adzling

aahh ok so you assign an armor thickness based on facing collision model rather than facet. got it.

check out the tank destroyer thready devlin, there's a lot of relevant info there.

ok so here's a question for you Clay; some faces obviously face in two (or more) directions at the same time. Does this mean that they should be included in the multiple collision models? For example a sloped face that faces both front, left and top should be included in all 3 collision models? thanks!

hey wendigo 1). make your wheels 8 sided octagons (all drop team wheels have that geometry). 2). reduce the track thickness and increase their width a little, dont worry about the lack of detail the texures provide that. 3). no need to any openings for driver vision, they are represented by textures not geometry. 4). i would suggest combining the operator cockpit with the turret and moving it to the centerline of the afv, that way the same model could double as a remote AFV or a manned AFV. 5). I like the idea of adjusting the concept slightly to make it similar to a bren-gun carrier. To do this you would need to add a small open or flat-bed infantry carrying area to the rear of the vehicle. I would see this as a unit that is deployed WITH inf as a single unit. The player has the option of driving/ transporting his unit in the vehicle (with the commander manning the gun/driving and the rest of the squad firing from the back in a similar manner to building occupation). Hit the "b" key and dismount with the option of the commander continuing to drive/fire while the rest of the dismounted squad fires/follows depending on the action of the commander in the carrier.

"4. The act of "Trolling" is prohibited on this BBS. Trolling is defined as someone who routinely, although not necessarily exclusively, posts inflammatory, untrue, and/or generally useless statements with the primary motivation of insulting, demeaning, and in general causing disharmony within the BBS. Trolls often refrain from challenges to their flimsy arguments (when they even manage that much!) and fail to post rational follow ups to well thought out responses. This shows that the person is both a "mental midget" and a coward and does not offer anything of value to this BBS, the games being discussed here, or the community built up around them." sound familiar? I think folks have been very tolerant of your childish trolling..... Perhaps you would like to moderate your behaviour and join the rest of the community with some reasoned arguments? I think that about 50% of your beef is reasonable, problem is it's not well explained nor is your discussion up to the level of an adult. "I am right and you are wrong" is not a platform for debate. Neither is "I am smart and you are stupid", assumptions about level of expertise, experience or knowledge.

yeah iceman it would make sense that it runs fine for you.... i've got the 17" powerbook being driven by a 64meg ram video card.....yours has twice as much ram with (perhaps) less pixels to push and a faster clock rate. Still, i'm happy to swap powerbooks if you like

Dorky! Thanks for identifying myself with your own sexual orientation...an obvious attempt at reconciliation. You're so sweet... I think it may be time to take your toys and a juice box and sit in the corner again..... It's ok we know you'll be back ah Dorky how we love thee...

there he goes again, that's the Darky i love.....aah darky actually i think you're right Dorky (oops silly me i made a typo) i got that game confused with another one on the same map i played against you and yurch.....THAT was the one where i was kicking your ass as your inf sat around scratching their heads while you whined about hermes rushing (which made sense because that's what i was killing you with at the time, if it had been a tank under aad you would have complained about that). sorry for the confusion there....hopefully it won't put you off your insulting behaviour and constant whining....oh wait what am i saying it's Darky! Cool Breeze don't worry about good ol' Dorky, he's what in common parlance is called a troll. Pretty soon he'll be teamkilling folks online while screaming epithets about his great skilz and superior good looks. Darky how we love thee......

ooh i love it when darky gets all jerry springer on people....yaay darky! it's really kewl when he mentions his superior intellect, great depth of tactical knowledge and then in the same breath screams at the "noobs" for beating him unfairly....i love that. In fact he's the cause of some of my favourite moments in the game. we're playing some map the other day which is going totally one-sided (i.e. not in darky's favor) due in no small part to some glitch in map-making when he begins to spam the chat channel with complaints about people using loopholes to kill him. which is kewl 'cause i was getting a little bored with it myself...drive in kill darky drive away kill him some more...it was fun to have him whining again. I asked him what was up and why don't ya' vote for a map change cause i was sure bored killing him over and over again but he didn't do that he just wanted to moan some more so who am i to deny someone their true calling? but then he abruptly quit the game completely spoiling any fun i was getting listening to him whinge and so i had to quit as well ;-(

hopefully not until the drop-pods stop going bang on landing though. all the smoke from those burning drop-pods slows down my machine.

well i'd like to use foliage but my poor computer isn't fast enough (1.5ghz g4 laptop) i would rather play with it on as it looks cool and would keep things on an even keel play-balance wise but i just can't do it with my current machine... squidlord's idea sounds good tho

i think one thing that would help is if drop-pods didn't drop EXACTLY where you wanted them to. Give them a radius of say 30 meters around the selection point that they can drop within and then randomize it. This would mean that you would lose the pin-point accuracy that seems to be the problem and still retain the ability to use mines as a defensive screen. Of course if you deploy during the deployment phase then you can actually place any item with pin-point accuracy so the defenders get some benefit here....as they should do.

