[DEVELOPMENT] Campaign 4 Development Thread

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I knew you'd like the changes, Rman. Anything further that needs a rewrite or tweaking, feel free to exercise your discretion. Whatever audio you send me will get processed.

I would also venture that you & Jorzi working together on FMV's (along with anyone else who steps up and is able to help) will result in some classic stuff. I'll leave that work in your very capable hands. I am available for the SFX, of course.

The new Transport body is a masterpiece, simply put. I hope to see it in-game very soon.

My limited modelling skills have been hard at work producing some acceptable things. I submit the new Command Center (we'll use that for the base at NEXUS Prime) in the final battle (-- WHEN it happens. ) and the Mobile Command Center Turret (MCC for short) for peer review and approval for inclusion if they are good enough -- although I'll need someone else to texture & prep them. My skills aren't that diverse yet.

I also have a working idea about "telling more of the story" in the vein of "episodic releases".

Let's say that the Player has driven NEXUS from Delta Sector (per Mission 12) and has escaped by the skin of his teeth. We do the final FMV of The General landing at Delta Base after the battle, congratulating the player and Sgt.Gibbs sans Episode 4 of Star Wars -- and we leave it there, except for an ominous laugh as the scene is closing, to be continued in Campaign 5. Then we can keep the story rolling. Any thoughts on doing it this way?

[Rman Virgil]

.....

I would also venture that you & Jorzi working together on FMV's (along with anyone else who steps up and is able to help) will result in some classic stuff. I'll leave that work in your very capable hands. I am available for the SFX, of course.

While we do not need fully detailed shooting scripts for the FMVs like what is done for movies, I think it would be helpful if we had a set of images you'd like for each separate FMV such that we can break out what can be done as Machinima, what would be better done as Blender animation, what could possibly be done as first person POV CGI, and the integration of the techniques. This way we can each focus on the techniques we've chosen to work in, do just those images you'd like to see in each, do just enough raw work necessary for post production editing and little more (in other words, we can't afford to spend time on creating any footage that's gonna end-up on the "cutting room floor" - or at least, try and minimize that as much as possible..)

In this last regard it would also be helpful if we could pre-determine some ball-park time signatures for the whole of each FMV .....and within the whole, breakout time signatures for individual component techniques. The whole can be related to how long the dialogues run (or where there is no dialogue, the SFX / Music soundtrack).

The new Transport body is a masterpiece, simply put. I hope to see it in-game very soon

.

Indeed it is.

Me too.

My limited modelling skills have been hard at work producing some acceptable things. I submit the new Command Center (we'll use that for the base at NEXUS Prime) in the final battle (-- WHEN it happens. ) and the Mobile Command Center Turret (MCC for short) for peer review and approval for inclusion if they are good enough -- although I'll need someone else to texture & prep them. My skills aren't that diverse yet.

On the MCC - what new GPMs do you foresee introducing with it ?

Texturing is indeed the high art of 3D modeling. This parallels the differences between creating a good drawing and creating an extraordinary painting, IMO.

I also have a working idea about "telling more of the story" in the vein of "episodic releases".

Cool.

Let's say that the Player has driven NEXUS from Delta Sector (per Mission 12) and has escaped by the skin of his teeth. We do the final FMV of The General landing at Delta Base after the battle, congratulating the player and Sgt.Gibbs sans Episode 4 of Star Wars -- and we leave it there, except for an ominous laugh as the scene is closing, to be continued in Campaign 5. Then we can keep the story rolling. Any thoughts on doing it this way?

Good idea.

I make no promises, but if I have the time, I can do first person FMV GCI of the "General" (or Sgt. Gibbs, for that matter). Lot depends on how it goes when I get my new Kitara instrument. I'll be doing some wood-shedding to learn how to play it, goes without saying, but I may also wanna spend all my spare time with it for months to come. We'll see how that plays out in actuality.

- Rman.
.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

On the MCC - what new GPMs do you foresee introducing with it ?

Providing the player with a mini-map and Intelligence. Normal Command Center will be needed to access the design screen. This is so that we don't *entirely* replace it, and the player will still require one. Think of it as supplementary command & control should something untoward happen to ones' base.

[Rman Virgil]

On the MCC - what new GPMs do you foresee introducing with it ?

Providing the player with a mini-map and Intelligence. Normal Command Center will be needed to access the design screen. This is so that we don't *entirely* replace it, and the player will still require one. Think of it as supplementary command & control should something untoward happen to ones' base.

Good choice.

In particular, a few basic enhancements to the Mini-Map will be absolutely key to a revolutionary expansion of Command & Control coordination of simultaneous multiple force vectors in the battle theater.

Intelligence can be evolved with the intro of MUAVs deployed as a Commander Special Ability...

Woa ! Getting WAY too ahead of the current state of the game there.

(Though IMO, WZ will realize it's great potential when, alas, it's battle GPMs match the already extant great possibilities of its Tech Tree & Unit Design.)

- Rman.
.

[eZAK]

Goth,

Let's say that the Player has driven NEXUS from Delta Sector (per Mission 12) and has escaped by the skin of his teeth. We do the final FMV of The General landing at Delta Base after the battle, congratulating the player and Sgt.Gibbs sans Episode 4 of Star Wars -- and we leave it there, except for an ominous laugh as the scene is closing, to be continued in Campaign 5. Then we can keep the story rolling. Any thoughts on doing it this way?

