Xenoforce Reborn

SEED - The straight forward aproche.

2012-02-14T17:51:00.001-08:00

Sorry for the late post, it's taken me a few days to get my thoughts together on the following subject. So, having said that lets take a look at SEED as an anime and see how this would work as a RTS shall we?

Gundam SEED is the story of a young boy who finds himself on a neutral colony in space during a war between the Earth and the Space Colonies. At first it seems like its going to be a reboot of the original story but it's far more than that. Soon the young boy finds himself in the cockpit of the Gundam Striker, the 5th prototype Gundam being developed on the colony, as it is attacked and the other 4 prototypes are stolen. Worse, he finds that one of the thieves is his long lost childhood friend. I can't imagine pitching this idea and keeping a straight face but apparently someone did it and did it well enough that it got made. Bravo random japaneese dude.

So what this really comes down to is a show with lots of "basic" mobile suits and a few high performance prototypes constantly fighting against each other. As the story continues people switch sides and new sides are formed which does not help our situation at all.

So what does all of this mean to you guys and the Mod? It means that we have potentially many different units to pull from but in the end with us only choosing units that would have been part of the Earth Federation, what exactly qualifies? And where do you draw the line? There are so many different Daggers and Windams, what ones do we go with? And the many MANY different Gundams and Mobile Armors... you start to see the problem.

In the end there are 2 major timelines from SEED that can be worked from, CE71 and CE 73. CE71 was the year of the Dagger where CE 73 was the year of the Windam. If we go with CE71 you have the Strike Dagger, Jet Dagger, Launcher Dagger, Dagger L, Jet Dagger L, and Doppelhorn Dagger L. If we go with the Windams of 73 you get the Windam, Jet Windam, and Doppelhorn Windam.

Units based on the Strike Daggers (Strike Dagger/Jet Dagger/Launcher Dagger) are teir 1 units that fill the basic attack/basic air unit/basic artillery positions. The Dagger L's would be the teir 2 units with the units following a similar pattern (Dagger L for basic attack / Jet Dagger L for basic air / Doppelhorn Dagger L for basic artillery). Finally if we did add the Windams in as the teir 3 units they would be the Windam/Basic Attack, Jet Windam/Basic Air, Doppelhorn Windam/Basic Artillery.

So thats our basic units setup. So far what we're looking at are 3 frontline, 3 air units, and 3 artillery units. The army so far is looking like a straight up fighting force. Where do the Gundams fit in?

I think how we should do the Gundams would be elite units that you can call on to support your forces in game. These units would be 1 time builds, built from a different structure or maybe summoned in using a support power. When I say 1 time builds I mean you only can have 1 on the field at a time. So what Gundams can we use?

Well, from the original show the first 5 prototype gundams were built FOR the Earth Allience so arguably even though 4 of the 5 were stolen if the EA wanted to build more they could have, they had the plans after all. That would give us the Duel Gundam, Buster Gundam, Strike Gundam, Blitz Gundam, and Aegis Gundam. We could also argue for the Calamity, Forbidden, and Raider Gundam but to me these always seemed like they belonged to Blue Cosmos and not the EA.

Out of the 5 original Gundams not all are going to make it, simply put we have to take things from a gameplay standpoint and I'm not going to put every gundam avalible in (we still have some to grap from 73 afterall). Out of the 71 series the ones that I would say "Yes, you should be there" would be the Strike Gundam, the Duel Gundam, and the Buster Gundam. These 3 units actually fit with our inital setup, with the Duel Gundam being the frontline unit, the Buster being the artillery unit, and the Strike being the air unit. The Strike continues to gain favor due to it's flexability allowing it to switch to artillery or front line with it's other forms to further it's position.

With the jump to 73 though we have a different issue. The Earth Allience did not use very many Gundams in its defense in this war, not ones that were truly theirs anyways. They did use the Chaos, Abyss, and Gaia. As these units were stolen from Zaft and held by the EA for quite a while it's arguable to say that if they wanted to the EA could have produced them as well. As such for the second teir of elites these would be the 3 that I pick. The Chaos abviously takes the slot as front line fighter, the Gaia takes the slot of air unit. The problem is with the Abyss gundam. As we don't have water as a transversal item (meaning you can't go in it thanks to the maps) the Abyss's armored mode is less that useful. However the argument could be made that we can modify it and make it's armored mode into a sort of stationary defense turret with long range having it fill the artillery slot.

Also these units help flow into the final class of units, the Mobile Armors of the EA. These bad boys are the Gells-Ghe, the Zamza-Zah, and the Destroy Gundam. I don't have to explain to you why these guys are picked. One downside to these guys are they would be VERY expensive to put onto the field, but they will be worth it.

So thats the basic forward facing design that I have come up with from watching the show and looking at the units. 9 basic units that each fill a basic roll and 9 elite units that will be able to stand against at least half a dozen units on their own (basic units that is, don't expect a Strike Gundam to take on GP03).

But wait! What about ORB and the Justice and Freedom?! Well, thats an interesting situation. I would like to put them in but really where do they fit? The Justice and Freedom never worked for the EA. Orb however DID at one point (even though they did it at gunpoint so to speak). This would fall into the "Addititonal Support" aspect of SEED. I know I want an ally system of some sort in there, where a player can choose either ORB, Three Ship, or Blue Cosmos to gain additional units. How this is going to work though has not been worked out. I'm thinking it's an additional defensive structure that will be built that will give "summon" powers to gain additional support.

ORB will grant the player access to the Astrays, the Murasame, the Strike Rouge, and the Akatsuki units. Three Ship will only give you access to the Freedom and the Justice. Blue Cosmos will not give you any additional unit types, but instead will give you additional units in the form of the teir 3 units. This means as Blue Cosmos you could attack an enemy with 4 or 5 Destroy Gundams at once! (Talk about power....)

So thats my thought process. Tell me what you think.

State of the Xeno Mod

2012-02-06T16:51:00.000-08:00

Ultra asked on the forum about what our overall plans were for the factions that we have not put into play yet. This is actually a good question. As always we are modifying desings as needed however this is the general design and play style that we are going for.

With the Earth Federation we are going for complexity. The idea is that the EF is made up of 3 full armies that are controlled by a general governing body. In game this translates to the player picking EF and then getting to further modify their choice in game. This is a huge tactical advantage as it forces your enemy to come to you and find out just what faction your moving with. On top of that this also allows you to pick a force and then find out what your enemy is using mid game to switch things up a bit. On the EF side you have UC, AW, and SEED.

UC is a force that is focused on defensive game play. Having said this that does not mean that they are a turtle army. They start out with slower but stronger units compared to the other 2 sides (and most other forces at that point in time) and go through a progression of gaining new technology as time go's on. The longer it takes for a UC force to win the more desperate the situation becomes for high command and they will continue to authorize newer and more powerful mobile suits to be used to win. This gives you a steady force that will continue to shift in focus as the game progresses but it also has the downside of you not being able to focus on speeding up deployment of units, things will just come as they come.

AW is a force that is focused on swarm game play. This is different than rush game play however. The force is designed to continually hit the enemy with many targets trying to overwhelm them. The disadvantage to this is that AW is such a threat in the global community that other armies (Zeon) will attempt to stop them whenever they can. To this end the AW player has to hurry and try to defeat it's opponents as quickly before colonies start falling from space (always a good way to ruin a great day).

Seed is of course sitting in a not-so-nice spot. The first course of action is to figure out what game play type we wish to go with here. Are we looking at a swarm army? A turtle force? How about making them a rush force? What units do they have that would fit into this kind of design? With UC about 50% of their units would sit in the tank/turtle category with the other 50% split between rush/dps (damage per second) and tactical/assault forces (units designed for attacking an enemy and forcing them off balance). AW's unit really made their own design, with so many weak units (daughtress's with their tenzans) with so many super units (all those mass production gundams) giving them a 65% rush / 20% tactical / 15% tank design. Truly AW is not designed for making a base. So SEED sits where it is until I can figure out what the units are telling me that their game play should focus on. (At this point it's looking to be the most direct straight up army that EF can deploy).

Now for the other forces that we've not talked a lot about. We have Zeon, Invid, and Robotech Defense Force. We actually have a pretty good idea where we want these guys to be (well, a good idea on Invid and Zeon with a general idea on RDF).

Zeon and Invid have a lot in common. They are both based around the idea of an invasion force. Where they are different is in how they do it, Zeon is an invasion force with the end game result being to control the Earth. Invid on the other hand have only one purpose, destroy the Tiberium and anyone or anything that has come into contact with it. This makes them very unique in their way of deployment.

The Zeon force is going to be based around tank units (units that are slow but tough and able to take a hit from all sides) and in a lot of ways will be THE Turtle force of the game. The idea will be that where they land they will place down a lot of heavy defensive structures and have a lot of heavy units. They will sit back, build up, then crush anyone that attacks with a massive counter-attack. The downside to this is their units will be a bit more exspensive per teir and their actual structures are not going to be very tough. Their entire design is based around cheap, quick to put up structures, heavy units and heavy defenses, and an income that holds it's own. As far as units/structures that we have for them is concerned we have a lot of Zeon units along with the structures from the original Xenoforce Mod. Defenses I will have to make myself (I have the designs done, just have to make the models).

Invid are a completly different beast. There are a few Invid designs floating around but they all focus around a central theme. The Invid units will have different designs that as time go's on will mutate into other designs. What this means is that when a unit is built it will be also given one of 3 upgrades randomly. It will either be given a speed boost (50% movement), a power boost (25% additional dmg) or a toughness boost (25% additional hp). The idea is that each unit is modified as the Invid Regis changes it's mind. Can this be done? I think so. Will it be easy? Not in the least lol. Now, here is the thing. I currently do not have any models for the units or the structures. At one point Doug sent me some units but I don't know what happened to them, so yea.... The overall design of the Invid is a force that focus's on Damage and is not interested in taking land. This means an Invid player will not have to expand their base very far to be successful, but they WILL have to kill enemy units. As far as their economy... yea I am not sure how thats going to work yet.

The RDF is another force that is unique in our game. Each and every other force in the game (Including NOD and Scrin) are military forces that are trying to take land or be a political power. The RDF however has little interest in "taking over the Earth". The easiest way to explain them would be as a Technologies Company with many military contracts across the world. In fact the RDF only has a few large installations on the world in Alaska and in the Philipine Islands. Most of the RDF work happens on Mars where the RDF has the only off-planet research facility. Now the RDF has 3 aspects in the show, there is the actual Robotech Defense Force from the 1st season, the Southern Cross from the 2nd, and the Robotech Expeditionary Force from the 3rd. I already have models for many of the RDF forces thanks to the first Xenoforce Mod as well as having all the structures that I need. At this point I need models for the Sothern Cross (Hover Tanks Rule pound for pound) and Robotech Expeditionary Force (Defiantly the Cyclone will be an interesting unit to design).

So how will they work? I don't want the RDF to be like the EF so what I'm thinking personally is that we have 3 structures. One of them builds units from the RDF, one builds SC, and one builds REF. There are 3 teirs of units for each section. One unit from each teir will always be build-able (so you will always be able to build the basic veratech or basic hover tank) but the other 2 units in that teir can only be built IF you choose to build from that side first. SO how it will work is this. At Teir 1 if you build the basic hover tank then the other 2 SC units from teir one will be build-able and the other 2 RDF and REF teir 1 units will be locked out. At Teir 2 you can then build the basic RDF unit to get access to the other 2 tier 2 RDF units locking out the other 2 SC and REF units. Same with Teir 3. This means that the player will have access to a maximum of 15 different units out of the grand total of 27 units possible. I personally like this idea. This also gives the Robotech Force the most flexibility to change tactics mid game. If your looking for hard hitting units you start with the REF. Then you notice that your enemy is going to be hitting you with a swarm of units and you simply can't keep up with a war of tactical strikes so at teir 2 switch over to the Southern Cross to give you some Heavy Turtle/Tank units to protect yourself. Then at end game you see that your Southern Cross units are tough enough to stand up against the enemy and your REF units are fast enough for hit and run tactics but you really need some units that can both come up and support the SC forces while also being fast enough to retreat if things go wrong, so you go with the RDF forces and their Super Veritechs.

So the end game design looks like this.

GDI - Turtlers Army
Scrin - Damage Per Second /Super power/ Swarm Army
NOD - Rush /Super Power/ Elitest Army
Earth Federation (UC) - Turtler Army
Earth Federation (AW) - Swarm Army
Earth Federation (Seed) - ?
Invid - Tank / Swarm Army
Zeon - Tank / DPS Army
RDF - DPS / Elitest Army

A Turtler Army is designed to take a long time to execute but when it does it hits with a massive amount of power.
A DPS Army is designed to do maximum damage at the expense of the units themselves.
A Swarm Army is designed to over-run an enemy position with numbers.
A Rush Army is designed to hit fast and first.
A Tank Army is designed to take a hit and shrug it off.
An Elitist Army is designed to use special, expensive super units to deal with multiple enemies at once.
A Super Power Army is designed to be able to manipulate the entire army with powers and upgrades.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

Will the SEED design suck?

2012-01-28T11:23:00.000-08:00

It's a good question to ask at this point. Now that we've gotten Scrin redone (again) and have a solid focus/design for Nod done it's time to look at the next big thing. (I am ignoring GDI's work as really they are not getting any real attention this time, they're pretty much good where they are other than the stuff I mentioned last week).

And that next big thing is SEED. SEED has quite a few things going against it right from the start too. You have the fact that we've been working on the EF for two years now (I'm about sick of it honestly and can't wait to go on to Invid/Zeon/RDF). Then there is the fact that SEED has a very diverse selection of units and mobile armors to pick from. On top of that is the fact that many of the more popular SEED units would not fit in our design as your playing as Earth and not Zaft. Finally you have the problem that we have a ton of suits already made for us and donated that we have to sort through, maybe one that we've been given just won't work when we try to put it in (A problem I had with the Powered GM many times. All 3 donated versions caused severe lag in-game and I ended up retro-fitting a different model to get one in).

Having said all of that there is also the issue that I honestly do not have a clear vision of how I would like to see SEED in the game. The vision for UC was there and worked from the get-go. The vision for AW also varied only slightly from it's initial design and works well I think. So where does that leave SEED? In strategy terms UC is the Turtle Army and AW is the swarm army. Is SEED supposed to be the Blitz army? Maybe it's supposed to be between UC and AW, able to both turtle and swarm but not really having to devote it's entire strategy down one of those paths. Or could SEED be destined for something else, a force more akin to Nod using stealth and super powers to try and win the day. In the end I really want SEED in the game but I'm afraid that if we just half-ass it we're going to end up with a less-than-optimal force that people play for "fanboy" reasons and not because it brings something unique to the table.

What do you guys think?

GDI's new design.

2012-01-22T13:40:00.000-08:00

Yes, I finally am getting around to talking about the changes that I've planned for GDI. There are not a lot of changes that I plan on doing, only 3 in fact. 1 change is to their economy and the other 2 are to their super powers. Thats how strongly Doug and I feel about GDI's current design.

The first change is going to be with their economy. GDI's design is based around deployment and units, showing a strong front on all fronts and wiping away the enemy with grand sweeping groups of forces. They will have 2 sources of Income, the traditional mining of Tiberium being the main and our new "force economy" as the secondary. What's the force economy? Basically what we're going to try and do is have every single unit that you build tick off cash every 3 seconds. The amount of cash they tick off will be 1/100th of their normal cost. This will mean that once a unit has been on the field and not killed for at least 5 minutes the unit will have payed for itself. Obviously this isn't going to be the case most of the time, but this also means that a turtle who just builds and builds and builds will continue to offset the cost of their base and new units with existing units allowing GDI to get more bang for its buck.

Now for the superpowers. GDI currently has the Ion Cannon, and that isn't going to change. We are however going to expand the way that the Ion Cannon can be fired. The traditional Ion Cannon is going to switch to being a 5 minute power and be the "Non-Targeting Ion Cannon" power. This is because after you tell it where to fire it will do just that and you can't change the target.

The second fire mode (or first new Ion Cannon) will be a "Controlled Ion Cannon" and will fire much like the USA cannon did in CNC Generals. The idea is that the power will spawn an "invisible, controllable, unit" that the player can move wherever they want. As the unit moves it will spawn the "big beam" of light part of the Ion Cannon and cut a path behind it. Finally this unit will last for like 10 seconds and then self-destruct, basically giving you control of where the beam go's. This beam will not have a large blast radius but it will be useful when you need to cut a path open. It will have a 7 minute timer.

The final fire mode (or second new Ion Cannon) will be what I like to call the "Planet Cutter". This power will literally cut a semi-controlled path across the map with multiple cannons firing at once! How it works is that the player "targets" where they defiantly want the beam to hit and then an "invisible" unit will spawn. This unit will move like the Firehawk bomber and work exactly like that unit does when it drops the MOAB. However it will also work like our EF Capitol Ships do, attacking any enemy that it flies over. This means that the unit will fly across the map in a straight line and any enemy that is caught underneath this drone will trigger the Ion Cannon to fire at that place! It will fire a few or ton of Ion Cannon Strikes all in a row doing massive damage. This Timer will be 15 minutes long.

So there you have it, our current plans on GDI. Let me know what you think.

Speak out against PIPA/SOPA!

2012-01-18T13:35:00.001-08:00

As you may or may not know today is a national "blackout day" against these bills that the US Congress is trying to shove down our through. Speak out against it! A prime example would be THIS MOD! According to the laws it would be copyright infringement and be competently shut down without ANY DUE PROCESS!

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Go here for more!

State of the Echo

2012-01-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

While working on this mod I have learned quite a few things. I've become a much better modeler (I still have a ways to go) and a more creative coder. I've also learned a lot about game design and how the three mesh together.

The final part of my Scrin Design centers around the Echo ability. This is a power that modifies itself based on the upgrade chosen. It's unique in this game as this one power can do many different things and modify many different units and structures on a global scale.

The first pat of this power is the upgrade. You have three choices, Infantry - Vehicle - Aircraft. These choices at first seemed simple to me, you choose the class that you want to focus on. But the difficulties in coding this power caused a new question to appear in front of the old answer. Before it was just going to duplicate whats already there. Now I have to pre-decide what units I want to pop out of the structure. Hmmm. Upon further testing only single units could be built in this fashion as well, no squads. That's a pain, but also an opportunity.

As I now have to decide what unit I want the power to spawn from the structure and the POE (Point of Echo) it occurred to me that I had no idea what I wanted to have pop out. But after a while something dawned on me, this is more than just letting the player choose what units it wanted to focus on due to their preferences. This is the player CHOOSING to supplement their game style!

This is how I have broken the three classic trinity of RTS types down (I-V-A. The 4th would be W for Water if we were putting that in, which we are not). For the Scrin, Infantry are for swarm attacks. Cheap units that are quick to move and simply overwhelm an enemies defenses with numbers. Vehicles are for frontal assaults and for the player that is looking at a drawn out game. Aircraft are for both quick attacks and seiging an enemy base from a distance.

What all of this means is the Echo Power has to help the design further along. The Infantry Echo has to not only phase the Scrin base and force out for a minute but also supplement the Infantry's goal of a swarm force. As these phased in forces are only going to be around for a minute this leads to a few issues. The force that appears at the base won't have time to move from there to the attack point (unless a player also picks the wormhole ability). To that effect these forces are more of a use to the player thats base is under attack, further protecting the base from enemy by giving a credible threat to an attack force to deal with. I have made some Gunwalker Echo's for this job. They are fast firing anti-air and anti-infantry units that in numbers can also deal with lighter vehicles. Perfect for a defense.

But what about the POE force? What if the Echo is used to get your swarm forces into position to attack inside a base? For this I have decided to go back to the original Mastermind design. My current Mastermind is an elite attack unit that based on it's position (if its the banner carrier or not) it has one of two weapon types making it the perfect choice no matter what your going up against. At the Point of Echo 8 of the old style masterminds will spawn allowing the player to take over an enemy's defenses or units to use against the enemy until the other forces phase back in. This allows for the Scrin player to gain temporary control over an enemies own defenses and use them against themselves weaken the front. I like to call it "Operation That's Just Not Right".

Where does that leave the Vehicles and the Aircraft? I have not gotten that far yet but I'm looking to do something along those lines. For the Vehicles I'm looking to not only allow their phase out time to be 2 minutes (giving the player a small window where both the main force and the echo force are active on the field at the same time). I'm thinking of the Defense Force to be made up of Seeker Tanks and the POE force to be made up of Super Shielded Tripods that are designed for close range assaults. For the Aircraft I'm thinking of having the defense be made of Planetary Assault Carriers and the POE be made of Devastator Warships. I am also thinking of letting the echo to cause Signal Relays to spawn Capitol Ships giving you even more air power at your base for defensive cover.

As always I await any thoughts. I will also probably post something soon about GDI's powers (I know I keep saying that).

This is not the update I planned....

2012-01-11T11:41:00.000-08:00

But as a lot of you know these things don't work the way we want sometimes. I planned on talking about the new GDI Ion Cannon designs that I came up with (they are great, just go with that). That will have to wait until next sunday.

Recently I did a post explaining my process of how I was adding the Scrin Echo power into the game. Here is the good news.

1. I have developed a way to have a spell power to become modified based on the upgrade chosen. This means for example I could have a "megaton bomb" drop power that drops Vapor bombs if upgrade A is chosen or fire bombs if upgrade B is chosen. Cool right? I can think of a lot of ways that this could be useful (Thinking Invid here really, but possibly also NOD).

2. I got the echo power to work, when you echo all Scrin units phase out then all scrin infantry echo in additional basic versions of themselves.

Now for the bad news.

Apparently if you have more than 20 Scrin infantry units on the field and you echo it causes the game to crash. It appears to be linked to the engines inability to handle a sudden influx of over 60 units at once, but I can't be 100% sure thats whats causing the problem. The engine only crashes though when there are a lot of units that are suddenly echoing in. At about 8 to 12 units and an echo there are no problems.

So that leaves us with what to do. I really like the echo idea and want to make something out of it. I'm just not sure what at this point. The idea of a player ONLY having a hand full of units when they echo is absurd, we all know that armies get up into the 50's and 100's of units in some of these games.

If anyone has an idea of how else to do this let me know. Your idea doesn't have to explain HOW the code works, just a "when this happens how about this?" type of explanation will work. Otherwise my next step is that the echo phases everyone out then summons in some free units at the point of the echo. Not nearly as cool as I wanted, but it may be what I have to do.

No post this week.

2012-01-09T20:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry, don't have much to say this week as we just got everything back up and running (both Doug and I decided / had to reinstall windows and stuff at the same time, funny how that happens).

I will post my ideas on GDI and their super weapons that I've developed recently tomorrow.

This post is a little different than the rest.

2011-12-31T16:37:00.000-08:00

As the title says, this weeks update will be a little different than the others. This week I'm going to explain how I did the Scrins ultimate power, the Echo effect.

The Scrin have 3 super powers now (depending on your way of interpreting super power), the Black Hole, the Blanket Storm, and the Echo Effect. Everyone knows about the other 2 powers already, but I want to explain about the Echo Effect and how I designed it in game.

