What Darren is working on Part 4
I've decided to write about what I've been working on lately - this turned out to be more than I originally envisioned so I have a series of posts about the things that I'm working on, broken down into these:
Here's Part 4.
It Came From Red Alert! and Rifles Mod addendum
I've appended a fair bit to this about Rifles Mod as discussed in part 3 as I've done some more work with players and a nice new night map setup.
It Came From Red Alert!
A little while ago I pulled all of the NPatch requirements from what will be, at some stage, the next version of It Came From Red Alert! - which means the changelist looks like this.
It Came From Red Alert! Release Canditate 1
Removed NPatch requirements, due to techinical differences in standard Red Alert 2: Yuri's Revenge the following things have now changed:
G.P.S. Satellite is no longer a super weapon, the Allied Tech. Centre functions like the RA2 Spysat Uplink.
The M.A.D. Tank affects an area 62% of the size it used to.
The Parabombs have gone.
The Soviet Spy Plane has been moved to the Radar Dome.
The multiplayer colours will look incorrect on the pre-game menu but are fine ingame.
Changes/additions in this version:
Flame Tower's fireball reinserted.
Volkov added (coded, not buildable).
Chitzkoi added (coded, not buildable).
Removed ugly texture from Iron Curtain animations.
Tesla Coil weapon now correctly fires in 3 bursts.
Re-enabled campaign menu and added UI art.
First Allied campaign mission added.
Reverted to none-NPatch menu system.
Soviet Rifle Infantry's text string corrected.
M.A.D. Tank has visual explosion.
"Retro" and "Retro Contraction" removed, remappable graphics are now forced.
A number of small voxel detail fixes.
All voxels renormalized with latest auto-normals.
New map - The Hills Have Eyes Redux by Dutchgamer.
In terms of what's left to do there are two big, tedious jobs which are the terrain tiles and damaged building graphics.
Rifles Mod addendum
In the time since I posted the previous part of my WIP series I've been working on a night setup which has also forced me to get some extra pawn (player) stuff done in order to stop it looking silly.
I've removed the big team coloured flash when a player spawns (which used to show on the floors above and below the place the player spawned too), the yellow spawn protection shielding effect, the red taking damage effect, the distant team colour glow effect, tweaked the player name beacons to only work up-close and replaced the bright team colour materials with a greyish-brown skin to represent the Axis and a camouflaged skin using colours from British paratrooper gear to represent the Allies.
In a daylight map this means that at long range you can't immediately ID a player and even right the way up to medium-close range you're relying purely on seeing which team material a player has. At the moment there's no friendly fire so firing on an incorrectly IDed player doesn't do anything but waste your own time and ammo, things are a bit more interesting at night though...
Youtube Video - DZRIF-Crossroads4N Night Gameplay
In a night map it's fairly difficult to even see players at any kind of range and IDing is almost impossible. Firing your weapon lights you up like you've a big neon sign saying "Shoot me, please" attached to your head (the lights need tweaking to slightly different sizes/brightnesses for the different weapons) but if you hold your fire you can sneak right up on the enemy line without them seeing you coming provided you stay in the shadows - which is demonstrated quite well on a few occasions in this video, where the teams manage to get a good distance across the open field without being seen.
Youtube Video - DZRIF-BeachHead Night Gameplay
The random scaled-down Hellbenders have got a BAR in the driver's seat and a .50 cal MG for the gunner, I don't think they'll make any possible release because I dislike vehicle handling in Unreal games.
There's a few things I like about the darkness - for one the muzzle flash lights going off in random places looks quite nice (with everything finished graphically it'd make a good screensaver), secondly it theoretically doubles the map count (if there were night and day versions of every map), it also flips the rules for the maps (areas like the buildings in Crossroads or the small wooded area on the left-side of BeachHead would be safe areas of cover versus the open ground where you'd be immediately cut-down in a hail of gunfire in daylight, but the become dangerous areas in a night map because they're lit and make you easier to spot) and lastly I can't think of another game with dark multiplayer maps with this level of visibilty (the nearest I can think of is Call of Duty: World at War, but it's easy to see players in its night maps).
I also got someone to test the mod on PS3 and apparently it works fine which is nice, it also got me thinking about widescreen and I found some elements of the mod weren't widescreen compatible (mainly the sniper scope/binoculars) so I fixed those.
This concludes my WIP series.
