Recent content by Johnny Morphine

Alright, mates - quick reply before I head off to work for New Year's eve (oh joy)

And sorry your posts sat around for a couple days --- since things have been slow on here I haven't been checking as frequently (as you can see)

As far as the poll goes, I find it pretty interesting. I think that it's revealing a lot about where I need to put my focus here. Overall, though, I don't think it deviated too far from what I expected.

Progress - well let's see. I basically wrote a program that makes rigged models for me, and does so without disturbing any existing content on the model (such as vertex coordinates and normals) so the model goes in one side of the program and comes out the other fully functional. This is completely awesome for level-of-detail models, cranking those out without a single slip.

I think I'll also expand the program to automatically make male/female versions of armor as well. Should be easy compared to what I've done with it so far.

But that's about it, other than a couple new armors and a few new outlines, but I'm glad I had the idea to write this program because it's going to save weeks of effort later on down the line.

Next thing I'm going to be doing is creating a mini-mod that will run on its own for awhile then automatically give me what weapon proficiencies an NPC of a certain level with a certain skill in weapon master should have, based on the roughest situation possible to make sure NPCs can compete with the player in combat. That won't take long.

After that I'm going to run some tests to figure out the new cost system for items. After that it's onto finishing the troop trees. Then I'll do some modeling, then run in-game tests. While that I'll keep doing more modeling, more sound work (I just spent almost $200 on new samples ten minutes ago), and more of anything else we can come up with.

Meanwhile, gotta run to work. Later on

I thought about having some context-specific spoken dialogue, but realized it wouldn't fit for some characters to have it and most not. But as far as voices for delivering orders, yeah, that will happen. I've currently got four guys willing to help out with voices, three of whom I know to have had experience doing voice work like that before, and the fourth I'm positive is capable of doing whether he's had experience or not.

So I plan on having a number of voices for you to be able to choose from, so that you will hear yourself giving orders. NPCs giving orders will be audible as well. Also, the types of voices in the game, such as those made by NPCs during battle in Native, will probably have some small degree of customization for the player - there might be two or three possible sets of male voices for that. Similarly, a few quest-oriented NPCs will have their own battle voices (each will therefore have to have their own troop type, so this number will be kept low) and some classes of regulars will also have different voices from those normally heard on the field. For example, Assassins will make very little noise on the battlefield, and the bigger Asgards and Azathoths will have voices unique to their branches of their troop trees, so that when a big viking with an axe runs up behind you you'll recognize his battle cry and know to get the hell out of the way.

Adding additional voices will not really add too much to the size of the mod - audio files can be compressed a number of ways so I'll use my own ear as the judge when it comes to how much quality to include, but regardless a few voices would be small change when it comes to the new audio tracks and graphics. In any event, I think people would be less concerned about download time and hard drive space than they would be about getting the fullest experience possible from the mod.

Update:
Decoded some essential parts of the SMD model format, so now I can write a program to streamline the rigging process for M&B applications, which will decrease the time it takes to make body armor and boots by up to 50%. I've also found some junk in the SMD file format, probably created by rigging editors when vertices are switched from one bone of the skeleton to another during the manual rigging process. The program I'm writing will get rid of that, just to decrease the system load a fraction of a percent. Since this will greatly increase the speed at which I can model armor, I'll probably go ahead and get started on that alongside balancing NPC stats and enhancing AI so I can conduct more comprehensive tests, so I can see how things look in addition to seeing how they perform. Thank god QBasic is still a valid Win32 application.

Right now I'm planning on having at least two or three lords per faction that will have truly distinct personalities. All kings/faction leaders will have their own personalities as well. The rest of the lords will share some of their lines, but there will be quite a few of them to draw from. The way I'm doing this is by assigning personality scripts to troop slots (same technique I'm using with the AI scripts). For the 100% unique lords, these scripts will only be assigned to them. For the other guys, they'll have a bank of personality scripts that will be assigned at the beginning of the game, so that they might share some lines in their bank with other lords, but in total their list of available words and actions will in fact be unique to them.

