Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Some pics of the new Scrin Design.

So again, I had promised a few pics of some of the changes to the armies.  I decided to do a post for each of the 3 armies, here are some pics of the new Scrin changes.

The biggest thing to note here is all the icons under the Defense Tab.  The Scrin no longer have defenses that are buildable on their own.  Instead, they have a Generals Style powers tab that you can pick 7 of the 12 powers to apply to their army instantly.  The 3 rows are Defenses/Offenses/Tactics respectivly.  

Defensive powers are System Shields (turns on the shields), Infantry Mines (allows certain infantry units to turn themselves into landmines.  When the mines go off the infantry reapear), Blink Packs (allows some units to teleport around the map) and Living Armor (many high end Scrin units will now heal automatically when not fighting).

Offensive powers are Tiberium Laced Weapons (some units can use tiberium as ammo to make their weapons deal more damage), Mothership Deployment (allows you to deploy the Mothership), Rift Generator Deployment (allows you to build the Rift Generator), and Prototype Technology (many units gain power powerful weapons to use instead of their normal ones when this is used).

Finally we have Tactics.  These are basically different special powers that you can use.  They are Tiberium Scan, which now is able to be used the moment the scan wears off, Phase Shift which can now work on both your units and your enemies units as a way to sort of "put them off" for a moment until you can deal with them, Wormholes which now last forever (you can destroy a wormhole by simply shooting at it instead of moving to it, but wormholes are really only affected by BEAM weapons), and a new power called Nightmare Pulse.  The Nightmare Pulse forces all enemy infantry units to become surpressed for a full minute, helping you if your enemy is moving in with a large force of infantry by effectivly stopping them in their tracks.

But that's not all, many units themselves are different.  Again for example, what you see in one of the pics is me having 10 explorers built in my base.  The explorer now generates a randomly moving Ion Storm that comes and go's as it pleases.  This just adds a little random chaos and fun to things, don't you think?  Take a look at the pics and tell us what you think!







Sunday, August 29, 2010

I promised more information.

So here it is.  I've got 3 pics to show you guys today.  These are the latest designs we have come up with for the SEED unit layout.  Unlike UC where as you go through the game you unlock more units and lock out older ones SEED will have no lock out units.  This will make SEED more of a snapshot in time type of setup vrs UC's a history lesson of the gundams.

Keep in mind that every unit you see on these charts will not nessisarily be in the game.  For instance, I really think I may skip the Abyss gundam simply because the current maps that have water on them are waterlocked (IE even if you have a unit that can swim you can't swim on them thanks to the maps design) and that makes the unit pretty much useless.  

So here are the pics.  Feel free to comment.  And maybe you'll realize as you do look at what we plan on adding to the setup and what's changed to SEED just why it's taking so long to do lol. :)








Friday, August 27, 2010

It's been awhile

Just wanted to let everyone know that we're not dead, we're still here working on the mod lol.

It's been a busy last few days, but we've pretty much got everything for the original 3 armies set.  There have been a lot of changes done to these armies and I'm very interested to see how things work out in the end.

Within the next few days I'll post some new pics to give everyone an idea.  We've stuck to our original guns, there are NO new units in the game for the original armies.  Well, not really.  Ok, so technically there are a few new units, but they are more like different versions of the exsisting units with different weapon payloads.

My favorite unit so far is definatly been the Stormsmoke Orca.  It's more expensive than the normal orca, but unlike the normal Orca who's main weapon are the Shriker Missles and has an anti-infantry 50 cal machine gun for secondary uses this thing has 2 45MM cannons on it which unload a ton of weak, but effective, shots upon ground targets and has hellfury missles for it's secondary weapon, which are used against air untis.  Now the major difference here is the Stormsmoke Orca doesn't have to go back to base to reload, giving GDI a unit that can effectivly stay out in the field during fights and give the GDI forces some much needed ground support. 

When we finally do come out with the next version of the alpha, and it should be soon, there will be a very long list of changes that I'll have to go over.  If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Otherwise, have a good one guys and I'll go work on getting some pics taken for the next update.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

So here is an interesting problem.....

I just finished my work on the Scrin Army, it's pretty much where I want it to be (minus the required weapon balancing and the like) so I decided to turn the game on and see how the AI fairs with my changes.  

This was my major worrying point while I was doing all this work, that the AI wasn't going to be able to do anything with what I was giving it and just run around in circles chasing it's own tail.

The result?  Oh dear......  So in my new design I gave the Assimilator a new ability.  The Assimilator is the Scrin's Engineer unit, but I wanted it to stand out a bit more, give it some new functionality as it were.  So I gave it the ability to turn itself into a biological powerplant for a short ammount of time.  The result?  It works great as a player.  Unfortunatly the AI can't seem to understand the point, and all it does is make a ton of these guys and turn them into powerplants while trying to get them to go capture a Tiberium Spike or something.  

Yea, that's not very good.  So I took the ability out, and the AI is working great.  I'm not sure if it's using my upgrades or not, it appears to use at least 1 of them, so that's pretty cool. 

But that leads to an interesting point/problem.  Whats better, making the game simply from the point of view of the real people who are going to play it, or designing the game around the idea that the AI does have to actually work?  What's more important?  Tell me your thoughts.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Heh, I learned a new trick.....

