Metal Mayhem is coming

[GiantMonkeyMan]

man... you are so good at modelling! keep it up

[Bwian]

Right.....now for some examples of what will sit on top of those base units!

First into combat is a medium rated combat unit. Armed with twin spinning disc weapons. Suitable for mounting on medium rated chassis, or...with reduced armour, on a light chassis. These are seen in place on a medium wheeled chassis:





Next, we will see how this unit looks mounted on the other available medium chassis....... but not now!

[Bwian]

And, in order to show the variations planned.... here is the same basic mesh with the battering and snipping weapons. Each basic combat unit will be available with a variety of weapons depending on the research done.





Next job is to attach the same unit to the tracked and walking chassis.....


One model....9 units!

[Bwian]

Not all of the droids employed in combat on the New World were built there. Some came as part of the original ships complement. Thousands were packed up in travel cannisters and loaded into the cargo pods. Many survived, waiting to be activated. Others were built from ready packaged factories, ready to serve the colony's needs. They were designed to build, to maintain and to serve. With the addition of simple armour to protect the positronic cortex, they also served as soldiers.



4 manipulator arms allowed them to perform a variety of tasks....including battering other droids into submission. After all...this is war!

Follow on designs removed the manipulator arms and replaced them with basic compressed gas projectile launchers. A cheap and simple conversion utilising readily available rivet guns to give limited offensive capabilty.

Further variants replaced the arms with digging tools, for those tunnelling and mining requirements. Field conversion of standard equipment.

more pictures to follow......

[Bwian]

These guys are the missile adapted variant. The manipulator assemblies have been removed in order to provide secure mounts for the weapons, and to save weight. These guys are range attacks only!


On this model, the handling gear is removed and digging spades installed instead. These are surprisingly effective in combat, and give them the ability to tunnel.


Factions distinguish themselves by their differing camouflage colourschemes

[Bwian]

Since no-one else wants to post in the thread, I'll just carry on with the screenshots!



A mixed battery of artillery is over-run by armoured servitors.

In the meantime...I have managed to get the unit cards done for the artillery and fixed the push points so the units push in the right place. Next job is to finish off the projectiles and then get started on some UI stuff

[Sundjata Keita]

The lack of replies is only a testament to the awe these screenshots create. It's great that such an adventurous mod is surviving.

[Bwian]

That's a relief! I thought everyone had run off to wait for MTW2

If the tools allow, I will certainly be porting this over to the new engine if it has modding potential. If it doesn't, then there is no reason not to finish this off for RTW/BI. It looks perfectly good enough and has a mature toolset.

I am tempted to make a video of some of this stuff in action.....the stills don't show the units rolling, and that's my favourite bit!

This weekend, I hope to port over my original RTW map for BI, and get a few more units top-halves built. And a new look interface. And then some new strat map models....and so on! Want to make some new battlemap foliage too!

[Geoffrey S]

Indeed, lack of posts doesn't mean lack of interest. I know I keep coming back to look again at this unique and fascinating looking mod.

[wlesmana]

Bwian> if you got the time, try to read the short story "Autofac" by Phillip K Dick. In it is the story of a futuristic landscape where all the engineers are dead from a world war and the surviving citizens are served by automated factories set up in different States (in US). The citizens can't stop the factories and worried about them eating up resources until they ran out. The factories ended up fighting each other for resources by building weapons of war. The similariy with your mod cold give you some ideas.

[Bwian]

I'll keep an eye out for it. Philip K Dick is a good author, but I've not read that one. Bladerunner just didn't do his book justice either I always enjoyed reading sci-fi that didn't portray the future as neat and clean and tidy....but rather grubby, and real ... like things are now, just a bit higher tech!

Anyway.... now back to the mesh making! I want a couple more robot upper-sections in place for the light units before the weekend is over.

[Myrddraal]

Since no-one else wants to post in the thread, I'll just carry on with the screenshots!

I like screenshots

[Bwian]

The screenshot fest continues!

Furst off, not the promised new units ...but rather the work in progress on the interface. I have given it a very 'metallic' look, which I like...but it is perhaps a little dark. I might lighten it up to make the unit stas clearer.