cool this will make things *much* easier clay. From your post it seems you just paint all the faces that are *front* the same color. How does Dropteam recognise the colors that correspond to front/side etc.? Are they preset color values (i.e. "blue" is front, "red" is left)? I need to understand a little more about the discreet models needed. Currently I have my models broken up into: chassis (including wheels and tracks)- center of x/y on origin turret- center of rotation on x/y main gun (including coax and mantle if present)- center of pivot point on x/y my question: how does the game know where to place the turret on the chassis if the origin of the chassis and turret differ? Same goes for the main gun assembly... Can you specify such things as speed of turret rotation, max elevation/depression? I noticed that there are "physical object groups" called out in the dropteam data folder. I presume these are something that notes that a mojlnir is composed of a turret, chassis and gun and the files are called x,y,z. What generates this file (or is it a simple text file)? thnx

haven't had it used on me yet but darky was complaining last game about it (no darky that wasn't me dropping them on you). seems like a single hit from aad should vaporize the pod or possibly explode it in mid-air sending bits of metal raining down....but no mines. sames goes for the cobra missile turrets, they should blow the pod to bits in the sky... and the hermes... and the galaxy.... and yurch's bachuss.... and anyone how manages to hit one with an afv weapon...

heyu konstantine, what i meant was if you want to do the scripting and texture editing needed to get the 6 wheeled ifv in-game i can send the model over to you

and how about a heavy IFV? based on the nemesis/mjolnir medium tank chassis it incorporates a 120mm and room for a squad of inf. To maintain play balance i would think: 1). less armor than the mjolnir or nemesis, more like paladin armor 2). turret only traverse 180 degress (or 270?) 3). reduced ammo load out of 10ap/10 heat 4). speed between the apollo and thor (same as mjolnir) 5). crappy apollo optics... ok i gotta stop this modelling now...

hey konstatine check the light tank thread If you want to deal with bringing it in-game I can provide the 6 wheeled variant for you to play with. this image better shows the comparative sizes of the afv's....look how big that freakin' paladin is! I think i may have gotten the scale a little wrong.....can anyone confirm/ deny this? I guess it's carrying 6 inf so that makes some sense. look at how nice it looks with 6 wheels tho

ooh lookey lookey, it's a 6 wheeled IFV. People seem to have been clamoring for a six wheeled version of the paladin chassis so here it is. Smaller wheels allow it to get closer to the ground. Top speed should be less than the 4 wheeled variant of course but survivability should improve somewhat. + it should be easier to to texture than the custom models i'm working on so if someone feels like they might want to cut up the existing .png texture file for the paladin and do the rest of the work to bring this model in-game i'm happy to pass this one off....

yeah clay that would be great, it simplify yurch's work on getting the models into the game enormously.... I have revamped the models so that the "flair" are separate components wthin skecthup which allows me to turn them on and off for export very easily.

hehe ok here's a tracked IFV based on the paladin chassis with a 120mm gun now that's a little silly.....i'm sure it would get knocked over if it fired that gun to the side that's a little better ;-0 while i'm waiting on the development team for formz to write some custom scripting for me i'm going to keep playing with these models... (formz's support is stellar, when i described the troubles I was having doing uv unwrapping with their app they decided to do some scripting to merge their very robust "unfold" tool with their uv mapping tool....now that is tech support for ya!...course the software is a few thousand dollars so they bloody better be nice

ok here's a couple jpgs showing the comparative sizes of the IFV, Light Tank, Medium Tank and Heavy Tank chassis. One of the features that will distinguish the Mjolnir from the Thor (besides armor and speed) is the the coax (14mm vs. the thor's 20mm) + ammo load-out (mjolnir will carry 20/20/10 vs. the thor's new improved load-out of 30/30/10). I am still working on the texture maps (and yurch is playing with the scripting needed to get the mjolnir in-game) so still a ways off...

Hey i managed to get some of the drop team files imported into sketchup via blender. (import to blender from .cob files export to .3ds format and import into sketchup). Note: the files come into sketchup tiny so using the dimensions Clay gave me i scaled them...seems like the appropriate scale is 38.99 times (39x seems close enough). although this is not confirmed yet so it could be off by a little bit... You'll notice how dang large those paladin afv's are.... + you notice how small those vehicle's i've been working on are compared to the apollo (a "light tank"). I'm going to adjust their scale to fall between the apollo and thor, check the tank destroyer thread for the latest...

nice one yeah a double barrelled 76mm turret with armor on the base that's similar to the turret armor..

I wish there was a way to keep the knocked out hulks in the game.....as it is they just dissapear after a while. a field of knock out afv's makes for decent cover if used right.... i guess it's because of the number of polygons getting thrown around if there are 20-50 dead vechicles lying around... still....

some issues with turrets i just noticed on a game in the ice field map 1). burning/ obstructive drop-pods The drop-pods currently leave a sizeable obstruction to sight lines once they've dropped and deployed the turrets....... Once they've dropped their turrets they then commence to burning up giving away the turrets position....and once enough them get going slowing down my poor machine 2). when dropped on top of the wall around the objective on ice field they do not deploy their turrets.....they just sit there....perhaps because there's not enough room around to deploy or perhaps its something to do with landing above ground level.... other wise like them....look more convincing than the previous versions