Contingency - A Warzone 2100 Expansion Pack Mod (Preview)

[milo christiansen]

Balancing with a script will always fail unless you put more work into the script than it would take to hand balance, it seems good but things like a slow firing units vs cheap skirmishers will look just as good to a script as fast firing units vs cheap skirmishers even though the fast firing one is way better even if it has less DPS.

[Iluvalar]

Balancing with a script will always fail unless you put more work into the script than it would take to hand balance.

I made over 150 versions of my mods NRS and NRS+ .

Tweaking the balance by hand is good enough, but what if you want to change the progression of the game ? That's why I started that script a long time ago.

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

After a bit of modding and some testing, I found out that, when the unit's weight reaches around 75% of its engine power, its off-road speed seems to start dropping, while when it reaches its engine power, its on-road speed seems to take a huge nosedive. Its on-road speed seems to become its off-road speed, while its off-road speed remains at about 1/3rd of its on-road speed. Is this supposed to happen, or should I open a ticket for this?

In any case, I may have to either reduce body and turret weight by 25%, or increase engine power by about 33%, so that units wouldn't get slowed down so easily while off-road. My starting trucks, which weighed as much as their engine power, were moving rather sluggishly, even with the Fuel-Injection Engine upgrade.

[Iluvalar]

yeah when the engine power (probably once modified by the terrain and experience) go under the weight, there is a sudden slow down.

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

1st off, I've been studying Black Project's Nostalgia mod in order to find out how he implemented all those new sounds and .pie models that were present. I would like to reuse some of the models and sounds that were located within the non-implemented features list, though I don't know how to do that other than by extracting from the Nostalgia mod.

Anyways, here's a few new sounds that I made for this mod:

New Sounds.zip

Due to uploading limits, I'm uploading these sounds as a single .zip file.

(288.55 KiB) Downloaded 375 times

About these sounds:

cyborgmortar.ogg and lightmortar.ogg: A couple mortar sounds that were created for the Grenadier Cyborg, and regular Mortar and Pepperpot, respectively, by speeding up the original mortar sound (which would be reserved for the Bombard, or for any Mortar Firebases).

empexplosion.ogg: A new sound to go with EMP weapons. Was made by taking the beginning of the EMP sound, and applying the Change Tempo and Reverse effects with Audacity.

shotgun.ogg: A new sound for the new Anti-personnel cannons. Was made by speeding up the Heavy Cannon sound.

minirocket.ogg and tacticalmissile.ogg: The former is a new sound for the Mini-Rocket Pod, Mini-Rocket Array, Seraph Missile Array, Sunburst AA, and any other weapon that shoots small rockets/missiles. The latter is a new sound for use with the new Tactical Missile Launchers. Both were made by speeding up and slowing down the normal rocket sound (which would be reserved for weapons that fire larger rockets/missiles, such as Lancers, Bunker Busters, Avenger SAM, Archangel Missiles, etc.) respectively.

smallflameexplosion.ogg: A fiery explosion to go with a few incendiary weapons, such as the Incendiary Mortar, Incendiary Howitzer, and Phosphor and Thermite Bomb Bays. It was created by taking com037.ogg from Black Project's Nostalgia mod, speeding it up a bit, and applying a fade-in effect for the first .1 second.

gattlingcannon.ogg, gaussgattlinggun.ogg, and lasersatellite.ogg: I've already shown these sounds to you before, but basically, they're sounds to go with the Anti-Tank Machinegun, Gauss Gattling Gun, and Laser Satellite respectively.

heavyhpvcannon.ogg and lighthpvcannon.ogg: Sounds to go along with the heavier and lighter versions of the Hyper Velocity Cannon respectively, they were made by slowing down and speeding up the regular Hyper-Velocity Cannon sound respectively.

heavylaser.ogg and lightlaser.ogg: The regular Flashlight sound slowed down and sped up respectively.

heavypulselaser.ogg, ultraheavypulselaser.ogg, and lightpulselaser.ogg: The Pulse Laser sound sped up or slowed down. ultraheavypulselaser.ogg MIGHT be used for an upcoming Laser Fortress.

needlegun.ogg, railgun.ogg, and massdriver.ogg: Sounds for the Needlegun, Railgun, and Mass Driver respectively. Although needlegun.ogg and railgun.ogg were created by speeding up the Gauss Cannon sound, massdriver.ogg was created by slowing it down.

nexuslinkborg.ogg and nexuslinkfort.ogg: Sounds created by speeding up and slowing down the NEXUS Link Turret's firing sound respectively.

