[Mod] Taco's RA [1.04]

A rebalance of the current OpenRA Red Alert + new units

Information and discussion for custom maps and mods.

Which faction are you most excited to see in the future?

German
6
38%
African People's Army
3
19%
Operation Group Echo (pre-GDI)
7
44%
 
Total votes: 16

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

Anyone know what bellator named his BM30 Smerch in his released .zip file under /mods/ra/bits? I can't find any name that makes sense.

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zypres1
Posts: 276
Joined: Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:22 pm

my feedback

Post by zypres1 »

Takes forever to build :-)
Badger stops in air with "S", and sometimes in the air
amazing bombs from mig, like torpedo
brutal ai is not brutal... (or is it not yours?)
nice paradrop, the text is vrong
is it medium tank, or scout tank? light tank is also faster
russian swag :-)
nice mammoth mk2
not ballistic on subs?

it was fun..

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BaronOfStuff
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 22, 2011 7:25 pm

Post by BaronOfStuff »

I have a few sound effects around somewhere. I'll tear the balls out of Resident Evil later for what often turn out to be very suitable audio pieces (no, not the voices).

The SMERCH is in several parts:

Code: Select all

rsam:
	idle: mischassis
		Start: 0
		Facings: 32
	turret: mistur
		Start: 0
		Facings: 32
	aim: elevated
		Start: 0
		Facings: 32
	turret-3: elevated
		Start: 0
		Facings: 32
	empty-aim: empty
		Start: 0
And finally, here's some nonsense and bollocks that I just threw together:
Image

Anyone can use these for whatever projects, I just make them without thinking now.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: my feedback

Post by tacozmeister »

zypres1 wrote: Takes forever to build :-)
Badger stops in air with "S", and sometimes in the air
amazing bombs from mig, like torpedo
brutal ai is not brutal... (or is it not yours?)
nice paradrop, the text is vrong
is it medium tank, or scout tank? light tank is also faster
russian swag :-)
nice mammoth mk2
not ballistic on subs?

it was fun..
1) Building is supposed to be slow ;] makes it a trade-off. More troops or more tech? Strategic risk! It's awesome :P
2) Yeah, that seems to be a game engine thing, not my fault. I noticed that, too. It's because the damn thing's going so slow.
3) <3 my V2-esque bombs
4) Brutal AI isn't set up yet
5) I'll fix it
6) Medium tank >_> Already fixed on my local version.

But yeah, thanks for the SMERCH stuff. I think I'm going to be modifying artillery a lot ;] So some new arty pieces would be nice. Is there a MLRS I can use? Like the mobile rocket launcher from C&C. And a shotgun sound from the original Doom would be cool xD Just as long as it's an aud file. I can't seem to get anything to go .aud

And my god, those icons are so cool xD Now I wish I had a use for them ;P But frankly, I don't want 6 kinds of medium tanks :P then it's just confusing.

And can you make an icon for a "Special forces"? I think I'm gonna turn the current stormtroopers into non-stealth and use the same model. Stormtroopers just don't seem sneaky to me.
Attachments
Artillery's gonna see some sweet changes.
Artillery's gonna see some sweet changes.
smerch.png (763.51 KiB) Viewed 9298 times

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BaronOfStuff
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 22, 2011 7:25 pm

Re: my feedback

Post by BaronOfStuff »

tacozmeister wrote: But yeah, thanks for the SMERCH stuff. I think I'm going to be modifying artillery a lot ;] So some new arty pieces would be nice. Is there a MLRS I can use? Like the mobile rocket launcher from C&C. And a shotgun sound from the original Doom would be cool xD Just as long as it's an aud file. I can't seem to get anything to go .aud

And my god, those icons are so cool xD Now I wish I had a use for them ;P But frankly, I don't want 6 kinds of medium tanks :P then it's just confusing.