WHAT! No M13! No epic battle! (or am I just missing the point?)

IMO; I would like to see an end to Nexus once and for all in Cam4.
When there is no end game players loose interest. No sense of accomplishment.

In other words; Why keep cutting the head off of the serpent when you know it is just gonna grow back

In future campaigns a new & deadlier foe can be created. Possible spanning another 4 missions.

Just throwing it out there!


On another note, One thing I would like to see is an alternate view mode.
Like a view from the turret of a selected tank, vtol, or hover.
This would give the player a better perspective in order to gain different tactics.



Thanks for all your tireless work guys! Keep it up!

I'm dying to test out Delta: Mission 1

[milo christiansen]

Well here's the newest version of the cam package

cam4 pkg.7z

To make the mod for your version place the contents of the base folder and the 3.0 or 2.3 folder into a new folder, then zip the contents of the new folder using "store" compression. The root of the resulting zip file should contain the .lev file. Once you have a correctly made zip file, change the extension to .wz and use like normal



Mission 2 will load up fine but this brings to light a new map related problem

As soon as mission 2 loads the map is "reset" to how it was at the beginning of mission 1 + all the new mission 2 stuff.
Apparently the mission 2 map needs to be just the differences between mission 1&2, the problem is that flaME provides no way of doing this. Making a new map by hand is not an option because things like unit ids won't match up.

Is there some kind of utility I can run the compiled maps through that will strip out all the redundant unit/structure entries?

Scavs that keep coming back to life are no fun

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

OH MY! I forgot to upload the latest fixes to the map (that has that exact fix!). That was the last thing I did over the weekend before letting things settle down. My apologies!

Each map has been recompiled to account for these fixes. Apologies to all.

Cam4MapFixes.wz

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Alright, moving on.

[quote=eZak]WHAT! No M13! No epic battle! (or am I just missing the point?)

IMO; I would like to see an end to Nexus once and for all in Cam4.
When there is no end game players loose interest. No sense of accomplishment.[/quote]

We're extending the story. You can't expect NEXUS to simply LET you kill him? No, no -- it's going to be much more involved than that.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Milo, my Mission 2 script does everything that is supposed to happen short of laying down the objective markers. Was hoping you saw my earlier post and started on M3.

*shrug*

I'll replace yours with mine for M2.

[milo christiansen]

How did you fix the maps? I would really like to know for any future problems/projects

As for the mission 2 scripts, go ahead all I have done is the framework anyway. It would be nice to have a copy for testing though
On to mission 3

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

The fix for the maps wasn't obvious at first, but then I realized that since we've already drawn everything on the map on M1, we don't need anything else in later missions except for differencing changes. It's actually a really good way to do things, as we can apply changes to the maps according to what the scenario state calls for like in M5 when we actually start to build Delta base, and on to M7 when we've "poured concrete" for our base foundation. This will give us a TON of flexibility that I didn't think we could do.

So in a nutshell -- design your entire map as it should be, use it for your first mission *only*, then future levels have the map completely devoid of objects except for things you need per-mission. Anything placed ON the map will stay. If you want terrain differences you can do those too later on (although I'm still testing whether you have to compile with everything on it, since *technically* it's a different map).

I'll be happy to include M2 *AND* M3 that I've gotten working. Thanks for getting me started, it's been a big help and I understand the scripting a lot better. Still can't get setDeliveryPoint to work in M1, but I think I'm supposed to use world coords for that and you can't use a Scavenger Factory for that (got a type mismatch error when I tried). I'll try that again and see.

scriptsm1tom3.zip

There we go.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Oh, and it might help to have the current state of map fixes too.

cam4mapfixes051811.zip

[milo christiansen]

Anything placed ON the map will stay

I knew that much but how do you compile with only the differences?

Or do you make a new map per mission? If so are there any unit/building id problems?

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Yeah, I compile from new each time. And no, there's no problems with ID's. Once it appears on the "initial scenario state" map, it's there until destroyed as long as we're using CAM_EXPAND. That's how we can get "differencing" maps that can change and *appear* dynamic. I still have testing to do in this regard but I think that's how it works.

I ran into a crash issue from trying to load M4 (new map). Not sure what's going on there, probably how the pumpkins dealt with it was having the player "load the transport" so that the CAM map was still there. We'll need to investigate this further.

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

Little update on the audio:

I've finally gotten around to doing the final mix-down states for Tactical Sergeant Gibbs. This is a milestone, since all that's required now is the dialogue and a day or two to process it all. Here's a sample of the mixed-down dialogue:

gibbs_m1brief.ogg

I have someone in mind for the part of NODE. Have yet to ask her to do it. Heh.

The *new* NEXUS dialogue likewise has its' mix-down state (and it's fairly impressive trickery -- not to mention CPU intensive!) and is waiting for test dialogue so I can finalize it.

SFX work is going smoothly so far. The new Medium Transport has it's SFX now.

That's it for now, folks. I'll be incognito most of the day tomorrow. *wave*