Saturday Update

Yes, I know that this Saturdays update is technically being done on Sunday but it's 30 minutes late, give me a break?  I've been working on the White Base, and I think I've come up with a good way of using it in the game without making it feel like just another super powerful unit flying around.

My idea is based around making it Garrisonable.  Now, in the game engine you can set the game up so that when a unit is inside of a building it uses a different weapon than when it's not.  Why this is I don't know, but hey I won't complain.  My idea is that with the White Base the unit will have 4 Garrison slots.  This will let the player add up to basically 4 different weapon systems to the unit.  You can pick all 4 of the same type if you want, or mix and match as you choose.  How it will work is I plan on having 4 different types of infantry units that you can purchase from the Space Relay Station (the building that lets you get the White Base).  Each type of infantry will do something different that will let the owner of the White Base customize it.  There will be the Riflemen that adds to the anti-infantry abilities of the White Base, the RPG Speciltists who will add to it's anti-vehical abilities, the Engineers who will allow the White Base to fire EMP-Rockets, and finally the Sniper who will give the White Base a long-range, powerful, but slow firing artillery type shot.  

Tell me what your thoughts are if you have any on this idea.  I like it, but personally I am thinking I may drop it instead and give it to the Macross Side.  I think it will fit their play style better than the EF's.  

Also I am almost finished with the base defenses of the EF.  They have 4 different types of defenses now in the game, a Radar Bunker which grants an un-gernadable (by this I mean a single gernade won't kill the people inside) defense for infantry plus gives the EF it's radar, a stealthed underground turret system that is, well, stealthed until it fires, a fast firing SAM sight for anti-air that also detects stealthed units, and finally a long-range deployable beam based cannon system.  This one isn't in any of the pics yet, but it is in the game.  It works a lot like the NOD's defense turrets, but instead of deploying 3 cannons per power relay it only deploys 1.  This may sound like a bad thing, but the range it can deploy these cannons from the power relay is 3.5X grater than what NOD does.  This gives the EF player the ability to have a sort of early warning defense system in place that rebuilds itself as the enemy moves in as they can put the power relays back near the rest of the base defenses and the cannons themselfs out quite a distance.  Now the cannons are not that powerful and have a massive power draw, but if you put enough of them up and use them with the rest of the base defenses already avalible to you the EF can mount a very formitable defense that is very tough to beat. 

And at the very least, you will always know that the enemy is comming.  :) 

Later this week I will post some pics showing all the units in the game for the EF side and give a breif discription of what they all do and how they work together.  I hope to do this after I get the GM-79, GunCannon, and Gundam RX-78 into the game along with the Gundam Upgrade System up and running.  

A few pics

Just wanted to post a few pics of the EF in action.  This isn't much, their side only has a few buildings and a couple of units (no Mobile Suits yet, that's the next thing I will be putting in after base defenses) but it shows how the early EF game will play.

One of the defensive structures that the EF will have right from the beginning is a long range radar system.  This building will be how the EF's radar comes on line.  It will also serve as their primary bunker (you could always just use the riflemens dig in ability but I find a structure that gernaders can't just destroy works better in the long run).  So this will become a very important building.  However, it is a little on the expensive side on top of having a decent build time and a huge power draw.  I find a mix of the 2 types of barraks works well so far vrs. the GDI on medium difficulty.

I must point out that some of the units in the game were pulled directly from the GDI that will be on the EF side.  I just don't see a point in putting another rifle infantry unit into the game when the one that's already there will do just fine.  Same with the APC unit.  I will in the end modify them to make them different than the GDI's, but in the early release the units will stay the same as the first public release will be a proof-of-concept of the Mod.

EF and Base Design

So I was having trouble comming up with an economic design for the EF.  Both the Macross and Zeon sides economy works well in my opinion.  But the EF seemed, well, to be at a major disadvantage.  Having a limiting number of buildings that produces resources seemed to stagnent them, and seriously be a major disadvantage.

Then I thought, why not figure out a way to have the amount of cash comming in be based off of the size of your base?  The bigger the base, the more money.  Seemed to make since to me.  So, there you have it.

The way it will work for the EF is simple.  All base structures (other than base defense and power plants) will produce 100 resources every 10 seconds.  (Not counting the actual resource deploy point.  This one produces 1000 every 30 seconds, making it much more valuble but you can only make a few of these).  So the bigger your base, the more money incoming, the harder it is to defend.  It seems to work well for now.  Hopefully this will work thoughout the design, we will see.

Any thoughts?

Saturday Updates

Hello all.  A few things have changed in the last month or so, and I wanted to keep everyone who is interested in this mod informed.