And can you make an icon for a "Special forces"? I think I'm gonna turn the current stormtroopers into non-stealth and use the same model. Stormtroopers just don't seem sneaky to me.
I've got pretty much every Tiberian Dawn unit converted to the RA palette, so that won't be a problem. Doom's SFX would sound awful though in-game. Believe me, I tried it myself. They just don't match up at all, with the exception of random monster snarls etc.

As for those icons, one idea could be a third faction, at least far as those tanks are concerned (one of them looks decidedly 'heavy'; it doesn't necessarily need two guns). Of course this will result in a hell of a lot of reshuffling for the current stuff too, but in any case the other three would easily find a use within the two default factions, using recycled parts from existing units. I have a couple of 'prototypes' that work well enough so far. But I'm not saying what they do!

As for another cameo, sure. I'll fuck around with some images and see what turns out.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Re: my feedback

Post by tacozmeister »

BaronOfStuff wrote: Lots of words
Thanks! Oh. And if we could add a new faction, we could add Africa or something like that xD . As long as we can get enough units for it. You can probably get a lot from Bellator as far as tanks and stuff. I guess their bonus will be that they have cheaper units, and don't need technology. Lots of ligher units. We could add a lot of unique-ish units too, like maybe technicals and machine-gun tanks and toyota trucks with AA guns on the back of them. And maybe we could give them chem troopers and terrorists. Bomb trucks. Rocket trucks. Gunboats that use machine guns and mortar infantry/trucks for artillery, too. Mechanic maybe. They can use the Russian hind. I'll draw up an idea for this.

Or alternatively we could add some kind of faction that is far advanced :P Not aliens though. That's too freaky. But laser guns and stuff would go with those icons. But for that we'd need a laser projectile and many kinds of laser sounds. I'll draw up an idea for this too :P Like what units they'll have and stuff.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

Just now typed up a more concrete concept of both ideas, like what units they'd have and stuff. Made them in spreadsheet and converted to PDF

African or whatever we wanna call it is here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/91743020/AfricanArmyConcept.pdf

And the high-tech team is here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/91743020/HighTechConcept.pdf

Both would require a lot of models, but the high-tech would also require lots of sounds.

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zypres1
Posts: 276
Joined: Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:22 pm

Post by zypres1 »

Technical would be fun... Worth a mission on it self... Urban single player mission.. Scott?
A little like the the Halo warthog... multiplayer with one player behind, one driving? Ahh, halo units in mod anyone?
And I like mortar trucks... Should we have mortar units?
suicide Jetliner is ok IMHO

Iran
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Sep 08, 2010 3:16 pm

Post by Iran »

tacozmeister wrote:
Petrenko wrote: the beta2 isn't working for me. This is the log:
Are you using the OpenRA version July 30 2012? That's the only supported version. It relies on that version of OpenRA. Besides that, I have absolutely no idea what your problem could be xD As far as I'm aware, it runs on multiple computers. Did you try clearing out your "~\Documents\OpenRA\settings.yaml" by removing the "mods: " line?
Yeah, newer versions of OpenRA will give that error if your mod isn't based on a mod that comes with those newer versions, the EvaAlert stuff is inside system.yaml, if you fix that issue you'll probably get a few more, so the best thing you can do is copy and paste the system.yaml from the ra or cnc mod that comes with the newer versions and modify that.

You probably have to modify some other files as well, at least that was my experience when I had to update my mod to the newest version of OpenRA in the trunk.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

Iran wrote: Quoteception + Other stuff
Oh, okay. thanks! Yeah. I'll probably have to make too many modifications for my likings, but hopefully it's easy. Either that or someone else will update it. Someone offered in the previous page of the forums. Maybe while I'm at it, I can make individual building queues, if that's not already implemented. But yeah. Definitely gonna be a pain.

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BaronOfStuff
Posts: 438
Joined: Sun May 22, 2011 7:25 pm

Post by BaronOfStuff »

Dohoho, and I am only making things worse with all this tempting shit:
Image

Remember RA2's Crazy Ivan? Yes? Well, fuck him. This guy turns buildings into rubble, AND has a rifle to get him out of trouble if enemy infantry come sniffing around.

