Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 8:49 pm Post subject:
Nomad Galaxy
Subject description: A homeworld inspired mod for OpenRA. WARNING: Gifs.
Before doing this announcement, a big thanks to Graion Dilach and to ApolloTD, who gave their support and knowledge to make this project real. And now, I present to you, Nomad Galaxy:
As you can notice, this is a space mod built on the OpenRA engine, the project has two goals in mind, the first is to create a game that has not been seen in ORA before, and second, to create a game that is independent from any franchise.
The gameplay itself is a merge between Homeworld and Command and Conquer, your bases are now fleets which are no longer static, the buildings have been replaced with civilian ships that cover the basic needs of a fleet, like sensors, resourcing, production and tech, and you also have military ships that you have to use to defeat your opponent, these ships come on four sizes, similar to Homeworld (Fighters, Corvettes, Frigates and Capital ships). The game offers a simple rock paper scissors logic that has been always seen in these kinds of games.
The map themselves don’t have any barriers, but they are meant to be filled with anomalies or hazards, whether it’s asteroid traffic, nebulae, planets, unstable objects, it’s the player who must know where to place their forces to make sure he gets the maximum advantage from the environment.
Finally, the factions, currently there is only one enabled but I have the plans to add two more into the game in a similar fashion to Conquest Frontier Wars or Starcraft, (Human, bug aliens, technological advanced aliens), these factions should have small differences between each other, mostly stat differences plus one special trait or ability here and there, but not too many, since that’s not all.
I also want to add a subfaction system to the mod, similar to how Emperor Battle for Dune did it, basically, you have a pool of mercenary factions that offer unique units each, and you are limited to select 2 each match, my goal here is to give each of the subfactions skills related to a topic that the main factions do not have, so say, one of the mercs is specialized in cloak technology, another is good for fortifying positions, and so on. Currently I have 4 of these sub factions, and wish to add more. So, this is it for now, I hope you enjoyed it.
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Creator of Shattered Paradise .
ORA Discord https://discordapp.com/invite/tuhp9m6 , SP Discord https://discord.gg/hk428Wk QUICK_EDIT
I see a lot of potential in this project and i'm looking forward for more news and updates.
P.S.: do you want to add a Kodiak as an easteregg ship/unit? Because i have by accident a Kodiak model _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 11:41 am Post subject:
Eyup, I still have a lot of hair waiting to be pulled out in frustration of getting things working for it. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
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WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
Wow, this looks impressive. I love the retroish 16-bit style. You should probably add more remap on the units though, to make it easier to distinguish friendlies from enemies. Some of the battles seem so chaotic it's hard to tell what's what. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 14 Feb 2006 Location: Flying into hostile territory
Posted: Fri Mar 10, 2017 7:08 pm Post subject:
A brief moment of coming out of hibernation to say well done. its been great watching you make progress over discord.
The civilian ship identifier icons could use a little help i think. their icons just seem to float above everything and need don't fit the ship styles to well _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Thanks guys, sorry for the late answer, I wasn't expecting to get such a nice reception.
Banshee wrote:
That's a very nice idea . I look forward to see its progress. And remember, if you need a forum for it, PM me .
Thanks but I am going to pass for now, I didn't use the Shattered Paradise forum at all back then (mostly cuz I preffer to make stuff than write about it), so I am guessing I am just going to post the updates here instead.
Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:
P.S.: do you want to add a Kodiak as an easteregg ship/unit? Because i have by accident a Kodiak model
Sure, tho I don't know where I could use it, neutral unit? wreckage? I already made a very low poly version of the Excalibur (Babylon 5) so I don't mind adding easter eggs .
Crimsonum wrote:
You should probably add more remap on the units though, to make it easier to distinguish friendlies from enemies. Some of the battles seem so chaotic it's hard to tell what's what.
Ugh, that's something I have been avoiding for a month already, mostly because that kills the look of a unit, if you want them to be easier to identify then you gotta make them like the RA1 units. _________________
Creator of Shattered Paradise .
ORA Discord https://discordapp.com/invite/tuhp9m6 , SP Discord https://discord.gg/hk428Wk QUICK_EDIT
yeah, neutral or wreckage unit could work.
Or you add some kind of mercenary guild, which has numerous ships of different designs for the player to hire.
What's your render setup? Camera angle, main light direction etc.
Do your 32facing SHPs start with direct north and rotate clockwise? (because TS and i think RA2 too 32 facing SHP start with a 22,5° angle facing slightly northeast)
Do you have stand, move, idle, firing, damage frames for SHP units?
Concerning remap:
how about some remap colored transparent glowing rings under the units?