The Scrin player gets to choose 1 level 4 power in the upgrade tree, but each power ties in to the Echo Effect. The First choice is Echo Infantry, the second is Echo Vehicles, and finally the last is Echo Aircraft. The Echo is tied in to the Scrin Phase Out power, when you phase your army out every Scrin Unit and Structure phases out and becomes pretty much invincible. However whatever Echo power you choose will also go into effect during this time. This means that if you choose Infantry Echo all infantry squads after phasing out will spawn 2 or 3 squads of their type onto the field at their location for use. These units do not have access to any of the upgrades that the Scrin Upgrade system uses so they are vanilla units but hey, they are free. They will last until killed or for up to 1 minute so these are not just "free" units. However this is quite useful as you can say "phase out" your entire force and use these new units to help counterattack on an offense or to begin your own attack drawing the enemy away from where your main force's are heading.

How I did this in game is simple. Each unit now has the code to allow it to "spawn" additional units like the Refineries do with the Harvesters when they are built. There is a requirement on the spawn ability though, for example infantry units would have the "TriggeredByUpgrade:SpawnEchoInfantryNow" upgrade.

So this is how it works. You pick whatever echo you want, for this example we're going to go with the Echo Infantry. This Upgrade grants 2 upgrades in the coding, "Power-PhaseOut" and "InfantryEcho". The Phase Out power when used spawns a special effect wherever you use it that fires off a weapon that only effects ally units and structures that phase those things out. After that the effect has the ability to spawn 1 of 3 invisible units that are based on which echo upgrade is given, in this case it's the InfantryEcho. This spawn power creates a new unit that we'll call "TempInfantryEchoOn". When this unit is created we set it up to on creation grant the upgrade "SpawnEchoInfantryNow" and we give it a life span of say 30 seconds. Now for the next 30 seconds infantry units will trigger their spawn power creating new "cloned" versions of themselves.

Finally, at the end of the 30 seconds the unit TempInfantryEchoOn will die and on death we will have it remove the upgrade "SpawnEchoInfantryNow" turning off the echo ability. In this way the infantry units that spawn themselves will only spawn for a short amount of time. A minute afterwords any spawned units that were not killed in battle will self destruct. This gives the Scrin the unique ability to double or triple their fighting force of a specific type while also protecting the main force at the same time, a very powerful and unique power that will defiantly make the Scrin a threat on the battlefield.

So the overall effect works like this.

Activate Phaseout -> Phaseout entire force -> Spawn in temp reinforcements -> End phaseout -> Kill extra reinforcements that are still around.

If you guys like this kind of explanation on how we do some of the powers/effects that we do in the game let me know and I will do more updates like this. Have a happy new years!

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

No real update this week, computer is getting work done on it (bad hard drive getting replaced) and it's Christmas so kind of busy anyways. Happy holidays everyone.

Something that apparently needs to be said.

2011-12-18T11:29:00.001-08:00

I recently released a story explaining the origins of the Scrin in our game. Ultra apparently took offense to my story (Sorry bro, but thats the way it is) and I have to point some stuff out here.

Listen, the Xenoforce Reborn mod is taking many different races/stories/series and putting them together into a single world. This means a lot of stories are going to be modified as needed to make them fit. This includes the original 3 CnC races from CNC3. GDI is having the least amount of changes done to them as story wise they still fit their original roll (for the most part). NOD and Scrin however are undergoing major changes. The Scrin are even easier to manipulate than NOD as there is even less information on them. Now why this is one could only theorize, it may be that EA wanted to keep as much of an air of mystery around the race as they could or it could be that their creative design team simply could not come up with something (or did not have the time to come up with something). Either way in our story I have done so.

Does this change your opinion on the Scrin? I don't see how it would, the story is what gives the units context in the game. Without this context the units are just there. But give them a story, a reason for why they are and why they work the way they do, and they come to life in a way that makes them truly unique.

Also the story that I started only covers their origins which started 100,000 years ago. The Scrin have undergone many evolutionary changes since then to become what they are now. However they still stick to many of the different stigmas that go all the way back to their origins. The Scrin are a race that take what they want and what they need to survive because thats what they had to do from the beginning, take or die. They also are a race of patience and cruelty, they will wait if what they are doing is working to get their end results even if it prolongs the agony of others just because there is no rush. Finally the Scrin are a race that take the technology of others and adapt it to their own use. They do develop their own technology, don't get me wrong, but if their enemy has something that they could use to further their existence then they will do so.

Within the Scrin structure individuality is a privilege not a right. Lower level Scrin who continue to obey and succeed in following their Formans orders are given the gift of individuality by the Queen Mind. If you want, think of the lower level Scrin as attack dogs who are bread and trained to do a specific task. If your favorite attack dog continues to succeed, continues to perform exceptionally well, it is given the gift of individuality. It is now an equal, able to communicate and think independently of it's original Formans wishs. Once individuality is given it can never be taken away.

What does this have to do with the game? Not much and a lot really. In one way it does not make the units any stronger or weaker, but in another it shows why the Scrin have units that are so weak, that are physically different from one another, and why the Scrins lack of emotions when dealing with many low level units. To me this helps give context to whats going on.

The last thing to talk about is the "Queens". The Queen mind is a very unique thing, it has no physical location but is made up of the subconscious of all of the Scrin scattered across the universes that the Scrin inhabit. The Queens themselves are immortal while in this state and they are able to shape the direction that the Scrin Race take. In effect this single body are the Leaders of the Scrin. A Queen is both an individual and a part of a whole mind at the same time, when melded together it is the latter and when separated it is the former. Queens are rarely seen active in the universe but when they are used it is because the situation demands a level of cunning and far-sightedness that a Forman simply doesn't have. Queens while in this form however can be killed and in doing so the whole of the race is weakened.

So in closing this is my vision of the Scrin. This is how they work. This is how I give context to the units that I am designing for the Scrin and the powers that I have given them.

The story of the Scrin - Origins

2011-12-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

Below is my story explaining where the Scrin and the oldest Queen of the Scrin, the Matriarch, came from. This is pure fiction as there is no proof in ANY of EA's information about the history of the Scrin. This history starts 100,000 years before the events in Xenoforce:Reborn.

The Matriarch - The Origin of the Scrin

Like many advanced civilizations the Scrin were not always what they once were. In fact for the majority of their time on their home world they were not even considered the dominant species. They were little more than dumb creatures used to hunt other animals by the dominant species of the planet called the Anoi.

The Anoi were a powerful sentient race who used the fact that they were the only sentient race on their planet to mold the planet to their own needs and purposes. They were tall creatures, standing on average at 9 feet tall, with grey tough skin and small blue eyes. They were bipedal, with 6 fingers on each hand, and had smooth, simple features. Theirs was a race that perfectly melded technology and ideology together forging a society that valued obedience and intelligence over personal choice. The Anoi Civilization had 4 major nations spread across their world, and as with all sentient beings these nations would fight among each other over differences of opinion and beliefs.

The Scrin however were vastly different. The Scrin of this age typically walked on 4 legs like a dog. They were strong, stocky built creatures with hard carapaces that were bread for war and protection. They were hard to domesticate, featuring an instinctive nature to group together and run in packs. Those Scrin who could not be domesticated were hunted for sport.

If it wasn't for a random act of fate the Multi-verse would be a vastly different place. One day a meteor fell onto the planet. This meteor was made of pure Tiberium, a substance that was an unknown at the time. It broke apart as it entered the planets atmosphere and hundereds of shards of Tiberium fell onto the planet signing the planets doom before anyone knew what was going on. Soon the great nations of the Anoi gathered together and started researching the alien substance. They found that it was an amazing source of power but it was also very toxic causing uncontrollable mutations in anything it touched. Because of this the Anoi began searching their planet for all sources of the substance. Left unchecked it would destroy the planet, and this could not be allowed.

However there was more going on here than the Anoi realized. The Scrin, being a violent and territorial creature, were also very curious. In the remote northern reaches of the Western Provence a pack of Scrin came upon the tiberium and started to eat the substance. Where other creatures that came in contact with the substance became violently ill and died soon after exposure the transformation within the Scrin was amazing. They started to mutate, gaining increased intelligence as they consumed the Tiberium.

Soon there were reports coming in from all over the world of unusually aggressive Scrin attacks on the outskirts of Anoi cities. Some reports claimed that entire Tiberium Hunting parties were wiped out by a single Scrin while others claimed an unusually high level of cunning being deployed by the Scrin, even going as far as to suggest that the Scrin were setting up ambush's against the Anoi. It did not take long for the Anoi to figure it out. The Scrin around the world were protecting the Tiberium deposits that the Anoi were not able to get to fast enough and the Tiberium was spreading.

It was around this time that the Matriarch appeared on the planet. Weither it was born or it was a unique mutation in the Scrin none can say, but the effect of the Matriarch was devistating. The first true Queen of the Scrin, the Matriarch was able to communicate with all other scrin across the globe turning these wild, savage creatures and teaching them how to communicate, how to focus, and how to build a society of their own. The Anoi could not believe what they were seeing happen around them. Their own planet was changing, evolving, and it appeared that they were no longer going to be the dominant race. They fought back with their technology and ideology comming together for the first time as a single people. No longer would they fight amoung themselves. Now there was a common enemy that would devour them if something was not done. The Scrin must be eliminated. Across the four nations the extermination of the Scrin began starting with those that were domesticated as they could no longer be trusted. Military forces began purging the country side killing any Scrin that they came across.

The Matriarch was outraged by such an act. She called to her children and began fighting back. Small battles took place across the globe with the Scrin making the Anoi pay in blood for their lost brothers and sisters. The Matriarch called for the most intellegent of the Scrin to gather to her and began what has become known as the Symphony of the Void. These scrin linked their minds with her and she gave them each the gift of induviduality. This first batch of "Formen" were given control over sertain sections of the world and given leave to do as they felt nessisary to insure the survival of the species.

Still the war raged on. As the days turned to months and the months turned to years the Scrin continually increased in numbers as the Tiberium infected the planet at a steady rate. The Anoi however were having trouble increasing their numbers in this situation and were relying on more and more advanced technology to help them win. 4 years after the beginning of the war the Anoi launched their first Orbital Battleship. This massive weapon allowed the Anoi to travel into space and then assault ground targets from above, a tactic that the Scrin had little hope of countering. In a desprate move one of the formen of the Scrin made a raid on an Anoi Manufacturing plant, crushing the plants defenders and a swarm of Scrin Buzzers and capturing it for the Scrin. This turning point introduced the Scrin to advanced technology which allowed them for the first time to stand on equal footing with the Anoi.

However the massive rush that the Anoi expected from this development never came. The Scrin used this new technology to

keep the Anoi at bay, never using it in an offensive manner. In fact the Matriarch determined that this would not be nessisary for as fas as she was concerned the Scrin had already won. Soon the Anoi came to a sullen realization. The Scrin were not attacking the Anoi they were simply distracting them. With the war raging there was no time or resources avalible to spend combating the incroaching Tiberium. By the time the Anoi realized this it was already too late and the Tiberium was killing of them at a quicker rate the the Scrin.

A short 3 years later the last of the Anoi gathered together in their most advanced and powerful battle ship and launched into space looking to escape the planet and live elseware. The Scrin let them go, their time would come soon enough. They now had unrestricted access to the planet, all of the Anoi's technology, and a vast quantity of Tiberium which they were becoming ever more reliant on. The Matriarch began looking to the stars. The Scrin would always remember how they were treated and the gift that the stars had given them. One day they would head out into space and finish the Anoi but first she wanted the Scrin to regain their strength and build their own new society. It would be more fun to crush the Anoi this way.

Oh, you insulted me. That will teach me, guess I should work harder.

2011-12-11T15:52:00.000-08:00

First, I must warn you that this weeks post is more of a rant than anything. It's aimed at one person in perticular, and 99.9% of the people that send me stuff are actually quite enjoyable to talk to and deal with on a daily basis. This kid is the other .1%.

So I received a not-so-nice email the other day from a "fan". I use the term pretty loosley as this person acted more like a 10 year old child crying about it taking too long for the cookies to get done baking.

Now I know that most of you out there understand that we are only a team of 2 people, that both of us work in retail in the US, and that this being the Christmas season it's also the busy time in our work/personal lives. Also, most of you understand that an email that says "Hey, I havn't noticed much work getting posted the last few days" or "I was just wanting to make sure that the mod was still getting worked on" will get a better responce than the following Email that I received.

"Yo, I juzt wanted to find out whaz takin so damn long to get SEED back in. No 1 care about GDI NOD and Scrin, they

suckz!!!! Stop wastin time with that crap and get back to work on SEED! This is stupiz! U had it once, my friend sayz you

guys are lazy and ur mod will not get donz. I think he might be rit."

Um... yea. I'm just going to say a few things about this.

1. This mod is NOT being done for the Community. It's being done so that I can kick Doug's ass in a game that we both will agree on. We were never able to find out who was better in the old Xenoforce Mod simply because the game crashed EVERY time we played.

2. We are giving this MOD to the Community AS we are working on it because we feel that unlike other mods that keep posting pics up but never let you actually get a chance to play it at least this way people can experience what we are experiencing and we can get good feedback about what needs to be done.

3. For me at least, this MOD is an experiment for me to see just how much support a fanbase will give to a project that is working towards actually giving them something that they want to see. All you have to do is look at how much support we've gotten for the Gundam Models that we've received to see that this is working out amazingly well.

Is our project ambitious? You bet it is, we're taking the original 3 armies and totally reinventing them while adding 6 additional factions WITH AI's and new sound effects into the game. Considering that this is our first project that we've ever made public (we have done other mod tweaks over the years for personal use only) this is a lot to deal with. However this MOD has only been around (on MOD DB anyways) for a year and a half. We've already rebalanced the O3 (now on our second revision of this) and added 2 factions in. The factions are not completed yet (missing damaged states and new sounds on a lot of it) but they work and the players can see exactly what we're trying to do.

So in short little kid, I don't care if it takes 4 years to put Gundam SEED into the game. I don't care if it never gets put in. I do care about making a good mod that not only shows creativity and different playstyles but also works for all parties involved. I am not getting payed for this, I'm on my own schedual, and it'll get done when it gets done.

Oh, and you and your friend are ass's. I couldn't care less if you don't play our MOD. And remember, I'm the nice one. Your lucky you sent this to me and not Doug.

With new designs come new headaches.

2011-12-03T15:35:00.000-08:00

I have almost completed my final rebalancing/modifications of the Scrin forces and I am at the moment pretty happy with how things are coming along.

But of course there are always bugs. For example my latest changes to the powers and their requirements now cause the game to crash when I build the stasis chamber. This of course means that I need to go back through each power removing them all and then putting them back in one at a time to figure out which power is making the game go "blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa".

And of course Electronic Arts and Microsoft do nothing to help. The generic "the program has encountered and has to close" message tells me nothing. The only good thing is I know it was working before messing with the powers so I at least have a place to start at.

Another issue that I had to change were the PAC's Dimensional Cannon Orbs that attacked the ground and air by causing a pillar of light to cover both areas when they died. This attack worked great when it was only dealing with the air, but for some reason the moment I told it to also hit ground targets the game would work for a bit then crash. Oh well.... I do have another design for the unit that I can go with. Now the unit only attacks air units with these orbs but uses a Zeus cannon to attack ground targets. You remember the Zeus Cannon right? It's the weapon that the original Devastator Warship used to use to attack ground targets. While it's not the exact same as what I originally hoped for it does do the same job admirably.

Which brings me to todays post. One of the more common problems that I personally have when I work on this mod comes down to trying to get what I want from my head into the game. Sometimes it's a modeling issue, but more often than not it's an issue of "I got it in but it doesn't work the way I wanted." So my process to this has changed over the last few years from just doing it and seeing what happens to writing everything down in a notebook (I have like 5 of the things lying around each based on a different faction or design), coming up with an alternative to the more 'complicated ones' in case the original idea doesn't work (also known as plan B), and then taking baby steps to get it working in game. This results in my compiling the mod about 15 to 20 times an hour while working on it just testing every little bit one piece at a time. This allows me to find where the issues are or will be so that if something pops up and causes an error I'm not stuck looking at 12 different changes and going "great... which one of you is giving me a headache now?".

And so the mod moves forward. The PAC now fires long range artillery at ground targets and swarms air targets with D-Bombs that home in on their target. The Devastator Warship is now equipped with a D-Cannon and Assault Lances that can be converted into Prism Lances. And the Stormrider is pretty much unchanged, still a powerful early to mid game quick assault unit equipped with plasma weapons.

So the moral of the story is always have a plan B, always make changes in small steps, and always make backups so that if there is an issue your not left holding a pile of crap that you can't work with. Now if you excuse me, I've got some power codes to go back and look at.

When a design doesn't work, what do you do?

2011-11-26T16:04:00.000-08:00

So I'm working on the Scrin right now while Doug continues to get his thoughts together for NOD. One of the things I was really looking forward to with my Scrin design was a new type of lance weapon called a Prism Lance. This weapon would work a lot like a normal beam lance however the effect would be that the beam doesn't do any damage while "hitting" a target. Once the beam shut off however there would be a large explosion and the target and anything around the target would take splash damage. This would in effect turn any Lance based unit into an artillery unit becoming very dangerous.

So I got it up and running and it worked. Sort of. The beam hits. Once the beam shuts off I got an explosion to happen and the enemy units took the damage like they were supposed to. That should mean that everything is great right? Nope. In practice it actually made little difference whether the damage was done when the beam hit or a second later when it shut off. Also the "blast" looked crappy at best. Finally it just didn't work well. SO, back the the drawing board.

My new design for this weapon (I'm not letting this go btw) is to use the charge up of the NOD Obelisk of Light and then instead of a beam firing it will fire off an energy "pluse" that will go boom.

Another example is my Carrier ship with the energy orbs that go boom. These work pretty well in use but I think I need to re-evaluate the explosion to try and get a different effect for when they hit/explode. Otherwise they are pretty close to what I want. The problem is that in use the pillar of light that is caused by the explosion for some reason causes the game to crash after use if I have it damage both ground and air targets. Weird, but a stable game is more important to me than a cool effect.

Whats the point of me saying all of this? Well, what it comes down to is quite simple. Just because one design looks good on paper doesn't mean it will work well in game. However you never know until you try. I would never have bothered with the Obelisk Charge and the big explosion afterwords if I hadn't gotten the carrier set up. I'm thinking that the Prism Cannon will fire the same weapon as the Carriers use but these are just "used" in a different way. It should be interesting to say the least.

A few updates to mention

2011-11-19T14:42:00.000-08:00

I have a few things to mention today there probably won't be a lengthy post tomorrow. So, consider this Sundays update.

First off, my PC is back up and running for working on the mod (yea, I hate moving). As such here's a pic that I posted up to moddb last night showcasing the new Medium Grade Avatar.

There will be another Avatar that I'm going to work on tonight, a Heavy Grade Avatar if you will. This Heavy Avatar will take its inspiration from a very obvious source once you see it, if I get it done tonight I will post it up tomorrow for everyone to see.

Second, Doug has finished the map for our game. This is how the world is divided at the beginning of the Xenoforce War before the intervention of the Invid or the Scrin.

Great work Doug! As you can tell the EF is divided into 3 different color schemes. This is because unlike GDI which is a pure military state the Earth Federation stands for National Sovereignty. However by themselves they can not defend against the massive size of GDI so they formed an alliance. Dark Blue areas would be considered founding and active members of the Earth Federation. These areas either have massive amounts of resources, high strategic value, or offer other valued objects for the Earth Federation to succeed. These areas would be considered always at Defense Defcon 5. Medium Blue are members who do not offer as much to the Earth Federation and as such do not get as much in the way of military support. These areas are always at Defcon 3. The light blue areas are areas who wish for Sovereignty but do not have anything really to offer the EF. In these cases the EF allows them to be members of the EF, but they do not get really any major ammount of support unless they come under attack and require support. These areas are at Defcon 1.

Finally, if you want to know more about our story Doug did an audio cast on his robotech fan talkshoe account about it. There he go's into much more detail about the back story and political and economical reasons for what happens in our story. The one you want is titled "So you want to know how good of a story teller I am."

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=70695&cmd=tc

Our history of the modern tiberium world.

2011-11-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the late post, it took a long time to type this up.

Many of you already know the story of Command and Conquer as done by Westwood (RIP). In the Xenoforce Reborn mod we're taking what they had and working from their last official piece of work, the expansion pack for CNC2 called the Firestorm Conflict and working forward from that point. So in other words, anything that EA came up with for their story of CNC3 and beyond is not going to be used by us. It's not that we dislike what EA did (though we do think they made many questionable choices in their adaptation of the story) it's more of a "we simply feel that this is the best place to interject our own history for the story of Xenoforce Reborn to work."

Keep in mind 3 things

1. This is a work in progress, and things / times are open to change as needed.
2. This is how I would write up our history for the game, Doug may have issues with some aspects of it and ask for them to be modified as need be.
3. This is to give you a general idea of how things are playing out. For specific "but what happened to this or that here?" or more details you will have to wait, but each part of the story will be told by the units and structures as we complete their final workups and post them up. These workups will make up the Codex for each faction.

Following the Firestorm Conflict many of the countries around the world began to question the decision to allow GDI to become the global government and police force that it had become. The purpose of GDI had been to protect them from global terrorism not to destroy the national sovereignty that they had been fighting to gain control of for 1000's of years. And then there was the fact that if it wasn't for NOD, the entity that GDI so strongly opposed and fought against for so many years, coming to the rescue of GDI and the world against CABAL then there would not be a planet to govern at all.

Soon support for GDI started to slip. In an act of trying to salvage the situation and to put a positive spin on things GDI publicly came to an agreement with the survivors of NOD granting them immunity for any and all previous war crimes committed against the world. At this time NOD began talks with Egypt to build a large city outside of Cairo with the sole purpose of being a peaceful place of sanctuary. In exchange NOD would share with the Egyptian Government some of it's highly effective techniques at harvesting and working with tiberium radiation.

Unfortunatly for GDI this had the opposite effect of what they were hoping to gain. While this show of appreciation and gratitude to their once hated enemy gained them support from a number of smaller countries that were starting to waiver it caused others to grow agitated at the way GDI was starting to pander to the will of countries that cry the loudest. Specifically 3 of the original G8 countries that help found the GDI now started to secretly turn their back on them. These countries could not forgive NOD so easily for all the harsh attacks that they had brought against them as they had been specific targets of NOD for over 20 years.

In 2037, 5 years after the Firestorm Conflict ended, the countries of the United States of America, Canada, and the United Kingdom officially left the G8 and the GDI. On March 15th they signed a treaty that became known as the Constitution of the Federation and the Earth Federation was born. This transition was not an easy one though, as many civilians opposed leaving GDI and felt that they were asking for another war to start again. Still, many more civilians agreed with the decisions of their governments here and the "National Sovereignty Movement", or NSM began to spread around the world.

Smaller countries in many of the yellow zones around the world stayed by GDI as without them they would have no protection from aggressive neighbors. Still others stood with GDI due to the fact that the recent decisions from GDI had benefited them greatly. Finally, the remaining G8 countries took the departure of the 3 superpowers in the "more for me then" mental fashion of the greedy and power hungry. Germany, Japan, and Italy each saw this as a way for them to come back and become powerful military forces once again and made great strives to militarize their countries again under the banner of protection.

And still other smaller countries that had the natural protection of location and little to no resource of want took this chance to become political neutral zones much like Sweden from World War 2. The most effective of this was a small island nation in the pacific that became known as ORB. This country had only one real resource, but it was one that many other countries wanted for themselves. This resource was intelligence, ORB became known for many technological breakthroughs as well as having a high number of engineers and scientists there. It was this limited resource that allowed ORB to remain neutral because if any one nation made a move to grab them the other nations of the world would have to "come to their aid" for the simple fact that they could not allow their enemies to have access to these technological advances.