Unit screenshots will come just as soon as I finish the annoying trial and error needed to get the top and bottom halves to mate neatly.

[Bwian]

Light scout unit - mechanised.


and also mounted on a light tracked chassis


The other unit to reach completion today is the light combat unit. Also cshown on it's primary wheeled chassis, but also available for fitment to walker and tracked chassis. I like this unit a lot, and might use it as a 'light' general unit too with some extra adornments.


This last unit will also be available in clawed and disc weaponed versions

[wlesmana]

You might have thought of this already, but here's a little trick to make an ON/OFF light-bulb if you're willing to sacrifice primary/secondary weapons. For instance, in a joke model I made, I put an OFF light-bulb (all black) on his antennae. A tiny bit bigger than this black light-bulb is an ON version, red colored, right on top of it, wrapping the OFF light-bulb, and set as "primary weapon". During death, primary weapon object is taken out of the game. So my unit would walk around with the ON light-bulb but once he dies, his light-bulb would appear OFF (dark colored) because the ON light-bulb is removed.

[Bwian]

Interesting thought.

I can see a variety of uses for this, but I don't know for sure how I am going to implement this. It could work for lights.... for, say, a screen display on the droid, or some form of holographic 'banner' for the officer units to distinguish them that goes out when they die .... many possibles.

Thanks for the suggestion!

[wlesmana]

You can see it in this pic:
I made a Prince (from the game Katamari Damacy). The primary weapon is the red bulb on his antennae and his "happy" face linked to the head bone. When he dies, the primary weapon is removed and you'd get the black bulb and "unhappy" face. It works as long as the primary weapon model is only linked to one bone.

[Ozzfest20]

Interesting... I'll try it.

[Alexander: The hellenic empire]

Explosively cool idea!

[Bwian]

Mayhem is getting some AFV's! ( I hope!!! )

After much messing about with scorpion carts, I think I have got this to the stage where I can make it all work! Screenshots will follow shortly.

I will need to make a new tank animation set, since my tracked vehicles were using a camel base, which cannot be used as a chariot hauler....

Here's the deal:

1) The 'tracks' replace the horses. Remove the pivot and bar, and re-set the horse positions to centralise things

2) The tank 'hull' is the actual cart itself. The scorpion and the pivot point are stuck using a single model, so this will have to be 'vanished'. I will either alpha it out, or replace it with a single polygon deal, which will be hidden inside the vehicle hull. At a push, the scorpio will be the gun barrel. All tanks would end up with the same gun...but I can't have multiple models for the scorpion....

3) The 'turret' is the crew member. This pivots with the 'gun' so it will appear to move. Turrets will have to be small enough to fit inside the hull. Why? simple....you have to have 2 crewmen! So...as long as the turret can be hidden inside the vehicle, it should look OK. I have concerns over what this will look like when death occurs....but only testing with a real model will confirm this.

I can, of course, mount this sort of thing on walkers too. The 'mounts' between the traces can be large sized legs to make a high powered gun toting walker.....or big wheeled rolling gun platforms. Change the projectiles, and all sorts of things become possible. They can't attack buildings sadly...but they can be quite fun!!!! Oh yes.....and you CAN make the cart scorpion fire like a machine gun......

[Bwian]

Not gone .... not forgotten... and bumped for a reason

[satanea juda]

I think everyone who ever wieghted a vertex is watching this Mod and the models your coming up with. Great work as always.

[Kuni]

wow. eagerly waiting for this mod. looks very promising, and I'm not a real robot fan!

[Jubal_Barca]

Hang on.. did you just say you'd found out how to make machine gun fire?

[Bwian]

Machine gun fire ....of a kind!

The fire-rate of the scorpion cart can be adjusted to a pretty rapid rate. This was something I messed about with when making a tank.

Go into the descr_mount.txt file, find the scorpion cart entry, and change the:

scorpion_reload_ticks 50

to something a lot less. say...

scorpion_reload_ticks 1

and try some Roman scorpion cart fun