Something that looks like part of the interface, giving the player some infos about the unit. These could also connect in some way to the healthbar, selection box and other icons. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
Already got mercs in, it works like on Emperor BFD, I could also put the Kodiak there, sure, we would have to see where tho.
My template is the same template I used to make the marauder on TI, the only difference, is that the camera has a different angle, don't ask me the angle cuz I never figured out how to rotate the camera in a predefined angle (maybe grouping the whole thing + changing the pivot of the group could work but, eh, details, and pain).
My ships start facing the north direction, ORA does not care about the rotation direction of the facings tho, so I just make sure that the scene rotates properly (I never figured how to force linear movement on the keyframes -.-). They don't have any kind of animation or damage frames yet. I am not planning to make specific animations for every ship yet, because you can just use idle overlays, muzzle anims or even dummy weapons to do the fancy stuff, but damage frames, sure, after I make completely sure that the game is fun to play, which is my biggest concern right now, and forever probably .
I need one last info: what size do you want the Kodiak?
Can you show an image of a similar sized unit or give me some pixel dimensions for the length when facing left/right? _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
I need one last info: what size do you want the Kodiak?
Can you show an image of a similar sized unit or give me some pixel dimensions for the length when facing left/right?
I guess a capital size ship would do, will send you some samples as PM.
kenosis wrote:
Incredible! Makes me want to try openra modding.......
Joined: 25 Sep 2006 Location: Teamblackistan Posts: Over 9000
Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:17 pm Post subject:
This is interesting! I know many people have tried to plan on a C&C space mod, but I haven't seen any that have actually applied it yet _________________ The Fall of Hammerfest - Epic Tiberian chain story
Tiberian Odyssey mapping department. Discord The Team Black Index QUICK_EDIT
That pic from the alpha sc comes from devianart? I am pretty sure the game didn't look as smooth, I kinda want to make that crystal now, lol.
Well a pair of updates, first I improved a planet capture mechanic the mod had, where you could place stations over planets to fortify them and get cash, the stations would evolve as time goes on, now with the recomendation of an user, I added some customization for it, each planet has four slots to place platforms, and currently you have five types: Fighter Bay, Heavy Weapons, Sensors, Repair Bay, and Trade Station, could also add some crew quarters but it's not a big priority.
I also started investigating if it's possible to do some kind of hyperspace / subspace / asdfspace mechanic without the need to rely on Portable Chrono or the Chronosphere power, and it seems it's working alright. I might change the animations if I can make or get something better .
Lastly, economy is a pain, those loose ore patches on the images are cancerous, they had decent value and great quantity of bales per cell, and it seems it doesn't work well to make a finite resource that has to last for some time, it made player economies escalate constantly over the match as they built more and more miners, leading to very spammy situations, I am considering (and testing) switching to something closer to starcraft now, singular ore patches with high density, but few in number, so the players are not motivated to build endless miners without even trying to expand.
You could just make the miners themselves super expensive to make them an attack vector instead. If a player has to be very protective of miners, they will deploy fighting units more carefully around the ore patch or risk their economy being crippled by a bold attacker...
A small update, I have been most of the time working on the designs for the human faction, for the designs I am trying to make them look as if they got primitive tech, most of their ships are long and have pieces that rotate to generate artificial gravity, and for their weapons, I am thinking on giving them modern weapons, nothing that sci fi.
On the other hand, I figured out how to record games, tho with a potato quality, this video should be enough to show how the gameplay is right now, it's me fighting the AI, which isn't optimized for this kind of game as you can see. I post this video with a bit of shame because, there are some things that look awful (planets) but eh, it serves as a memento for the future, if WWIII doesn't kill us first x).
combat starts at 6:30.
ships.png
Description:
Assault F. / Light F. / Engineer Crew / Habitat Ship (AoE House).
This is beatiful! Please, do make sure you have it all backed up on MANY drives/USBs. You never know when they hate you enough to stop working, and then all progress will have to restart from scratch. And with this much work done aready, it'll be quite the motivation-killer (trust me, I know).
Also, I remember MadHQ releasing a space 'Theater' (overrides tempereate, I think), pity no one is really using it. Oh well.
Make Westwood proud!
EDIT: Have fun making a tutorial! _________________ One and only developer of the Command & Conquer Dune "C&C D" mod.
m7 wrote:
I tend to release things I create so that assets are never lost to hard drive problems, accidental deletion, or me having to pretend to care about rippers taking things from my project when it is done.
oh, why i haven't seen this yet?
video looks very nice.
Gameplay at the start seems a bit slow, but later it looks nicely strategic. Even though i find it hard to follow what ship is doing what without any description/explanation?
suggestions:
-Change the shroud to a brighter color. black shroud in front of black space is hard to see imo. Something like a matrix green shroud would surely be better visible.