The civil unrest in the Earth Federation did not last long though, and in a matter of 2 short years the Earth federation had shored up its positions around the world and became the global superpower that GDI had feared it would become. It was about this time that scientists working for a company called Robo-Technology Institute in the country of ORB developed the first working Space Catapult system. This system was a revolutionary way of getting spacecraft into orbit compared to conventional ways. It used high powered magnets powered from renewable energy sources like solar panels and oceanic tidal generators to move specially designed spacecraft at huge speeds along a curving ramp that ended with the ship moving up into space. This design was an instant success and many governments raced to gain access to it from ORB. In the end GDI won a contract from the Robo-Technology Institute to build them 10 high performance craft designed for long range exploration of the other planets in our system in exchange for use of the Space Catapult. The Earth Federation immediately following the lost bid for the exsisting catapult contracted the Robo-Technology Institute to build them 2 of their own catapults, one in California and one in Alaska. NOD also secretly began work on their own, smaller version of the catapult in Australia.

The GDI used this new way to escape earth to start a new project of their own called the Planet Project. The design was for them to start building massive colonies in space to start offloading some of the people from more devastated areas under their control into these space colonies as a way of "protecting their people from the planet they are fighting for." However this massive project required resources that would not be available to GDI without significant cuts in their military R&D and so many types of research was canceled. One noteable line of research that was cut was the "Mecha" tech like the Wolverine, the Titan, and the Mammoth Mk 2 walkers.

Where GDI turned their backs on mecha tech the RoboTechnology Institute picked up. With all of the resources flooding in to them due to their now lucrative space transport projects they began work into military applications of mecha technology. They also used their newly constructed ships given to them from GDI and set out towards Mars for "research purposes." In truth they knew what they were doing all along as years ago the President of the company had discovered a faint energy signature coming from Mars. However at the time he did not have a way to exploit this discovery and as such he started the RoboTechnology Institute company with the purpose of one day getting there first. And thanks unknowingly to GDI they were on their way to do that.

During all of this NOD flourished. In small towns where most governmental oversight had been abandoned due to "the target not producing enough of a valuable asset to demand military involvement", most notably in yellow zones across the middle east and in parts of africa, NOD stepped up and protected these people from "roaming bands of rouges and bandits". In more civilized locations that were hurt economically NOD became a source of revenue as they built research centers, schools, and hospitals. To the world it really appeared as NOD had changed since the loss of Kane and they were becoming a full fledged religious force like the catholic church. However what was really happening was NOD was attempting to defeat their foes no longer with weapons, but with economics, and it was working.

In 2041 the Earth Federation began building their own colonies in space. There were 8 Colonies that were planned on being built. These colonies were 3 times larger than what GDI was building, and unlike GDI who was building them to effectively offload those refugees of the ever-expanding tiberium the EF was building them for their most prestigious and powerful officials to live in free from the worry of Tiberium. There was more to this than what the EF was admitting to though, the real purpose of this project was to build a secret and massive military complex on the Moon. In truth the shells for Colonies 7 and 8 were built but the insides were hollow as these parts were sent to the Moon for use in the base. Colony 7 was retrofitted into a research and development center for building massive carrier ships to allow the EF to patrol their section of space free from the fear of any "outside" eyes and Colony 8 was turned into a giant solar panel and refocusing center nicknamed "The Solar System". This colony was placed in a way so that the EF could capture and re-direct light from the Sun to any place on the planet no matter where or when it was needed giving the EF access to solar energy no matter what the situation was. This system also made for an amazing weapon when set to it's tightest beam setting, able to cut through anything in a matter of moments.

Meanwhile the Robotechnology Institute had made it to Mars and started research into the energy source that their founder had discovered over 20 years ago. What they found was a massive alien spacecraft buried under the sands of Mars. This ship spanned over a mile long and was unlike anything anyone in the expeditionary force had ever seen. The head of the force decided to build a massive base over their discovery which later becamed named Mars Base Serra. When word got back to Earth about their discovery the founder of the company changed the name of the company to the RoboTech Research Center. He also went to the Earth Federation, who up to this point was their companies greatest customer and entered into a research agreement. The Earth Federation would supply the Robotech Research Center with an uninhabited island in the Pacific currently under the Earth Federations control for them to build a new research facility. They would also provide resources and protection to the RRC and any convoys between Earth and Mars Base Serra. In exchange the Earth Federation would gain access to any technology that they discovered as a result of the alien ship on Mars. The RRC would also build and develop a massive military outpost in the northern most sections of Alaska at no cost to the Earth Federation for them.

However everything was not peaceful during this time of restructure and growth. Tiberium continued to move forward at an almost unstoppable crawl, and small border skirmishs between the EF and GDI were common. GDI fished the first of their Planets in 2044 and began to shuttling refugees into space very quickly. Soon after the Earth Federation completed Colonies 1-6. However, unlike GDI who were using their Planets as a way to ease the public demand for a solution to Tiberium the Earth Federation had found a better way to use their Colonies. The President of the Earth Federation at this time began by sending those Generals and Senate Officials who he trusted the least to the colonies as a way to solidify his power base on Earth under the guise of "promotions". With their families in space but them stuck on earth it became easy to influence those who spoke out against his plans the loudest to keep their mouths shut.

In 2049 a new power began to form in space. The movement started small and grew with a great wildfire between the Plants and the Colonies. This was called "Zeonism". The people of the plants were the poor and weak of Earth who at first though they were being sent to space as a way for their government to protect them. However after 5 years it became clear that this was not the case as overpopulation in the Plants became a common complaint. With overpopulation came crime, disease, and unrest. The people thought they were getting a new start in life only to find they were being sent into space to be forgotten about. On the EF side of things those who were sent to space by the EF so that they could no longer "cause problems with the heads of the EF" saw this as an opportunity to finally strike back at those who dismissed them. They began calling for the colonies to become separated from earth all together, and called for those in the Plants to side with them. The Colonies were much larger than the Plants. There was massive amounts of open space, in fact colony 6 was still only operating at 5% of occupancy levels! There was no reason for those who were promised protection to be shoved into a plant against their will like sardines in a can and forgotten about! On top of this on Colony 4 a new form of weapon had been developed. Spies for the Colonies had acquired some top secret designs that were being developed for the EF by the RRC and construction of this new weapon had begun. The EF had asked the RRC to go back to the drawing board and try a different, more structurally sound design, but the Colonies had no problems with this technology. This new weapon would become known as the Zaku, the first mass produced mobile suit ever built. A small army in Colony 4 consisting of over 250 of these suits were built by a former head of security for the Zeonic movement.

In 2053, with the support of many in the Colonies and the Plants, the Zeonic Movement announced independence. They deployed their Zaku Forces all around and inside Colonies 2, 3, and 4 as well as a dozen Plants. They demanded the immediate withdraw of all GDI and EF forces from the remaining colonies and plants or else war would begin in earnest. GDI withdrew from most of the plants right away, they were not prepared to deal with a military battle in space on the scale that the Zeon forces now offered. These abandoned Planets who did not wish to become part of Zeon became known as the Neutral 7.

The Earth Federation however had different ideas. They launched their secret forces from the Moon Base, carrier ships filled with their own mobile suits developed by combining Robotech Technology and using thier own knowledge of weapons systems. This force set up around the Colonies and prepaired for a blockade from Earth as well as to begin an assault on the rebel forces.

It was at this moment that NOD struck. Disguised as Zeon Loyalists they launched an assault on the GDI A-SAT System in Goddard Space Center taking down GDI's defense network around the Space Station Philadelphia. They then launched a Nuclear Missile from the Earth at the Space Station, destroying it in one blow. With this single act of terrorism NOD had not only sparked the next Tiberium War, but they had done so at the expense of Zeon. Now true war would break out across the Earth and Space, some factions fighting for power, others for their survival.

And in the deepest parts of space, ancient eyes turn towards the planet.....

Tripod Preview

2011-11-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

Here's a preview of the new Tripod Design for the Scrin. It may at first not seem that cool, but if you give it all of the gifts it could possibly get then it's a different story.

Annihilator Tripod -

1 Tripod
Cost : 3300/33s
Weapons : Plasma Cannons X 3, EMP Defenses

Plasma Cannons -
Type : Plasma
Range : 300
Targets : Air and Ground
Reload : 2s-3s
Clip : 3
Fire Rate : .5s
Damage : 650
Chance to miss : 8
Splash radius : 5

Q-35 Modulated Plasma Cannons (gift) -
Type : Plasma
Range : 350
Targets : Air and Ground
Reload : 2.25s
Clip : 3
Fire Rate : .5s
Damage : 700
Chance to miss : Always Hits
Splash radius : 5

EMP Defenses -
Type : EMP
Range : 50
Targets : Ground Only
Reload : 8s
Clip : 1
Fire Rate : .01s
Damage : 0 / EMP shutdown for 5 seconds
Chace to miss : Always Hits

Background :

The Annihilator Tripod first saw use about 500 years before the Scrin ran across the Invid in another dimension. The Scrin had had a relatively peaceful period for about 1000 years seeding and destroying worlds with little to no resistance. This all abruptly changed when they came across a world much like Earth. The spread of Tiberium on the planet had slowed to a crawl and was activly starting to regress in many areas and from a distance the Scrin could not tell why. The Scrin decided to error on the side of caution and called upon the most warmongering and successful queen to date, "The Reaper" and dispatched their forces to the planet 15 years ahead of schedule.

What the Reaper found was a planet already inhabited by a bipedal humanoid creature with an advanced civilization. They had come across creatures like this before but most of those encounters had lead to nothing as the Tiberium had done its job in utterly destroying those creatures before the Scrin even reached the planet. Here however this advanced civilization, while not as advanced as the Scrin themselves were, had actually discovered a way to combat the Tiberium and were going about harvesting it and using it for their own purposes! The Tiberium that was to have destroyed them instead gave them access to a vast, if unstable, source of power that they used to leap forward technologically.

The Reaper invaded with its forces but soon found out why the Scins Sensors did not detect these creatures. The planets atmosphere was prone to severe Ion Storms which caused long range sensors to simply be inaccurate and unreliable. After landing the Reaper had trouble communicating with the Scrin Queen Collective and was on it's own. These storms also caused problems with the Scrin Aircraft in use at the time as they were not designed to deal with the Ion Storm and would crash after taking massive amounts of damage trying to fly through them.

At first the Scrin had the element of surprise and was very successful at disrupting the inhabitants forces and mining operations. However it did not take long for the true owners of the planet to regroup and start counter-offensive maneuvers. With the lack of airpower and the most powerful land unit at their disposal being the Devourer Tank the Scrin soon had taken heavy losses and were being pushed back. The Reaper had to move fast and using the spires that they had built and the tiberium they had managed to gather during this war to come up with a solution. After much deliberation the Reaper designed the most powerful land unit that the Scrin had ever used, the Annihilator Tripod. This unit was able to move around the terrain like infantry, allowing it to climb over areas that a hover tank could not go. It also had powerful plasma cannons to deal with enemy fortifications and an emergency EMP field that it could generate to disable enemy mines and traps. It proved to be a highly effective unit but was only enough to cause a stalemate with the force as the Reaper still did not have an effective way to deploy these monsters.

However help would be coming for the Reaper in the form of the Traveler. When the Scrin Queen collective did not receive word from the Reaper and its assault force they dispached their fastest and most knowledgeable queen in terms of forms of maneuvering through the different dimensions that the Scrin knew about. The Traveler decided that a worm hole would be the quickest way to find out what was going on on the planet and went through with a small recon force.

What the Traveler found amazed it. In the first time of all of the history of the Scrin they were losing a planet to it's original inhabitants. The Traveler quickly met up with the Reaper and together they worked on a way to deal with these people. The solution turned out to be a very simple and elegant one, the Blink Drive. With this addition the Annihilator was able to be teleported around the world very quickly, bypassing enemy fortifications and hitting their supply lines and general populace. Soon after the Travelers arrival the original inhibitors were wiped out and the planet was taken under the control of the Scrin. Using the Travelers Wormhole Technique they were able to continue normal harvesting operations and soon that planet was a dead rock floating in space like the thousands that had come before it.

The Scrin never forgot the lessons of that world though. They started developing technology that allowed their aircraft to not only survive those powerful Ion Storms, but also gain regenerative abilities from them and even create their own artificial storms for additional protection inside a planets atmosphere. They also found that the original design of the blink drive, while highly effective, took too much power from the unit. They remodeled the Annihilator with a modualer system allowing Queens the ability to modify their tripods to whatever function they wanted to focus on. This included taking the blink drive out and replacing it with a weaker, more instantaneous drive that is still in use today.

Gifts : The Annihilator Tripod can have the following gifts applied to it.

Armor of the Reaper :
- Personal Shield
- Living Armor (Regenerates HP)
- Hardened Carapace (HP increases by 20%)

Weapons of the Reaper :
- Q35 Modulation (More consistent and farther firing plasma weapons)

Lesser Gift of the Traveler :
- 50% movement speed increase (due to the design of the Tripod it moves like infantry)

Greater Gift of the Traveler :
- Blink Engines (short range teleportation)

Echo of the Vehicle :
- Tripod will spawn an additional "Echo" version of itself when built. This Echo will not have access to any upgrades from any other gifts.

Scrin Infantry Designs

2011-11-06T14:03:00.000-08:00

Since I have a few moments of free time here I thought I would post up what I've come up with as a "preview" to the Scrin Codex that I'm working on. Some of this may not make much since to you guys, but I'm confident that you guys will be able to follow along. Below is the design layout that I've come up with dealing with the Disintegrator squads.

Infantry -

Disintegrator Squad -

6 Troops
400 / 4s Cost
Weapon : Assault Lances

Weapon Type : Lance
Range : 150
Reload : 2.5s
Clip : 1
Fire Rate : 0.1s
Damage : 400

Background :

Early in the history of the Scrin they came upon a race of creatures on a planet that they had seeded for harvesting. These creatures were massive, standing 18 feet tall on four legs with massive tusks and thick armored hides. They were quite literally built like massive ramming tanks and would take out any other creature that came near them by simply running them down and crushing them. To make matters worse, the Scrin's sensors could not detect these massive creatures until they were almost on top of them. The Scrin Queen known as "The Matriarch" developed these small units called Disintegrators as a way to deal with this threat.

The Disintegrators are little more than 4 legged lance cannons with a very simple brain. These units were designed to attack anything coming near them with their short range yet highly effective lance weapons and proved very difficult for the unknown creatures to deal with. Shortly after their deployment the Scrin were successful in their harvesting operations and as such the planet was destroyed.

However the Disintegrators were soon put into use on other planets in other dimensions thanks to their small size, fast mobility in a variety of different terrains, and effective stopping power against larger, slower targets. Some Queens have modified the design to their own purpose, the most popular design being that of "The Travelers" Disintegrators and their "Fleet Claw" bonus allowing them to move even faster over even the harshest of terrain.

Gifts : The Disintegrators can have the following bonus's applyed to them.

Lesser Gift of the Traveler : Gains 50% movement speed.
Gift of the Matriarch : Gains a Mastermind Leader equipped with a Plasma Disk Launcher.
Dimensional Shift : Can be shifted out of phase for up to 1 minute.
Echo of the Infantry : When built 2 other "echo" versions of the unit are also built. These echo's do not gain any bonus's from any other gifts.

The Scrin : Who are they?

2011-11-06T12:08:00.000-08:00

Within the next few weeks I should be posting up some material about our Scrin design. I'm not talking about weapon and unit stats (though that will be there as well), I'm referring to a history written out so that anyone who is interested can look at this and not only see WHY the Scrin in our mod work the way they do but also get a glimps of what the Scrin will look like from this point forward.

For example, the upgrade/powers system is going to be changed (again). But this is for the better, trust me. We're working on adding a bit of flavor to the upgrade choices and giving a better reasoning as to why the Scrin have different choices that they can take at the beginning.

We've also been working on NOD, though with NOD it's been more of a fine tuning of their story and restructuring of their forces to fit the story better than the Scrins entire back-history remake.

GDI is staying largely the way it is with only a few weapon tweaks. The major changes to GDI will come in their super-powers. Right now GDI's Ion Cannon while useful isn't excatly what I would call a "game ender". We're looking to moving the MOAB Firehawk Strike to a later superpower and actually make it a superpower due to it's effect in game. We're also looking to add a 3rd "power" to GDI that when used with the other 2 GDI's options for dealing with end game situations will become more adaptable than before.

Finally, again with the Scrin, we know that some people have pushed back a bit about missing weapons that used to be there (spicificly defensive structures). In the next version of the Scrin all of these things will be back, but probably not the way your expecting them. Keep your eyes open, and I'll post more when I get a chance.

Xenoforce : The Original 3 - Why do we bother?

2011-10-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

So we've started work back up on the mod and are currently modifying more things with the original 3 armies. To Doug and myself it makes perfect since to work on these factions as not only are they important to our game they are useful tools to help us learn more coding wise and continue to push our limits. However it appears there are two camps out there about this aspect of our mod.

Camp 1 asks "why are you wasting time on these armies when you could be adding in more Gundam/Robotech stuff"? Camp 2 asks "why hasn't the O3 mod been updated to the latest version thats in the last release for Xeno-Reborn?

I'll answer the second question first, the Xenoforce : O3 mod came about because someone asked for us to release just the modifications that we've made with just the original 3 armies and we agreed. It was a simple thing to do, and it caused no trouble. However the O3 is not our main focus, the Reborn mod is. As such updating the old O3 to the latest update would be an incremental update at best and honestly not worth the time.

That does not mean we're going to ignore the O3, far from it. I'm currently working on the O3 mod now as we agree that more needs to be done to polish up some aspects of the forces. GDI needs a resource modification added in as well as moving their Super-power designs around a bit, NOD's Avatars and Liquid Tiberium Bomb need work (currently working on the 10-stage LTB now, so far it's much more impressive than before and I'm only on stage 5). Finally the Scrin have a fatal flaw in their current design and are getting a makeover. This flaw is the fact that in every other force their units tell their story but the Scrins don't. The reason for this is that the old Scrin story was (to put it lightly) crap and we've gone ahead and changed it to our own needs. This in turn requires us to change the way many units work to fit the story that they now play a part in.

Which brings me to our first question, why do we waste time working on these forces? I don't see it as wasting time and neither does Doug. I learn more working on the O3 forces than I do working on new forces. Turning a Projectile into an autonomous unit? Learned that from the O3. Adding in a "shield emmiter that activates when an enemy comes near to protect everything in its area of effect?" O3 (yea, thats a defense for SEED)

See, just because we're not working on adding things to new factions at the moment doesn't mean we're not working on stuff. We really are, and I think in the end it will make a better game than if we simply took the original 3 out. If nothing else, you know you like crushing NOD buggies with your Super Gundams right?

Hmmm maybe thats why the AI doesn't care?

2011-10-24T22:18:00.000-07:00

I've started work again on the mod this evening and am working on a few new things for the next release.

First of all we're working on NOD. Nod is almost where I personally want it. There are some things though that need to be rebalanced on their unit end, to be more specific the way Flame units work. When we originally designed flame weapons we were planning on making them NOD's answer to beam sabers and melee based units. That however is no longer the case and these weapons need to fill a new roll.

Also we're looking at the Avatar and the Purifier. These two units are very unique in that NOD does use Mecha Technology but does not use much of it. Why? Because these two units are supposed to be all they need to deal with up to teir 3/4 Mecha units along with being strong enough to deal with teir 3 vehicles. (Keep in mind, a teir 3 vehicle like a tank is equivalent to a teir 5 mecha, I know it's hard to understand but it works for us lol). So these guys need to be worked on.

But here is the kicker. We're finally finishing the Liquid Tiberium Bomb. We've turned this weapon into a 10 stage (yes, 10 stages!) weapon that no longer adversely hurts NOD. In fact with this design of the weapon its launching is all part of NOD's grand plan of Tiberium Radiation and they have not only innoculated their infantry so that the radiation will have positive effects/mutations on them but they have designed their vehicles with radiation trappers to help focus the released energy into their weapons AND crystalline trappers on their structures granting free resources for every structure on the field. In short this new design is all about NOD WANTING to drop it and everyone else wanting them DEAD so it doesn't happen.

But that's not what this post is about. While working on the LTB I saw something on the upgrades template that caused me to go "no wonder the AI doesn't use some upgrades".

SkirmishAIHeuristic="IGNORE"

Yea..... I don't know how I missed that line of code but I have it on every UC upgrade that I put in. I just removed it and am running tests now to see if the AI now actually upgrades the units. Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants if all of my messing in the AI Scripts to fix it and it had nothing to do with the AI Scripts, it was in the upgrade templates?

Xenoforce 9E Final Release

2011-10-14T14:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?mfnbbji8a37zboj

Here is the version I am uploading to Mod DB now. Enjoy!

Release Canidate 3

2011-10-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

Give it a try!

http://www.mediafire.com/?a1g1ivbaizs3s6l

RC 3 will be released tommorow

2011-10-12T19:10:00.000-07:00

I really want this one to go right so I'm working on the AI right now along with final balancing issues.

Release Canidate 2

2011-10-10T14:41:00.001-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?vdmycrsqeannzab

Here is the next release canidate for Xeno 9e, let me know what you think!

Xenoforce 9E release

2011-10-07T16:27:00.000-07:00

Here it is! Go for it guys!

http://www.mediafire.com/?92m9yzy2mqmit0r

Oh, how plans change....

2011-10-03T23:57:00.000-07:00

So we're almost ready for our next release and are getting ready for our internal test phase. But there are some things that turned out differently than we originally planned.

For example our original idea for the Colony hasn't turned out the way we expected. Right now it's about 80% of what we were going to do. We were going to have husks laying around after the fall and that just isn't going to happen at this point. It's simply causing major issues with the damage and spawn code to add that one more thing in. So our solution has been to make the Colony that drops into a husk that will give you a bonus if you capture it. Whats the bonus? We haven't figured that out yet, but we will give you guys something awsome to make it worth wild. (honestly we do have an idea but I don't want to say it, I want people to play and figure it out. Trust me, you'll want this and you WON'T want your enemy to get this.)

Another thing that we've got going that isn't exactly what we planned is the Sat Cannons. We DID get the "phase of the moon" system up and running which is great. Unfortunatly we were not able to get it to only fire the sat cannons at Rank 4 (lame I know). However again there is a limit in there, albeit not one we wanted. Apparently while it works great the Sat Cannons can only be fired once (what?) Thats right, you get a single shot in that window and then the Sat Cannon will not fire again. While it's not the limiter we wanted it is one that works so thats what we are going to go with.

Finally we're having an issue with the "Unlimited Vision" upgrade. As in for some weird reason it isn't working. We wanted to have a power that when you activate it you can see everything on the map for a very short amount of time. We were just going to take the GDI vision power and increase the radius and call it a day. So we went in, coded it, and it won't let us actually lay the power down to activate it. What? Yea..... so right now we're looking at just using the GDI power with half the time. This still gives the player the bonus of being able to gather information quicker than any other player on the board if at a different rate (originally this power was going to be useable on the global scale every 3 minutes, now you can use the GDI power every 60 seconds).

So what do you think? Did we make acceptable sacrifices in these ideas to get the overall effect we wanted or is it not enough/too much? Feel free to post a responce!

No sunday post

2011-10-02T20:03:00.001-07:00

Sorry, busy working on the release. Will be a post within the next few days.