For example, let's just say that two key qualities in a lord are the importance of his religion, and his attitude toward his enemies. We've got four lords here, and for the simplest sort of example let's say they're all in the same faction and share the same religion. One of them values his religion above all else and shows mercy to his enemies. Another one doesn't place too much value in his religion, and punishes his enemies at every opportunity. The third loves his religion, but it cruel to his enemies, and the fourth doesn't really think too much about religion but does show compassion in battle. If there is a set of possible dialogue strings for each of these qualities, multiplied later by the number of religions, you can begin to see how each lord, despite some of them sharing lines here and there, will all actually have a set of traits that in total are completely unique to them.

A similar system will be in place for champion mercenaries, though their bank of available lines will of course be different. Some of these guys will also be completely unique.

Of all lords and NPCs, the claimants will have the most developed personalities, since these are the most story-oriented characters in the game.

Amman de Stazia said:

that means sieges will probably crash for anyone who can't disable that bloody message
"new enemies have arrived"
on a low-res machine.

Because with a high performance drain, this message causes a pause (up to 5 seconds, depending on battlesize, on my machine) every time.

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Not entirely sure what you mean by crash. The way this will work is that a list of available troops will be kept for each side, and when the conditions for reinforcements on either side are met this list is compared to the preferred troop spawn from that side (also a list) and then the troops will be spawned to the appropriate entry point, at which time their teams will be assigned and then they'll automatically move to join their formations. It's not the typical means for spawning, and it shouldn't cause any more drain on resources than the normal one because, if anything, the number of troops spawned will be less than the normal reinforcements for most people's battles (one at a time for defenders, and up to, say, ten max at a time for attackers - I haven't decided on the percentage required for attackers to spawn, but I don't ever want it to be the case that people are waiting for one last troop to die just so they can get a load of reinforcements)

If there was a way to avoid reinforcements in sieges, I would, but it just doesn't make sense not to have them.

Anyway, I'm sure it's not the message itself that's causing your system to pause. It's the fact that troops are getting spawned, which requires some resources from a number of your computer's parts. The scripts required to add heraldry to shields seems, from my analysis, one of the most draining scripts called when a troop spawns (actually it's called whenever a heraldic item shows up in a mission, so these scripts get called whenever a troop spawns with one of the typical shields, which is often) so I've been thinking of cutting back on the heraldry a bit for this mod. The old scripts for this probably wouldn't work in this mod anyway, since I'm restructuring some of the stuff that gets called on when this script is active.

Battle advantage of any sort is ignored during sieges - there are a certain number of men on the field and a certain number behind the walls, and that's that. No maneuvering is going to change that, ever. So the number of members on each side will be reflective of the sizes of the armies involved.
The offensive side will be able to choose precisely which troops to bring to the front lines. The defending side will only be able to choose half their troops, and the rest will be randomly selected from the remainder of the troops not selected. This is to prevent the scenario of someone loading up their castles with non-combat units, but putting their elite combat units up front to defend --- at first this sounds like I'm screwing the defender, but think of it this way - if a defender has, say 200 troops in his castle and only 50 are top-tier archers and infantry, while the rest are things like, say surgeons who are keeping everybody alive, then if those 50 troops are the only ones fighting then the castle could never fall.
To balance this further, though, reinforcements for the defender will happen immediately after a soldier has fallen. One man dies and another shows up at the spawn point, and gets to the front fairly quickly. Meanwhile, attackers have to spawn in groups at set intervals of time.

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From an earlier post of mine. That pretty much describes how sieges will be handled, including spawns.

WookieWarlord said:

Perhaps, but why would you need an elephant to take out a few peasants? 

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Haha.

Mainly it's just that if any number of troops could spawn, an unknown number of permanent props could be required by them, and this would simply make elephants, which would require a carriage upon which someone could ride them, impossible to bring into a siege. It would be possible, I think, to use them as long as the troops that use them are the first to spawn, and any troops requiring them later could not have them. Hence it's just easier to say they can't be used in sieges instead of people thinking that the game is just bugging out. What do you guys think?

For things like rockets and bombs, for which I'm using scene props, this doesn't present as much of a problem because these props are simply short-lived an can be recycled quite readily. Dead elephants on the battlefield cannot.