-the planets could use more frames. can you use transparency to give them a little atmosphere? (might also work by simply let them fade into black background) _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
Thanks, tho I think I messed up the resolution a bit, but it was a first recording anyway.
Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:
-Change the shroud to a brighter color. black shroud in front of black space is hard to see imo. Something like a matrix green shroud would surely be better visible.
I planned to do this at some point, but I since I am awful at sprite work I dropped it for the time being and started working on other stuff.
Lin Kuei Ominae wrote:
-the planets could use more frames. can you use transparency to give them a little atmosphere? (might also work by simply let them fade into black background)
I removed planet rotation entirely because I believe it will eat far more memory than what it's worth, you need around 200 frames to make them turn smoothly and I plan to have lots of planets, it is not worth it, some atmosphere animation could be cool tho, I did some minor work there but drop it to work on units and balance.
On the other hand, mod development has been frustratingly slow, since I am busy with my pregade thesis (I wonder if this is the right name for it) along with some finances classes, I haven't been able to do much besides balancing and some units, I wish I had more free time to do stuff.
So a few updates:
-Added a new renewable resource type, some gas clouds you can see there, ingame testing proved that having limited resources in a map is not fun once they start running out.
-Thanks to BoolBada/ForceCore, we got Aircraft Carrier logic now, they work like the RA2 carriers, except you can customize if you want them to auto engage stuff or not. http://imgur.com/a/HRWrz
-With the change above, I moved the Interceptors and Bombers to the second tier and chained them to their respective carriers, and the corvettes are now the first units available, that resolves the spam mess there was a month ago.
-Did a some extra human ship variants for the mod, haven't been able to polish them more due to time limitations.
I removed planet rotation entirely because I believe it will eat far more memory than what it's worth, you need around 200 frames to make them turn smoothly and I plan to have lots of planets, it is not worth it, some atmosphere animation could be cool tho, I did some minor work there but drop it to work on units and balance.
i assume even with 200 frames but a pretty low rotation speed, it wouldn't stress the engine a lot, because it would have to redraw the SHP only every few seconds. (unlike dozens of explosion anims and ships moving over the screen that need to be updated every frame)
Joined: 22 Nov 2010 Location: Iszkaszentgyorgy, Hungary
Posted: Wed May 24, 2017 3:47 pm Post subject:
OpenRA caches all sprites to the memory during loading. The issue isn't with engine stress but the texture bleak. (He clearly said memory, no?)
Also OpenRA doesn't use a buffer for storing frame contents, everything is redrawn between each rendering frames. _________________ "If you didn't get angry and mad and frustrated, that means you don't care about the end result, and are doing something wrong." - Greg Kroah-Hartman
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Past C&C projects: Attacque Supérior (2010-2019); Valiant Shades (2019-2021)
=======================
WeiDU mods: Random Graion Tweaks | Graion's Soundsets
Maintainance: Extra Expanded Enhanced Encounters! | BGEESpawn
Contributions: EE Fixpack | Enhanced Edition Trilogy | DSotSC (Trilogy) | UB_IWD | SotSC & a lot more... QUICK_EDIT
Yeah, Graphic card memory isn't unlimited and having a model with texture that spinned (ora dev idea...) would be tad more efficient than 200(?) rotating frames memory wise. QUICK_EDIT
Yeah, Graphic card memory isn't unlimited and having a model with texture that spinned (ora dev idea...) would be tad more efficient than 200(?) rotating frames memory wise.
I suggested a static underlying planet image with a few generic moving cloud animations that could be used over it to make it appear dynamic. Realistically we shouldn't see a planet spinning within the span of a game, so this seemed like a good compromise. _________________ http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai QUICK_EDIT
ah, ok, if memory is the problem and not the render speed, then yes.
Though 200 frames of a 300x300 pixel big planet would be still comparable to the 1000 frames of a 150x150 pixel big unit with standing, move and firing frames
G-E's idea sounds good. A nice looping atmosphere animation can be done in less than 50 frames.
No clue if OpenRA supports it already, but maybe there are keys that allow to tint the color of an animation.
So you can use the same (grey) atmosphere animation on different planets, but give it a red tone for one planet and a blue tone for another. _________________ SHP Artist of Twisted Insurrection: Nod buildings
So, it has been a little more than a year since the first announcement of this project, after that, progress slowed down due to some problems, design issues, engine limitations and most importantly, the need to spend my time into my university thesis, all of this made me pause development, but now after resuming work, I want to mention the changes and progress that has happened so far.