Superpowers in Xenoforce

2011-09-24T13:16:00.000-07:00

The question was raised on MODDB recently about what superpowers each side would have and how they would work. Traditionally in CNC3 the superpowers were the ultimate goal. These were what you were trying to get to so that you could damage your enemies stance in battle in such a way that their only way to defend against said attack was to attack you themselves. Because of the nature of these powers you could only ever get one of these at a time and even after you built one you would have to defend it least it was destroyed before getting a chance to fire. In most games one shot from these weapons were enough to tip the balance so that one side could win.

In the Xenoforce Reborn mod this poses a problem. Some "ultimate weapons" simply were not up to the proper classification to be considered such (I'm looking at you NOD. A nuke? Really? Thats the best you can come up with?) while others left much to the imagination (Yes the Scrins Black Hole Cannon was cool too look at but I imagine such a force as the Scrin would have many other options to persue in terms of nasty superweapons). So we modified certain forces and gave them new powers to really help show that, when at full power, these forces had some serious firepower to lay down and call upon.

The issue of course comes from the Gundam Universes, and to an extent the Robotech technology as well. In Gundam AW for example their super weapon would be considered the Gundam X and it's Sat Cannon. This Cannon is powerful enough to destroy a decent size island in one shot and yet is easy enough to produce that they put them on a mass production mobile suit. While it is true that you must be a newtype to fire the weapon the Earth Federation even finds a way around this limitation with the Gundam Double X. So how do we allow a player to have access to such power and yet honestly find a way to keep it balanced? Our answer was to base the weapon's ability to fire on an unseen timer that counts down. When the timer is about to expire the units able to fire their sat cannons will glow, and then when it is actually able to fire they will glow a different color. This is diffrent than normal though because unlike your normal super powers that count down and then you can fire when your ready these units will only be able to fire for a short ammount of time, say 60 seconds, before their window of oppertunity is gone and they must wait again. The idea here is to simulate the different positions of the moon like in the show.

As for AW's actual "powers" that they will have access to, we are trying to base all support powers again on the Newtypes from the show. Each power avalible to the AW player will be based off of what one of the different Newtypes in the show had. These will be mostly global powers with the exception of the BIT Reinformenet power.

UC on the other hand has a completly different way of doing things. UC's powers are more focused on reinforcing their basic mobile suits with additional fire support in the way of Gundams. Each Gundam as well as bring it's own firepower to the field will have a special "power" that brings added flavor to the field. But this does not mean that UC doesn't have a super weapon at it's disposal, it does. The final Defcon lvl of UC grants the player access to Nu Gundam (a powerful force in it's own right) and the Gryps Cannon. This Cannon works a lot like the GDI Ion Cannon in practice but has a few different side effects. The first being that the Gryps Cannon superheats the object it is firing at, causing a huge wave of heat to blast out from the target. This heat wave will do massive heat damage to anything around it's target.

Now that brings me to something else, the GDI Ion Cannon. As many of you have probably already played our Xenoforce : O3 mod I'm sure your all going "wow, you added a ton of powers to NOD and Scrin, gave GDI a bunch of new units, but their Ion Cannon is kind of weak in compairison to what the other 2 forces can do". And your right. We're currently working on a few different ideas behind this to help make the Ion Cannon more powerful. One option that we're really trying to come up with a way of producing is a "Carpet Bomb Ion Cannon Attack". Really what this means is instead of getting a single shot of you get 5 in a line going off. This hasn't worked out too well yet, but we're still working on it. Another option would be to have it fire of 3 or 4 shots in a given area, so the first shot hits were you targeted and then you get a few more scattered around that blast radius for added effect. It's an option. We're also looking at adding an EMP blast effect to the Ion Cannon. For GDI this is really their only super weapon they can fall back on and at the moment it pales in comparison of what the other forces can do.

So I hope this helps anyone out there who is wondering about the powers. Feel free to post questions if you have any.

AW, the force that keeps you moving

2011-09-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

As many of you probably already know from looking at the recent patch of pics on MOD DB the Tenzan ships have changed rolls in the game. Originally a way for you to deploy and support Gundams now the Tenzans are the premeire piece for deploying non-gundam AW units. They come in many different variations based off of the Daughtress units that they deploy but what it comes down to are these land bases are mobile, front line outposts with troops. Many of them can detect stealth, and they can put up a decent fight on their own. Add in multipble Tenzans at once and you have a military convoy that can deal a great ammount of punishment out as well as take quite a beating.

There is a downside to this of course. There has to be, otherwise it would be unbalanced. First is cost, these things are expensive and take awhile to build. Second is the lack of direct control of the units on the ships. Instead of you direceting the mobile suits you simply tell the orders to the Tenzans and the Tenzans then relay the orders to the mobile suits under their command. Also once a Tenzan loses it's mobile suits it takes a minute for another suit to deploy to replace the lost one. Finally the Tenzans themselves typically only have a single unit that says on the ship to defend it so they lose offensive ability as they lose units. A tenzan may have a ton of HP but if there is a single Command Daughtress on board it's not going to do much damage vrs a group of avatars or titan tanks.

The idea here is quite simple really. We plan for each of the 3 forces to work differently for UC, each with a common backdrop of the EF. UC and SEED are looking to be like 2 different sides of the same coin. AW however isn't even playing the same game as the other two! When it comes to AW there will be a lot of, lets say, "animosity" comming from other outside forces that are not even involved in the current battle. To say that the AW forces have made enemies in space against Zeon will be an understatment. This will really boil down to 2 things on the global scale of things.

Every section of UC will obviously work better against certain opponents. If I'm going against Scrin for example I'd probably have an easier time of it playing as SEED than UC or AW. Not to say UC and AW can't win, it's just SEED is looking to be a better match against Scrin. Against GDI or NOD I'm seeing UC as the way to go as its the most tradional force of the 3. AW will be where I turn vrs Zeon or another EF player. So the idea of Zeon not liking AW will also play into the fact that AW as a force is more tailored to deal with other armies designed around the "Mobile Suit" idea.

The second part of that idea is that AW is primarily a space force. As such they are not really designed around the idea of ground battles and taking land. This doesn't mean all the suits fly as thats definatly not the case but what it does mean is that the main part of your force does in fact have many ways of additional movemnt.

Take your 3 gundams for example. The Leopard is already a fast moving mobile suit over land thanks to the wheels in it's legs. The Airmaster is fast because it can transform into a freaking jet. And the Gundam x and Double X will have the option to be built with the G-Falcon already attached giving them flight/mobility. So all 3 of your MAIN gundam force units can be seen as fast responce units. And following that up the slow AW units are hitching a ride on these giant armored carrier Tenzans, so if they arn't fast they are definatly well protected.

In other words UC would be seen as a defensive, turtle creap army that slowly expands forward taking land. The more Land the UC player has the stronger they are and the harder they are to deal with. AW doesn't really need as much space to deploy a large force and they can move many units by only giving a few "orders". I'm really looking forward to getting this done so I can play with them and see how it gos!

AW, oh the power at your disposal....

2011-09-11T14:22:00.001-07:00

Comming up with a different play style based on the side-faction you pick when playing EF while keeping a common starting point isn't always as easy as you would think. For example, if you wanted to compaire EF-UC to another faction already in the game the closest choice would be GDI. Both sides focus their powers on reinforments and both sides use their baseline units to win the game. However EF-UC has access to other, more advance technology making many of thier units stronger than GDI's and EF also has access to a few other "specialty" powers that give them a bit of NOD flair. GDI on the other hand sticks with classic, proven technology with low costs allowing them to slowly overwhelm their opponents.

The AW force that is currently being added in however is much closer to a mix between Scrin and NOD than any resembelence to GDI. AW's powers fall into two categories, global and reinforment. AW units also fall into 2 different categories, basic and gundam. Where UC's gundams can not be directly built most of the time and are seen as "commanders" on the field AW's gundams are their bread and butter of troops. Their gundams may not be as strong as UC's but you get more of them so that should be a fair trade off.

AW's powers are actually what I want to focus on here. If any of you have watched After War Gundam X you know that there are a lot of different newtypes in the show that do different things. Our plan is to base the powers that you get as an AW player off of those powers.

The powers we're currently planning on having avalible are as follows.

1. Vehicular Hold - Freezes ALL vehicles, aircraft, and mecha on the battlefield in place for 30 seconds. This will not kill aircraft that must keep moving. These units will still be able to fire, they just can't move.

2. Planetary Vision - Reveils the entire map for 30s.

3. DOME Defense Deployment - Drops a DOME Defense Canister to the battlefield with 4 DOME bits attached to it for defensive or offensive support. This structure can be placed ANYWHERE.

4. Bit Deployment - All rank 4 Gundams or Cyber Newtype Gundams will deploy 2 bits for support purposes.

5. Colony Drop - Drops 3 to 5 massive colonys randomly on the battlefield, ushering in the next phase in AW technology. These colonies will do massive damage to whatever they hit. The areas around impact will then have a few "capturable" gundam husks lying around along with some enemy Zeonic forces. These Zeon forces will attack ANY forces that come near them, be them the players or the enemies.

I'm sure there are a few things you can notice from this. The biggest being that there are not very many powers avalible to AW. Another is the Colony Drop. AW is the space force for the Earth Federation. Zeon is a primarily space based force themselves. This "power" is to show the fact that if AW wish's to deploy it's most advanced mobile suits (Gundam Double X, Gundam X Divider, Gundam Leopard Destroy, and Gundam Airmaster Burst) that Zeon will try to stop them by doing what Zeon does best. So this isn't as much of a "good power" as a choice, do you take the risk that your going to drop a colony on yourself trying to get more powerful suits or do you try to win without them? If the enemy is at your front door about to kill you do you use this as a deterrent and try to distract them? Once the colonies have fallen do you go out and try to capture these discarded, broken mobile suits and fight Zeon or do you let Zeon act as a buffer against your enemy? The possibilities are quite amazing IF we can get this stuff to work right.

What other powers do you think AW should have? Your thoughts are always welcomed.

A lesson learned well years ago

2011-09-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

So the mod survived another HD failure, thats a releif. As many of you may or may not know the version of the mod that we have out there today is NOT the same version we started on. I'm not talking about a "redesign", I mean it's completly different.

The original attempt at Xenoforce Reborn started with us adding Zeon to the game. If you look back far enough you can actually find pictures on the blog of our first attempt. Then, as in now, the MOD work came to a screetching halt due to a HD failure. But unlike then this time the HD just gave up a few bad clusters and unlike then this time we've got a backup.

Yep, I back everything up when I do a major release onto an external HD and to another computer that is at my sisters house. I also back everything up when I do a minor update / test update for Doug to try. Thankfully this HD crash happened the DAY after I sent something to Doug so the only thing I could have lost was adding a sensor upgrade to the RGC80.

But that didn't even happen. After running some repair tools and stress testing the HD it appears that it's back in working order, so now we've dodged another bullet and are back to adding AW into the game. I have 2 more upgrades to add in for UC and then I can start actually working on adding AW models into the game.

I just hope the AI doesn't freak out over this design.

Early Update, AI questions and thoughts.

2011-08-27T14:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, this sundays post is a bit early, but I figured early is better than late.

So with this next update that will be released I am messing around a lot with the AI scripts cand codes. Spicificly I am adding in scripts that slightly modify the way the AI works to give players a more customized feel. For example I recently added 3 new Scrin AI Scripts in, one that focuses on tactical powers, one that focuses on income, and one that focuses on unit enhancment. This is to give the players more options to help talor their enemies to specific play styles.

The next one I'm looking at doing is for GDI, it will be called Xeno-No Orca. I am interested to see just how effective the GDI AI would be if it decided that it didn't like to build orcas of any kind. This doesn't mean that it CAN'T build Orcas, they are still there, it's just that this AI will prefer Firehawks and Tanks instead of Orcas, if it works the way I hope it will lead to a very interesting AI to fight against.

What kind of AI's would you like to go up against? Ones that spam ground forces? Ones that prefer infantry? How about ones that want as much land as possible and will just expand like there is no tommorow? Let me know!

The Defcon, the Refit, and the Hazel Project

2011-08-21T16:08:00.000-07:00

The UC side of the Earth Federation really relies on it's base line mobile suits to win the day. Where AW will have mass production gundams with abilities and SEED will have massive mobile armors to win its battles the UC forces really have to use their wide array of mobile suits to push through. Thankfully they have 3 different systems working together to allow them to get the most out of their forces.

The first system everyone already knows about, the DefCon system. This system works a lot like the old Timeline system did. The player has 2 ways to advance the Defcon system compaired to the Timeline system that only had the one. The first is just wait, as the battle progress's the UC high command will decide that the commander will need more advance tech to try and win and will not only allow you, the commander, to deploy newer, stronger suits to the battlefield but will also drop in a special "Command" Gundam mobile suit with a team to help assist. This is how the UC player gets access to Gundams in the game.

The 2nd system is the Retrofit System. At Teir 4 the Research Center has new upgrades avalible for research that will upgrade older mobile suits to new uses on the battlefield. Some upgrades, like the GM-III Retrofit, will upgrade the original RGM79 to a fully armored GM-III with a bazooka and anti-air missiles. We're still working on what upgrades we're going to do here, but at the moment we've got the GM-III retrofit, the Guntank Repair retrofit, and the RX-77 Guncannon 3 Retrofit in the works.

Finally there is the Project Hazel Retrofit. At Tier 4 (or 5, haven't decided yet) the Hazel Research Center becomes avalible to build. Inside will be 4 upgrades that will again increase the power and usefulness of 3 different units on the battlefield. There are actually 4 upgrades that can be done here. The major difference between the Retrofit and the Hazel systems is that the Retrofit system can drastically change the way a unit works on the battlefield where the Hazel system keeps the unit in its same roll just with more abilities to get it's job done. What we have here so far are the Powered GM Hazel Phase, the GM Sniper Hazel Phase, the GM Custom Hazel Phase, and the Hazel Retinue Phase.

The Powered GM Hazel gains accuracy with it's main beam rifle (which is also stronger than the original), gains a bit more speed, and gains anti-air beam cannons on it's back. The GM Sniper Hazel gains stealth (which is a big plus) and a more powerful beam rifle. The GM Custom Hazel gains a nice boost in health, speed, and a stronger beam rifle. Finally the Hazel Retinue is for the Gundams. With this upgrade special "dual shield" GM Custom Hazels will drop in with the Gundams. These special units will be as strong as the RX78, if not stronger depending on the situation and be equipped with 2 short barreled beam rifles.

So hopefully you can see how UC will play out. Not only do you have what we mentioned above on UC's side, you also gain powers based off of the Gundams that are on the field and the Gundams give "strength" bonus's to diffent class's of units. I hope you guys enjoy UC, it's really turning into a very unique army all it's own.

A two part update. GP03 and the AI

2011-08-14T00:26:00.000-07:00

So I was hoping to have pics of the new GP03 with all my changes up for you guys to see on this update, but I've been really busy with the AI so the pics will have to wait until later this week. Still, I promised more details and have been waiting to tell everyone about it, so at least you'll get to read what I'm thinking.

First GP03. When Doug and I decided that since we're going back and fixing things up anyways one last time I personally wanted to take a crack at making GP03 something truly special. Something larger than life. Something that your enemies will fear and you will honestly go "that's what I'm talking about."

And how to pull this off? Well, the first question came down to how should the unit work. There were 3 locomotor choices to choose from. 1-Come in and attack then leave, 2-Be built and constantly move, 3-Be built and hover. Also GP03 has 3 major ways to attack. 1-Mega Beam Cannon, 2-Rockets, 3-Beam Sabers.

As you all know our GP03 model didn't have the beam saber arms on it. It does now, I went in and added them in. It was a patch job, but it works. Then I looked at the locomotor choices. We had it originally set up at option 2, but the weapons just were not firing properly there. I switched it over to option 3 and everything clicked weapon wise. So to use all the weapons I would have to have it set up to as a hovering model. This ment adding some sort of "positioning thrusters" onto the body. Again, I went to the model and threw something together. Overall it looks rather nice I think.

I then took a good hard look at the code and the way the weapons worked. My biggest problem was GP03's mega partical beam cannon. There simply isn't a good way to make the cannon avalible to the player in a way that it would both be true to the actual power of such a weapon of that size AND constantly useable without being overpowering. So this is what I did.

I went in and combined options 1 and 3. GP03 will now fly in from the side of them map and make an attack run at it's target "location". When it gets close it will fire the Mega partical Beam cannon off once, doing MASSIVE damage to the location/target that gets hit. GP03 will continue flying forwards and stop over the smoldering ruins of it's target. It is then selectable and able to be used as normal.

But I didn't stop there with the unit. The Beam Sabers were given a good distance and set up so they only attack air. This makes GP03 a very dangerous anti-air unit. Enemy targets that get too close like Firehawks and Vertigo's that like the fly past their target after firing their missiles will get a nasty surpize against GP03. Orcas do the best against them with their quick hit and run tactics.

And then I went to the Rocket Pods. Sure, I could give the unit some missiles and call it a day, but that's not how GP03's rocket pods were designed to work. After 3 days of testing different things I came up with this - GP03 fires out 4 missile pods. As the pods fall they suddenly gain their own orintation in the air and take off on their own flying very fast. The pods will fly around the area and fire off 2 vollys of missiles from themselves, firing special micro missiles. Then the pods explode in the air. GP03 is timed to have at most 8 of these missile pods flying around it. The effect is quite awsome to witness and I can't wait to show you guys/let you play with it and see. There is no other weapon in CNC3 like this, and it has opened up another realm of possibilities to us. It all came about thanks to me making a mistake on the code by the way, GP03 at one point was firing missile pods that acted like jumping beans, bouncing from one target to the next killing everything and anything around it. That was just funny to watch lol.

So thats the update for GP03. Now the AI. I've had a problem recently where the AI just simply refused to work properly for me. The game would crash 5 minutes into a battle every time. I've narrowed it down to a couple of buildings, I'm not sure which structure of mine is causing this conflict that is doing all this but that has taken a lot of my time. Once I have this fixed I should have something that Doug and you guys will find a bit more challanging to face other than the current "wow..... that was just sad." AI that the EF currently uses. Here is hoping I can come up with some more evil plans right? :)

August has not been a good month for me.

2011-08-10T00:18:00.000-07:00

Lets see, first there was my GF's birthday, then my own 2 days after than, and then my sisters a few after that.... oh yea, and then my car decided to shit the bed and die on me yesterday, did I mention that? And work is cutting hours (only getting 20ish a week now!) during all of this. And it's only August 10th? Fuck, not looking forward to the rest of this month at this rate.

What does that mean? Well, for starters I've been too busy to post anything here (but not to do work, as many of you know from MOD DB). I apologize for the missing sunday posts and hope to be back on track this sunday with new information about how GP03 will work in the new version of the mod. I'm very excidted and love how it is turning out. As long as I can, you know, actually GET it to work. That's kinda key.

UC and AW, more different than just different units

2011-07-31T18:54:00.000-07:00

I received an email the other day from someone who wanted to know what was taking so long on the mod when it comes to adding UC back in and putting SEED and AW back in. While I get these kinds of emails all the time I felt it was important to explain the difference between UC and AW.

UC Powers and Design Overview

UC has 3 sources of income.

The Tiberium Rig
The Refinery
The Resource Resupply Dropoff

UC has access to many different normal suits that evolve in their rolls as the game go's on.

UC has very few production line Gundams to build.

UC uses 2 kinds of powers. Gundam Reinforment powers where they call in unique powerful Gundams to help support their lines and Defcon Powers. A Defcon power is tied to the Defcon that the UC force is currently at to give additional bonus's and abilities. This places UC inbetween GDI and NOD in terms of powers and abilities.

UC has access to many different defensive structures that gain experience and evolve as they are used.

UC has access to many different structures making them very reliant on space.

AW Powers and Design Overview

AW has 2 different sources of income

Refinery
Resource Drop Off

AW has access to only a few mass production mobile suits who fill very generic rolls.

AW has access to many Production level Gundam class mobile suits.

AW has unique land bases for super heavy support.

AW has very few defensive structures to build. They do not gain experience as they are used.

AW has very few structures to build, allowing for very small bases to be very effective.

AW's powers revolve around Newtype powers and abilites seen in the show. This can range from a massive "EMP" blast that shuts all ground units down on the map to the DOME system.

So as you can see, the difference between UC and AW will be more than just different units. We plan for UC to be a force that flex's and flows, with units that change rolls as time go's on and evolves as time go's on. AW will be a very straight up army with powers that have massive effects and powerful units who also can not deal well with loss's. For example, if you kill a squad of 6 UC Gm's it will not be the end of the world for UC. However, this same loss of a few Gundam Leopards will be a heavier loss as the AW forces will be their main line of defense.

As always, feel free to ask any questions you wish.

Work is starting to pick back up again

2011-07-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Now that all of my personal, family drama is done and over with (for now) I can get back to the mod. In this interm I have not been able to do any coding/modeling but Doug and I have nailed down EF-UC's design.

I don't want to get into much about it but I will tell you this. Previous versions of UC were bland at best, and mostly looked at as a straight forward no nonsense army. Our new design (which will be the final design, I must stress this) will have enough flavor that it will honestly be a very nice choice to choose. While each of the 3 sides of EF will play to a very spicific gameplay style UC is sticking with 1 major theme. The UC will be a turtler's dream. However, UC will also have a weakness against turtler armies if we do get it to work the way we want. So basically the strength of UC is the weakness.

More to come next week.

Late/no update this week

2011-07-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the late post guys, there won't be an update this week. I've been busy in my personal/work life and havn't had a chance to do anything. So, since I've done nothing, there's nothing to report. Exciting isn't it?

I should have something to talk about this Sunday. I'm just getting started on some work now.

Things about the new design.

2011-07-10T13:37:00.000-07:00

While we get ready to start working on our new Earth Federation designs one of the key points behind each design is making sure that not only each unit has a purpose for being in the game, but that each of the 3 sides have a true reason for being in the game and a distinct game play style.

Our current design for UC revolves around the holding of land. UC's defenses will be cheaper and gain experience quicker than AW or SEED's defenses. UC's air resource drops will also come in quicker as they have the supply lines better secured than AW or SEED. Finally, UC gains more tech and more units as the situation escalates. This means that the longer you fight UC the stronger they get. The reason for these game play designs is because in our story UC is supposed to be the force that simply holds the areas that SEED has taken. Think of UC as the forces that when they move they attack enemy lines as a large push, no small skirmish's with these guys.

AW and SEED's designs have not been figured out yet, but this is what I can tell you. From our story, AW is the force that is based off of the Lunar Base. These are the force that initially started the fight for the Earth Federations independence by launching attacks against GDI Blue Zones in North America. What this means is when we do their army the big thing that we'll be looking at is units that have speed, hitting power, and quick deployment and reinforments. This roll will work great for AW as between their "Bits" system for reinforments, the "Dome Defense System" for unique attack points, the "Sat Cannons" for massive stopping power, and the special powers being based around the unique "newtypes" that were in the show AW will have all of these things to make them a very dangerous army to play against. The AW weakness is going to be their structures, or more to the point their defenses. AW simply won't be designed around setting down massive bases, they will work more off the idea of small, efficent bases with few buildings that do lots of different rolls.

SEED is based around a very simple idea. In our story SEED is the force that takes land by making broad forward movements. Where UC uses a sledge hammer to hammer in a nail and AW uses a nail gun with a single nail in it and hopes it go's in right the first time, SEED truly is going to be the proper hammer for the nail each time. This means that each SEED unit that we do put in is going to picked and choosen as a counter for another unit type. While this means that SEED will always have something to work with this unfortunatly also means that if you pick the wrong units to build you could end up losing very easily. However, SEED doesn't have to just rely on having counter units to win. SEED will have additional Ally forces to call on. SEED can team up with ORB to gain access to units like the Freedom and Justice or they can team up with Blue Cosmos and gain super powerful mass production mobile armors like the Destroy Gundam. It'll be interesting if I can get this to work right, that'll be sure.

