j0g32

It looks like the textures are not fully resolving(?). The textures are there, but the resolution (or mip-maps?) is messed up. I sometimes get something similar for the first few split-seconds when I spawn. Have you played around with different graphics settings in the menu?

I am not disagreeing with you @TomUjain, quite the contrary. When I discovered original Renegade (playing the C&C RTS games before), some odd 10 years ago, I just fell in love with those very RTS elements wrapped in a FPS game, and that's what I still love about the game concept. However, mixing and balancing these elements is very difficult, and I don't know any game which has ever mastered the balance, if at all than at least as good as Renegade (X). Additionally, certain gameplay mechanics have lead to the adoption of a rigid "gameplay philosophy", e.g. "defending the base equals mining" - but that's not necessarily the main point here. All I was trying to say earlier is that striking a good balance within an established gameplay mechanic framework is tricky. I agree that C&C mode has its flaws, but you attempt to fix one, and another one arises... Where would you draw the line between units that are still available with timer and increased cost, and those that become unavailable? How do you justify that choice? Every player may have their own opinion/preferences. If you reduce the penalty of losing a building, you also decrease the impact of strategic play! A team may deliberately focus on destroying the enemy HoN/Bar to make infiltrating the base easier (in the longer run). Please, keep in mind that Game Development is (or should be) an iterative process: often you don't get things right on the first shot, even if the intentions are good - that's why I brought up the example of the surrender mechanics. My bottom line is that, yes there is definitely room for improvement, but as this thread already shows, the interaction of all the gameplay elements makes it difficult to pin down the "main flaw" and "single best fix". For example, I still believe that map design could alleviate many of the problems, e.g. add more defensive sweet spots to reduce the reliance of defence on mines. Add more paths and base entrances, to allow locked in teams to circumvent a siege, or conversely flank a line of defence, etc. We should think about available options, i.e. true strategic alternatives that players can choose from. Next time you find yourself frustrated, maybe take a note of what you would have liked (or were trying) to do, and why you could not achieve it. In either case, extending the unit roster (and how) when the corresponding production facility is destroyed is something we could look into and experiment with.

I understand your frustation of matches that drag on with limited options for too long, @TomUjain. But again, I dont see how this justifies a team getting their destroyed building back as the only option? Please, try to look at the implications for both teams... We have the surrender mechanic in place that any team can trigger if they feel unable to win this match anymore and want to start fresh. After all its just a game. This feature was also altered from immediate win, to 5 min countdown with veterancy bonus, because it was abused: as soon as 1 building was lost, the team would give up, making each match very unsatisfactory even to the winning team. Your main concern seems to be that you cannot use higher tier units. How could we not address that whith the existing "limited reinforcement" mechanics we already have in place? I could imagine that apart from 1k infantry classes, and vehicles such as mammoth, stealth tank, and aircraft; all other units could still be bought (tbd). Though, with a higher personal (?) cool down timer, and higher price; e.g. you could theoretically still buy Hotwire, but only 5 minutes after you die with that class or every 10 minutes or so. And as I suggested before, this could also be combined with the team-goal of achiving a certain amount of VP to unlock such a feature to begin with (or just parts of it, e.g. 15000 Team VP to unlock med tanks, which could then cost 1200 and have 10 minute timer to repurchase. Additionally, mystery crates contain classes and vehicles, so securing them is another option. Finally, map design is crucial for C&C mode, and might also be blamed for some of the aforementioned gameplay shortcomings. Buying back a building does not make sense to me; unless you have a proper resource based economy where repairing and constructing buildings both COST tiberium credits. That's why I linked the topic about RTS mode (which I still think could be a lot of fun, but would require a dedicated gamemode) Hope that helps.

Thanks for sharing your feedback @kbls and @Bigtimbers - your opinion as new players is very important to us! In terms of quick fix, I think we should just bring back the old loading screen that explained the essentials of C&C gamemode and also costs less memory than videos. Perhaps add a unique background for every map, battlefield style. Besides, I was working on a tutorial level for multiplayer, but the plans for it may have changed a bit - and when I find the time I would like to pick up the work again

Just adding my 2 cents here: Why are you actually discussing this? (1) Is it a out limiting the options when losing infantry/vehicle production? We have air drops and low-tier infantry/vehicles available, with cool down timers. This mitigates devastation of losing those buildings. Perhaps we could play around with those mechanics instead of overcomplicating things; e.g. just re-enable higher tier units (though with cost/timer penalties) when the team reaches X VP in total. (2) or lies the problem/discontent with the "established" renegade gameplay, i.e. building/base defence is lost forever, and so are associated functions? This is the year-old discussion about the cost to the loosing team vs. the benefits to the destroying team. Or in other words: "what's the point of attacking a building?" In such case you might want to think about changing the whole gameplay, e.g. towards a "true" FPS/RTS with basebuilding around proper resource management. Not to toot my own horn here, but I pers. think in terms of gameplay there's no sensible in between option...