While I'd like to release all these sounds under the CC0 license, I'm not certain if I can release smallflameexplosion.ogg under it, since it was made using a sound located within Black Project's Nostalgia mod.

[Arreon]

I still haven't heard back from you, Shadow. I'm waiting to hear what you think of the sound effects I uploaded a while ago. Are they good enough?

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

Well, I have some good news and some bad news.

The good news is that my mod is progressing well. I've been busy adjusting various stats, and introducing a few new .pie models, such as these Howitzer Firebases:

I've also started work on some new .pie models for the new bodies, though they take a long time to do, so I'll probably be using some placeholders during betatesting. I will finish them up eventually, but I'm focusing on adjusting stats 1st.

And now... for the bad news.

I recently discovered that the SetPower() function won't work at all during multiplayer matches in 3.1, so sadly, I'm unable to implement something like a solar or wind power plant for these versions. From what I understand, this was done so that cheaters couldn't use custom-made rules to cheat additional power. While I commend the team for their efforts, I really wish that mod support for these kinds of power plants would be made available. Maybe there's another way to combat cheaters?

[Shadow Wolf TJC]

For the record, I have not yet given up on this project. In fact, I've been busy adding in the new research topics, weapons, cyborgs, structures, etc. I even have my tech tree fully planned out.

Unfortunately, I hit another snag. I had originally planned on adding over 200 new defensive structures, but apparently, there seems to be a limit on how many structures may be present within structures.txt, of around 256 I'm guessing. Because of this, I've had to scrap plans for a whole bunch of structures, including a few fortresses, and to aggressively scavenge off of the existing structure entries, such as the various unused Collective and NEXUS structures, in order to go under the limit.

Aside from that, I'm guessing that I'm now more than halfway ready for releasing a version of this mod for beta testing.

[Rman Virgil]

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Yes... another hard-coded limit for performance reasons with the original release 13 years ago I'm venturing. The question arises - are those performance issues still valid in 2012...? MP games would never last long enough for 8 players to reach even getting close to maxing out such a raised limit, seems to me.

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[Reg312]

I had originally planned on adding over 200 new defensive structures, but apparently, there seems to be a limit on how many structures may be present within structures.txt, of around 256 I'm guessing.

did you meant master or 3.1 version in your mod?
i think it can be easily increased up to 1000 or 10'000

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MP games would never last long enough for 8 players to reach even getting close to maxing out such a raised limit, seems to me.
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i remember many MP in which i had 255 AA emplacements and i was forced to use another AA structures to make more AA

[Goth Zagog-Thou]

I'm interested in how this works out Shadow Wolf. Keep plugging away!

[Rman Virgil]

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MP games would never last long enough for 8 players to reach even getting close to maxing out such a raised limit, seems to me.
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i remember many MP in which i had 255 AA emplacements and i was forced to use another AA structures to make more AA

Really. That seems uncommon for online MP... LAN parties I can see. How many players and how long did those games last..?

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[Reg312]

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i remember many MP in which i had 255 AA emplacements and i was forced to use another AA structures to make more AA

Really. That seems uncommon for online MP... LAN parties I can see. How many players and how long did those games last..?

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its common situation for high-oil games
did you played maps like NTW2Max, SquaredV7 etc with 40 oil per base
such games happens every day in lobby
that games can be 1 hour long.. but if both teams are newbies or both super-pro then game can be longer than 1 hour
average time - 30 minutes (10 mins minimum and 1 hour max)
it can be 4x4 or ffa no matter

[Rman Virgil]

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Ok, I c. I'm outta touch with High Oil. Not my cup of tea.

That said... do you think there would be performance issues raising the struct limit in those type games...?

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[Reg312]

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Ok, I c. I'm outta touch with High Oil. Not my cup of tea.

That said... do you think there would be performance issues raising the struct limit in those type games...?

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many players already have perfomance issues in version 3.1
high-oil games can be very laggy in 3.1 if both teams (in 4x4 game) have built many defenses and artillery
we have 2 types of limits here
1) limit of each structure type per game
*for example you can have only 255 cannon fortresses
*another example - 5 factories per player - same thing limited to 5
2) limit of structure_stats which loaded from stats/structures.txt
*Shadow Wolf TJC talked about limit of possible types of structures
** i think we can load 10'000 structure stats from structure.txt without any perfomance issues (depends on memory)

so, i can make 255 cannon fortresses and next i can make 255 rocket fortresses and etc.. so structures really unlimited per game
==> if we increase limit for 1 structure type from 255 to 500 it doesn't matter, all will be same as we have now