooter is still slowly putting out updates! We put this update out the other day, which includes lots of awesome information on what we've been up to recently. We've got a solid team over at Bluehell Productions that is still around producing total conversion mods for Renegade's w3d engine! Our forum recently turned 10 years old, so that must be worth something! For fans of Renegade X who don't mind more of a retro graphical style, come check us out! The latest update can be found here: https://www.bluehellproductions.com/for ... opic=27640

Congrats guys. I say this time and time again but you guys have really done a fantastic job with this! In other news, I can't wait to get my hands on the editor for this and check out how you guys do your tracked vehicle physics. I had a go at tracked vehicles for my games design masters thesis and although I got them working correctly, the implementation wasn't quite as slick as the one you guys have in place. Exciting!