This page was originally an update page for many months of ATPT updates... the community really took to the little walker as it was a small version of the bigger four legged ATAT "problem" that eventually got solved and added to the game by Woodrow and others. It was great fun to drive once it was working and I spent way too much time playtesting the little monster. It moved with the standard W A D keyboard commands but had a nose gun that was linked to the mouse and offered a good range of movement. This made it somewhat unique in the game and a blast to drive around and blow things up with.
Although this page really isn't all that long, it summarizes nearly two years spent learning and working on a few aspects of game design.
That's a grenade I'm holding... ha ha
Unfortunately when I tried to convert the ship to multiplayer maps for online play, I realized that I had wayyyyy too many. Rotational bundles increased lag and also there was a hard cap in multiplayer map types... so I ended up going back to the early code (mostly copied and modded from the original GC ATST model) to accomplish functionality and reduce lag. So, I had to lose the real good walking animation I worked so hard on in the end when it went live.
customized x-wing cockpit with new struts and cockpit/vehicle icons. Pretty amazing that there are so many details and assets that go into this stuff... always seemed like there was just one more icon you needed to build and add that was missing or still from a previous base model...
My favorite (hardly seen) ship in Star Wars lore. The Storm
Living under the hoof of Artificial Intelligence...
BF2 came out shortly thereafter and I never started working with that platform. Most interest in GCX and GC was soon gone the way of BF2 and BF 2142 (and other newer games) and mods for them as well.
BF 1942 may be one of the last moddable gaming engines a single person or small group could do some pretty amazing things in a relatively short amount of time with. Great community and developer support, tutorials, and user participation. (Although Crysis and the Unreal engines come to mind as exceptions to this...)
I would recommend the bf1942 engine to anyone who has an interest in learning something about how all this stuff works. It was a great time and I'd like to thank Dnamro, the modding community, GC devs and DICE for their support and a great learning and gaming experience
Take good care!
Don't be afraid to break things and get your hands dirty fixing them once in a while, ya might just learn something!
best regards,
Nex
I mainly wanted to work with a number of player/ai positions and learn how to do more complex cockpit glass set-ups. The arc-170 was also bristling with weapon load out possibilities
This shot gives ya an idea of the scale of the cap ships in GC - Note that I'm only responsible for creating the model/code etc for the fighter in the pic... although later, I did manage to code the ai in the rebel blockade runner... The reb runner was actually one of the first I got to cooperate with AI...it was a bit of a breakthrough when I finally got the AI crew to man the positions and fire ruthlessly on anything that came close
Above are a few more shots of the arc-170... It ended up with pilot forward firing lasers, a gunner position with movable guns, r2 player or AI position -to heal the ship and drop mines, and a rear gunner position.. and all player man-able OR ai friendly. There was also a second single player version added later.
Back to the beginning... This is where it all started... the ATPT
I had always liked this vehicle and really wanted a playable version in GC. So, I decided to try and build one myself and get it working in game. Well..... that sounded easy at the time....
early in game version
another early in game version
AI testing. I put together a level from 1942 with 5 ATSTs and 3 ATPTs on each side of a bridge and it was madness. A sort of mech warrior-esque battle with AI support or multiplayer capability. It was just pure redneck mech battle fun to play!
That's actually the death star's texture file on parts of the ATPT. I would use it initially and then change it out as I made the texture map that is seen in the later pics. The back of the model was textured with a picture I had taken and modified of the back of the actual ATST toy. I liked the connection to the toy and the physical world from whence it came. It really turned out pretty good.
The inside cockpit texture was looted and adjusted from the imperial shuttle model that was already in game, but the base textures were largely build on photographs I would take of old electrical boxes or rusted equipment I found around and then detail and build upon them in photoshop.
I got pretty lucky with the AI on my first attempts at coding the ATPT for use by bots. Later, AI compatibility would become an end unto itself.. but with the atpt ai was always in and it made testing more fun (sometimes a little annoying though.) The ai were deadly accurate with the nose gun at a distance, eventually I had to tone their accuracy down due to player complaints on the forums that it was just too damn difficult to engage one when manned by AI bots.
