[DEVELOPMENT] Campaign 4 Development Thread

[Rman Virgil]

That reminds me. Rman, if you don't have the time to do Gibbs audio, let me know soon. I can always do it (and it'll give me something to do while I'm offline).

You mean re-recording over & over & over because of changed copy - then the answer would be it's not a matter of time but rather the frustrating sense it will change again and I will have to do it all over because you have yet to arrive at truly FINAL dialogue copy. While not as labor intensive as having to rewrite scripts (for example) it is still a far cry from being a negligible consequence - at least from my PoV.

Now I understand revising to make stuff better. I do it all the time myself (in all disciplines I create in) & actually enjoy the process of editing-perfecting. However, this is different because I'm not making changes to my own work but simply expected to respond to the uncertainty of copy changes you may continue to make to "final" drafts and having to once more chuck the recording work I've done and that is not enjoyable for me after the 3rd time, to be blunt. Now if i were doing this professionally it wouldn't bother me because it would just mean 'mo money in my pocket but since the coin of the realm here is solely in the fun of doing - well, you get the gist I'm sure.

So it probably would be better for you to do it all as you will likely get as much satisfaction from the necessary re-doing of your own recording work as you do from the continued revising of your own written drafts for however many times it takes you to get to final finished copy and final recordings of each.

(On top of which, I'm rather over the pronounced pattern of cogent, constructive, responses to posted queries seeming as if comprised of invisible pixels - now that I don't have time for. Nor is it any fun being hung-out to dry like that; a kinda black-hole like effect that happens way too often to be taken as inconsequential.)

Anyway, it's been an interesting learning experience, all round, in truth &, of course, my best wishes for continued successful outcomes at every stage on the long journey to completion.

- Regards, RV
.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Well, I guess that settles that.

I apologize for the frustration you feel. Sometimes ones' sense of perfection (or in my case, overperfection)can be one's worst enemy. I acknowledge this without bias or hesitation.

As a (former) professional musician I saw it constantly, and had to work within parameters that were (at times) challenging and (in my opinion) "nit-picky". I know you understand that sometimes certain aspects "don't make the cut" and must be modified to meet certain standards. Sometimes I felt the standard was too high, or unreasonable, in my previous line of work; and rightly so. I apologize for my over-zealousness regarding the copy changes -- and the resulting frustration it has caused you (and others, I'm sure), not to mention the time you have spent recording dialogue that now appears to be wasted. It wasn't meant to be a waste of time.

My position is that I want Campaign 4 (and 5 .. and 6) to be a worthy successor to what Pumpkin Studios did. That's my motivation, and my goal. Not for notoriety or prestige, but because this game has gotten me through some very dark times and I want to contribute somehow.

So again, I apologize, and respect your decision. If you reconsider, please let me know.

[milo christiansen]

As long I don't find a major bug of course

Well I found one, but I think its a warzone bug. Every time I try to get the patrol AI to load it crashes with an empty log. I tried commenting things out but nothing helped. I even added deliberate syntax errors on the last line, in that case it crashed reporting the added error. This leads me to believe that its something wrong with warzone but that doesn't make much sense because its only that script

I want to run a few more tests before I go make a ticket, but that won't be for a while because I'm going on a trip for about a week.

I was going to post the files involved so others can take a look but it looks like I forgot to load it on my drive

[bendib]

Is there a good summary of the storyline? :^)

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

It's looking more and more like WZScript is horribly broken. I've run into the same issue at times -- functions listed in the Scripting Manual crash the game without any output at all.

Should we wait until the javascript implementation before trying again?

[driver4]

I enjoyed playing the story on PSX, and once this nears release I'll play the PC's campaigns as well. But, how do the new campaigns you are working on tell the story? Will there be cutscenes, or text written out to us?

[milo christiansen]

No it will be easier to port already defined logic than to just waste time, besides JavaScript will have some of the same function problems just less so.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

@ driver4: Yep, it'll have the whole gambit. Think of it as a "grand experiment" -- to see if we can do it.

@ Milo: Gotcha.

[medusa]

No it will be easier to port already defined logic than to just waste time, besides JavaScript will have some of the same function problems just less so.

what do you mean?

[milo christiansen]

The part about porting or the part about function problems?

If I have the script structure down pat in wzscript I can decide how to port to JavaScript easier

As for function problems, both wzscript and JavaScript will have the same back end so I'm sure some of the same problems will be there, also the documentation will probably get less accurate unless someone puts a lot of effort into updating it

[milo christiansen]

Well I managed to fix the patrol AI as a side affect of my work on the tower defense proof-of-concept. FYI there are more undocumented pitfalls in wzscript than any other language I have ever used and the only reason I managed to figure out the problem is because I dug though the warzone source.

In any case here is the latest... the mission 2 timing is more or less broken so this is more for backup/info purposes than anything.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Wow. Well ... alrighty then. Your efforts are appreciated, Milo (as of course are everyone else's ).

I think we're discovering why the switch to Javascript is happening, eh?

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Milo, your Patrol AI is a thing of beauty.

I've applied the cosmetic map changes to the master file (up to M4 at least). I've made some balance changes to M1 -- I was a little overzealous with the Scav defenses, hehe.

Playing thru M1 left me with the following thoughts:

- Balance is good (now)
- It's challenging without being overly so -- remember to use hit-and-run tactics! Your Assault Gunners will thank you.
- The end where you complete the objective tends to go to the stats screen a bit too quickly, so I've changed the timer to be a bit longer (to 85 = 8.5 seconds, up from 25 or 2.5 seconds).

Great job so far Milo.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Missions 2 and 3 work fine. Only thing about Mission 3 is there appears to be no victory trigger once we get the NEXUSLink (and thus, the mission won't end that way). I don't foresee any difficulties adding it in.

Mission 4's map is all done. I added a lot of doodads and things to dress it up & otherwise make it more interesting, but nothing has changed with it mission-wise.

So all that seems to be left to do are fresh compiles for the maps (already re-compiled up to M4 earlier today, will do the rest tonight) and I'll get around to doing the rest of the audio.

[vexed]

FYI there are more undocumented pitfalls in wzscript than any other language I have ever used and the only reason I managed to figure out the problem is because I dug though the warzone source.

Can you elaborate more on what the issue was ?