Besides, an ability to use elephants as rams would give the faction using elephants an unfair advantage during sieges, because they'd never even have to build their siege equipment if they have so many organic ramming machines available.

Currently I've decided to rethink how I'm implementing elephants for purposes of increasing their capabilities and simulated realism. Some new ideas came to mind, so we shall see what comes of them. I'll keep you informed as I figure things out.

I've been planning on preventing all parties from bringing elephants and chariots to sieges. For one, it's not all that easy to do logistically, particularly for defenders, but due to the nature of the module system and it's sad lack of a way to spawn scene props, and because elephants and chariots require scene props, and because sieges require reinforcement spawns, if I were to allow these items to spawn in sieges I'd have to include hundreds of empty scene props in every scene in order to spawn them. And I'd have to have all these things spawned from the start of the battle (potentially hundreds of them, possibly thousands, because I'd have to account for the possibility of any troop spawning) and this could cause severe performance issues. So that really can't be an option. So unless anyone can come up with a good way to handle sieges without reinforcement spawns, then there's really no way to do this.

Yeah, the AI in Native is extremely poor. By the end of a game every battle was just about exactly the same. The sick part is that commander AI is extremely accessible in the code - it just takes a little bit of ingenuity to create good strategies for commanders, but even basic modifications in strategy would have been easy and it's honestly disgraceful to the developers' other efforts that they never did anything to add to this capability.

Everyone's formation location remains saved even when ranks are broken for a charge, so getting them back into formation would be as simple as pressing a button. If you want to keep them in formation while attacking an enemy position (as in a phalanx line) you can just forgo the charge command and continue to push on the enemy. I plan on coming up with a separate script for this kind of tactic, so that the line will control its own positioning in relation to the enemy without you constantly having to adjust the line.

Wu-long said:

I woudlnt say the chariots arent great just not suitable for the terrian
As to what your making id say its historical fiction ^^

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I suppose you could look at it as historical fiction. Depends on how loosely we want to use any terminology. Historical fiction generally happens within a historical timeline, and although each individual faction may have some historical precedent the factions themselves are works of original fiction and the context in which they meet is completely beyond the realm of history. It's just hard to nail a genre to it.

On chariots, I think it will be interesting for players to get into the game fighting armies that regularly deploy chariots, then suddenly think they have them in caught in rough terrain, expecting the AI to be spending hours trying to push their chariots over mountains like cavalry in Native, only to meet the enemy on the field and see that they've decided to leave their chariots behind.

Hristov said:

Hey you sound like you know your history. Good work. Obviously I understand that even the Natives are like a speculative fiction, if this happened how would things happen type. Which I think is great.
I understand what you trying to do. Good work.

I would speculate that Vaegirs  based on Rus or Vikings that settled on Ladoga and united Slav tribes into Novgorod Rus. And Rhodoks i think remind me of Livonian order, or Lithvenian knights in the same time period. I am originally from Russia and I used to do historical reenacting, which gave me a brief idea of what was going on in medial warfare. Which brings me to a point where I would like to suggest something. U know how usually in battle in Native, when you tell your soldiersthem to hold the ground, the soldiers spread as wide as f@ck)) Anyways would have been cool if you could tell them to look the shields and actually create a shield wall. (as a first row), and have spear mean or long axe man to attack the enemy heads from second row. Trust me this technic works very good in real life))) Of cos got some doubts that it is possible to script them like that, but it would have been a real shield wall then. What you think.

All the best.

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Yeah, each faction does seem to have at least some loose basis on some culture or a mix of cultures with a little bit of creative spin, which is one of the things I really like about the game, and I hope to try to follow along those lines (with perhaps a bit more creative freedom) in this mod.

On that formation you mention, it's absolutely doable. You'd assign shielded infantry to the first line and lower the spacing modifier down to the minimum. Then displace the second line of spearmen to a distance one or two meters behind them. If I'm using a formation like that I'd keep my cavalry back a bit, spaced a good distance out, so that I can make a quick audible if the enemy tries to outflank the linear formation.