So soon I should have some pics of the new design working (assuming I ever get past the design faze and move into the recoding faze). If you have any suggestions or questions let us know.

Sorry for the late update

2011-07-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy weekend with 4th of July here in the states. Sorry for the late update.

This post isn't going to say much other than I'm currently working on the new design for Earth Federation - UC (Yes, AGAIN, but with good reason this time.) After all the hard work that we've put into the original 3 we have learned quite a bit about the engine and the AI. The biggest things are what we can get the AI to do, what we can't, and what it really can understand out of the options we give it.

Its for this reason that we're abandning the UC Timeline design. Yes the AI can do it, but it really is not needed. Honestly, it's kind of silly to have all these units that you can only build at certain times. The reason we had the timeline setup in the game was because we were trying to stick to the UC Story as much as possible.

This is no longer going to be the case. The UNITS themselves will still work as close as possible to the Gundam story. The force itself though will not. This means the following.

1. A RGM 79 will work like you expect it to vrs say a Stark Jegan. I kinda feel sorry for the RGM 79 in this match-up.

2. You will be able to build the RGM 79 and the Stark Jegan at the same time with this new design. No more "greyed out units", you just get more as you move forwards.

Doug and I have been having a lot of discussions latley about this new design. If you listen to Doug's podcast you will have heard us and him discussing the new ideas we're toying with. The biggest thing I want to point out is that the things we talk about during this time period are NOT garunteed to be in the game. They're just discussions about what we could do and what is possible and what's not in the game.

Everyone have a good week, and I hope to have some more news soon.

Xenoforce : The Original 3 RC2

2011-06-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

At the bottom of this post you will find a link to the next RC for the 1.1 update to Xenoforce:O3. But for those that actually read this first, I want to thank you for helping us try and make this mod better.

I would like to take a moment and try to stress a few things, why we're spending time working on the Original 3 and why your support and help are important.

We are working on the original 3 because, to be quite frank, we have no choice. If we are going to add such drastic forces as Gundam/Invid/RDF/Zeon into a game and keep that game balanced and fun then we have to use a system that is neutral to both series. Originally we were going to just use EA's design and call it a day, but after the last MOD release it was obviously apparent to us that EA's system simply wouldn't do it. EA's system simply did not have the scope to do what was needed. So we could expand on EA's system or come up with our own. The problem with using EA's system was it would not be fair. If we can agree that Gundam/Robotech must be placed on a neutral system to allow for proper fairness then we must also agree that to allow CNC's units to use their own system would simply be unfair.

So we designed our own system and started the process of converting CNC's units to our system. And since we were doing this we went ahead and made the changes that we felt the CNC armies needed to help make them unique.

Now why this is so important is my second point. We have now made 3 armies with this system (GDI/NOD/Scrin) and only with your feedback and support can we hope to see exactly how this system will work for EF/Zeon/Invid/RDF. What glaring bugs appear with our system? How were these bugs fixed? What does this mean for the other armies not placed in yet? These things are important. So thank you for your support and help, and hopefully this RC will be the last needed.

Xenoforce : The O3 RC2

http://www.mediafire.com/?11ddfquaam4lbd2

Xenoforce O3 1.1 release canidate

2011-06-23T18:01:00.000-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?33ufwyjv0tii8x8

Here's the release canidate for 1.1

The Original 3 is a great sucsess!

2011-06-19T10:53:00.000-07:00

I guess it depends on what your measuring it up against but to me over 600 downloads in a week is great! On top of that we were on the front page of MOD DB for the week and in their "showcase slideshow"!

Later this week (probably close to friday) I will be uploading an update to the O3 mod, version 1.1

This version will address a few balancing issues with the GDI and NOD along with major rebalancing of the Scrin. For example the Stormrider will now get 3 plasma guns instead of the lance weapon, the Tripod loses the ability to upgrade it's arms individually (now it's done through the regular Scrin Powers System) and gains the ability to blink (ah ha! Now there is a good reason to pick that power! Blinking Tripods with Shields and Lance Weapons? Talk about dangerous!)

Keep your eyes open guys, and we'll see you next week.

Xenoforce : The original 3 fixed version

2011-06-12T10:59:00.001-07:00

http://www.mediafire.com/?bpyn9o6gci7icsi

Sorry about that guys, here's a new version with the correct sku. Enjoy.

Xenoforce - The Original 3 is done.

2011-06-11T11:36:00.001-07:00

The official release of Xenoforce : The Original 3 is here!

http://www.mediafire.com/?8sey9klesm38o79

Enjoy!

There will not be a Sunday post tommorow.

EDIT - Wow did I mess up. I posted the wrong sku file for the mod to work. Download this as a temp to fix the issue, tommorow I will repost the MOD with the correct sku.

http://www.mediafire.com/?0cp1lgwl4s337y2

XO3 test 2 now avalible

2011-06-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

Here is the next test version of Xenoforce : The Original 3 (or XO3)

Depending on how this gos I'm hoping that this will be the version that will be placed on MOD DB. Let me know if you find any issues with the balancing / powers here.

http://www.mediafire.com/?kmatv77o8f1w7r7

Xenoforce : The Original 3 Rebalancing Test

2011-06-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

Here it is, a playable rebalancing for the original 3 armies of CNC3. This is a test run of the new 3 armies and the way the rebalancing came out. If it turns out to be good then I will release this version as a seprate mod on MOD DB.

Sorry, mod was pulled due to me being a moron and not resetting timers on NOD powers. Will be back up in a few hours if I can get the upload to go through.

Ok, here's the link to the REAL test. NOTE! Do not pick EF as a playable choice. If you do it will crash the mod. This mod ONLY has GDI/NOD/Scrin in it. IF this test go's well I will release this as a full mod with only GDI/NOD/Scrin on MOD DB and EF will not show up as an option.

http://www.mediafire.com/?211r3svg2oqdlnu

Home strech of new NOD design.

2011-06-05T12:34:00.001-07:00

We're almost done with the new NOD design. This means 2 things.

1) we can finally get back to working on EF. I personally can't wait and am finding it hard to NOT just jump in and start working on AW.

2) a release for these changes will be coming soon within the next few days for everyone to try out.

Now the 2nd reason is important. I wasn't going to release the mod this way and just keep it as an internal mod but recently I've had a few emails (and one request on the image section of MOD DB) asking for us to release the mod with only the 3 original armies. So thats what I plan on doing. This mod will be called Xenoforce : The Original 3 and will only have GDI/NOD/Scrin in it. A few things to remember on this is that this new mod will not be getting updated regularly, it's simply a test run for our new balancing system and for the people out there who want to play the mod this way. Also, just because we won't have any EF stuff in here (or an option to play as EF) does NOT mean we are stopping work. I know it looks like we keep taking things away but I promise you thats not what's happening here, this is just what some folks have asked for.

Here is the list of changes that still need to happen before the release this week.

1) NOD special powers.

2) NOD Defenses need rebalancing.

3) few more GDI Tweaks.

4) few more AI tweaks for Scrin.

So here we go.

Whats going on, I thought NOD was going to be done last week?

2011-05-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

Yea, me too. Unfortunatly it's still a few weeks out now, but allow me to explain. Originally we were simply going to update NOD to the new damage / health system and call it a day. However when we started asking about them / working on them something became apparent. There simply are not many NOD players out there who are playing the mod at the moment. This leads one to wonder why and the answer that Doug and I came up with was simple. NOD simply wasn't that insteresting to play with.

So we started brain storming and have come up with an entire new NOD to play with. This new NOD is a lot like the old one in that they are using the same units for the most part and any current NOD player should have no trouble "stepping" into NOD's shoes and feeling at home with them. However this new NOD has quite a few new tricks up their sleeves.

Without going into the details of the back-story let us just say that the Xenoforce Reborn mod will be re-writing the CNC history for our story and that most changes happen after the 2nd Tib war. Previously NOD dissapeared after the Firestorm Conflict, but not this time. What we've done is make NOD into a full fledged Religous option for the people of Earth. They have their own churches, they are very open about following the teachings of Kane, and even have their own "guards of NOD" military force. This means that the troops of NOD are not just fanatics handed a weapon and pushed into service, these people are well trained and know how to use the equipment intrusted into them.

Now, NOD has 2 aspects of this force. They have the "Show" force of Buggies, Bikes, and Scorpion Tanks that they use and the world sees every day. The main reason GDI is not worried about these forces is that in comparison to GDI's forces and equipment NOD's is not a real threat. At least thats' what they see. NOD has developed additional tech to add to these units to bring them up to -par- with GDI's tech but they don't come that way to begin with. NOD wants GDI thinking these units are for defensive use only and not able to take GDI on in a head on fight. Thats why you get the laser capacitor upgrades, armor upgrades, and tiberium warhead upgrades to make them stronger later.

The hidden part of NOD is the other end of the spectrum. The Flame tanks, Stealth tanks, and Avatars are not shown to the world and GDI has no idea they exsist. These are the real force behind NOD.

Now, each vehicle is going to have a special attack or effect that go's off when the vehicles are killed. I have shown a few of them on MODDB recently. This is the current list that we are aiming to have in.

Radier Buggys - EMP blast when they are killed.

Attack Bikes - Drops a small mine field onto the ground when killed.

Scorpion Tank - Summons a Scorpion Bike when killed. (Scorpion Bike is bike with lasers instead of rockets and is a different color).

Flame Tank - Drops a Firestorm Bomb onto the ground when killed.

Beam Cannon - On death summons an Obelisk of Light to the battlefield for a short time.

Stealth Tank - On death fires off a large volly of rockets around it randomly.

Scud Launcher - On death turns into a "turret" that can fire it's Scud Missile one additional time before dying.

Avatar and Purifier - On death turns into a husk, also all units around them gain 50% attack speed and movement speed.

Can you start to see the opportunities? Run in with a large buggy squad to try and shut down the enemy defenses, then send in beam cannons and stealth tanks to try and do as much damage as possible. If I can get this all to work right, it could be a great time to play as NOD. :)

Also, NOD's powers are changing drasticly. NOD is all about Mass Distructuion and we plan to show it. Here is the list of powers that I am trying to add in. The biggest thing to know about these powers are none of them target a spicific thing, instead they all target a given area.

EMP Control - Fires off many EMP blasts in a given area.

Firestorm Control - Many hidden Firestorm bombs are detonated in a given area. These bombs may go off instantly or in 30 to 40 seconds. These bombs do Fire Damage.

Air Rocket Control - Drops metal canisters from the sky that hit the ground. When they do, they deploy into SAM sites that fire off a large volly of anti-air rockets and then explode. These do Rocket Damage

Artillery Shell Control - Small artillery shells rain down from the sky and pummel anything they hit on the way down. These do Cannon Damage.

Laser Maw Control - 5 Obelisks of Light are summoned into a given area. These Obelisks can combine their beams to damage a single target making them very dangerous. These last for about 30 seconds to a minute then dissapear back into the ground. This does Laser Damage.

Liquid Tiberium Control - Drops a Liquid Tiberium Bomb onto the battlefield damaging everyone and anything Tiberium related. This does Tiberium Damage.

Time control - Activating nano-bots inside the bloodstreams of the NOD personal caught inside the activation pulse, these units gain 50% attack speed and 50% movement speed for a short time.

Rage control - Activating nano-bots inside the bloodstreams of the NOD personal caught inside the activation pulse, these units gain 50% health increase and the ability to regenerate their health for a short time.

So thats what we're looking at for the new NOD. It'll be a few more weeks until its done, if you have any questions feel free to ask. :-)

Sorry for the delay.

2011-05-22T20:07:00.000-07:00

I was hoping that by now you guys would be playing the next internal beta of the new balancing system that we're putting into play. All that was left to do was NOD and the original 3 would be done. Unfortunatly, unforseen family issues came up and I wasn't able to work on the mod these last few days so it will be a few more days until I can post it up. If I get lucky, maybe it will be done tommorow, it depends.

You see, Doug and I have come up with a pretty cool idea for NOD. I like it anyways. However I am finding that there simply isn't a lot of support for NOD out there. What I mean is, the players just don't want much done to NOD as it is. Thats either because they think NOD is fine the way it is or you guys just don't play NOD. Myself I enjoy NOD some, but for the most part I'm more of a GDI or Scrin player simply because I like GDI's military aspect and I like Scrins power system. Only thing that I really like about NOD is the Avatars and their WMD's.

So other than the cosmetic "fluff" changes that we've put into play for the new NOD those are the 2 areas I think I'm going to focus on. Other than that, I just don't see myself wasting much time on expanding NOD. If you have any comments, let me know.

The next internal alpha should be avalible soon.

2011-05-15T11:12:00.000-07:00

Hopefully by next Sunday what you will be doing is not reading this blog but instead testing out our first internal alpha. I've finished with Scrin and GDI and now only have NOD to retool. When they are done I will be posting a link on here (but not MODDB) with this new alpha that is retooled/rebalanced for the original 3 armies. Depending on the feedback from this we will continue with our plans to rebalance EF-UC with this system along with starting work on EF-AW!

GDI's issue was simple, they needed more units to feel like a true military force. They needed variety and options that were there in the lore of CNC but not in the game. This has been fixed I think.

Scrins issue was equally easily seen. They needed more focus on tiberium (which is why they are there to begin with right?) along with a more unique army setup. Again I believe this has been accomplished.

NOD is different. They are a religious organization with militant overtones that are not afraid to use whatever WMD that they can get their hands on. How does this play out in the game? Well, NOD as it stands doesn't have much of a "religious" feel to it in the game. They really feel like a copy of GDI. So how do we fix this? This isn't as easy to do as one would think. We need to inject not with the ability to gain resources in an additional way along with Tiberium Gathering while still focusing on their main three bullet points.

1. They are a religious group.

2. They are a militant force made up of fanatics with little real training.

3. They supposedly control the majority of the Tiberium harvesting operations around the world.

So how do you convert these things to an army in game? Good question. This is what I've come up with. As far as the religious aspect I'm going to make structures that have religious meaning not only cost less but also produce cash. This means the secret shrine and the temple of nod will make you money and cost less than they used to. Also, the Stealth Generators are going to be renamed "Stealth Shrines" that will not only stealth themselves along with other buildings but produce cash. This will make them very valuble to the NOD player for obvious reasons.

Next I will make the refinerys cost less/take less time to build. This will show that NOD is able to deploy refinerys and harvest at a much quicker rate than other armies due to their experience in this field.

Finally, their lower end units will cost less and have worse aim than their GDI counterparts. This is to show 2 things, one NOD generals put the untrained in rolls that are not very costly to NOD if they screw it up but at the same time their lack of training makes them not as effective with these pieces of equipment. However as a NOD unit gains experience they will also gain accuracy. This shows that the in-field training pays off. If they can survive it that is.

What other ideas do you think should go into NOD with their design to help them better fit their history and help them stand apart from GDI? Let me know your thoughts.

The Scrin. How the aliens do things differently.

2011-05-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

As many of you know by now, the major issue Doug and I have had with the original 3 armies from a purly design stand point was how the Scrin were designed exactly like the GDI and NOD. Sure sure, I'm sure EF didn't want to "confuse" it's customers by making the different armies too different from each other, but isn't that the point? If they are going to be a DIFFERENT army then they should be more things about them different than just what units they are using. And an Alien army should be very different than the human versions right?

I'm almost done with the Scrin changes (how the heck did that happen so fast? Seems like it took me forever to do GDI.) and I think that with my new changes plus the old "new" changes that I did already things will be very different for Scrin.

You already know that the Scrin powers and upgrade systems are different than GDI/NOD. With Scrin you basically get to "pick and choose" what powers you want right from the beginning. You can't have everything, but you get enough that you can customize them to your playing style. This is even futher added upon now. Scrin can really be 3 kinds of armies. You can focus on their resource generating capabilites, a sure favorite if your playing team games as you now become "THE" resource force. Everyone will want you to play this type as it will allow you to provide them with money for free! Then there is the "Superpower" play type. With 3 different Motherships deployable now you can play those epic units hard and fast (especially if you have the cash to do it whenever you want) for maximum damage. Add in the Rift Generator that summons in a Mothership after the Gravity Well disipates (oh, did I forget to mention that? Yep, working on that power now.) AND the new Ion Blanket (still way to overpowering but thats the way I like my technologically advanced alien species, feels better when I kick their ass) and you can pretty much force your opponents hand as they can't just "let" you do what you want to. Finally we have the real "Ground Pounder" playstyle. You don't win with fancy weapons or by tricking your opponent. You win because your units are stronger, faster, and tougher than other scrin units. You have hardened shells and energy shields. Your weapons can take in Tiberium to make them stronger, and your plasma cannons are super-cooled allowing them to fire at a quicker rate. A wave of your troops moving across the field brings your enemies to their knees in fear.

But I digress, you already knew all of that right? Here is something else that really bothered me. Why do the Scrin need their tech building to upgrade their power plants? Gone. Now you can just upgrade your plants whenever you want, even from the very beginning. Why do you need to build the "scrin barracks" building to build the Stasis Chamber? Gone. Once you build your Command Node (to me this is a very important building for scrin) then you can build whatever advanced building you want, as it is the command node will be the only "required" building needed to build more advanced buildings.

Finally, Scrin infantry. It's no secret that I made infantry weaker with the last version of the game. I believe I went too far and plan on doubling their HP and seeing where they fall now on the newer version that I'm working on now, but the Scrin Infantry need more. The scrin ground force is very "low" on what it can deploy honestly, they have 4 vehicles really. And out of those 4 vehicles, only 2 of them are designed to survive long in combat. Thats not very good in my eyes, so I plan on giving the Scrin's infantry a further boost making them very tough (but still infantry) in comparison to other infantry units. I mean, I watched 4 swarms try and kill 1 GDI gunnery squad and they never got close! While that's fine, I then watched 4 disintergrator squads try to kill this 1 gdi squad and they were wiped out too. Then a Gunwalker tried and it died as well. That's not gonna cut it. Especially with GDI getting the other Pitbull now.

As always, I welcome your opinions.

GDI - The Airforce that rocks

2011-05-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

I'm almost done with the GDI rebalance and just finished updating the air units descriptions so I thought I'd mention how GDI's air power has changed.

First you get the normal Orca. It still has it's anti-infantry vulcan and is equipped with TOW Rockets giving it an overall balanced useage. Its also the cheapest of the 4 aircraft. The disadvantage is its advantage, it's a jack of all trades master of none.

Then you have the Strike Orca. This unit is a stripped down Orca with high speed boosters on it. It's equipped with Structure Buster Missiles, these bad boys are designed to do triple damage vrs structures though they will do ok damage against vehicles in a pinch. Their disadvantage is they are really only good in a bombing roll, as a defensive support unit they don't have much value. Also their armor is pretty weak compaired to the other choices.

The final Orca design is the Gunship Orca. This replaces our old Stormsmoke Orca unit. The main reason for the change is that while the AI would use the Stormsmoke once in a while a player really couldn't tell what Orca they were dealing with by looking at it. This Orca is much heavier than the other 2 making it slower. However it's armor is stronger. It is equipped with a forward light gattling cannon. The main advantage to this thing is it doesn't need to fly back to reload meaning it's the only GDI air unit that can stay out in the field at all times. The disadvantage is the cost is higher than the other 2 orcas and it's not as fast. Also it's cannon, while it can hit ground and air, does have a chance to miss.

Finally we have the Firehawk. Not much has changed here, other than the payload. Now your 2 choices are Flexable or MOAB. Yes, the MOAB is back folks, and it's better than ever! Flexable loadout is equipped with Anti-Air Missiles and the Firehawks Carpet bomb loadout, the Firehawk will use what it has to to get the job done. If you switch to the MOAB you lose the ability to defend against air, but you get the MOAB! Awsome right?

One last thing to talk about. With the new "hit/miss" system added in to cannon type weapons I have found a few things out. Units that now have a chance to miss have a harder time hitting mobile targets. This gives lighter/faster units an actual feel of being able to pull off "Hit and Run" attacks. But not always, they still do hit, it's just harder like it should be. Also I've noticed that smaller units are harder to hit than larger ones (duh?). I watched 4 Gunship orcas go to town trying to blow some pitbulls up and having a bit of a time with it as the pitbulls were moving/escaping. However I watched the same 4 pitbulls go to town and have no trouble hitting a Titan Tank. Its simply easier to hit larger targets. I like that.

I'll be posting pics of the MOAB in action on Mod DB soon, so keep on watching. After this is done I'm off to work on the Scrin, then NOD. Scrin shouldn't take too long as I'm only changing a few things/powers. NOD is a different beast all together as we're not sure what we're going to do really when it comes to a few things. Till then.

Sundays post on Saturday? Weird.....

2011-04-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Yea, last weeks update was late, this weeks early, don't you love it?

I posted earlier this week the new GDI tech tree and the response has been more positive than negative, but I was surprised by the number of emails I received from friends worried about us working on this aspect of the mod. Let me tell you, just from the 3 new units/new balancing that has been done to GDI they are a lot more fun to play with. I find myself now when I'm playing GDI vrs GDI looking at my units and building 3 or 4 war factories so I can pump out many different units at the same time. Each unit has a unique advantage that makes you go "I need a few of these, a couple of those, maybe 2 of those...", you get the picture.

Take it from this point of view. The Pitbull 5 can turn it's turret 360" and will fire at any enemy unit near it making it an excellent choice for quick hit and run attacks on an enemys base, especially if they drive by enemy infantry. I find myself making attack runs like this, quick in and out shots, to keep the enemy on it's toes. APC's filled with RPG's make great all around units, Pitbull 6's are great early anti-air and anti-vehicles, Defender APC's are great anti-heavy armor but lack air defenses, Preditors are great cheap front line tanks and once upgraded are a match for Titan tanks, Titans are great defensive tanks that work well protecting Juggernaughts and MRLS's, MRLS's are great for dealing with large swarms of light vehicles/buildings, and Mammoths while expensive and time consuming can deal with almost anything out there, they really are Mammoths on the battlefield.

So to all of you out there worried that we are wasting time doing something that isn't needed, don't worry this really does give GDI what they were missing. They now feel like a true army.

GDI Vehicle and Structure Tree

2011-04-21T11:49:00.000-07:00

Thought I would post up the current tree for people to get a feel for the new GDI tech tree.

GDI, taking the long road.

2011-04-18T22:30:00.000-07:00

Right now I'm working on making GDI feel more like a real military power in the game. My biggest issue with CNC3 from the beginning wasn't the graphics or the fact most multiplayer games lasted at most 15 minutes (ok, that did seem odd to me actually). In the end it was the simplistic, cookie cutter game design that bothered me the most. Its not that GDI and NOD had the same units, far from it, but they did always have a like class system in place. Scout vehicle? Buggy vrs Pitbull. Tank? Preditor vrs Scorpion. Heavier tank? Mammoth vrs Avatar. You get the picture. In fact, the only real difference to me was that GDI had APC's and true artillery and NOD had suicidal infantry (ooooh, so scarry) that you saw comming a mile away and the beam tank (laser artillery? Who's idea was that?).

