More posts, more posts. Wait, stop! Less posts!


"Less posts, more ghosts. Shadow Team, awaiting orders."

I'm on fire! Not literally, just figuratively. My hands, however, feel like icecubes, so that's a thing.

Today, I bring you... Release 1! That's right, no more betas.



Release 1 marks the integration of the Cyborg Commando which is the mod's official milestone for "out of beta". Are we finished? Not yet- there'll be more added, with time. However, for the moment, Major and I will be taking a short break to work on other projects.



Ed: Now launching R1.1 with fixes to the Commando and his Plasma Cannon. The bolt now looks like this;



...rather than the rather bland appearance it had before.

Fun stuff, well polished throughout and entertaining.
Nice touch with the easter egg, good tribute to c&c. I didn't actually catch it til I looked through some scripts, but it's still fun.

As for the issues:
Weapons:
The piercing sniper and the hawkeye seem a bit too terrain piercing, In particular the non-hawkeye one can get through 1 or 2 sections of concrete per shot and when combined with high accuracy and a not limited clip (which at least the hawkeye has) you could shoot through a bunker in fairly quick time from quite a long range.

The rocket launcher can do some wonky stuff on both aimed and non-aimed. Non-aimed - I think it moves slightly too slow or something, cause I've had several occasions where it gently bounced off terrain (as hard as fairly distant concrete) then made some circles around on itself and disappeared. It probably should be triggered more easily or something. Aimed mode can be a bit wonky with its targets, I've seen it target things very much off from the mark and behind terrain, and if you have a squad of 3+ of them and aim at the same thing, at least one of the ai's aims tends to spaz out trying to find the ideal target. This probably has to do with the ai more than with the weapon though.

The C4 has a tendency to stick to my own guys more than anything else. I used it a handful of times and the majority of them it stuck to the thrower. While this makes for awesome suicide bombs, it's a bit wonky. That said, I imagine you're using the base c4 script, if so it's not really your fault.

The flamethrower still saddens me with its base effects

The rest of the weapons seems solid, though the gattling guns don't feel as heavy to me as they should (might be cause of their sound effect). Also, this isn't really an issue but I was really hoping you'd use the TS cyborg commando plasma gun sound effect.

Actors:
The actors are solid for the most part, and play well.

The shadow ops are my favourite, they're very entertaining to squad up and fly at people, and make me wish I could dual wield tib guns with them haha. Some special c4 for them with a quicker detonator or a trigger or something would be nice though, it really kills the tacticool waiting for 10 seconds to blow up a door when it'd be quicker to shoot through it.

The black hands jetpack seems a bit too strong (they can fly forever with a fairly heavy load) but I guess that's okay due to their price tag.

The cyborgs are walking tanks, I love their slowass walking speed. That said, you gave them extremely good jetpacks for some reason, so they kind of lose the weakness of slow travel.
Both cyborgs and black hands seem to have a loud noise playing on jetpack jump_start, which is fine normally but sounds awful when you have a bunch of ai doing their useless burst jetting. I think it's probably worth getting rid of to save on annoyance.

The cyborg commando's a lot of fun, definitely worth the price and a nice gamewinner while not actually being too absurdly op. Its weapon seems to bounce sometimes, particularly off doors when fired at close ranges, which can be a little detrimental to its user. Didn't find any other issues though, it plays well.

I'd like to see a cyborg reaper sometime, that could be a lot of fun if you pull it off well.

Anyway, good stuff, now I'm looking forward to GDI

I'm tempted to make it kick in a little sooner, but having it is a nice clear mark of when they're no longer able to regen health.

As a sidenote that was a huge ♥♥♥♥♥ to get working right, we couldn't just gib the legs outright - oh no. Eventually we had to make it so the script deletes the legs and spawns a 'dummy' leg object, which gibs into the actual leg gibs.

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Noted, and tuned accordingly. The Hawkeye will probably remain suitably penetrating/lethal, but we'll see. I might tune up the cost and weight accordingly.

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Yeah, getting a good balance between thrust and homing capability is tricky. I'm working on improving this where I can.

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I've tuned the script a little, so there's a brief delay before it tries to spawn the 'active' component. Hopefully this should keep it from sticking to the user now.

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I'm experimenting here, but flamers are tricksy. The next build will have a new flamer (look for the 'FG14 Odonata', under the regular flamer) which has a firebolt kind of deal going on, and deals damage using a modified version of the Talon/Mantis scripts.

