Sunday, October 30, 2011

Xenoforce : The Original 3 - Why do we bother?

So we've started work back up on the mod and are currently modifying more things with the original 3 armies. To Doug and myself it makes perfect since to work on these factions as not only are they important to our game they are useful tools to help us learn more coding wise and continue to push our limits. However it appears there are two camps out there about this aspect of our mod.

Camp 1 asks "why are you wasting time on these armies when you could be adding in more Gundam/Robotech stuff"? Camp 2 asks "why hasn't the O3 mod been updated to the latest version thats in the last release for Xeno-Reborn?

I'll answer the second question first, the Xenoforce : O3 mod came about because someone asked for us to release just the modifications that we've made with just the original 3 armies and we agreed. It was a simple thing to do, and it caused no trouble. However the O3 is not our main focus, the Reborn mod is. As such updating the old O3 to the latest update would be an incremental update at best and honestly not worth the time.

That does not mean we're going to ignore the O3, far from it. I'm currently working on the O3 mod now as we agree that more needs to be done to polish up some aspects of the forces. GDI needs a resource modification added in as well as moving their Super-power designs around a bit, NOD's Avatars and Liquid Tiberium Bomb need work (currently working on the 10-stage LTB now, so far it's much more impressive than before and I'm only on stage 5). Finally the Scrin have a fatal flaw in their current design and are getting a makeover. This flaw is the fact that in every other force their units tell their story but the Scrins don't. The reason for this is that the old Scrin story was (to put it lightly) crap and we've gone ahead and changed it to our own needs. This in turn requires us to change the way many units work to fit the story that they now play a part in.

Which brings me to our first question, why do we waste time working on these forces? I don't see it as wasting time and neither does Doug. I learn more working on the O3 forces than I do working on new forces. Turning a Projectile into an autonomous unit? Learned that from the O3. Adding in a "shield emmiter that activates when an enemy comes near to protect everything in its area of effect?" O3 (yea, thats a defense for SEED)

See, just because we're not working on adding things to new factions at the moment doesn't mean we're not working on stuff. We really are, and I think in the end it will make a better game than if we simply took the original 3 out. If nothing else, you know you like crushing NOD buggies with your Super Gundams right?

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Hmmm maybe thats why the AI doesn't care?

I've started work again on the mod this evening and am working on a few new things for the next release.

First of all we're working on NOD. Nod is almost where I personally want it. There are some things though that need to be rebalanced on their unit end, to be more specific the way Flame units work. When we originally designed flame weapons we were planning on making them NOD's answer to beam sabers and melee based units. That however is no longer the case and these weapons need to fill a new roll.

Also we're looking at the Avatar and the Purifier. These two units are very unique in that NOD does use Mecha Technology but does not use much of it. Why? Because these two units are supposed to be all they need to deal with up to teir 3/4 Mecha units along with being strong enough to deal with teir 3 vehicles. (Keep in mind, a teir 3 vehicle like a tank is equivalent to a teir 5 mecha, I know it's hard to understand but it works for us lol). So these guys need to be worked on.

But here is the kicker. We're finally finishing the Liquid Tiberium Bomb. We've turned this weapon into a 10 stage (yes, 10 stages!) weapon that no longer adversely hurts NOD. In fact with this design of the weapon its launching is all part of NOD's grand plan of Tiberium Radiation and they have not only innoculated their infantry so that the radiation will have positive effects/mutations on them but they have designed their vehicles with radiation trappers to help focus the released energy into their weapons AND crystalline trappers on their structures granting free resources for every structure on the field. In short this new design is all about NOD WANTING to drop it and everyone else wanting them DEAD so it doesn't happen.

But that's not what this post is about. While working on the LTB I saw something on the upgrades template that caused me to go "no wonder the AI doesn't use some upgrades".

SkirmishAIHeuristic="IGNORE"

Yea..... I don't know how I missed that line of code but I have it on every UC upgrade that I put in. I just removed it and am running tests now to see if the AI now actually upgrades the units. Wouldn't that be a kick in the pants if all of my messing in the AI Scripts to fix it and it had nothing to do with the AI Scripts, it was in the upgrade templates?

Friday, October 14, 2011

Xenoforce 9E Final Release

http://www.mediafire.com/?mfnbbji8a37zboj

Here is the version I am uploading to Mod DB now. Enjoy!

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Release Canidate 3

Give it a try!

http://www.mediafire.com/?a1g1ivbaizs3s6l


Wednesday, October 12, 2011

RC 3 will be released tommorow

I really want this one to go right so I'm working on the AI right now along with final balancing issues.

Monday, October 10, 2011

Release Canidate 2

http://www.mediafire.com/?vdmycrsqeannzab


Here is the next release canidate for Xeno 9e, let me know what you think!

Friday, October 7, 2011

Xenoforce 9E release

Here it is! Go for it guys!


http://www.mediafire.com/?92m9yzy2mqmit0r

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Oh, how plans change....

So we're almost ready for our next release and are getting ready for our internal test phase. But there are some things that turned out differently than we originally planned.

For example our original idea for the Colony hasn't turned out the way we expected. Right now it's about 80% of what we were going to do. We were going to have husks laying around after the fall and that just isn't going to happen at this point. It's simply causing major issues with the damage and spawn code to add that one more thing in. So our solution has been to make the Colony that drops into a husk that will give you a bonus if you capture it. Whats the bonus? We haven't figured that out yet, but we will give you guys something awsome to make it worth wild. (honestly we do have an idea but I don't want to say it, I want people to play and figure it out. Trust me, you'll want this and you WON'T want your enemy to get this.)

Another thing that we've got going that isn't exactly what we planned is the Sat Cannons. We DID get the "phase of the moon" system up and running which is great. Unfortunatly we were not able to get it to only fire the sat cannons at Rank 4 (lame I know). However again there is a limit in there, albeit not one we wanted. Apparently while it works great the Sat Cannons can only be fired once (what?) Thats right, you get a single shot in that window and then the Sat Cannon will not fire again. While it's not the limiter we wanted it is one that works so thats what we are going to go with.

Finally we're having an issue with the "Unlimited Vision" upgrade. As in for some weird reason it isn't working. We wanted to have a power that when you activate it you can see everything on the map for a very short amount of time. We were just going to take the GDI vision power and increase the radius and call it a day. So we went in, coded it, and it won't let us actually lay the power down to activate it. What? Yea..... so right now we're looking at just using the GDI power with half the time. This still gives the player the bonus of being able to gather information quicker than any other player on the board if at a different rate (originally this power was going to be useable on the global scale every 3 minutes, now you can use the GDI power every 60 seconds).

So what do you think? Did we make acceptable sacrifices in these ideas to get the overall effect we wanted or is it not enough/too much? Feel free to post a responce!

Sunday, October 2, 2011

No sunday post

Sorry, busy working on the release. Will be a post within the next few days.