So what I'm doing now is adding new units in to GDI's side, but it's not more stuff for the sake of more stuff. These units actually are needed from a story side of view. GDI is supposed to have been the defacto military/government force for the last 30 or 40 years and they have shit to show for it. No variance, no choices, just the same basic force over and over. That doesn't sit well for me. So the updated GDI that I'm working on will have that. Do you really need a GDI pitbull with a machine gun on it when you can use an APC? They both kill infantry, both cost almost the same, Pitbull can detect stealth and APC can add more troops for more firepower. So why the choice? Because the choice IS the point. Some players will choose to go the cheaper machine gun pitbulls and APC's with TOW Rocket troops for air defense where others may go TOW pitbulls with APC's with basic rifle infantry. Or they may ignore the APC all together and mix the two pitbull types together.

The point isn't that one can fufill the roll of another, the point is that a player needs to have the feeling that he has a vast arsenal to pull from. NOD doesn't have the resources to match GDI on a unit - to - unit variance, so it only makes since that GDI has more to use right? NOD's true power lies in their ability to hide with stealth generators. They don't need 3 different Pitbull types to win, but they need to keep their troops alive long enough until they are ready to strike.

So thats what I've been working on these last few days. I'm working on the new Titan Tank for GDI, it's a mixture between a Preditor and Mammoth. It will give that needed middle ground so that a player isn't forced to spam preditors if they don't want to until they can get Mammoths in the field. I should be posting a new "Tech Tree" soon for GDI to let people see just how many new units are being added in and where. Keep your eyes open and as always, let me know what you think.

sundays post will be late

2011-04-17T16:53:00.001-07:00

sorry, todays post will be done monday or tuseday at the latest, family stuff popped up.

Sundays update, a change of topic.

2011-04-10T13:02:00.001-07:00

I was going to post todays topic with a decision about the original 3 armies and some pics of GDI's tech tree and how it's changing, but someone posted a comment on last weeks topic today that I have to address.

Anonymous Said :

"guys, i feel like being honest right now,

im telling you that, i wont come here anymore, the reason is, you guys are almost dead,

the mod was quite good when it started, and as far as i know, the most fun i had with xenoforce reborn was with one of the first release, i think its the 8.0a or something,

it had all 3 factions, and was just fun.
but now that you guys took 2 of those out, ...its been like a hell,

even if 8.0 was full of bugs and all, WTH, it was still WAAAAAY better than what i've experienced on 9.0c, d or something.

anyway, thanks allot for making xenoforce reborn, i had really good times with it.

i hope you guys can come up with a better version next time. "

Ok, while I am sorry that you feel this way it doesn't change the fact that I think you missed something. We're not dead, we are far from it. Right now I'm working on adding AW (along with some other things) back into the mod, then after that SEED is going back in. These forces were removed for a very real reason, that is they were only there to show people a glimer of what we were going to try to do but people took it as these armies were ready for prime time which they were not. We were getting so much flack from people saying that this stuff was overpowered/unbalanced/didn't work right/buggy that we just took it out until we could get the AI working and get the base design down for EF. Now that thats done we're putting them back in.

I'm sorry you don't find UC compelling, or all the changes to GDI, NOD, Scrin, but I'm not going to say that your right and that we should have kept the other 2 in until we could get back to working on them. Remember this mod is really only being activly worked on by 2 people, Doug and I. We do have our own issues to deal with in real life and can only do so much at once.

Finally, like I said, I've been working on things a lot latly. But it has been on the coding side of things so that there isn't any screen shots to show the progress. If you don't wish to stick around to see what's going to happen that is fine, it's your right. However, progress is going forward and like I said a few weeks ago, I make this mod for myself first and share it with others who I think would enjoy it. Good luck.

Design Ideas, what stays and what go's?

2011-04-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

When working on a project one of the biggest mistakes that I know that I am always making is coming up with a design and then not sticking with it long enough to see how well it works. We've done this a couple of times with our releases and are working on fixing this as we speak.

What this means for you, the end user, is every time you get a new version of the mod it's like relearning the game. This leads to a fractured design where some people want this, others want that back, some like the changes others don't, and by trying to make everyone happy what we get isn't what the original design called for.

Take AW for example. Our original goal was for them to be a very easy and straight forward army to use compaired to SEED and UC. Our current design is not hard to use, but it's got a few things going on in it that scream to me "complicated" and "hard to use". Is this a real problem? Not if we handle it correctly, but at the moment I am worried.

Another example would be our current ideas on rebalancing the entire game. The comes a point where adding new things in only make the game more complicated, and more complicated does not always mean more user friendly or fun. I'm currently working on making each side unique in one of 3 possible ways. Weapon Tech, Economy, and Deployment.

Some forces will have very unique weapons in the next release, the Scrin for example are going to focus on Plasma Technology and Lance Technology for their weapons and will be unique in that they are the only ones on the battlefield that have these kinds of weapons. EF will have a unique economy design, with many different ways to earn income to produce what they need to build the great wall of EF. Finally, GDI has unique deployment, and is able to get most if not all of their ground forces air-dropped in for free after a certain point.

The major issue I'm facing right now is change. What I mean is I feel that we're not giving certain ideas enough time to truly see if they can stand on their own before saying "we need to change it, it doesn't work." Another issue is chaning things that are already in the game, that I feel are fine, but I'm hearing "we need to change this" or "you should fix this, its not supposed to be that way" when it's the way that we wanted it.

Take the White Base for example. Does it work? Well, yea, it does. It drops off units and lays down cover fire for your units as it moves. Does it work right? Not really, the way I have it firing doesn't look right, and I am still exploring ways to fix this. However, people need to realize that not every idea is going to be possible. We will do our best to make this game live up to its potential but some things simply won't work. Someone wanted us to keep the Whitebase as a mobile fortress like we used to have. The reason we took it out was it simply was too big to be a viable unit in the game, and if we make it much smaller we hear "it's not sized right" (not that we don't hear that at least once a week when it comes to the sizes on our mobile suits).

Just a final thought. I was asked recently why I spend so much time working on something that I'm not getting paid to do. My response was simple. "I make this game for myself, because I'm trying to make something that I want to play. The only reason I'm offering it up to others to play is because I really think there are others out there who feel like I do and would want to play this kind of game."

Balancing, a tricky situation.

2011-03-27T14:11:00.000-07:00

Anyone can say "This is unbalanced, you should fix it." But actually going through and making changes to exsisting forces is not as easy as it sounds. For one, your opinion and my opinion of what a unit should be could be entirely different things, so when I say "I fixed this" you may go "It didn't need fixing".

I bring this up because right now Doug and I are working on rebalancing the entire CNC3 game, from ground up, with our own designed system. This is very important because the current game system works as follows.

There are 5 different armor types. Gun, Sniper, Grenade, Rocket, and Cannon. We are wanting to change it to Gun, Grenade, Rocket, Cannon, Beam, Flame, Missile, Laser, Rail, Mega Partical. A big difference thats for sure. But look what else we have done. We went from having 60% of the armor types dealing with infantry to 30%, just this one change makes the game shift from an infantry focus to a vehicular focus which, in all honesty, is what it should be right?

We may go even farther and add Plasma based versions of the weapons to the game as well. That would expand it even further. All of these new weapon types of course lead to a huge issue with balancing. The idea is to give players even more control over their armies and more depth to the game. Do you build the units that are spicificly designed to deal with your enemys super units or do you build the slightly weaker yet universally better units? Do we make the Scrin Shields effective against kenetic types of weapons only, or make them good universally? If we do make them kenetic only shields, what does that mean for GDI who's weapons are mostly kenetic based?

Ah, your starting to see our issue. As such, I want to let everyone know that there will be many changes going on with the balancing, so be prepaired for a lot of "fun" changes. We're trying to make things better, but if we go too far thats what your comments are for. Don't be afraid to say something, the worst we'll say is "no" right?

Our choice of engine and an interesting question.

2011-03-19T22:29:00.000-07:00

Someone recently asked my why we decided to go with the CNC3 engine instead of one of the more "popular" game engines out there like Company of Heros or Dawn of War 2. My first knee-jerk reaction was to say "Because the original mod was on CNC Generals", but then I thought about it.

There are a lot of different game engines out there that players can choose from if they want to build a mod. CNC is definatly not one of the nicer ones out there, requiring a player to recompile the mod after every little change just to see if it went into effect properly. Talk about annoying. Other game engines like the original Dawn of War are much more user-friendly in that they use Lua Scripting instead of XML. So really, why CNC3?

The truth is once I started thinking about it I think CNC was actually the proper choice, though we may not have realized how good of a choice it was at the time. Games like Company of Heros and Dawn of War 2 are amazing games, full of great replay value and strategic choices to make to win the game. But if you step back and tried to put a Gundam into these games, it wouldn't work. These games are designed around squad level tactics and you would end up with either games being about 4 or 5 mobile suits vrs 4 or 5 other mobile suits or they would simply be too big to field on the maps the games come with.

The other engine that was very popular at the time when we started was Supreme Commander. This engine would have actually been a good choice in a lot of ways, huge maps (I mean HUGE maps), and 2 very straight forward resources (vrs CNC's Limited Resource and As much as you have space for and can afford resource). However, have you ever actually PLAYED a game of supreme commander? A 45 minute game feels like it took 2 hours, and a 3 hour game feels like it took all day. On top of that a lot of the game is played from such a high view most of the time that you just see dots moving around on the screen. In the end, it's not the effect we were wanting to go with, on top of the bigger question of "would the models we already have be compatible with it?"

CNC3 is showing that it has quite a bit of potential left in it. The only unit cap is what your computer can handle, and the AI is being found to be easy to manipulate as long as your careful (read - make back up copies after every verified working change).

So yes, the CNC engine was a good choice, and we're definatly not moving on from it. Honestly the engine I would want to make this type of game on doesn't exsist, but if you want an idea to what it would be like try to go back and play a few games of "Empire Earth", and then imagine that with a very healthy dose of "Command And Conqure Generals" and the stability of CNC3. That would be my ideal choice.

Xenoforce 9d release!

2011-03-13T17:45:00.000-07:00

Here is this weeks update, really it's just the link to the MOD! Download the latest version of the mod here!

Please read the readme on the instructions for the game.

http://www.mediafire.com/?eyujfpfrss24d11

The next step on the mod

2011-03-06T13:55:00.000-08:00

So now that we're almost at the next release of the mod, which will only contain UC (sorry SEED/AW fans) it's getting to be close to the time to look at what the future holds for the Earth Federation. I've been watching Gundam a lot recently trying to get new sound effects and some things have come to my attention.

UC, SEED, and AW will play very different from each other. It's almost not fair to group them all under the banner of Earth Federation. Almost lol. They will share a lot of the same basic buildings, but the more advanced buildings will be different and allow for unique feeling armys and not "cookie cutter" versions of the same army.

UC's design is based around building a wall and holding off your enemies until you have built a big enough force to go and attack. Normally if their line starts to fall then there is little you can do to stop it, but cracking that wall is a tough challenge to say the least. They have a nice mix of beam and kenetic weapons, with a heavy focus early game on artillery units.

The plans for AW are still solid, which means we know what we're going to be doing and we know how we are going to do it. Finally, we know how to do it (I think lol) so it should be VERY VERY interesting to see it come together. The AW force will be based around units. They don't have a large selection of units, but they can expand their bases rapidly and their basic units are also able to be produced rapidly early game. Late game they can switch over to an advance "Gundam" unit setup allowing them to be the army that can truly field a large "Gundam" army. Also the AW side will have access to the "Newtype Training Facility" allowing the players to build very expensive but much more powerful and quicker "Elite" units instead of having to level the units up to gain the experience. Finally AW will have access to DOME for their main defense.

Finally we have SEED. Seeds design again will be different from the other armies. Where UC focus's on defenses and AW focus's on massive unit rush's SEED will focus on specialty units. A lot of units will have a spicific roll on the field or a special ability that makes them unique. For example, you will have units that focus on firepower like the Dopplehorn Daggers, or units that foucs on kenetic resistance with Phase Shift armor like the Strike Gundam. Finally, where SEED will be very different, is that you will get a choice at some point to choose an ally. This will work from the spellbook, you either choose to research ORB as your ally or Blue Cosmos. Depending on who you choose will unlock different powers and units. ORB will give you access to an airport building giving you access to their vast arsenal of transformable mobile suits along with allowing you to call in the Archangel with the Justice and Freedom gundams. Blue Cosmos will give you access to their powerful mobile armors like the Destroy Gundam. Yea, things will definatly hit the fan when you move 4 destroy gundams out onto the battlefield (assuming I can get a model/make a model that will fill the roll of course).

So thats' our plans in a very limited nutshell. We have other ideas that we plan to implement that will continue to make these 3 sides feel alike and yet vastly different. After this release I plan on moving on to AW next, so here is hoping that I don't have to go back and do anything drastic to fix UC after this release right?

Ranks and their importance.

2011-02-27T13:49:00.001-08:00

Normally in these games a unit ranking up to rank 4 is a "nice" bonus for a unit, but not a real goal. However in the current build of the mod that will be releasing soon I have been spending a lot of time working on making this a very important aspect of the Mobile Suits.

What this means is a rank 4 mobile suit will be something of a goal for some players. An example would be the Powered GM's. I find I use them as a kind of "fill in the gaps" defensive team during the 3rd timeline. Once I move on to the 4th timeline I use these now more advanced units (for some of them have gained ranks due to all the killing they have been doing) as a hit-and-run tactic. I send them into an undefended section of an enemy base, kill a few targets, then run away.

Why are they better ranked up? Well, in the original game as a unit ranks up it gains some basic level bonus's. Each unit in GDI for example when it levels up gains a bonus to fire rate, health, and reload speed. That's it. What the Powered GM gets is a major increase in speed, taking it from a fast mobile suit at rank 1 to a mobile suit that can actualy out-run most enemy retaliation strikes. For example, the only GDI unit that can actually hurt a rank 4 Powered GM that is running away is the Storm Orca. This is because both the normal orca and firehawk fire weapons that do not track their target, missing because by the time the weapon gets there the GM is already long gone. And other GDI units are just too slow to catch up. The storm orca can both keep up with it's enemy and fire the gattling guns while moving, making it the proper counter to hit-and-run army tactics.

We're working with a number of different ideas at the moment on what kind of bonus's a unit should get. This is our current thoughts.

Direct-Fire Artillery Units should become more accurate as they rank up, so a rank 4 artillery unit will always hit it's target.

Indirect-Fire Artillery Units should be able to fire faster as they rank up, so a rank 4 indirect unit will get 2 shots off in the time a rank 1 gets a single shot off.

Front line units will gain stat increases that help them keep alive as they fight. This means they will gain health, fire rate increases. They will also get a one time auto-field repair when they rank up.

Certain units will gain new weapons at rank 4.

Thats about as far as we've gotten. So yea, we'll see how it plays out. If you have any thoughts about this, feel free to say something.

Almost done balancing.

2011-02-20T13:56:00.000-08:00

Whew, a full week and I'm still messing with this stuff? What am I, lazy?

Well, yea, but that's not the point.

It's actually a lot harder doing this than you may think, but I think I'm almost done with it. The major issue on the EF side wasn't just redescribing all the units and rebalancing their health/weapons/armor/cost but modifing the Experence System and it's bonus's.

What we're doing with the EF leveling is different than your typical unit when it lvls. Each lvl a unit gains a spicific bonus in any number of key areas. This could be anything from 10% health and armor boosts per level to gaining new weapons and abilities. Something we're looking to do spicificly for Gundam X is that the Gundam X unit will not be able to fire it's Sat Cannon until it reach's level 4.

So this has taken me a lot longer to do than I expected. Still, I'm almost done, now all I have to do are the Command class units (RX78, Nu Gundam, the like).

Now I'm sure your going "Command Class?" Yes, there are 5 class's of units. These are

Command
Elite
Troop
Fast Attack
Heavy Support

Looks familiar if your a warhammer 40k fan doesn't it? This is how it will break down.

A command class unit is a very unique unit to see on the battlefield. These units are unique, meaning you'll only ever see one of them out there at a time. This could be because they are so expensive to produce that only one or two were ever made or becuase it's a special charecter unit. Command units also have access to many special powers or upgrades, making them even stronger on the battlefield if a player invests in them.

An Elite unit is a specialtist unit. It fills a very spicific roll on the battlefield, and is very good in this roll. They are more expensive because of this, and if you send them off to do a job they're not designed to handel they will not come out on the winning end. Sometimes they even have access to one or two special powers.

A Troop class unit is a frontlines unit. They don't normally have special powers to activate, but they are well balanced and cheap units. They can fill a number of different rolls depending on the situation.

Fast Attack units are units that have given up armor and health for speed. They are ment for hit-and-run tactical attacks. They can be expected to get the first hit in in a battle, but are not designed for prolonged exposure to enemy fire.

Heavy Support units are the big monster units you see on the battlefield. Sometimes slow, always heavily armored and equipped with powerful weapons, these guys are great fire support units. However, they are also very costly.

So thats how things break down here and thats what I've been working on. I've also been working on making certain types of weapons more unique. This is how that chart is breaking down.

Gun - Machine Gun type weapons, typically used for anti-infantry usage.

Grenade - Grenades are great anti-infantry weapons, doing decent blast damage and used to clear buidlings.

Cannon - Kenetic based weapon, strong vrs vehicles.

Missiles - Rocket based damage, small blast radius but strong impact power.

Rockets - Rocket based damage, larger blast radius than missiles but the blast damage is gernade based.

Beam - Beam based weapons are typically used by Mecha, they are high damage output with long reload rates.

Laser - Beam based weapons, typically low damage but fast reload rates.

Indirect Artillery - Cannon/Rocket based, does an even number of points of each in damage and has a high blast radius.

Direct Artillery - Cannon/Grenade based, does high kenetic damage and decent blast radius damage.

Flamethrower - Beam/Grenade cross weapon. The funnel effect is grenade based, but the center line of fire is low damage beam based.

So instead of 5 different types of weapons we now have 10. Makes things a bit more interesting doesn't it?

State of the balancing

2011-02-13T10:04:00.000-08:00

So I'm currently working with Doug on a class system for the units. We've been working on this kind of thing for awhile now, basiclly it breaks down to a few important things.

We need to keep it balanced.
We need to keep it feeling right.
We want to make things fit the actual cannon of the units better.

If we can do this I think things will be fine. The biggest problem though will be the fact that we are mixing 3 drastically different Sci Fi Universe's together. CNC, Gundam, and Robotech all have advantages and disadvantages to each other so it should work well in the end, but at the moment we're having issues getting Gundam to fit properly.

And last night I think we figured out why. What it comes down to is we're trying to use CNC's system and make everything fit to that. But that would not be fair, this would give CNC an advantage as the system is theirs to begin with. So what this means is we're going to have to come up with our own system to try and get this to work, and that means overhauling everything.

Unfortunatly this means we have to go back and change the stats on the GDI/NOD/Scrin too. Ugh, extra work.

But we're making progress. If we can get something down things should work out for the better, and that's what matters right? I mean, in the end, the most important thing to us isn't the models or the material that we're pulling from, it's a balanced game with many different options given to a player.

Design ideas and the AI, the process.

2011-02-06T10:20:00.001-08:00

As many of you know we call this an alpha of the mod. We do this because we're constantly trying different designs out as we go, changing things quite drasticly at times. Now that we have the AI in the game we're learning just what designs that we came up with work and what ones won't cut the mustard.

A few examples of ones that have to go away would be the Madea fly in delivery system for the Mecha, it just won't work. There is no way to get the AI that I have found to understand that when it wants an RGM79 to build the RGM79MadeaSummon unit and that will give it the RGM79. There reason why is because the AI works off of the idea of "kill teams". It looks at the situation on the board and then based on that it looks at what teams it can build and what will be the most effective against a priority target. Problem is if I tell it that it needs 5 summons to make a team it will just keep building the same thing over and over because the summon doesn't stay around long enough to get 5 of them together for a team, the unit it summons does. And if I tell it that it wants the 5 units that the summons drop it just doesn't do anything because the AI doesn't understand that the summon has the unit inside it. So that's got to go.

Another example would be having the Timeline research and the War Factory put together. The AI won't do any timeline research simply because it doesn't have the time, it would rather pump out units from the warfactory than shut a factory down for the 3+ minutes it takes to do an upgrade, so again we have to leave this idea behind.

But for every "design flaw" that we have to remove/replace new ideas that we didn't even consider pop up. Take this for an example.

This "design issue" is getting the AI to expand. EF doesn't use tiberium as a resource, instead they get their resources flown into them. The problem is that the AI is hard-coded to use Tiberium as the determining factor for expansion. So as EF doesn't ever touch the tiberium, it doesn't ever need to expand. Except it does as EF is designed to take up a LOT of room. We've tried to use this as a trade off. Yes their buildings take up a lot of room, but they also do alot on their own. A solar powerplant now produces 30 energy, thats huge! A nuclear powerplant produces 100 energy, so even though it's the size of 2+ solars it outproduces them. The "Frontline Troop Depot" takes up more room than a regular war factory but it produces infantry, vehicles, and has 2 defenses built into it. You get the point I hope.

So my first idea to fix this was to tell the AI that if needs a ton of tiberium in it's "home" to be considered "resource safe". This leads to the AI expanding like it should but it only does so once. I need an AI that will expand as needed more than once. Also if a player kills off the EF's resource gathering structures they won't build any more, the AI doesn't consider it a nessesary structure.

This leads to my creative idea to fix the issue. First, make the Tiberium Refinary a "Tech" structure. The AI will build one if it doesn't have one because every building requires it. It will only build one, but one is enough to get the job done. The second thing to do was have the resource refinery spawn more than 1 harvester at a time. I changed it to 3 at first and it was such a dramatic change in the AI's behavior that EF won every battle I put them in. 1 on 1's, 4 way free for alls, it just wasn't funny. So I lowered it to two and tried again, this time EF was a bit slower but still walked all over the Scrin, GDI, and NOD.

Wow. What happens if I change GDI and NOD to 2 each also and turn Scrin into 3? AI on crack, thats what! The Scrin tore threw tiberium fields like a plauge (which to me looked proper. They are supposed to be Tiberium based, so it just made more since to me to give them more resource gathers) and GDI and NOD threw up troops like mad. EF now got its ass whooped in a 4 way game. The EF AI built the wrong defenses (built guns instead of AA so scrin had a field day with them) and that was that. In the end it was an awsome battle, and its something I plan on keeping.

Another thing I'm changing is the refinerys abiltiy to regenerate the harvesters. I'm trying to set it up so that if the harvesters die the refinery will rebuild them in 2 minutes. Idea here is that the AI will re-boot itself after a bit of time in case it gets stuck. This is something I'm doing to all 4 factions. This will have the added ability of mitigating NOD's super weapon a bit too. Cool huh?

All of this leads me to the real topic of todays post. I have come up with a way for EF to advance through the timelines other than through researching them. I have not implemented it yet, I wanted to hear what you guys thought first.

The idea is that when a timeline 1 unit ranks up to lvl 4 then the player automatically advances to timeline 2. When a timeline 2 hits rank 4 it auto-advances to timeline 3, and so on and so on. This semi-automated system would be sweet because it would give players 2 ways to advance, through research or combat. It's really up to the player on how they wish to do it. You would still need to have the Tech Center built for it to work, but what do you think? Let me know. And if you have any creative ideas that you think would be cool for the game also let us know.

Sunday, Jan 30th. More of the same.

2011-01-30T21:40:00.000-08:00

So now that we have a working AI I've been redesigning the game so that the AI works properly. Now this isn't as easy as it sounds. The redesigning part I am enjoying, that I can not lie about. But one of the things that I've been asked to "fix" I'm finding impossible to do for some reason. That's the Resource Dropoff point.

