Zeon hlv pod.

[smoth]

just a thumb
Click for larger image

HLV pods are used by zeon both to deliver and ship off supplies to the homeland. This pod launching pad was built and they have the hlv pod for base supplies. After the battle ground is secured the launch pad will serve to send valuable parts and metals back after the establishment of a base.

The building was very large and since the hlv pods are merely glorified containers it is rather dirty in comparison to the freshly built MS and buildings. In the game it will represent the starting building and since such landing/launching pads in a safe place are rare, it is important for zeon that you not lose your landing pad.

The decisions was made to make a building the command center rather then the epic coms by default. This will make the 16X16 maps that are used by spring more readily supported. Also a large structure like this creates a really nice centerpiece.

I have not created the corpse yet and I have not done the hlv animations for it unloading the materials into the building.

[Warlord Zsinj]

<3

gorgeous scaffolding

The base platform could use a little more love to bring it to the depth of the other areas, in my opinion.

[Gota]

I wanna play gundam now..
You need a widget to show units behind buildings now ^^.

[Pxtl]

I wanna play gundam now..
You need a widget to show units behind buildings now ^^.

He always needed a "hidden units" widget anyways - Epic Comms obscure half the battlefield.

[rattle]

The decisions was made to make a building the command center rather then the epic coms by default.

[Pxtl]

The decisions was made to make a building the command center rather then the epic coms by default.

Well, yes, but obviously he's still going to include them. Either way, it's sad - I mean, the new pod looks really cool, but ultimately it's just a big building. The Epic Comms were something I'd never seen before in any other RTS (except maybe Homeworld - but even that isn't really applicable since it's really not the same). Too bad there isn't a way to just make the epic comms work better on smaller maps.

[smoth]

They can't "work better" unfortunately on a smaller map they will drift into each other and begin a dance to the death. Nothing can be done about it, they are big ships with guns and range on those guns . If the map is small they have no room and must KUNGFUFIGHT. I may eventually remove the epic coms as an option if I can figure out a way to give the player a battle ship in game.

I like the flying commanders and they are very neat on a large map. However, spring does not have a lot of large maps. The old tiny com was not good on a small map and they make no sense in regards to fluff also, it was created because TA needed a walking com. Both commanders were created to fill their role for the time but now you lot will see the demise of the tiny com. The command buildings are meant to replace the tiny commanders, they make more sense and they get rid of com rush on small maps. This will be the final nudge away from things I felt were left overs from TA gameplay.

When I say small map I mean 16X16 or lower. Of course on some of the tiny as shit maps you will pretty much see base wars(TM) rather then units fighting, not my problem, don't play on a 4X4.

Showing unit behind a structure would be nice but it is not something that I can put time in to. Writing such a widget is not a core element and I am focused on those. Furthermore I seem to be the only guy using fps cam so who cares right? If someone writes a non-gpl version I would consider adding it but I see such things as breaking immersion and that bothers me.

[Warlord Zsinj]

Theoretically you could just change one of the existing unit outliner widgets so that they always render above everything else.

Making them render through specific things (ie: big buildings but not terrain and each other) would be more difficult.

[Erom]

God damn, smoth, your stuff is pretty. Can't wait to see the animation - is the pod actually going to blast off?

[Otherside]

do sumthign ala necrons in dawn of war

they slowly upgrade monolith building till eventually it turns into a monolith. So you can slowly upgrade the command center eventually you could lift of and have your mobile com

[Erom]

I doubt upgrading an HLV into a GAW would make sense, cannon wise, and anyway that would let you get the epic com on small maps, which is exactly what Smoth is trying to avoid.

[smoth]

I thought about it taking off and landing with new supplies but decided against it. That doesn't mean that after I get comfortable with lua that you will not see a hard drop with pods landing in the field and dropping special units off.

Well, in all honestly, the drop pod would be the location the ship would arrive at. The idea is/was that after 30 minutes all players would receive their respective battleship as a free unit. Yes, I know FREE UNIT but it would be neat. That would be a throw away unit given to them and they could use it without care. :) AKA get them to fucking do something.

[Gota]

I wish someday someone explains the mod to me..

[smoth]

I probably should mention that most games on a small map have not lasted more then 20 minutes..

[Lumpy]

I like the scaffolding and everything about it..

My only suggestion is to maby add some of those nice green lights to the actual pod..

[Pxtl]

I realize this is a probably a pointless suggestion/question, but since Gundam has always faced problems with small maps, and Spring doesn't really support the scale of maps that it does work with very well, why not shrink everything?

[smoth]

It supports them fine, the player base makes a lot of small ones because the *a mods generally have short ranges and sight. Gundam uses much larger sight and ranges, while several projects have adopted this, the player base has grown fond of the size 16 maps. Making most of the available maps in 16X16.

The preferred size for gundam maps is a size 20, half of the maximum possible for spring. However, since the map's compression is highly lossy and SM3 is not being worked on the maps that are size 20 have to be very large files if I want to have any detail to them. This in turn means that they are going to eat much more memory and since memory is going to be the ceiling for gundam I am worried about the smf based maps eating up all the valuable texture space.

To compound this the tiny com was IMO imba and having a stationary com would be very nice. Most players who are new to gundam will have difficulties if the epic coms stay as default because they have to get the rarer large maps, learn to use the camera better and deal with people comm rushing them. By setting the command buildings as default the player not only gets a simpler com to deal with they also can play on most of the common maps. So with the addition of the command buildings the default is going to be the comm building with the epic coms for people who want them.

The scale is not changing, I took particular care to make the mechs scale to TA. The problems of downscaling would be:

The cars would be even SMALLER next to invisible. Gundam already seems unrealistic because most of the tiny details people associate with realism are too small to depict.

I would have to take out all vehicles.

The units are scale to the TA features and I have gone to great lenghts to see the scale preserved.

The hieghtfields in spring have little enough detail to them and making the units smaller would further amplify the lack of detail in the map heightfields.

The map textures(smf) are very low res thanks to the amount of memory they eat.

The spring elmos, gameunits etc are not precise enough such that scaling things down even further would make things even more unrealistic.

Remember 70+ foot tall mechs. If I scale everything down, the vehicles would go and realistic details would be invisible as a car would be 1/4 a footprint unit.

[Pxtl]

Fair enough. And by "doesn't really support" I meant what you were saying - large maps are a PITA.

[Forboding Angel]

Large maps are also tough to render.

Thankfully my comp is powerful enough to do 28x28's now, but I rarely can justify the time needed to render them.

Now to that end, I have made them while at work remoting into my comp. But the next problem is exporting, which I've conquered as well, however, ad in time for the metal map, a half ass decent feature map, and compiling time, we're talking about several hours wasted just on bullshit work.

Not to mention that when Evo starts using Evo only maps, 28x28 are lolfilesize?

Edit: one thing I forgot to mention is that progs like bryce take damn near a week to generate the texture. L3dt takes roughly 2 hours. I dunno how long the wic editor would take or if it's even possible via wic, but in these progs, the problem is always when you try to export the texture. Thankfully l3dt is generally very merciful in this area, but meh.

[Hoi]

just dont play gundam on duck or cow, problem solved