Something New is in the works

[Bwian]

After much soul searching, I have decided this is something I have to do! I started trying to make a Myth Mod, but I just can't make it how I want it within the skeleton limitations. I might pick it up again if the situation changes, but until then ... I have a NEW PROJECT:

Allow me to set the scene:

It is the future, and mankinds continued growth and expansion has exhausted the natural resources and habitable space, and brought us close to environmental collapse. Colonies have sprung up to strip the asteroids for raw materials and to exploit what we can reach, but the far seeing know this is only a short term answer. The future of the species demands a new home.

Nothing suitable exists within our solar system, so probes are sent and the search begins for a habitable world.

Years pass, and the search is fruitless, until at last, a world is found. Is is primordial and hostile, but it is close enough to the earth in it's earliest days to give life a chance of survival with a bit of 'accelerated evolution'

So, the plans began to Terraform 'new earth'.

First to leave would be the automated factories, bound together in a vast cargo ship, they would be dropped onto the planets surface, there to mine resources, produce machines of ever increasing sophistication, and turn the planet into a new Garden of Eden. Every major corporation on Earth contributed, each producing their own specifications for their dedicated tasks.

Next to leave would be the sleeper ships. The human cargo sleeping for the century long trip to their new home, spreading the seed of mankind.

But...something went wrong. The machines built their roboti offspring, adaptive programming techmology allowed them to react to problems...to think for themselves. They worked, they spread, and they began to compete for certain rare minerals. And, being adaptable, it was only a matter of time before the factories machine intelligences began to see their rivals as a threat to their core mission....they began to develop new machines.

As mankind had done millenia before, these machines learnt to fight!

Ok..wafflng background story aside....I bring you 'Terra-War'

Cities are replaced by factories, key resources are the mineral wealth to build. Population is representing production capability, with all sorts of interesting options here. Most of which I haven't decided yet.... but...well !

Units will be assorted robotic creatures, some humanoid, some definitely not! There will be walkers, rollers, possible even hovering variants, but the military technology will remain very basic. The early units will be fighting with equipment designed as tools, but modified as weapons. Later will come dedicated war machines. Gunpowder and similar volatile chemicals will not be present, so brute force will be the order of the day, with some compressed air type weapons to supplement this later on.

Concept art is being worked on, along with a basec 'look' for each of the Factories ( factions )

No screen shots as yet, since there is very little to actually see. More to follow

[Duke John]

A very ambitious project! Don't forget to add somewhere in your story that since the robots were primarily designed for terra-forming so the battlefield logarithms are a bit outdated, or some might even say stupid

[Sundjata Keita]

Sounds cool Bwian and if the units are as good as they were in the Mythology mod then this should be great.

[Kraxis]

Not trying to be a partypooper here, but you stopped the Myth mod because of the limitations of the skeletons, then I wonder why you would jump into something this complex as it too will need very different skeletons.

[Bwian]

Not true Kraxis

The Mythology mod required certain designs. It needed me to create creatures which were pretty much already defined in myth, and I needed to work to those forms.

With this, I define the shape....and I will make the shapes to fit the skeletons.

Also...when it comes to making machines, the animations can be used in a 'flexible' way, so to speak. I tried making Centaurs by combining units, but they 'fell apart' when killed. Looked wierd. Such things would be perfectly natural looking for a machine though. Also...I have experimented using just parts of skeletons.

I made a 'walker' using just the back legs and certain key sections of a skeleton, and it is fine. You just allocate the bulk of the mesh to the 'root' bone, and it is great. For an 'organic' object, you expect natural movement...in a 'droid...no worries. As I said.... this is intended to be something DIFFERENT :D

[Sundjata Keita]

The thing I like about this idea is the need for resources. If you don't start expanding and getting the resources your faction will die out quickly. You should make the resources give huge bonuses to fit the storyline.

Also what kind of other factions would you have considering the culture types are hardcoded? Who will be the senate?

My last idea at the moment would be to give a neo-classical style to the units. You could make them have helmets and capes like ancient warfare but against robots. If you had army uniforms like at present I think it would give the wrong feel to the game.

Anyway good luck with it

[Bwian]

The 'Senate' is the remains of the ships AI. It will have made a crash landing, and occupy a single territory. It has a reason to give 'commands', but I am not 100% sure how I am going to make it's tasks fit the picture.

As far as 'uniforms' go, there won't be any :)

I plan to use certain design features to give a 'faction' feel to each side. The factions are corporations, and they will each have a 'style'

This will cover either basic construction shapes, design features and such like or through colour schemes and trimmings. Working on that at the moment to get some concept art together before I start modelling.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Very sneaky avoiding the difficulties of modern projectiles.

Very neat.

An idea: the general factions should not be created equal. The corporations would have been responsible for only a few tasks - maybe "United Minerals" being a mining faction, "Thor Energy" for managing power sources like reactors (equivalent of farms since robots don't eat?), "Tektroniks Limited" an engineering firm (responsible for building other bots), and other things. Each having their own strengths, weaknesses, and units.