Now the way the game code works is this. The Resource building "spawns" a drone, which is the beacon. This beacon lives for 5 seconds then it dies. When it dies it summons in the Madea to the place where it died which has a unit inside it. This unit drops and then kills itself, replacing itself with a structure that looks the exact same. Finally this structure has a 3 second lifespan, but 2 seconds in it uses the tiberium spire code to give the player 2000$. Can you see where my problem is?

The problem is that every time one of these units dies to spawn the next bit the games "audio information delivery system" lets you know that you've lost a unit that you didn't even know you had. It's retarded! So at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to get this to stop, but I'm not having much sucsess.

Another thing that we've been thinking about is how do we want the special powers to go. A lot of people have complained that they don't like that EF's powers are all just "summon gundams". They want more. One person's suggestion has lead me to try something, but again I'm not sure if I can pull it off. Basically, what it is is an area-of-effect ability that boosts the attack speed and health of the select units that are "caught" in this boost affect area. It's basically a "free" promotion to becoming an elite unit. I was going to do this for UC, but now am looking to use this idea for AW and call it "Trigger Newtype Abilities". So that means I still don't have any good ideas for UC's special powers. I may just make them "off screen attacks" like artillery bombardments and stuff, if I do anything at all.

Which brings me to something else that I'm finding interesting while doing all this recoding. We've been updating the buildings while doing all of this and one of the big issues that is still creeping up is "size vrs. ingame size". All I can say to this is please, just give it some time. Trial and error is the only way I'm going to get that stuff right.

But something that is comming up is the quality of the models. Since I'm already working on the new redesign I'm also redesigning the models. As people following the MODDB sight might have guessed by now, I go threw quite a few different attempts at making models before settling on one that will work "for now". I say "for now" because it keeps comming up. I do something, I like it, I put it in, it's fine for a month or 2, then I see a better idea that fits better and we restart all over again. :p So when it comes to the quality of the models, I guess all I can say is "Sorry, but they do progressivly get better right?" A good example will be the pics of the new Powerplant that I'm going to be posting up on MODDB later tonight.

So thats it for now, not much of an update but after getting the AI working there's not much going on other than me plugging away adding things back in and checking to make sure the new stuff works. Time to get back to it. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

I shouldn't have worried.

2011-01-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

So you know that big artical I posted up on sunday going on about how to get the AI to work? I shouldn't have worried, I managed to get a working AI for a new faction. Lol. We're all good people.

CNC3 and it's AI.

2011-01-23T13:21:00.000-08:00

Well now that I'm moved into my new apartment and have begun working again on the Xenoforce Reborn mod I thought I should tackle that one thing that everyone wants to see. God did I not know what I was getting myself into. You see, I have been messing with CNC3's AI for the better part of 2 years now. Not seriously mind you, and not in the way that I'm now working on it, but just looking at it and reading online what others say can and can't be done with it.

I have recently started doing serious moding on the AI within the last 2 releases of the mod, more spicificly I've been working on making the GDI/NOD/Scrin AI more of a challenge. In some cases I would say I was sucsessful, in others not so much. But it has been a good learning process and I have made good progress.

So the next logical step would be to add that infamous AI to the Earth Federation faction. As the Earth Federation will be the most complicated army out of the 4 we are adding in they are the ones we wanted to start with. Now for a bit of information that you guys may not know about editing the games AI. If you edit the AI and make even the tinyest mistake, the game will crash. However, it will not crash the compiling of the MOD, it only does it once you try and load up a map with the new AI active. Also, for the AI to work the map must be edited so that it will apply AI Scripts to the new faction! This isn't nessicary on maps for new AI's based on the original 3 armies as all the maps have already been set up for GDI/NOD/Scrin players but this leads to a unique issue for a new faction. Is it a problem with the map that's causing the crash or the AI scripting that's doing it?

And of course when the game crash's it doesn't tell you why, just that it's sorry and it needed to close. So I have been working on a seperate mod simply called XenoforceAI which is just a new faction (Clone of GDI) with only one AI choice (xenoforce) with a single opening move set. Why did I do this? A few reasons actually, the first being that as long as I'm using an existing force's models and playset I can take my own units out of the equation as to why the game is crashing. Also by trying to make it as simple as possible and with as few changes a possible I take a mod that takes 15+ minutes to compile and do it in less than 5 seconds. This means I spend more time trying different things than sitting around doing nothing.

So that's where we stand now. I've been doing slight modifications to the game trying to get the AI to work in some form (heck I would settle on it just not crashing when starting at this point). I will know within the next few days weither this will be a plausible choice of if I should start looking at other ways of getting the AI into the game.

Now I know what your thinking. "Wait, he knows of another way to get the AI into the game and isn't just doing that?" Correct, I do. On top of that if I choose this path I would be garunteed a working (if not fully functional) AI. However I do not want to do this as for all of its advantages the major drawback is a big one to me.

What I would have to do is add the EF force into GDI.

I'll let that sink in a bit. All done? Good. I already know how to manipulate the exsisting AI, it's really not all that difficult honestly. What I would have to do is modify the exsisting GDI AI's opening moves and change the starting building for GDI. The new start building would simply be a building with 2 upgrade choices, GDI or EF.

You would select which side you want and the starting building would transform into that factions starting building. On the AI side the Opening Moves would have to have what "side" the player wanted as the first option to do, then everything would move on from there. In theory this would work fine. Another advantage to this idea is that the AI would work on all maps with no modifications needed by us. That makes things all the better for people who have a favorite map that they want to play on.

My issue with this solution should be fairly obvious. It's a serious pain in the butt to go back through and make the changes for this to work, and on top of that it's a fairly "blunt force" way of getting a working AI for EF into the game. I mean honestly, making a player jump through that many hoops just to get to play as UC for example, it's a bit more complicated than it should be. First you have to pick GDI, then EF, then build the required buildings to pick UC. Not that it's that big of a deal, it's just thats one step too many for my tastes.

Another thing that's come up about the AI recently is getting a unit to use it's special powers. We were sucsessful in getting the AI to use the upgrades that are located on the Devistator Warship (Scrin) and Avatar (NOD) recently, but only slightly. The Devistator works all the time just fine, so no problems there. The issue comes up with the Avatar using it's ability to upgrade itself. If you play the game on medium the AI will only use the Avatars ability to upgrade just before it's about to be killed. On Hard it does it after it's taken half damage, which is fine to me, but on medium it upgrades and dies almost at the same time. I'm trying to find the bit of code that controls this but so far have had no luck.

But this brings me to my last point on this topic today. The different difficulty settings. The game currently has 4, Easy - Medium - Hard - Brutal. The honest to goodness truth is that there are not a lot of differences between these settings. Easy has all of it's timerates turned to high so it takes forever for the AI to go from one build list to the next. Medium has all of it's times turned to low, so it only takes 3 to 5 seconds inbetween the AI switching to another build list. I suppose this could be seen as a normal player taking a few moments to decide what to do next. Also the Medium difficulty has a 25% chance to deviate from it's build order. So it has a chance that while it's supposed to build say an Orca it will randomy pick a different air unit (Orca Stormshell or Firehawk) for that team. This gives the AI a bit of random personality that I like.

The Hard AI is the exact same as the medium except they took out the time delay inbetween build orders and removed the chance to deviate from it's plan. The way I see it the Hard AI has a plan and it simply sticks to this plan, the consiquences be damned. A good thing and a bad thing at the same time. Finally the Brutal AI is the same as the Hard AI except that the game cheats on Brutal with all units costing half of what they normally cost and building twice as fast as normal. Not a good thing.

To me you have 2 choices. You can either make an AI smarter or make it unpredictable. If you have to have the AI cheat to win then you fail as a programmer. So with saying that I plan on making the following changes to the AI.

Easy will stay the same. Medium will have the same time delays as normal, but with only 2 different starting build orders and with a 20% chance of a build deviance. Hard with have 4 different build orders but will have a 0% chance of a build deviance. Finally Brutal will have 5 different build orders with a 40% chance of a build order deviance.

Thats right, Brutal AI will be the most random AI I can make it so that you will never know what to expect from it.

It will NOT have a cheat bonus. I will also be modifiying the "Kill Teams" that the Ai will choose to build, a good example of this would be our current NOD AI. It has the ability to build Scarab teams to seige the enemy instead of Beam Tanks, and it will do this 66% of the time if NOD gets into the position that it needs to lay seige to an enemy base. A good idea here would be to add in something unexpected for a seige attack on Brutal. Say, a kill team made up of 1 Scarab, 3 Avatars, and 8 Stealth Tanks. The Avatars and Scarab would be a good distraction (because they are visible the enemy will see them first and attack them) while the stealth tanks can get way up close and do what they do best (be evil).

So those are my thoughts on CNC3's AI, what we're trying to do, and possible solutions to exsisting problems with the AI. If you have any thoughts yourself, feel free to post them. Have a good Sunday everyone.

OMG, he doesn't post here anymore! He left us for MODDB!

2011-01-22T13:51:00.000-08:00

Not hardly lol. While it's true that I don't post here as often now that our MODDB page is up and running I have not forgotten about this page. In fact, I'm looking to change the reasoning behind this blog now that we have the MOD DB page, but I won't simply forget about it.

So what's this page going to be for going forward? Well, I don't always want to post every little "small" test update onto MODDB (why would I?) so people who look at this page will be able to get access to the mod before it appears on MOD DB. Also I plan on posting development pics here unlike MOD DB which will get in game pics only. Finally I will be posting different thoughts on the modding process in general on here going forward, hopefully once a week every Sunday night. This way it can be saw as a kind of "Developers Diary" but it will always be on a spicific topic.

So keep your eyes open for this Sundays post, I will be discussing the games AI, what I can do with it, what I've learned, and what you would like to see from it.

Xenoforce 0.9c released!

2010-12-21T23:11:00.000-08:00

Yes, 3 days early in fact! I was going to wait until Christmas Eve to release the mod but I remembered last month when I tried to do it on a specific day on MODDB and forgot that it takes anywhere from 24 to 48 hours for MODDB to actually post the mod for download from when I submit it. That just won't do this time!

So I present to you the link to the latest and greatest update to the Xenoforce Reborn project to date. The 0.9C. Have a merry christmas guys!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?jm3gc5j559mdoaw

Armored and Stark Jegan

2010-12-17T19:59:00.000-08:00

I've managed to get the Armored Jegan and Stark Jegan into the game. The difference between these two units actually go's past the typical "weapon swap" considering they are both based on the same unit. So I felt this was a good time to talk about the Teir 5 units and why Teir 5 really is the pinical of UC tech. Some of these units are also Teir 4 units but are still avalible in Teir 5.

The RVC-1 Guntank II is more of a mobile vehicle than a mobile suit. It is equipped with an assortment of weaponds and it's primary purpose is long range artillery support. However due to it's heavy weapons and armor its a very slow unit making it more useful for base defense rolls.

The GM-III is the typical frontline unit for Teir 4 and 5. Its equipped with a standard Beam Rifle and has decent armor. It's cost is only slightly higher than the original GM's but it's speed, armor, and firepower all range between 20% to 35% higher.

The Armored Jegan is long range artillery support. It is equipped with 2 powerful beam cannons and is heavily armored so it can take quite a hit before sucumming to enemy fire. It's firepower is roughly equivilent to the GMC-83 GM Cannon II, and it's not quite as tough armor wise, but it's speed is much faster making it easier to deploy on the battlefield.

The Stark Jegan is quick response firepower able to move as fast the RGZ91 in Waverider Mode. Power wise it's able to release a massive amount of kenetic damage against an enemy target with it's hyper bazooka and missle loadout. However, it's speed and firepower are offset by it's basic armor, so it's not able to last long in a fight.

The RGZ91 is a very powerful mass production unit. It's equipped with a rapid fire beam rifle and it is a heavily armored unit. It's main advantage is that is can switch at will between mobile suit mode and waverider mode. In Waverider mode it gains more speed and missile pods but is much more fragile to incomming fire. It is however a very expensive unit.

And there you have it. Thats a rundown of Teir 5's suits. I know some of you may be going "oh gee, 5 suits? Thats it?" Well, yea pretty much. But you also get Nu Gundam along with any other suits that you've got left over from previous teirs (time to pull those old RGM79's out of retirement and put them into the field). On top of that you have the air units still avalible (which will be getting an overhaul before the release next week) and the basic vehicles that EF gets (so that's the Jeep, Colony Defense Tank, Missile Truck, and T61 Tank). Honestly, that should be enough don't you think?

Quick update

2010-12-14T23:38:00.000-08:00

Thought people may want to see the new EF Landing Pad that's replacing the old new one... yea.... something like that. Anyways, here's the pics. One is the regular version, and the other is the upgraded one for UC's timeline.

Also, I wanted to let everyone know that I've added the EVA sounds in for EF. They're just the same sounds as GDI uses for now, but it's something and it does help.

New ability discovered.

2010-12-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

So I just figured out how to properly use different models dependant on their damage states, along with different movement animations. While this is quite cool, what I wanted to do with this new ability isn't possible.

See, I was trying to get the units to lose limbs as they take damage. Spicificly, I was trying to get the Powered GM to lose an arm after it takes X ammount of damage. I was able to pull this off, except for 1 issue. If I did the animation of the arm blowing off then every time the unit stopped moving it would redo this animation (not what I was going for). If I didn't do this the arm would simply disappear, which wouldn't look right to me.

So I ask you guys, what would you suggest? Right now all I've done is add a sort of "wobbly" effect to the unit when it starts or stops moving, but that doesn't seem to be enough to show "damaged" to me. I really don't just want to do a "texture" swap with damage on it, that's lame considering the possibilities of being able to swap the entire model out. I'm gonna try adding damage wires and stuff to the model and see what that looks like, but any suggestions would be welcomed.

New ideas for EF/UC

2010-12-03T21:59:00.000-08:00

So the votes are in and for the next month we will be working on finishing UC up. This means code cleanup, new sounds (hopefully), damage effects for the units, weapon balancing, these kinds of things.

In the last few days I have been working on the new turret system for some of the units. I have also been working on making each unit even more unique (lets be honest, some times units really feel like the same thing don't they?).

For example, we have how many long range/artillery units in UC? Well, in timelines 1 and 2 we have the GM Sniper, the GM Cannon 80, the GunCannon RX77D, and the GunTank Mass Production! Thats over 50% of their forces consisting of artillery units, that's quite a bit. So what did I do? I added another one in of course.

So this is how it's going now, a breif description of how each of the artillery units will be different/used differently.

The Guntank MP is equipped with 2 120mm long range cannons. It's long range helps keep it well out of enemy range, but it does take a bit of time to reload. It's also equipped with a secondary weapon, machine guns on it's arms, to help protect it from enemy infantry that could try to flank the artillery.

The GM Cannon (RGC80) is equipped with a single 240mm cannon. But, due to the cannons shorter barrel it is not as accurate and requires the unit to be closer to the target to use. Also, because this weapon is mounted on a normal GM body, the unit is fragile. However, it is also very cheap and easy to produce, and it can pack quite a punch.

The GM Gunsniper has been modified to a new setup, one that I think makes the unit a lot more effective and useful. Now the unit is stealthed at all times except when firing it's weapon. However, the unit can not fire until it is in deployed mode. It works a lot like the GDI Rig in this fashion. However, it has great range and with the proper deployment these guys can make great "stepping stones" for the enemy to have to go through when deployed in a forward sense.

The RX77D Guncannon is a much more heavily armored unit when compaired to the GM Cannon RGC80, and comparison is in order here. The unit is equipped with the same weapon as the RGC80, but it has 2 of them instead of the RGC80's one. However it's cost is greatly increased, so while have some of these guys mixed in to your forces makes good sence trying to build a huge army of just these guys will drive you bankrupt quite easily.

The other teir 2 unit is the GM Sniper 2. Compared to the original GM Sniper, this one is equipped with a normal kenetic based rifle. It however still has amazing range, stealth, and can pack quite a punch. It does not however require deployment to be used, so in this sense it's a lot like a normal unit with a powerful rifle which, in the end, is exactly what it is.

In the 3rd Teir you gain access to the GM Cannon 2. This unit is very expensive, but is very powerful. It is a GM Custom unit with Gundam Alex's extra armor making it a tough unit and is equipped with 2 powerful beam cannons. Now the key thing to this unit is that when the GM Cannon 2 is killed what actually happens is that the GM Cannon sheds its outer armor and cannons reverting to a GM Custom unit.

Teir 4 has the Guntank 2, a traditional artillery unit. The Guntank 2 has 2 recoiless 120mm cannons that allow it to fire in a much quicker sucession than the original Guntank. Also, the Guntank 2's secondary weapons are now rocket/missile tubes allowing this unit the ability to deal with enemy mecha as they get closer to it easier.

Arguably also Teir 4 has the Super Gundam which is equipped with a powerful long range beam rifle, so you could consider it artillery also.

Teir 5 is the only teir that doesn't have any artillery in it, but does it really need it? I didn't think so either.

Better late than never!

2010-11-26T23:35:00.000-08:00

The 9b alpha is now being uploaded to MOD DB. Check it out and tell me what you think!

EDIT

The file is still awating athorization on MOD DB so for now here's a Mediafire link. http://www.mediafire.com/?8c384b5x6ycv65p

EDIT 2

The mod is now avalible on MOD DB, so if you don't want to use the mediafire link you don't have to.

Mod delay, Of course.

2010-11-25T21:39:00.000-08:00

So I've gotten the 9b mod done, but my net connection is causing issues uploading it to the net at large. So, I will have to wait until tommorow (Friday) to try and upload it again. Sorry everyone, I really tried, but sometimes there's just nothing you can do. Hopefully tommorow night.

Less than 24 hours for the .9b alpha!

2010-11-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

I'm now working on the final touches of the alpha 9b, mostly balance changes and the like. This version should give Scrin the extra little boost it needs early game (wow did I not realize how bad their early game was) and NOD gets epic artillery (Give me a hell yea) along with a redesign of the Avatar making it work better and more weapon balancing for GDI. All of this along with a new NOD AI (xenoforce) and we're finally making good progress with the Mobile Suits and their waists turning and firing correctly (Unfortunatly only the RM79, RX78, and Gundam Alex both armored and unarmored have the new changes, but it gives you a good idea on how mobile suits are supposed to work now).

So, time to get back to the MOD. Keep your eyes peeled.

New discussion about new units/ideas

2010-11-19T21:30:00.000-08:00

I have started a thread on the Moddb Xenoforce Forum about new ideas that I am now accepting about the EF army, much like we did here earlier on SEED. Based on the feedback I will decide what army to work on next, SEED or AW for hopefully a Christmas release.

If I don't get any feedback, well, then I guess I'll just draw a straw or something lol.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/xenoforce-reborn/forum/thread/new-ideas

New NOD Experiences

2010-11-18T13:08:00.000-08:00

So I have been doing a lot of work on the NOD/GDI AI latley and I have some great news. Not only have I managed to get the AI (on medium) to almost always do it's tech research to actually get the upgrades needed (really important for GDI) but I also added in a new AI for NOD, a Xenoforce AI. This AI is very aggresive and the other 2 AI's seem to have trouble with it most of the time. I love it!

A new tactic that this AI likes to use is the Purifier Team, basically 4 Purifier Warmechs are built then go to town on enemy expansion bases. As these bases are normally not as heavily defended as the main base these guys manage to do a lot of damage before getting taken down.

Another tactic it uses is, if the enemy is well bunkered into its base, the AI will now build 4 or 5 Beam Cannons and 2 of the new Scorpion Warmechs and make a long range assault on the enemy. It's very interesting to see the hard AI finally using new units, and I can't wait for you guys to see this new mini-release.

Another update.

2010-11-16T13:50:00.000-08:00

So I decided that I will release something for you guys to play for thanksgiving weekend. There still isn't (much) different with the last release. Most of this stuff is just tweaking, but there are a few things that will definatly be different.

For one, we've gotten the turret system down for a few units. This will give people a glimps of how the new mobile suits will move from this point on.

Also we have increased the sight range on the Scrin Devistator Warships and increased the scout range on the Scrin Planetary Assault Drones. We have been talking about changing the roll of the Scrin "Eye of the storm" mothership from a planet killer to something else. If we do somethinge else, what would you like to see?

NOD has been where a lot of our work has been recently, fixing a few bugs that crept up and gave us great concern. You don't need to know about the bugs, but what you should know is what new toys NOD has to finally allow it to stand against it's enemies on the battlefield.

First of all, the Avatar Prime has been removed from the game. It's just no longer needed. What we have done is manage to get the AI to use the special power system on the regular Avatar, making it much more deadly. We did change the weapon system on the Avatar, so instead of gaining stealth from the Stealth Tank it gains a Stealth Tanks missle system instead.

Now, with this system, the Avatar does not kill any units to gain the upgrade, it's simply an upgrade given to the Avatar based off of what the unit represents. Beam Tank gives the Beam Cannon upgrade, Flame tank gives Flamethrower, Stealth Tank gives a Missile Rack, and finally the Scout Bike gives speed and the ability to detect stealth. These upgrades do have a cost.

There is now an upgraded version of the Venom ship that is equipped with a variation of the Obelisk of Lights weapon, making it basically a flying artillery platform. However, this version of the Venom has lost it's ability to be stealthed.

Finally we looked at what we lost when we removed the Avatar Prime. The Avatar, for all of it's new abilites and strength, is still just not strong enough to be the "end all and be all" of units. Especially once you add in the fact that a fully upgraded Avatar costs over 4000$. So to help counter this we have 2 new toys. One is an obvious choice, we put the Purifier in. It's a Red Avatar that is equipped with 3 Flamethrowers. It's speed is much faster than the normal Avatars allowing it to get into range quicker.

The other choice was one we had thought about doing awhile ago but we went with the Prime instead. Now we have decided to add it in. It's based off of the MCV, we have basically armed this thing to the teeth. With 2 massive gattling artillery cannons hanging over the main unit, we decided to name this thing the "DeathWalker Scorpion Mech". It's also equipped with the targeting system of an Obelisk of Lights system and a Scattershot Missile System. Still, it's weak against close range units, infantry, and aircraft, so it has a place.

Here are the pics.

Where the hell have I been and what the hell have I been doing?

2010-11-06T23:19:00.001-07:00

Well will you look at that. It's been almost a full month since my last post. Where have I been? Well, here and there mostly. We found a new bit of code that is letting us redo a part of the unit AI so that the units can now use the special powers that they are equipped with. This is huge, it's a major step forward for our Zeon and (some) SEED ideas as without this little ability we would of had to redesign these things.

Right now we are testing out these things on NOD, spicificly the changes to the Avatar that we have made (yes, we made new changes again. But it's always for the better, I swear). I will have to honestly say that after watching the latest AI vrs AI vrs AI (Scrin/GDI/NOD) that NOD just got that shot in the arm they needed by being able to upgrade their Avatars on the battlefield when the AI decides it wants it. They still lost, but they came in 2nd where normally they were the first one out, so thats definatly something in my book. Now if I could just figure out where the code is for when the AI decides what special powers it wants to use from the spellbook then we would be all set!