You can see the texturing progress in the pics above, but what ya can't see is the evolution of its walking animation. As I got better with coding (and got lots of code given me to work with by some brilliant folks (namely: woodrow & dnamro)) I ended up using more or and more rotational bundles to get a better walk animation...
The yellow paint that you see on the last pic was eventually taken out due to player complaints of inaccuracy to the lore. I was mainly just trying to figure out how to make something look like it was metal, painted over, chipped & faded, and also give the little guys some added color and character. I did like the yellow paint and missed it after it was gone. The side vent is painted in photoshop, not built into the actual mesh or modeled. Yeah, kinda cheesey looking in retrospect, but I was pretty proud of it at the time
Next up was the Z-95 I think...
This ship was an precursor to the x-wing (in the lore- unused in the films though) so I used the GC x-wing and did all manner of horrible things to it...all in the name of learning how to do flying models... including these engines that I think were eventually switched back to the way they are in the first pic
the texture was the original GC texture that I modified (added some to it, & squashed, rotated and stretched some) as I tried to figure out how it all worked. I kinda regret not getting around to doing a a full custom texture for it before I moved on.
The Hapan ship called the storm. I had found this ship in a reference book and thought it would be interesting to build a ship almost completely from scratch. Beginning with just two drawings in a reference book, I scanned them in and started trying to build a 3d version.
Here's an early render before skinning it and coding it into the game
The ubiquitous death star texture is on it in this shot
Added in the pic above is a new texture roughed out and the new "space mines" weapon and icon.
The original load out for weapons systems overview collage i used as an update "preview" of the ship for the community. Originally, I had designed the r2 position to be able to rear fire quad lasers. I decided to instead go with a rearfire drop mine setup. 2 versions of the storm were evtually added to GCX I think, one had a r2 playable position equipped for a second player or bot and the other had a single pilot position only. One of the reasons I wanted to do this ship was because it looked like it would have a fantastic cockpit view (the lasers visible within shot etc) while attacking as seen in the pic above.
I had offered the ATPT up in a few maps that worked with the single player GCX minimod for community testing and it generated a good deal of interest. With all the attention it was getting, the gcx team decided to ask me if they could formally add it to the mod's content and I was happy to give them permission. Dnamro was pleased with the AI work I had done on it and asked if I would join his team and help out with working on the problem of getting AI to pilot and man the turrets on the huge capital ships and the newly added ATAT.
It was dangerous work...
I got the atat to run with bots and improved it defensively (so much so that we began to get complaints that it went from a sitting duck to nearly impossible to get near without getting shot out of the sky.) After taking away some of the atat's turret positions, we began to look at ai piloting capships and manning their gun turrets.
Always respect the AI!
This was an error most Battlefield 1942 AI coders have probably seen and was likely put in by a programmer at DICE tokeep people who messed things up from bothering him or her. I am guessing that I was just real tired... but getting this error at 3:34 AM one morning about killed me, I literally just started laughing and decided it must be time to get some sleep before I messed up anything else
Most of these pics were taken to document a new ship or system working with AI
Such as this newly added GC gunship done towards the end of my modding run. Note the ai listed in the player slots above. A pic like this demonstrated that both the player slots and ai slots were working on a given ship or vehicle
It was pretty cool and very satisfying to watch the cap ships tear into each other when they engaged during a space battle. Reminded me of some of the shots from the movies once I started to get a good number of the ships working with AI. These dev shots really don't do justice to the visual appeal of flying around the ships as they exchanged hundreds of laser bolts at one another during a mele in one of the levels
Attacking an AI manned cruiser and an interesting POV shot from the R2 position on an x-wing.
My mod work kinda climaxed with the Carrack; a massive Imperial carrier that defied my every effort to get it to run with AI. After several weeks of nightly 5-6 hour attempts, I finally cracked it. Turned out that after all the effort, a ladder used by human players to change decks was the source of all the problems. After that was fixed, I messed around with a few new ships and the juggernaut design above, but all in all, I was pretty fried on Star Wars themed modding. I had been working two jobs, modding, and somehow managed to finish a master's during this time and it was time to get back to reality. Change was a coming, as they say....but that is another story....or another webpage or just plain irrelevant to the topic at hand...