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Which sound effect in particular - the spin, or the firing? Firing is a little trickier to sound good SFX for now, as I have to do per-shot sound effects since I got some nice spinup coding from Cave. I'm happy with how they handle compared to regular gatlings, at least. Cyborgs were kinda OP without the slow ramp-up mechanic.

I'm hesitant to mix in SFX from the older games in case it stands out too much.

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I did have the C4 on a shorter fuse before, but I reverted that change a while ago. I might restore it.

As for the BH, yeah- jetpacks are fiddly as well. I've reduced it a little bit, need to test.

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It took quite a bit of fiddling to get a 'slow, but not too slow' speed, but I'm pleased with how they came out.

I'd rather see the AI's dumb burst-jetting fixed first, frankly.

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Equally pleased with how the Commando came out, and glad it's worth the price tag. It was Major's idea to have the head as part of the torso sprite, which made for a really nice 'perk' in the form of headshot immunity.

I've not seen the bouncing thing happen - it shouldn't even be possible with a GibImpulseLimit of 1.

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No promises on either count. Major's getting hammered by work and doesn't have much time to work on sprites, but I'm laying plans and whatnot in the meantime. I can neither confirm nor deny plans for the addition of GDI materiel.

I appreciate all the feedback, though. I may have about 1.6k subs on the workshop, but almost nobody gives solid feedback.

Forgot to mention a couple things:
1. I like the heap rocket's terrain digging/armor piercing thing, that's a cool touch and a nice effect when it hits a wall. Frag doesn't seem to have too much more spash though, so I'm wondering how useful it is vs heap.
2. The carryall's dust on the ground stuff is cool, but it's also a little silly on higher maps. E.g. dummy assault, when you've got a carryall a thousand+ pixels off the ground but it's still puffing up dust way way below, that looks a little weird. If you can limit the range on that, I think that'd be good (also it'd cut down on the lag the particles produce so that's another gain).

Yeah, I think it wouldn't be too bad if you bump it up to a quarter or a third. Does it play a sound when it happens (my volume was off) cause if not I'd reccomend it, to make it a bit more noticeable.
Strange you can't gib the legs, I didn't know that. Did you try applying a bunch of wounds to gib it (place some emitter with a bunch of very short range particles on the legs) or just gibthis()?
I guess it doesn't matter since this worked haha.

Yeah, it's fine for the hawkeye but a bit much for the other sniper. The price increase is a good idea I think, since it's pretty much equal in effectiveness to all the best guns in the arsenal.

Sounds good about the c4 changes, that'll make em better. You could also consider making them all detonatable, but only letting shadow squad have the detonator (make em unable to drop it or whatever). It'd give them a neat advantage with c4s that their lore would kind of suggest. You'd have to keep track of what team the c4 was thrown by and so detonators only work on their own team's c4s, but that should be pretty simple.

Yeah, I'm sure flamers are rough - fancy effects make them too laggy and so on. That sounds neat, though I find the biggest issue is still the basegame effects for them instead of something more interesting, but as you say, that's probably pretty hard to pull off well and non-laggily.

Sorry for the lack of clarity, I meant the firing; the spinup is great. Yeah, the spinup plays well and works well and so on, my only issue is the firing sound has the bullets sounding kind of light - it never fires fast enough to be some sort of crazy shredding bullet spam gattling gun, but its sound isn't deep enough to feel heavy and punishing, if any of that makes sense haha.

Fair enough about the plasma sound, it could very well be pretty jarring. I guess doing things just as a nod to the original might not the best way to go lol.

Sounds good for the black hand jetpacks, did you do the same for the cyborgs? Cause they kinda need it more to fit with their slow movement (which, again, feels great).
Haha fair enough there, that's up to abdul I guess.

Yeah, no headshots is a good touch, makes it as reliable as it should be since it won't take unexpected extra damage. Good job on it.

Fair enough about the other stuff, believe me, I get being hammered by work You'll do it when you do it I guess, that's entirely reasonable. And hey, plans are good, they result in more stuff and I'm looking forward to that.

Haha yeah, feedback is remarkably hard to get and infinitely valuable. I do what I can cause I know how much I appreciate getting it.

Remember the Frag detonates simply by passing close to an enemy. You can sling it over a barricade and be sure to damage enemies behind it, whereas with the HEAP you'd have to take a gamble on being able to punch through their cover (not reliable!).