Right then, what else. Well, we're heading into Thanksgiving and Christmas which means less time to work on the mod and more time at work (I work retail, fun fun!). Always happens this time of year you know? And Dougs been busy with his own family as well, so things are going to be speratic for a bit. I'm also looking at moving by the end of this month, so that will also cut into Mod work time. All of this means that the schedual I had planned on in October is going to be horribly missed. Still, I hope to have the next version of the MOD out to you guys by Xmas week, if not sooner. (I was aiming for thanksgiving but as I am only about 15% of the way through remodeling the mobile suits so that they can turn their waists and fire on the move properly that isn't going to happen.) I may release something for thanksgiving week without the changes to AW or SEED, just a revamp of GDI/NOD/Scrin/EF(UC). Think of it as an alpha 0.9b of sorts. We'll see.

Finally, if anyone has any suggestions they would like to make on the mod, Valherran started a thread in the MODDB Xenoforce Reborn forum section with a few suggestions. I always enjoy reading what people like and what they think needs balancing so feel free to stop in and make a comment or suggestion of your own. I will always respond (sooner or later lol) and I will definatly let you know if what your asking is either a good idea, worth trying, not possible from a coding standpoint, or just not what we're trying to accomplish and why. At least I always give a reason. :)

New forums up at MODDB

2010-10-08T14:15:00.001-07:00

Just wanted to let everyone know that we've activated the forums in MOD DB for the mod. This will let us interact in a more streamlined fashion with you, the players.

Also, we have finally gotten the code to work right for the mobile suits to use their waists as turrets, meaning that mobile suits will become more dynamic in their movement, targeting of enemies, and become more useful than before. Also it should help us differentiate the different units even futher through allowed movement and fire types based on the weapons the units are equipped with.

ModDB

2010-10-05T09:20:00.000-07:00

this is just a quick update to let everyone know that our mod is now officially on moddb. this will still be the place to come to for development news, but mod releases from this point on will be done there so no more mediafire or rapidshare links unless its an early preview of something.

Alpha 9b patch fix.

2010-10-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

Here's the fix and a list of what we fixed.

http://www.mediafire.com/?iw9mvqh3ihdff2j

The discriptions with the Scrin are fixed for their powers.

The NOD defenses have been made stronger.

The EF defenses have been made weaker, you now get fewer of them.

The EF forward base now has the proper image.

The EF supergundam now costs to activate the upgrade.

a few other basic balancing options have been done.

Xenoforce 9a Alpha released

2010-10-02T02:58:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's 6+ hours late, but it's done. I would have posted up a nice long article telling you guys everything that's changed in this release, but I'm too fucking tired right now to give a shit. So, I guess you'll just have to download it and try it out yourself.

I'll tell you this. EVERYTHING has changed. This mod is nothing like the last one. SEED and AW are NOT balanced in this mod, I would not suggest using them. UC may or may not be overpowered now, we rebalanced them but havn't tested any of the rebalancing (that's what we've been doing for the last 6 hours) so if they are we need to know.

http://www.mediafire.com/?82lqorj7i836ft8

EDIT POST - EDIT POST - EDIT POST - UPDATED - UPDATED - UPDATED

Yawn, wow, I was up way too late last night lol. BUT it was worth it. Yes, the alpha 9 is out in the wild now, and quite a few of you have already jumped on it. I can't wait to hear about your current experiences.

Ok, first up are the known bugs in alpha 9.

The only 4 big ones that I have noticed are this.

If you use Justice Gundam or Freedom Gundam from SEED and they die they fire the wrong weapon. Now instead of them going nucular they end up causing a liquid tiberium bomb explosion. Needless to say, this isn't right or good for anyone lol.

GP01 Full Vernian mode doesn't seem to fire, so I would suggest not going into Full Vernian mode with GP01.

The White Base is able to be dropped even though the team is already on the field, allowing a player to get more than 1 RX78.

The Scrin powers have the wrong discriptions set up for them (how did that happen?).

Those are the only 4 ones I've noticed so far. The SEED one is a game buster IMHO, but again I don't suggest using seed right now unless your just wanting to look at it. The balanced army is UC. (sorta balanced) I will be releasing an update to the 9 alpha in a few days to fix these issues.

Now for the changes.

GDI -

*Gernaders now randomly throw EMP Gernades

*Preditor Tank and Mammoth Tank now have 2 new upgrades avalible to them, the Rail Cannon Accelerator and the Adaptive Armor making them much tougher on the battlefield

*APC is now a bit cheaper

*A new Orca is now avalible to be built, the A10-Orca or SmokeStorm Orca. Its equipped with a powerful gatling cannon and hellfire missles. It does not need to go back to the airfield to reload.

*Juggernaught now has access to a different fire mode, the Urban Firemode. It switches the cannons out for direct fire rail cannons.

*The Command Post now has the basic unit upgrades on it.

*The Space Port now grants a new power, the MCV Drop. This will drop an MCV, 2 Preditors, and 2 mammoths to the battlefield.

*The Sonic Cannon now fires a longer range EMP based Sonic Blast. It doesn't do much damage to vehicals but it does shut them down along with killing infantry instantly. Also when you place one you get to place a second one for free.

*The AA Cannon now gives you 3 AA guns for free when you place it.

*The Watchtower now gives you 3 watchtowers for free when you place it.

*The Cannon Defense now gives you 2 Cannons for free when you place it.

*The Firehawk now has 3 weapon outloads. The Missle Mode fires off missles at enemy aircraft, the Carpet Bomb mode drops 10 bombs in a row that light the ground on fire for a few moments, and MOAB is a powerful single bomb that not only does massive damage but it also keeps the ground on fire for awhile.

*GDI's Commando is no longer buildable. Instead, when you drop the Zone Troopers from the Space Center it will also drop a single Commando. This removes the limit of 1 Commando on the field at a time as well.

NOD -

*The NOD Avatar now has 3 upgrades that replace the original upgrades. The Flame Thrower upgrade gives the Avatar a flamethrower, lowers the range on it's main beam weapon, but allows the Avatar to fire and move at the same time with both weapons. The Missle Upgrade adds an anti-air rocket pod to the back of the Avatar, allowing the Avatar to target multiple targets at the same time along with attacking ground and air at the same time. Finally, the Beam upgrade increases the range on the Beam and adds a 2nd Beam to the other arm.

*The Nod Avatar Prime keeps the all of the original upgrades that the Avatar had access too. It also now spawns a repair drone allowing it to fix other units in the field.

*The NOD Venom has been lowered in cost.

*The NOD Vertigo Bomber is now the NOD Vertigo Fighter. It now fires off missles at the enemies. The Missles drop out and then gain speed as they lock in on their targets. The Vertigo Fighter is best used in attack runs. It does not have to go back to base to reload.

*The NOD Armageddon Bomber is now avalible to build. The Armageddon Bomber drops 3 bombs, but the bombs are not very acurate. Best used when you don't really care who gets hit as long as something gets hit.

*The NOD Scorpion Tank is slightly cheaper, and does not lose the main cannon when it gets the laser upgrade.

*The Shredder Turret now becomes good against both infantry and vehicles when the laser upgrade is done.

*The Laser Turret now gains the ability to hit air and beomces stronger with the laser upgrade.

*The Nuclear Missle has been now moved to the Liquid Tiberium Research Facility. It is deployed by a bomber and dropped onto the battlefield. If the bomber is shot down before the nuke is dropped then the nuke does not go off.

*NOD now has a new super power dropped from the Temple of NOD. This is the Liquid Tiberium Bomb. What this does is drop a missle from space that no matter where on the battlefield it's dropped it will hit EVERYTHING on the battlefield, ally and enemy alike. It does massive damage to anything tiberium based (effectivly killing all refinerys and harvesters on the field), and it also kills ALL infantry that is on the field that is not inside a building or APC. When the bomb kills the infantry it has a good chance of turning the infantry units into Vicroids that will attack anyone that comes near them.

*Nod Buggy now deploys 2 buggies when you buy one.

*Nod Attack Bike now deploys 2 bikes when you buy one.

*NOD's Commando has been removed. It has been replaced by a squad called Nod Elite Squad. This squad consists of the Nods Commando and 2 Elite Confessors. Each member of the squad has the ability to place the C4 charges.

*NOD's Obilisk has a stronger attack now, making it more valuable.

Scrin -

OK, this is a bit different. Scrin now have a different design all together.

Scrin can NOT build defenses now. Instead, certain buildings build defenses when they are built for free. The basic idea is that the barracks comes with Anti Infantry defense, the Warp Beacon comes with Anti-Aircraft, well, you get the idea.

The Scrin Defenses tab is now dedicated to a Generals Style Power tab. There are 3 coloums each with 4 powers in them. The Defense powers are L1 Personal Forcefields, L2 Infantry Mines, L3 Personal Blink Packs, and L4 Regenerative Armor. The Offensive powers are L1 Tiberium Based weapons, L2 Mothership Research, L3 Rift Generator Research, and L4 Full Scale War equipment. The final option changes many weapons to a different fire mode, or adds additional powers to the units. The final powers are Tactical based. L1 is Tiberium Vibration Scan, L2 is Phase Field (which now can be used on enemies or allies), L3 is Wormholes, and L4 is a Nightmare Pulse. The Wormholes are now perminant, allowing the Scrin to set up tunnel networks all over the map (these can be shot and destroyed by ctrl fireing on them) and the Nightmare pulse basically forces all infantry to stop and hit the ground for a full minute. They can still fire, and they are harder to kill in this mode.

*The Scrin Infantry now have acidic blood when they die, so running them over with a tank is a bad idea now

*The Mastermind has the ability to fire off Ion Storms now.

*The Gunwalker is now an infantry unit and not a structure.

*The Devistator Warship now fires Dark Matter bombs. It has an extremly high reload rate, but a player can push the ship and also use a manual Dark Matter bomb power.

*The Planetary Assault Carrier now has 2 fire modes, the normal mode where it launches fighters or an assault mode where it keeps the fighters attached to it but fires powerful beam blasts at the ground from the ship itself.

*The Mothership is now called the Eye of the Storm. An Ion Storm is constantly inside the ring of the ship, and with the proper powers being used with it it can also be equipped with extra armor and additional guns that will fire upon enemy air units.

*The Harvester now can gain a shield.

*The Corruptor now is very useful as a healing unit. If you tell it to force fire on another scrin unit it will actually heal them with its beam instead of doing damage. It will also follow the unit around until you tell it to attack or move somewhere else.

*The Devourer Tank now fires a rolling partical attack. With the proper upgrades it can also fire a concentraded tiberium beam inside the rolling partical attack.

*The Annihilator Tripod now has a pulse energy beam. This beam is half as powerful as it's normal attack but it can hit air and ground. Each of the 3 tenticals can be induvidually upgraded to the regular beam everyone is used to, allowing you to customize your Tripods.

*The Alien Explorer now has a completly unique roll. Now they effect the atmosphere and cause Ion Storms to randomly appear and move around the map attacking enemy units. These storms come and go with time.

*The Scrin now have a new AI option! This AI is called the Xenoforce AI, and if you want them to use the power system you need to choose this AI.

Earth Federation -

*The Earth Federation now bring in all of their vehicles through ship drops. A ship will fly in from off the map and drop the units onto the field.

*The Default War Factory now has the ability to build a resource drop. Every 2 minutes the ship will fly in and drop of resources to the player.

*The EF can now deploy a Nuclear Reactor for power. These are very powerful, but if sold or destroyed they will go nuclear and explode. BE VERY CAREFUL.

*The EF player can build more Forward Bases now.

*To move to the UC timeline you simply have to build the UC High Command building.

- UC -

*The Gundams are now deployed as powers on the left. These are free.

*The only requirements on units now is to be in the proper timeline.

*The Timelines are done through upgrades in the UC High Command.

*All units have been rebalanced. I need you guys to tell me if you find anything to be overpowering.

New, simpler UC Design.

2010-09-26T09:29:00.001-07:00

So I wanted to give you guys a quick rundown on what we are exactly doing to UC for the next release this Friday. The plan is to make the UC simpler and easier to use. How are we going to do this? I'll tell you, and it's what I hope to be a good idea.

First we're removing the flag/force upgrade from the game. Instead, there will be 3 buildings that will become avalbile to you to build. The 3 buildings are an AW DOME Relay Node (which lets you pick AW and will have DOME controls in it), a SEED-Mass Driver (which will not only allow you to build Archangel Class ships but will also allow you to build other structures as well), and finally the UC-Earth Federation High Command (which will allow you to move forward with the timelines inside UC).

The AW and SEED buildings will be in place by friday but they won't do what they are supposed to yet, they simply will be used to allow you to still use those other 2 sides of the armies. Be aware that those armies are now considered broke as they need a serious update to make them fit better and this hasn't been done yet. UC however will be fairly straight forward. You place the High command and it will have 4 upgrades in it. Each upgrade will require you to build the previous one to move forward in the UC timeline. You will also have in the spellbook 5 spells that are UC spicific. These will be Spell 1 - White Base drop, Spell 2 - Grey Phantom drop, Spell 3 - Albion drop, Spell 4 - Psyco Gundam drop, Spell 5 - Argama Drop.

How these will work is like this. While in the teir 1 timeline the Teir 1 spell power, White base drop, will be avalible for use. Every X minutes (right now we're testing 2, but there is no garuntee) you can summon in the Whitebase anywhere on the map. This will work a lot like how the Arch Angel is being done in SEED, it will fly in and land on the ground. However, here is where it's different. The White Base will land on the ground, and drop off the Prototype Guncannon, Guntank, and RX78 units for free! Then after 15 or 20 seconds the ship will take back off and be able to be used like normal. So for the first few moments the White Base will have to be defended by it's units, after that it can defend itself. If one of the units the White Base drops off are destroyed then the White Base will respawn the unit after a minute or 2. If the White Base itself is destroyed then it can be resummoned from the spell power when the power is again avalible. If the White Base is resummoned it will only drop off the units that don't exsist any more, so for example if the RX78 and Whitebase died but the Guntank and Guncannon survived then when the whitebase relands it will only drop off the RX78. Also, it will only be able to remake units and resummoned while you are in the Teir 1 timeline. If you move to Teir 2 the units will still stick around, but if they die then that's it, there gone and can not be gotten back.

Buildable units this time around will also not have such stricked requirements to be buildable. Instead of needing the guntank to exsist to build mass production guntanks, just by being in the proper timeline will give you the ability to build the units that were in use during that time period. This will allow a player to build the units that they want and not be stuck going "Damn, I wish I could build some guntank 2's, but I have to wait until I finish all this research first, and once I'm done with that research I can just go to the next timeline so what's the point?"

Now the hard part. What do you need to advance through the timelines? Just build the upgrade, it's that simple. We're playing with 5 minutes per time period for the upgrade to get done to advance through the timelines, but we're not sure what we're going to do yet. There will be a very minimal cost to advance through the time, but the point will be that the HQ building will be very important for you to protect and for your enemy to destroy. Without it you can't advance, and that will make it a very important target for your enemies.

So now for the drops.

Spell 1 Drop - RX78-2, Guncannon Proto, Guntank Proto
Spell 2 Drop - RX77-6 Mudrock, Gundam Alex, 2 GM Snipers
Spell 3 Drop - GP01, GP02
Spell 4 Drop - Psyco Gundam
Spell 5 Drop - Nu Gundam, RGZ-91, 2 Jegans

Now for the other issue. Yes, I know that the Argama wasn't used by the Nu Gundam in 93, it was the Nahel Argama that Londo Bell used. Also, I know Mudrock wasn't transported on the Grey Phantom. However these are the models I have or would like to still use in these situations, so that's what we're going with for now. If someone has a Nahel Argama model that they'd like for us to use please let us know and we would be glad to use it.

As always, let me know your thoughts.

Some teaser pics

2010-09-24T21:56:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to show off some of the new buildings that I've thrown together today for the mod. We have a Solar Panel based power plant, a Tiberium Refinery Rig, and the Vehicle Drop Depot. I'm not 100% happy with the Vehicle Depot but I do like the Solar Plant and the Tiberium Refinery buildings.

EDIT - POST UPDATE - EDIT - POST UPDATE - EDIT - POST UPDATE

I added a pic of the other power option for EF, the Nuclear Power Plant. I shouldn't have to explain why this is so dangerous now should I? Yes, it gives off a ton of power, you shouldn't need more than 2 of these things to run a base, but when they go critical, they GO. Fair warning, that's all I say. :)

An update of sorts

2010-09-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let everone know where we are at.

Well, I just finished watching Gundam SEED, and I also finished Gundam X. Yes, I know, how can you work on a mod without watching the shows first? So sue me lol.

Having watched the shows now though, I can see some issues with what we were planning on doing with Gundam SEED. So this is simply to let everyone know that the last version of the SEED layout that I posted will not be the one we are going to be using. I have also taken into account everything everyone has been asking about, and there will be a lot of changes in the comming months to the mod.

What are these changes? Some of them like the changes to GDI, NOD, and Scrin you already know about. Some of them you will finally see next weekend when we hope to have alpha 9 out (Oct 1st if everything go's well). Others, like the changes to SEED and AW will have to wait until the 10th alpha. But good news, we hope to have the final layout of UC done for next weeks release. The buildings will not be correct persay, I have been making some throw-together models to use temporarily just to get the coding aspect done, but they will accomplish 2 important tasks.

1. Their look should give you an idea as to their purpose.

2. They will function properly in their designed way.

This means that, for example, the UC Vehicle Depo will actually look like a landing pad and ALL of it's units will be flown in on a Madea and dropped off from off the map. So a player that plays his base close to the edge will get his troops quicker than a player that has his base near the center. Also, this means that a player could, if not careful, have his Madea's shot down before the troops are dropped off, so you will have to at least think about giving the Madea's flight path some thought when deploying the building (a hint, the Madea will come from behind the building and then land in front of it).

Also, the new UC design we hope to have in place by then will also be more streamlined, with a clearer understanding to what you need to do to gain more mobile suits and advance. This is being done because our current system, while interesting, is too cluddersome and makes playing UC way to slow, especially compaired to UC's enemies.

What else..... EF as a whole has a new resource gathering system. The Resource Pylons will still be there, but with a different building, as a secondary source of income if the player feels they need it or they simply want more, but the main source of income will come from the Vehicle Depot. There is now a unit you can build that is simply a resource drop. This unit costs no cash to make (wouldn't make much since if it did) but takes some time to drop in. This means that the player can build quite a few of these things for cash, and then switch on the fly to unit deployment when it needs to. We still havn't worked out the exact time to cash ratio yet (right now it's sitting at 30 sec for 2000) but this should again make EF different on the field. Also at the moment only the basic Vehicle Depot can gather resources. If a player upgrades the Depot to a timeline spicific Depot then it loses the ability to be used for cash. Again, I don't know if this will stay in the A9 release, but it seems to work well now and gives the player something to think about.

And finally we come to the new design for UC. What we're going to try to do is make the Pegasus Class ships along with the Argama do more of what they are supposed to do, which is be used to deploy and carry mobile suits instead of build them. How are we going to do that? It's a secret!

Open forum time.

2010-09-03T07:09:00.000-07:00

The other day I placed out our current plans for the SEED design. Since then we have been getting a lot of feedback (mostly in a negative way) about what we planned on doing.

So me and Doug talked about it and this is what we have decided. Were going to put SEED off for just a bit while we here from you guys on what you want.

And so this is my challenge to you. Tell me how you want your Earth Alliance SEED army design to look like. What units, what build orders, what abilities/special powers. I'm not saying that we're going to use them, but we will look at each and every one and if there is something there that we think is a good idea then we may just use it!

And besides, it's not like we're REALLY putting the Gundam SEED off for very long. I'm currently working on redesigning the basic EF force right now (building orders and such). Here's a pic of a building I put together for the EF replacing the original War Factory. Our idea is to have the Madea fly in and drop the unit off on the landing pad instead of it just comming out of a giant hanger. It's not very detailed right now, I need to go back and do some more work on it, but it works for now for me to test the drop-off code.

Also, if you guys have any pics or ideas for buildings that you think I should use instead of the ones that are already there (yea, right now I'm looking to replace most of the buildings in the EF faction) send them my way so I can take a look. Also, if you can't tell, I still suck at texturing models. If anyone happens to have a good tutorial explaining how to texture a model in 3D studio max 8 I'd appreciate it.

As always, email is Azuza001@hotmail.com

Pics of GDI

2010-08-31T22:05:00.000-07:00

And now we have pics of the new GDI. GDI is different from NOD and the Scrin in that they are more about structure and control than mindless chaos or total destruction.

In the first pic you see that we replaced the Orca Strike with a Firehawk Strike instead, no big deal I just thought it made more sense to have firehawks than orcas. Also the bombs they drop are the same bombs as their Carpet Bomb attack (except not in a row) so you know it's gonna kill pretty much whatever it hits.

The next pic is of the new Orca Stormsmoke unit. GDI really needed an aircraft that didn't always have to go back to base to reload, so we outfitted this Orca with dual 45mm cannons and let her loose. It does pack a nice punch against vehicals and strucures, and it can defend itself against air units for a short time, but it isn't very accurate when firing at infantry.

In the final pic you see one of the Preditors new upgrades, the Missle Pod. This is a simple add-on that lets the Preditor hit air units and pack a bit more punch against vehicals and structures.

A few changes you don't see here in the pics is an MCV drop, that lets the player call in for 2 mammoth and 2 preditor tanks along with a MCV for free, along with the MOAB attack that the Firehawks can get and the new Carpet Bomb attack they get. So don't let these pics fool you, GDI got just as many new toys to play with as NOD and the Scrin got.

Some pics from the new NOD

2010-08-31T21:53:00.001-07:00

And now for some pics from NOD. First we have the new Avatar designs. Instead of ripping the weapons off of perfectly good units to make themselves arguably better we have the upgrades as just that, upgrades on each individual unit. You can upgrade to the Flamethrower Avatar, which gives it a nifty new red paint job along with the ability to fire both the flamer and the beam cannon on the move, the dual beam cannon upgrade that gives him 2 powerful inter-firing weapons for tougher targets, or finally the missle upgrade that adds a missle pod to it's sholder and lets the Avatar deal more damage to it's foes in the great blue skies.

Then we have a pic of the Armageddon Bomber. We changed things up a bit here, turning the Vertigo Bomber into a fighter jet and moving the Armageddon Bomber from support unit to buildable unit. It's bombs are also slightly different. The Armageddon Bomber is anything but accurate, so it drops many slow moving bombs out the back that kind of scatter as they hit the ground. Kind of a shotgun bomber if you will.

Then we have the new Elite Infantry squad. I say new, because technically it is new, but really it's just the NOD Commando with 2 Confessors. However the unit still works like the old commando did in that they can plant bombs and blow up buildings, but they are more effective now against infantry and vehicals.

On this final pic you may be wondering what your looking at. Well, we gave NOD back it's Liquid Tiberium Doomsday Bomb, and when NOD drops it EVERYTHING on the map gets hit. The only way to hide from this thing is to be in a building or bunker, it's that effective. It doesn't do any real damage to vehicals or buildings, but it does massive damage to Tiberium based units and structures, pretty much destroying all Refinerys on the map. Also, it has the side effect of killing all infantry units off and causing Vicroids to spawn. We wanted it to be Muntant squads, but I just couldn't get it to work, so in the end I just went back to the Vicroids. Honestly, it's pretty cool to see happen, but it REALLY SUCKS when it happens to you. What this means is if your playing a map with a NOD player be prepaired to try and kill that Temple of NOD as soon as you see it, otherwise things could get all sorts of messy.

Some pics of the new Scrin Design.

2010-08-31T20:50:00.001-07:00

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!

I promised more information.

2010-08-29T16:48:00.000-07:00

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. :)

It's been awhile

2010-08-27T16:12:00.000-07:00

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.

So here is an interesting problem.....

2010-08-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-08-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

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. :)