Quite ambitious what you have in mind there. The basic RX gamemode would need to be heavily modified, in particular how buildings are handled by the gamemode... Don't know if/how your idea would fit with RenX, or might overcomplicate things... Maybe check out this discussion: In any case, the SDK and most of the code is out there! Why don't you give it a go and see what you can come up with?

If you would just disable beacon purchsse instead of placement that could work.

Yes, "some things" are probably much to tackle alone... With C&C Hammerfest, I had some intentions similar to the above, but I also had a few months time... and still I couldn't get at everything I wanted to before life took over^^ Some ("personal") word of advice: try to break down your project into "manageable" components; in the above case, e.g. convoy movement, player respawn system, scoring, or in the case of assets, modelling, unwrap, texturing, rigging, import, uscript Setup etc. Try to make a detailled to-do list, with every little step along the way. That helps you stay focused, work towards your goal and make real progress. Start with small little tasks, something that you can finish within reasonable time. And anticipate that things will take longer than you expect, EVEN if you anticipate that - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter's_law?wprov=sfla1 Thanks @Henk I cannot infuse you with motivation, but perhaps this helps you to regain and keep up the motivation and to finish your projects! And if you need resources or have questions, browse the forums or ask people

Yeah, I agree, some variation from box standard C&C mode could be great fun! A few things might be possible just with some clever level editing: E.g. you could put the Refinery and TibField navigation points far apart, and block some paths in between to force the Harvester to follow a certain route. Also, you don't have to place every building on the map combined with VehicleFactories you can create Siege and Defense scenarios. We also have capturable MCTs. You can spawn bots in Kismet and give them orders like "enter vehicle", "Move to" etc. There is already a good amount of tools at your fingertips! I guess the main difficulty at the moment is to tell the game about a "custom" victory condition, other than time limit or base destruction; i.e. when to end the game and who has won. And the other, probably bigger, issue is gameplay balance for both teams in a new gamemode So, if you have some ideas, just give the SDK a go and see what you can come up with or build yourself ! Or just share your ideas for someone else to try and implement them! At some point, I would actually like to write some new Kismet nodes that allow you to trigger certain game mode events, victory conditions etc. to make tbose things "easier" for fustom maps (these things should be possible, this is the UDK after all)

I dont think that's a good idea. The surrender mechanics (promoting the dominating team to heroic) are meant to bring about an "inevitable" result (as perceived by the surrendering team) more quickly, since the game would continue until every single building was destroyed. A timed game will end with certainty, but might be a close win/loose. The nature of these games is more competitive (just like most sports) since every score counts. And in those tight games, both sides will fight even harder in the last minutes to gain victory. After that you shake hands, admire the effort ("gg") and go for a new round. In marathon however, only perma-damage to buildings will decide the winner. Anything else may support that, but will not be relevant for victory otherwise. The loosing team is of course free to surrender at any time, but that is up to them, and I think less likely to happen in timed games in the first place...

I think we should revisit how to deal with comm spamming. "Focus fire" is already helpful. But as pointed out before (can't find where and who) sometimes people can only communicate with regular text chat, which gets flushed away within seconds. Is it possible to reorder the item to the top, when it gets issued again while being displayed? Regardless of what the underlying mechanics to use that command; e.g. CTRL ALT or Q spot, or commor rose menu or whatever.

Hm... to be honest, I don't know why "AOW" needs a seperate name - it is just a server setting, though which affects gameplay and strategies, but the goal is still the same - destroy the enemy base while protecting your own. The scores/points should reflect the efforts/effectiveness of either team towards this goal. The timer just helps to avoid games from dragging on and getting stalematy, and just takes a snapshot of the total war efforts till this point. Yes, it also entices players for desperate/crazy actions in the last minutes since there are no consequences to it, but this is Game Theory 101 and unavoidable :-P It is unfortunate that "AOW" does not seem to be that popular, in terms of active player numbers and/or servers hosting it - though, I don't know who to blame, or what is the cause...

But still, I think it's just impressive what a difference it makes to use the same models in a W3D engine vs. Unreal (even without updated shaders) Those models could already serve as decent placeholders, if you want to take this to the next level

Looks promising

I didnt know that - that actually makes some sense, still a pitty though...