Frags can still down dropships with indirect blasts, too. They're better for saturation or if you don't have the time to establish a lock but you know the missile time well enough to lead the shot normally.

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Yeah, I've tuned it once before but it still seems to be a bit much. Will tune again.

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It does. This should occur regardless of the Cyborg's actual leg status, too.

GibThis() didn't work at all, kept returning this;



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It's a fine line to tread/tweak for sure. I've slightly tuned down the sharpness/velocity on the R59, and reduced the number of particles a little too.

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Does mean you may have to stand slightly further back if trying to stick it to something, but hopefully it should be a bit safer now.

Not sure how I'd go about doing the detonator thing, but what I might try doing is rigging up a variable timer that can be set via pie-menu, since detonation is controlled by the script rather than inicoded stuff.

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My expertise goes as far as coding with some very light scripting/spriting. Not much I can do about the base effects, really.

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Just the Cyborg one, or the Confessor Autogun as well? I'm fairly satisfied with where the latter is, but I think the former might need some work soundwise.

The Cyborg one also takes a while, but it does eventually get up to 1200 RPM. I might tweak it for a higher base/max and slightly faster ramp-up though.

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I did. Loyalists got a slight buff whilst I was at it, since their jetpack is pretty weak.

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The trouble is good, useful feedback, really.

Ah, I didn't realize the frag missile detonated simply with nearby enemies, that makes sense and certainly explains it use.
I figured they were better for general spamming, but they didn't seem so different that they were really necessary, since heap still sent out a reasonable amount of frags. But with proximity detonation to give them an advantage, that makes a lot more sense.

Did you try casting the leg references to MOSRotating or Attachable (using ToMOSRotating or ToAttachable on them)? It seems like you were trying to call ToActor(Actor.FG/BGLeg):GibThis() but GibThis() is a method of MOSRotatings.

I'm sure there are basegame detonators you could look at. Either way, the most straightforward way that comes to mind would be to set the bomb's sharpness to its team when it's thrown and when a detonator is pressed, look through all items, find any that have the right presetname and whose sharpness == the actor with the detonator's team (and are within a range limit if you want that) and detonate them. Nothing too complex I think.

Haha fair enough about the flamer effects, in my opinion that's the biggest issue, the basegame flamer, and thus this one, don't feel very interesting or devastating. They're feel pretty much like longer ranged diggers with a few glows and smoke puffs thrown in - they're effective for sure, but not particularly exciting.

I don't honestly remember about the gattling guns. The cyborg for sure, but the confessor may be fine. Maybe that change would help, I'm not really sure haha.

Yeah good point about the feedback, I meant reasonably well thought out, constructive feedback rather than not particularly useful stuff.

So how 'bout dat R1.2?

great, well detailed mod. Wish it had bombs

Release 1.3a:
* [MISC] Fixes for UL2 support.

ED:

Release 1.3b:
* [MISC] Further fixes for UL2 support.
* [WEAPONS] Fixes to the particles of the Brotherhood AG79's special grenade option. Should be less laggy, less weird, and actually dangerous.

Release 1.3c:
* [WEAPONS] Increased max RPM and max ammo of the Cyborg Gatling. It ramps up to the max of 2400 within 50 shots now, and holds a total of 400 rounds.
** Relatedly, an earlier fix (1.3a or 1.3b) also amended the weight of the Cyborg Gatling and its ammo to more appropriate levels.
* [WEAPONS] Rebalanced Redeemer ammo; HEAP has less spreading shrapnel but a more powerful lance effect. Frags now produce slightly more shrapnel that is also faster.
* [WEAPONS] Tweaked/standardized shrapnel for all explosives.
* [WEAPONS] The Odonata Prototype/Variant Flamethrower has been retired, pending further improvements to the standard Dragonfly.
* [SCRIPTS] Finetuned performance on the proxy detection for airburst grenades. They will also only be set off by actors now, not loose/dropped weapons and items.

Looks like I accidentally left the extra-bouncy shrapnel enabled for the Brotherhood AG79's bouncy grenades. This is a fun little thing I've been tweaking lately that, using the same basic bounce script as the grenade itself, causes the shrapnel to ricochet off hard surfaces. It only applies if the shrapnel is travelling at a sufficiently high velocity, and shrapnel loses a lot of energy if it bounces off something.

Note that it only bounces off terrain and not actors.