Araes
Bio
Delays, Delays, but Moving Again
April 16th, 2004
After a bit of a gap, I'm back working on things again. In the meantime I got one of my new weapons to work and made up some initial ships with really low polys for testing. The weapon for now is a three beam minigun with an adjustable spread, basically like a choke, that can be adjusted to vary from about a 0 - 30 degree arc off of the symmetry axis. Now I just need to get some form of HUD representation for this ability, like a little slider bar that tells you your current spread and maybe up it to a spiraling or 6 beam pattern. Things for later. Anyhow, next up is to implement some of the basic beam cannons and try to work on a first gen concept for the formation code. I'll see how that goes in a few days maybe. Unfortunately, also busy writing a thesis and going for doctoral work, so who knows.
Got UT2004 and Working on Simple MUTs
March 24th, 2004
Well, Amazon sure took their sweet time in getting my limited edition copy of UT2004 to me. Ended up nearly a week late compared to people who were playing it right out of the stores in my local area. Ah well, either way it worked out, as I was in Vegas for most of that week, so I couldn't have worked on Mods anyhow. Now that I'm back, I've started in on the space strat mod in a general sense and am doing simple Muts to work up to more difficult stuff.
On that topic, while actually playing it, I was also a bit surprised by how little mileage they really get out of the space aspects. From the demo videos and such, I expected them to run with such a neat concept as coexisting space and personal scale warfare, yet I've only been able to find one assault map so far that really utilizes it. Guess its good in a sense, as it means that any space add-ons will be that much more unique. Yet, I can't help thinking I ought to get slightly distracted and at least make a space VDM or space ONS map. Also, I was surprised at the stark contrast in the skill of the bots between land and spatial combat. In space, the bots are fairly nasty, firing crack shots at all who oppose them and effectively rushing objectives en mass. Yet on land, I could waltz through armies of them, achieving Godlike status in me-vs-them maps more often than I'd like to think about. Very odd.
Anyhow, back to the grind.
Preliminary Design Doc Work
March 10th, 2004
Here's a link to the design document for my proposed mod to UT2k4.
Moderate work so far. Still need good diagrams, placeholder models, and placeholder sounds to go with it. I'll probably move this off-site and then link to it later, as I figure this isn't the most appropriate place for it, but for now it can at least serve as a sort of workspace for my mental, organizational purposes.
March 8th, 2004
Introductions being underway, I'm a new modder to the Unreal community, but a past modder of things like Half-Life and Serious Sam. My main strengths are with modeling and textures, as I'm a mechanical engineer by profession. So, naturally I've got a wee bit of practice with creating functional mechanical objects and can wrap my head around 3D proportions. However, over time I've also picked up a fair amount of experience with coding as my research requires it. Most of this has been technical languages like MatLab, however, I also know a bit of PHP, a fair amount of Javascript, and a bit of Java as well.
As I also write a fair amount in my spare time, and like to pump out random disertations on all kinds of topics, you can catch a glimps of this over at my [spot on the web].
General Plan
I've got what I view as a grand idea for a mod (of course), however, as its somewhat large I'm going to segment it down into a number of smaller steps that I can handle efficiently and hopefully finish. Ability willing, these would probably also be potential canidates for simpler mutations , which would probably be their first iteration of design.
- To Dos
- Finish a full blown design document with sketches, work plan, subtasks, and other assundry info.
- Create placeholder unit models to go along with this
- Create placeholder sounds to go along with this
- Create various other placeholder assets.
- Develop code to create formations of units (or at least simulations of them) within UT.
- Different options for this, one would be to use given destinations and AI to tell them to move (Bot AI that tries to maintain a particular position?), other would be groupings of models that operate as a single model.
- Still exploring these to see which would be more effective and wouldn't overload the cycles with inefficient script.
- Write the nice folks at Sierra, as I think my design may impinge on their intellectual property.
- Finish a full blown design document with sketches, work plan, subtasks, and other assundry info.
Tarquin: Hi, welcome to the wiki 
EntropicLqd: Hi, Welcome to the Wiki
Araes: Thanks for the welcome. Hopefully I'll have more to show than the above vagueness shortly (such as a contribution to that design document topic) 03/08/04.