Look ma, I figured out a way to add stuff to an exsisting model in the game without having to export it or edit it.  :)  

Is this very useful?  Well, yes and no, but it's kinda cool.  It does open up a different level of coolness of things I can do to the models that I can edit already, letting me have things appear on models when upgrades are done, so in that since it's very cool.

Well, what your looking at in the picture is a concept design to what one of the new scrin options will be, which is an upgrade to the mothership.  It's been upgraded with greater armor, along with new weapons for firing at air units and finally a perpetual Ion Storm that is always with it.  All of this adds up to a mothership capable of doing some SERIOUS damage to an enemy as now the thing can protect itself on top of everything else.  Now, you may be saying to yourself, WTF, why would I ever want to fight against something like that with a Gundam? All I can say is that you need to either have another high-class unit to fight them (GP03, Pegasus Class Ship, a few Gundam X's with the Sat Cannons, those kind of things) or a lot of units as you can see in one of the pictures, the ship still needs to get in range and that's where it's vulnerable.  

Oh yes, did I say them? Yep, you can get as many as you can afford.  Enjoy the pics.  :)






Dougbendos Battle Reports / A quick update on current progress

So doug has done a few more battle reports for everyone to watch, he shows off the new GDI quite extensivly in these so if your interested in how things are changing I'd say give it a look.


Scrin are about 60% done now, I hope to be done with them by next Monday.  We're pretty much set on how we want to change EF and SEED now, so hopefully once that part of the project gets underway we won't be having any more "Well, our design worked fine until such and such happened, then it kind of went out the window" instances and we can get on with the real work at hand.



Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - Why the Freedom Gundam is no more prt 1




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDq8E2stFIU


Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - Why the Freedom Gundam is no more prt 2


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoRXeC41aT8


Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - Why the Freedom Gundam is no more prt 3


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jol160JgGs8


Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - why grass hopper got a buttwoopen prt 1


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOIuiHYM0Fs


Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - why grass hopper got a buttwoopen prt 2


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UehlfeSQY_o


Command & Conquer 3: Xenoforce Renorn - why grass hopper got a buttwoopen prt 3


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o0FK1f0hqo

Thursday, August 5, 2010

I would love to show you all new pics of the mod!

I would love to, but I'm not going to. Why? Because honestly the next release won't have any graphical improvements. No new units, no new special effects, none of that stuff. Ok, maybe a little, but not anything that pics could possibly express.

Instead I would suggest that everyone take a look at Doug's youtube videos from last week if you havn't already.

http://www.youtube.com/user/RobotechPodcaster#p/u

He has a few vids up showing a couple of games that were played using the new GDI. In it you'll see some sweet stuff like the GDI Firehawk dropping carpet bombs, the Sonic Cannon shutting down vehicles, and some other sweet suprizes. I'm not sure, but one of the vids may also include NOD with their Catalyst Doomsday Bomb. I'm starting to wonder weather it's a good idea to have such a massive power in the game, I mean, we're talking about a power that you can not avoid no matter what! So if you see a NOD player get his final power (it'll have a countdown up in the corner, I think the pic is still a nuke explosion but it's not a nuke, it's the catalyst missle) you will want to step up your game and deal with that PRONTO.

Now, the reason it's taking some time to do is 2 fold. One, again I'm restructuring Scrin in such a way that they will not play like the GDI or NOD, so don't expect the same "class" unit to be effective against what it was before. A prime example is the Mastermind. I've given it one more ability right now, and we're toying with a second one but I'm not sure what the 2nd one could be (maybe the ability to morph into a tripod? Maybe not lol, still, the ability to turn into something bigger and much nastier without the powers has promise) but the 1st new power is the ability to summon an Ion storm onto the field where it is. This storm can not be stopped and will stick around for 60 seconds doing some pretty serious damage. This alone makes the mastermind a very dangerous new foe!

The 2nd reason is even more simple. With the changes we have made to NOD so far, along with what we are doing to Scrin, some things have to change. First, I have to look and see if I can make Scrin still work as an AI that is able to fight vrs labotamizing it with my changes (In other words, if I break the Scrin AI I will have to fix it and that will be a pain as I hate AI coding more than making a model from scratch) and the EF. The EF in particular is screwed fighting NOD right now. Why? All a NOD player has to do is get the upper hand for a moment and destroy the starting EF base in battle. Once that's done, the player can sit back, get the Tiberium Bomb, and then blow it up taking all the EF Resource Silos with it. This would be very bad as it would end up causing the EF player to have (gasp) NO structures to build more structures! So we have to redo some things. Yea.

So anyhow, take a look at his videos and tell us what you think! And if you have any suggestions/ideas, I'm always open. However, we're still sticking with the "no new units, lets try and make the ones that are already there work right", so if your suggestion would be to add a new tank in then it will probably not happen. :(

EDIT : AUGUST 6, 2010

Here are a few pics of me FINALLY getting a special power working for a Scrin infantry unit. This power turns the infantry unit INTO a land mine, and when the mine go's off the infantry unit comes back (on top of the damage done from the mine exploding). I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out ways to use this in an evil sort of way.