Haha, that question assumes that M&B Native was in any regard of the whole historically accurate. No, I'm not making a history mod, and I'm not making a fantasy mod any more than Native was a fantasy mod. At no point in history were factions like those five in Native coexisting in the same small geographical era. If I'm mixing "time periods" a bit more than they were (and even this assumes that each of the five factions can be specifically linked to a certain historical culture, which Rhodoks and Vaegirs decidedly cannot), I still wouldn't say that's fantasy. If anything, and I mean anything, it's science fiction, but science fiction from the standpoint of a medieval observer framed within a span of a few thousand years prior to anything we might call the "modern" era.

Hope that answers the question!

By the way, chariots weren't used in Europe not because they weren't great, not that no one could possibly build them or drive them, and certainly not because no one knew about them, but the terrain in Europe was not consistently conducive to effective military applications of the technology. The Roman chariots you see in movies are somewhat misleading - yes, the Romans used chariots, but only for parades and presentations because in most of the regions they were fighting the chariot was simply not a viable option. This mod will feature a wide variety of terrain and topography, so chariots will be an option, but you'll have to consider the terrain before you deploy them.

Yes, the backing up of these things presents two problems - #1, it's infeasible, as you stated. Secondly it would, believe it or not, be far more complicated to code than forward motion. Getting them to automatically avoid obstacles might be a good idea - we'll think about that. But overriding the player's ride with an automatic script might be annoying to some people, and I imagine they'd quickly learn from their mistakes.

I agree that speed of a chariot should be diminished if a horse dies. For the game's sake, I'll be automatically reorienting the remaining horses to the center in this event. As far as controlling the speed once one of them dies, I know of two possible ways that this could be done, and I have yet to figure out which of the two would work better. Either way, speed will drop if you lose a horse.

Chariot horses are not trained to be ridden, so I imagine that they would not be able to be ridden unless the player has some insane amount of riding skill. In cases where a cart is pulled by another sort of animal, such as an ox, which I have seen ridden, I imagine this could be much more feasible.

On charging with chariots, this is a common misconception. Chariots are not designed for charging, the horses aren't trained to charge, and the last thing a chariot driver wants to do is charge - these things were always used as archery platforms (and the archer was not the driver) and kept at a distance, if possible, from any enemies. If footmen ever did get up close, there was a guy called a runner that ran alongside the chariot and fended people off. Chariot use in this mod will be closely akin to that.

Also, in order to drive a chariot, you'll need at least one free hand, so you might be able to throw from the ride, but if you pull out a bow or a two-hander you won't be able to control the horses (it's not like you're sitting on them and can give them orders with your feet at this point). I think this would probably be OK with a shield, though, since some shields don't require a firm grip of the hand. I could make it based on the shield, perhaps, so that some types of shields would allow this and some others would not.

As far as the control scheme, I currently think there should be four controls - one to move forward/increase speed, two to turn left or right (only at speed), and possibly a way to back up. Elephants will certainly have the ability to back up, but I'm limiting it to a straight line. I'm pretty sure that with the topographic map I can keep NPCs from getting themselves into sticky situations, but the player might not be so lucky. I don't know how mean I should be to him, haha. Maneuverability, I think, should be, on average, slightly worse than a charger. Absolute maximum speed should be somewhere between a warhorse and a hunter, and that's with maxed out horses. That's just me working out balance and feasibility in my head - let me know your thoughts. Other than that, thanks for the input so far, and keep it coming

To anyone: start throwing out suggestions on a good control mechanism for chariots and elephants. I'd like to keep things simple but adaptable. Just remember that these things won't be as maneuverable as if you were riding a horse, and the interface should be somewhat less direct than that due to the fact that you're controlling these things via reigns from a distance instead of sitting on top of them.

If I do plan on joining the industry, I think this is probably one of the best platforms to get started. I've tried making my own games before, but creating a good engine that runs smoothly is the roughest part, so I've just been modding games on and off since Doom.

That thing is just a staff and was intended to be so, but if this mod ends up getting released after Warband I plan on using Warband's features to create multiple-use weapons that can function as ranged and melee weapons alike in a smooth fashion. This mod will have a few NPCs who use ranged weapons in a melee capacity, but that's only achievable through creative modeling and scripting as far as I know, and needs to be done under controlled circumstances in order to look decent.