But... he doesn't actually exist yet, because modifying E1 sprites (or indeed, any infantry SHP) is a pain in the ass and potentially takes a long, long time.

Still, something to consider...

Iran
Posts: 92
Joined: Wed Sep 08, 2010 3:16 pm

Post by Iran »

My experience was that updating the yaml files was easy, but it did take around 45 minutes.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

It's almost sinful to post something that is 30% Baron's work, 15% my work, 5% bellator's work, and 50% community's work on this forum :P I'm tellin' ya.

But god, I'm excited. I think we should go the Africa / Middle East route. Even though Westwood's already done that with Generals, it's much more of a realistic route, especially seeing all the interest in the West & Russia in the past with the Middle East. That, and modeling is easier and less lasers and stuff.

But yeah. Hmm. Demoman sounds cool. Which team, though, which team. :P

SO YEAH.. Current agenda:
1) MLRS icon (GDI artillery from CnC) and body
2) Special Forces Icon
3) Demoman, that guy looks awesome.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

So, there will be an change to artillery and it's kind of big, so I'll describe it here.

Artillery (V2/Artillery) will now:
- Have giant range (50-80), about 10 to 5 time further than previous
- Be extremely inaccurate
- Be much less damaging (Except V2s. Those just fire really slowly.)
- About twice as expensive (land only).
- Auto-attack disabled

This will make them easier to micromanage and they'll be less annoying than they in the base game wherein a group of them could blast anything before it got to them.
Also, they're easy targets, so it'll make them easy targets for airplanes and helicopters and stuff, especially the newly implemented ones with this mod! :D

If you've ever played the game Wargame: European Escalation, I hope to make the artillery much like that.

The BM30 Smerch and the MLRS will be freaking awesome artillery units that fire a burst of fast, inaccurate, yet sweeping and damaging rockets and take a long time (60 seconds) to reload. They're also very expensive, so it'll be hard to get more than 3 so no complete baserape can occur.

This also helps break stalemates because if a team is defending really well, it won't matter: it is futile to defend against artillery when the enemy has forces in front of them. It'll force teams to want to move forward and avoid being rained on, and may cause panic-tactics and psychological effects. Very fun and interesting. Only rarely do the best generals come out of these situations unscathed, and the lower-end generals will find themselves walking into a bloodbath if they panic-advance unprepared.

Don't worry, though, about base defenses then becoming worthless. It's extremely hard to hit a base defense even with 10 artillery guns. And units (as long as they're moving) won't take too heavy of casualties from artillery.

Artillery will also ALWAYS have a way to trace the direction it's coming from. Rockets will always fly from that direction, and artillery shells will have long contrails coming from the direction the arty is fired.

Worried about allied artillery having an advantage with GPS? Well, infantry don't show up on GPS, so that's good. But Russian tanks are armored enough to take minimal damage from the artillery shells. That, and you can always spy-plane over the area shells are coming from and directly smack them with your own artillery.

tacozmeister
Posts: 126
Joined: Tue Jun 26, 2012 3:37 am
Location: St. Louis, MO

Post by tacozmeister »

Okay.. So a few things

1) The next update: I think we'll go 2.0 and then just provide updates for OpenRA versions (like 2.1 for the next release, 2.2 for the one after that). Bug fixes will be in the form of 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.

2) While still doing that, we can work on the version for 3.0, with a new faction. I think we should go for the deserty faction, but anyone else's ideas are very much welcome.

To get to 2.0 though, I'll still need just a fewwww things:
- The SHPs for the MLRS from the original command and conquer (GDI's artillery gun)
- A "Special Ops" icon
- Maybe that demoman? If it's done in time. Most importantly those two things^

The sooner the better, too. I really am eager to get rollin'.

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