The ship AI (senate) can lead a coalition of smaller factories that follow the original plans and try to continue the work they were meant for. Which in the AI's mind involves subduing the deviant factories.

An expansion to this mod (hehe that's far away) could involve the humans arriving...

Can't wait to see how this turns out.

[Bwian]

Alexander... that is pretty much what I had in mind.

I like the idea of the 'senate' faction continuing the original brief to terraform and prepare for human occupation. It gives them a reason to work together initially, and to fight against the other factions. Simplifies the senate commands to. Thanks for the suggestion!

As far as the rationale goes, I have started off with the limitations I know RTW has, and have thought up a background that allows for this from the outset. I didn't want to fall into the trap of needing 'breakthroughs' in modding to do this.... with this, I have worked out what I CAN do, and started form there.

[Duke John]

Are you going to use vegetation? Since we cannot edit trees and such I would suggest to use only desert to make it more alien.

What are you going to do with the rebels? Perhaps a primitie native alien race? Sand Worms (yeah yeah, from Dune) or other monstrous aliens might be a nice change from all the robots.

[Sundjata Keita]

Are there going to be any humans? It may be a bit boring with out them. I think you should go for a full out civil war between the different companies/factories.

This could be the storyline.
The humans after planning to have left the robots alone for 100 years to make a hospitable world find that the robots have made little or no progress. Instead they are fighting among themselves for the natural resources. The humans create a coalition to end the war of the robots but becasue the companies (robot factions) have become independant it is not as easy as they thought. etc... war begins

This would pit three different classes against each other. The senate factions who continued to terraform the new earth but now the humans attack them because the humans see their army as a threat. The humans who arrive unprepared for war begin to build weapons factories and recruiting stations. The independant robots who have become individual factions fighting for the resources.

This could be an expansion or fitted into the original version.

Ideas on the look of robots. Just to clarify my neoclassical idea here is an example of what it could look like

[Bwian]

Hmm...humans.

Now...I see what you mean, but bringing humans in brings with it all the problems I was trying to avoid. Any humans arriving would include a degree of military presence. This would mean fire-arms. And modern weaponry at that. I can't see an effective way of adding that in without serious complications. If this becomes possible later on, then this would be a natural follow on to the Mod. The Humans are going to arrive...well, they ARE on the way :D

Now...DJ...that is a good idea. I could make some simple 'stone-age' type creatures. Broadly humanoid, but definitely alien. There is no reason why their tech level cannot fit in very well. I will see what I can come up with on that front.

The terrain detail will be something I will have to work around. If I can only have limited terrain types and open terrain, then that suits OK. I can always replace buildings with interesting 'crystal formations' or whatever. The sort of polystyrene rocks that always adorned Star Trek sets

Anyway.... I got 2 weeks holiday coming up which will be 100% PC free ( don;t know how I can survive...but I will try ) so I will be focusing on concept art and detail. When I get back, I want to be ready to model..... so don't worry if I don't post back here for a couple of days.

Your ideas are very welcome and have already added things to the melting pot I hadn't considered! Thanks

[Sundjata Keita]

Hmmm, slight problem with having a desert landscape inhabited by wierd rebel aliens is that if the humans spent ages looking for a good planet to live on why would they pick a barron desert landscape filled with aliens.

[Bwian]

It's supposed to be quite 'primordial', and that means lots of rock and vulcanism. I will have to see what I can do with this.

[Sundjata Keita]

Maybee a place like Egypt's Nile delta. Desert but with some spots of lush vegetation. As you said yourself you could add models onto the battlemap. Maybee you could add some big plants or some big rock outcrops.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

The only reason there are so many robots is because there is a lot of work to do preparing the planet for human colonization. There could be somewhat terraformed (greener) areas around the "good" robots and/or an agriculturally-oriented factory. The rest of the landscape could be varying degrees of desert (maybe icy wastes near the poles?).

I would think that the robots would be very utilitarian (is that the right word?) and not very humanoid, at least to start with. In thinking up designs, I think you should keep in mind what the original designers of the robots were thinking. Mining robots won't look much like humans, for instance. As the tech tree advances (robots are designed via factory AI) the robots can take on a more military-oriented design, or something like that.

Leave the humans out, at least for version 1.0. That should be a problem left for an expansion of kinds, I think.

Native fauna? Hmm. Are we assuming that the planet was mostly barren or not? If so, then maybe have like sand worms or something hive-minded. If the planet is not barren, maybe some cool lizards or mammals of large size... like elephants? Personally, I don't like the idea of native creatures... but that's me.

This is so cool.

[JimBob]

As for humans have a Marius type event where a 'landing beacon' or some such thing is built and the humans land. But because they are colonists they bring little in the way of modern weapons as they believed the robots would have subdued any opposition. And on their arrival they must resort to using what the can for war and devoloping weapons as the robots did. Even have a crash landing where most military equipment is destroyed.