First, we have finally started work on the public alpha of the mod.  That means that once we are done with this current version it will be released to the public to play.  No more "trying to get the game to do what we want", as this means we finally figured out how to get the game to do everything we need it to do!  

Next, I want to talk about the first Army that we will be getting into the game, the Earth Federation.  The EF was known before as the Gundam General.  Unlike the Gundam General, the EF will actually work more like the EF did in the shows.  That means that it is a military style army to play as.  Their focus will be around base defense, building prototype units, then mass production versions of the prototypes, and finally using tactical resorces to defeat their enemies.  These guys arn't about gurilla tactics or hiding their base, when an EF player is on the field you will know as their base will be very easy to find (it will be the one with all the laser cannons shooting at you).  

As of right now we have the EF's main starting base in the game, the Forward Base.  From the forward base you can build infantry squads, RPG squads, engineers, light tanks, and heavy tanks.  Now, the idea is that very early in the game the EF will have to use their conventional weapons to the best of their abilities until they get their Gundam Development Project online.  Once this is done, the Forward Bases use will shift from troop deployment to fund building.  Unlike the current armies in the game, the EF will not be gathering resources from tiberium.  They will instead get resources dropped in to them from the Forward Bases like a Tiberium Spike (or more to the point, the supply drops from Generals).  This will let the EF player focus on base defenses and not have to worry about "resource gatherers" but on the other hand will limit the ammount of income that an EF player will be able to generate.  So an EF player will also have to spend his resources wisely or face the consquenses.

So thats where we are right now.  I will be posting another update next Saturday to let everyone know where we stand, and maybe even a pic or two.  

All Apologies

I would first like to apologize to anyone who has looked upon the earlier work of this mod and believed that it had anything to do with Homura's work.  I started work on this mod because of his mod, because I enjoyed it so much even with it's flaws, and because I knew the flaws of that mod were in no way or shape his fault but due to the game engine itself.  

Second of all, I must point out that ALL the models in this mod that are going to be IN the mod are either from Homura's original mod OR were freely donated to us.  I will not be using any model in the model from anyone else work.  I am a coder, not a modeler, and I do not possess the knowledge or skills of the source material to do recreate those models from scratch.  As Homura has freely posted the source code to his mod and offically ended work on it, I don't see any problem with me using these.  If anyone feels the need to argue the point with me they are free to do so, thats what the reply section on here is for.

Third of all, any version of the Xenoforce Reborn mod that may be out there in the wild right now should never have gotten there.  Those versions were very early alphas that were more a proof of design than an actual attempt at recreating the Xenoforce mod.  I will be the first person to say that the current wild version is complete and udder crap.  It's not worth your time, do not play with it. 

Also, I must say that I had not realized what kind of negative press/posts were posted about this project online.  I have been, for the most part, just the coder on this job.  I will say that the models that were the cause of the online issues will NOT be an issue from this point on.  Why?  I have no intention of changing GDI/NOD in the final version of the Xeno mod.  The point isn't to add stuff to the GDI/NOD forces at all, there are other mods for that kind of thing.  The point is to add Earth Fed, Zeon, and Macross to the game.  That is the point. 

Work on this mod has restarted, but I will say that if anyone has any questions about it they should forward them to azuza001@hotmail.com. 

A new format / A new idea

Well, after a short hiatus (a month and a half isn't bad in the online free industry) I'm back to continue work on the mod.  

On my way home from work today, I had an idea.  I'm working on this, and I am not really getting any information from you, the community.  What do YOU want to see in the Xeonforce mod?  What kind of things do YOU think should be in here?  Should the Zeon tech tree work off of tech levels or off of researching certain parts and units that require these parts can be purchased once the avalible parts have been researched?  

Any comments or thoughts are welcomed here, I'd love to hear your ideas.  Email me at azuza001@hotmail.com with your thoughts if you wish to help on this.  Remember, there are no dumb ideas, just dumb people that suggest them.

It's over 5000!

So an Alpha Tester of ours named Raxoll decided that he wanted to see just how powerful EA's little engine was.  He decided to see just how many units he could build before his powerful gaming machine (I'll just say it was a quad core Intel with a Radeon 3850 and 3 gigs of ram on Vista) crashed.

Here's a pic.  He said that whenever he got above 5035 (yes, thats right) Zaku II's that the game would crash.  Honestly, if you need more than a thousand Zaku's to get the job done then something is wrong here people.  Now, the game only would run at 3-5 fps after he up past 1000 but still, 5035 is DAMN impressive.  (myself, I was hoping he'd get over 9000!)