Geeez, time flies by - sorry for the sudden silence... As some may have noticed, I have fortunately been invited to join the Dev Team after working on this tutorial project for some time, though with my own plans in mind. All I can say for now, is that there are plans for an official Tutorial, and that I am occupied with unrealscript. That's why there haven't been and won't be any further updates on this thread. Close thread.

Just to clarify: this was not meant to be patronising @Comrade Maxim, we have already been working on the "usefulness" of the SBH ironsights... Now, can we please stop arguing about how to argue^^, and juet focus on real issues/suggestions? By all means, @Comrade Maxim feedback and suggestions are always welcome, but they will be discussed before implementation in the game

Yeah, the scoreboard integration might be a good idea, perhaps also/instead on the TAB scoreboard, since the screen is already quite cluttered with the scoreboard. See Battlefield: I would however use more simplistic icons similar to those on the minimap, and new ones for classes. A lot of weapon profiles are difficult to read/interpret at that scale... By the way, the map view [M] already displays the vehicle and class counts. In either case, it only improves situational awareness, but does not facilitate communication to actually do something about that.

I don't understand their perspective either, especially from a business stand point. It's not like we are competing with any of their products, quite the contrary...

Great to hear that you are enjoying your course and developing your skills! Try to look at some real guns to get inspiration and a better idea of proportions Keep going!

Yeah, perhaps we should encourage players to simply VOTE for a (smaller/bigger) map, whichever is recommended for the current player amount. Maybe by broadcasting server messages, whenever the player count deviates substantially from the recommended number of players for a specific match. Ad dynamic map size: I dont know if that is much "extra" work: I was deliberately presenting Field as an example, since it has been revamped with additional paths for tanks/sneaking. As mentioned many times before, I believe that the reasons for why rushes & stalements don't work and are not enjoyable, is because of map design and limited choices. If a map is not enjoyable because of bottlenecks, then open up new paths. However, instead of making this a permanent change to the map layout, we could make some of those new paths "optional", because with fewer players there might be too many choices and it becomes too easy to attack, and impossible to defend. And it would be more fun to have a simplified, more manageable battlefield... And i think it would be rather easy for mappers/designers (disregarding any technical issues) to temporarily close up some paths. Another example - Lakeside: with less then 10 players, the infantry path and the wide vehicle path up the mountain would be closed, as well as the Tiberium tunnel connecting the two battlefields. Instead, a bridge could be spawned between the two infantry paths/sniper spots. The canyon and this new path would be the only two paths between the bases, where the forest in the canyon also provides good cover to engage eith vehicles. I am not saying THIS is THE solution, just trying to communicate another approach to map design

Or along aimilar lines, how about "dynamic" mapsize, based on player count. Inspired by Battlefield 2 maps, where the same level could be played in mode for 16, 32, and 64 players. Gulf of Oman The Combat zone (=playable area) would be different as well as the number and positioning of CapturePoints and Vehicle Spawners to cater the amount of players. Though it would not change during the match based on player count, but rather offer the server host to load specific map layouts. Now, imagine e.g. below say 16 players, the second, outer vehicle route on field would become unaccesible, the mappers would have to place some sort of dynamic map boundary boxes. Visually this could also be supported by spawning (or unhiding) barbed wires and tnak blockers. Analougausly, currently cluster-f#@&ed maps could receive an overhaul with additonal routes. That way all maps would stay in rotation, but remain playable with various amounts of players... Just a random idea

Just a random thought, following up on this The fact that people are suggesting all kinds of different balance tweaks, is somewhat a prove of its overall balance: Since now it's just down to different preferences over weapons, vehicles, and playstyles of individual players, and anecdotal evidence, there is no consensus on what is "unbalanced". Speaking in terms of welfare economics / political economy, there are little/no efficiency gains through balance tweaking; i.e. increasing the fun for everyone (on average), without making too many worse off. In fact, I conclude that therefore on average the game seems to be fairly balanced... Though, I haven't played myself in a long time...

I personally loved playing Project Reality (battlefield 2 mod), back in the days. As far as I am aware, Squad also supports a sophisticated base building and logistics system. And combined with Renegade's base functionality and C&C gamemode, this could be very interesting, and probably how I personally would have imagined the perfect game^^ I guess I was thinking of a very similar approach to base building and RTS mechanics for Renegade... Good luck!

Good job, I like it! The outposts are cool! Thats what I imagine the Dutch coast might look like during the Tiberian Sun / Tiberium Wars era But the windmills are too high poly, you should definitely try and lower them down, at least create LODs. The abandoned outpost/silo/harvesters scenes are nice, but again since they are blocked off, I think you should rather put these details into actually accessible areas, and save on objectdraw calls where possible Keep it up!