Both I and my brother found this game through Steam because of a special pricing offer almost a year ago. In fact, everyone I know outside these forums got the game from Steam. Regardless, I've got to be sure that this mod will work smoothly for all prospective users.

Elephants will actually be a mount with an invisible rider. This way their enemies will actually try to attack them. A platform scene prop will be linked to their location, and the actual riders, as far as gameplay is concerned, will be fixed to that platform, which should be able to hold two or three, maybe four people. Another scene prop will fill in the space taken up by the larger model (since scaled horse models are not possible) and a simple script will be running to make sure anyone run over by this thing is damaged and kicked out of the way. I had thought about making a giant scene prop for the elephants, but the scripts required to move so many parts would be too expensive - at the barest of minimums, we'd be talking five sections constantly being repositioned, and ideally we'd be talking 10 to 14. This method would have made elephants more easily trackable, and I could have made them attackable by placing dummy agents inside the prop and linking their HP, but it's just too much work to move around and it would require a completely different set of mechanics from the chariots.

I haven't committed to a control scheme for elephants or chariots as of yet. Anything is possible; I'm just searching for a means that balances user-friendliness with the real-life difficulties inherent in controlling these sorts of vehicles.

...

Kirin, you spoiled my post, haha. Just keep in mind that the mechanics that govern chariots and elephants will be applicable to similar carriage-type transports as well, so ox carts, coaches and the like should all be possible. So even if you're not raising Egyptian or Indian troops, you can still have easy access to similar equipment. Aside from that, you can always buy this equipment if you can find it.


Edit:

Actually, you know what, I just had a brilliant idea. You're right, WookieWarlord, that pose does look like it could be used as some sort of launcher. Since rocket launchers already follow a modified set of rules, I can put together a set of scripts to put someone into that sort of position with particular weapons and then allow them to fire from the hip. This is much closer to how the bee's nest rocket launcher would be fired, particularly. I might have to mod the animation a bit just to make up for the breadth of the weapon, but even if I don't it might be close enough. I need to figure out these animations a bit more so I can develop a way to allow someone to turn while aiming the thing, though, but we'll see what turns up.

I suppose the answer to that is, very little, haha.

Melee weapons are just easy because they're static models and I've got a good grasp of three-dimensional sculpting. Guess that comes with being an artist. I'm running Ulead PhotoImpact on my desktop also, which is the best tool I know of for building textures from scratch.

Helmets are second because they're similar to melee weapons in that they don't move. Gloves and bows require a series of frames in their construction, all of which need to be precisely formed, so they're a little bit rougher but easy when you get used to it. Body armor is a ***** because of M&B's strict interpretation of rigging, but I think I've gotten the hang of it. Boots are easier but still require rigging. But I'm sure you know all of this - you seem to be a pretty decent modeler yourself.

A lot of the factions' equipment models will be easy, and in fact can probably be slightly modified versions of existing models (specifically armors). The Azathoth equipment is the most difficult, because it follows different rules than standard weapons - see the spoilers at the bottom of this post for a somewhat dated example.

If I decide to include scaled skeletons in this mod (and if I do the differences will be slight) this complicates the armor process a little, but I can get around that by limiting different skeletons to certain types of armor and making them unavailable to the player and his or her companions, since I will never have time to make separate meshes for every skeleton with every imaginable armor. Bigger models will only be apparent in the Asgards and the Azathoths, so the additional workload would be limited to within acceptable parameters. It's just too sloppy to try to make a larger suit of armor on a small skeleton. I'll probably also include a new female model, the use of which will be similarly restricted, simply because I think the female model in Native is pretty bland.

Speaking of other skeletons, I know everyone else is using Iron Launcher for this, but I've found that, at least the last time I tried it, which was several weeks ago, it seems to get upset when you try to use it with M&B versions purchased through Steam, and there are probably a lot of those out there. So unless that changes and/or the program itself gets all bugs worked out, I'll be including a self-sufficient batch file with the next release that will accomplish most of the same things. The action of the batch file will be made reversible by activating a secondary batch file, in case anyone wants their old data folders back. Or if I get in the mood to look for my old registered copy of Visual Basic (I've still got the disks somewhere) I'll put all of this into a handy executable.