Hello old friend (aka: First impressions in years)

[Emdek]

Yeah, first thing I'm doing there is to send load full of trucks which start building air defenses, repair stations, CB tower and some long range artillery. When I have enough artillery I'm beginning to provoke Nexus to fire, so CB can start targeting enemy installations.
Then I'm going south and cleaning everything along using tracked (so I can avoid losses) assault guns and scourge rockets (I'm using only these in final missions), later going to northwest corner (after cleaning up that small base near center) and then south, to main base.
Last time I've tried a bit different approach, I've send one commander northwest, second one through center close to main base and third one as backup near southeast corner. However taking out that northwest base required use of both first groups anyway... After that I've proceed through both entrances to main base, focusing on east one. After destroying strongest obstacles my units went to unorganized total destruction of base remains.
And yes, there is nearly no use for VTOLs here, unless you will take lots of effort to clean up lots of AA installations first, finishing ones could be removed by VTOLs themselves without losses). Probably Nexus has issues with production of own VTOLs, so when initial stock gets destroyed then they are replaced at very slow rate... Also I've not seen any flying cyborgs there.

[Stratadrake]

Also I've not seen any flying cyborgs there.

Nexus does have cyborgs with the jump backpacks (templates "NX-Cyb-Rail1-JUMP", "NX-Cyb-PulseLas-JUMP", "NX-Cyb-Miss-JUMP", graphic "cybodyjp.pie") but they do not actually fly (assigned propulsion: "CyborgLegs").

Wait ... exactly how was jump propulsion implemented again? I'm searching the 1.10 datafiles but can't find any entries related to it. In fact, it looks like the only time they ever saw action was in the old NEWST v1.11 mod.

[Lord Apocalypse]

Yeah and there were balance issues to them that were never quite worked out. They didn't look as "arse" as the pumpkin dev team claimed but they were rather silly looking. I would like to add them back in again with Redemption but they will need a complete overall on the mechanics I think and perhaps the animation.

[Per]

I remember jump cyborgs from that patch back in the day... I think "arse" would be a rather apt description; not that I ever saw them call it that. Starcraft 2 has jump propulsion that looks good (on reapers), though, so it must be possible to fix.

[Stratadrake]

Part of the problem is the whole graphical model of how cyborgs are rendered - the upper "torso" is actually part of their weapon graphic, not the chassis graphic.

[Per]

I thought the ugly part was how they jumped about like crazy and were almost impossible to control properly. If they only jumped cliffs, and walked normally otherwise, the jump would be fine, and very useful.

[Lord Apocalypse]

Like I said, a complete overhaul of the mechanics Don't have SC2 yet but will have to find a vid on the youtube if I can.

[Per]

Like I said, a complete overhaul of the mechanics Don't have SC2 yet but will have to find a vid on the youtube if I can.

See eg http://youtu.be/3h_5PbLs_x0.

(Also, some other things highlighted in this video that is relevant to rethinking Warzone strategy, like the importance of scouting and then reacting correctly to enemy strategies.)

[MaNGusT]

Part of the problem is the whole graphical model of how cyborgs are rendered - the upper "torso" is actually part of their weapon graphic, not the chassis graphic.

The more "right" solution is the bone animation. Currently cyborg's/derick's animation is the nice thing that can be completely erased.
Well, it could be left for for a simple object animation, i.e. propeller,wheel rotation, somewhat simple animation for a buildings, etc. but it should be in more editable,artist friendly way.

[Jorzi]

I have looked a bit on the .ani format and it is actually something which one could write a blender export script for. Essentially each frame contains values for translation and rotation of each .pie level. This is a bit like bone animation, except it doesn't allow deforming geometry or parent-child relationships, which would be extremely useful for cyborg legs.
One of the problems is the relative lack of support for animations in the game itself. Many animations are hard-coded, like the barrel recoil, and it doesn't really seem to be possible to just add in animations wherever you want them. This is something which could be thought about for the wzm-branch.

Edit: Implementing linear interpolation between keyframes could also be useful.

[Stratadrake]

I know about the .ani format, last versions of Pie Slicer had rudimentary support for editing ANI values. WZ actually has two animation methods, there is the "frames" method (each submodel is a complete frame of animation unto itself, like an animated GIF) and the "trans" method (transformation matrix, e.g. rotation and offset). Cyborg legs and all scavenger animations use the former; super cyborgs and oil derrick use the latter. And yes, when the game uses an animation is all totally hardcoded. A shame, really

IMHO, I would like to see the ability to specify an animation as a component graphic instead of only ever a .pie file, where the animation is basically a list of event triggers and what .ani file is rendered for each trigger. Then we could have completely customizable animations specified on a per-component level. Imagine the possibilities -- for example, melee-specialty cyborgs with full attack animations.

[Jorzi]

Yeah, take Total Annihilation, for example. It's animation system is quite primitive (comparable to the "trans" method used by the oil derrick) but the fact that the animation is customizable really gives a lot of possibility for modders.

Berg is currently doing good work on utilizing what we currently have to the max, but it's far from an artist friendly system.
Since the new wzm format requires rewriting animation code anyway, it is a good chance to make things right imo.

[Stratadrake]

... wzm?

[Lord Apocalypse]

Its in the wiki or dev section I think... I know I ran across it on the site somewhere.

[Jorzi]

WZM is a new model format that has been silently worked on the last few years. While it will not be radically different from the old .pie format, it sacrifices backwards compatibility for a cleaner layout, along with support for vertex normals and tangents. It is also optimized for using vertex arrays, which will allow for higher polycounts without slowing down the game too much.