[Sundjata Keita]

I think the mining and factory working robots should be non-humanoid but some of the later warriors should be humanoid as this will make them look really good.

[Duke John]

Mars is barren, still it is good planet to start inhabiting. There are ideas of spewing huge quantities of CO2 into the air so an atmosphere is created. The planet could also be used purely for mining operations. We are depleting Earth's resources and with the evergrowing population there will always be the need for metals. Wether it is sensible if the journey takes 200 years is another story. I don't think humankind is picky about barren planets as long as there is a good gravity, temperature and a non-toxic atmosphere.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

For the "Senate" ship AI, the single factory-city should be the actual landed ship.

Maybe name the ship "Manifest Destiny" if you don't mind ship colonization cliches.

[Bwian]

OK..just to let you know this is still alive and kicking !!!

Over the last few weeks I have been 'without PC' so there has not been much progress on models etc, but work has definitely progressed!

12 factions now have outline designs for models, and a set of 'features' that give each side a definite look and feel. Also, these outlines have now been traced over a set of skeletons to make sure that they will fit and match up with the bone positions and proportions.

Some additional designs have been scoped out which will require new animations, but will allow me to stretch the skeletons usefulnes in some slightly new ways ;) More on this when I get it to work!!!

Work has now begun on the basic look of the models and some preliminary 'eye-candy' for screenshots. Additionally, I have begun the work of re-naming factions etc. to fit. Resources have been considered, and will be re-named and tweaked to fit the needs of the mod. Translation of most of the stock resources has been worked through, and new names and details roughed out. Food, for example, will become processed raw materials. Farm improvements become refinery enhancements. Since 'gold' and 'food' seem to be the things that make new units, 'gold' becomes 'solid state components'. Population level becomes 'manufacturing level'. I have carried out similar translations across the broad sweep of resources to make them work with the plan.

Next task for me will be to put teh new faction names in, and get that to work. Then I want some new banners. In between this, I will start building some actual models!!!

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Phew. I thought this had dissappeared. Go to hear it didn't.

[Bwian]

It didn't disappear.... I did!!!!

Well...for 2 weeks to sit on a beach in the Caribbean sipping rum and admiring the scenery ....

[Myrddraal]

Lucky ....

[BassV2]

The 'Senate' is the remains of the ships AI. It will have made a crash landing, and occupy a single territory. It has a reason to give 'commands', but I am not 100% sure how I am going to make it's tasks fit the picture.

As far as 'uniforms' go, there won't be any :)

I plan to use certain design features to give a 'faction' feel to each side. The factions are corporations, and they will each have a 'style'

This will cover either basic construction shapes, design features and such like or through colour schemes and trimmings. Working on that at the moment to get some concept art together before I start modelling.

ahh, for Senate, you should do like "a big three " they start out powerful factory owners, they are like the villans in the game - unplayable, and the ultimate goal is to defeat them ? The senate could be like the undergorund people that control these big three organizations

oh yeah, need anyhelp? I can basic animation and 3d i guess

[Bwian]

Ok...after some major 'teething problems' I have managed to get myself back on track for this. A key element of hte droid building process was the need for making custom animations....somehting which I knew how to do in theory....but couldn't make work in practice without a CTD issue...well, thanks to some better informed members of the community, I have got this sorted.

Currently I have about half a dozen completed meshes, and have a few working in game. Textures need doing ( they are just at the template stage now..so no screenshots yet!! ) which will be happening shortly.

First new animation is up and running ( a basic variant of fs_dagger with the taunt animations removed ) with the next one under way. Some of the droids will be using 'floating' drives, so the next anim will be a basic one with the run/walk animations modded so the root of the model remains at a constant level. Then....it's time for the first of the BIG machines. This will invovle quite a lot of new animations...so it will be a bit of a challenge :D

[shifty157]

Good luck. I know im eager to see what you can come up with.

[Bwian]

First basic models are in game and functioning.

Unit: Marshall Dynamics Maintenance Droid ( Militarised )

nickname: 'The Spanner Boys'

Lightweight structure combined with a versatile android chassis made these units ideal for human-droid interactive maintenance. Able to function in extreme conditions, they were a valuable assert to construction and maintenance of the initial terraforming construction. Since they were the initial pattern for this corporate factory, they are both numerous and cheap to maintain.

Weaponry: Basic maintenance tools ( Spanner, Monkey Wrench )

Drawback : chassis loading prevents heavy upgrade to weaponry, erratic programming under stress gives unexpected 'Return To Base' issues. Obsolete but plentiful

( pictures to follow )

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

That sounds totally awesome. Can't wait to see some pics.

[shifty157]

[QUOTE=Bwian]erratic programming under stress gives unexpected 'Return To Base' issues.
[\QUOTE]


hah. i like that.