Fleet construction
The first big area was the fleet construction and teching up system, here I went through four different systems:
The first method was classic CnC, where you deploy buildings around your mobile construction vehicle, this was the safest bet but I rejected it because it would turn this project into a clone of the official mods.
The second method was more than inspired on the homeworld games, you would have one mothership along many carriers that handle production, and all the teching was done with a research system, this idea worked, for a while, but made teching too simple, there werent enough targets to take down, and there was no way to remove the research of the oponent (unlike when you take down a radar in CnC), finally, this also lead to an hypermobile fleet that removed all the borders in a game, making it… strange, so I had to change the system again.
The third option was a merge of the two, where you would have a fleet with mobile economical ships, and would also require to build key facilities on planets, I rejected it because it was too hacky, felt arbitrary and forced players to remain on one spot, resulting on something similar to what was done on the first Lord of the Rings RTS.
After all these tries, i left this topic on hold, until I found that MustaphaTR managed to replicate the Overlord upgrade system from Generals, with that, and some extra feedback, i made a new system, similar to the Empire of the Rising Sun from Red Alert 3, this was the key detail that made me resume work on this project.
Players would build core ships, blank vessels that could be customized after being built, these would apply their main function once they are ordered to deploy, becoming static in the process, players could undeploy their core ships at any time, allowing to move them as they see fit, but loosing their functionality.
Basically, this reduces the amount of freedom the player had, but helps make the game more understandable and allows for other key components, like rally points, later on in the game, you will be allowed to build support structures like a warp gate, which allows instant travel between two points, and a sensor array, that would allow you to find where your oponents are, this to avoid hide and seek situations, superweapons are also planned, but I preffer to go one step at a time.
Unit Movement
Another big change is unit movement, I started using the Aircraft trait, which allowed for free movement around the map, but had some limitations, like having all selected units gathering at the same spot after a move order, or having them ignore blockers and go straight to their destination.
These limitations are not good for the game because first, damage in OpenRA is applied to the area and not the unit, meaning many units can be hit by one weapon if they are close enough, on the other hand, it also led to death ball situations, why would you spread your forces when you can gather everything on one spot and steamroll? the end result is this movement type was reverted later, now frigates and corvettes move similar to OpenRA tanks and infantry, but the fighters remain using the Aircraft behaviour.
Combat
There were a few minor changes to the combat system, mostly the armor types change, that went from the usual CnC method, where the wrong weapon deals almost no damage, to something more close to Starcraft, where the wrong weapon deals atleast half of its damage. On the other hand, there were some graphical weapon polish, thanks to Voidwalker, I managed to make bullets pass through the targets when missing to simulate the lack of gravity.
Finally, some targetting priorities changes have been applied, which aims to make units engage what they are best at, reducing micro on a game where some units move too fast to target manually.
Good luck targetting those fighters here.
Map design
Another thing to change was map design, while originally maps were intended to be completely traversable, the result was that the levels were very boring, since there were no chokepoints, and there was nothing to design, the nebulas that only modify stats dont bring enough to generate an environment, so instead I decided to simplify things a bit, and add a blocker, that is the green cloud for now, gray clouds provide resources, and the blue ones serve as hiding spots.
After all this work, I finally believe the mod passed from being an experiment, to an achievable project, it might not replicate the space setting completely, but it is enough to bring a different type of game into OpenRA, and that is enough for me.
Starting with map/terrain, I think if you're going to have blocking regions they should be asteroid fields not gas clouds. However, I think if possible you should make a variety of gas cloud types that will change the speed at which you move through them, and make some deal ambient damage to units within. I think this would logically bridge what you are trying to accomplish but add even more variability to a player's strategy.
Also you should look into placing large decorative asteroids or exo-planets around the map which force a player to go around. Some can have what appear to be active metor strikes or twirling storms like we see on jupiter to give them a little spice without making them resource heavy.
Perhaps you can get a feature that would disallow other vehicles of a certain size within 1-2 cells from its center. Call it an adjacency buffer. Then you could still allow the small aircraft type units to fly in to attack but would prevent another capital ship from crowding it. The buffer would apply the larger of the two values when two vehicles with buffers meet. This could help ease the visual clutter by forcing it to spread apart a bit. _________________ http://www.moddb.com/mods/scorched-earth-ra2-mod-with-smart-ai QUICK_EDIT
Well, yeah, probably I could do that, I decided to keep asteroids as resource nodes instead because it makes more sense, and resources have to be infinite.
If I go placing 1x1 asteroids all around, then its going to look fake because the cells are to big to avoid making it looking like a grid, the rest of your ideas are doable and I will consider them when I get to iterate map design again (faction design goes first)
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Nomad Galaxy
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