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[Sean Mirrsen]

I suppose you could try DSTech... for a somewhat skewed idea of "balanced", anyway. I liked the dual-wielded MASSIVE FISTS OF PUNCHING DEATH (I think they got shunted to an "extra" folder in the latest release, along with a few other favorites of mine).

[Duke 2.0]

 Fun overpowered crap that I can dick around with. If it resembles AAL, then it is a step in the right direction.

 Also, rocket silos. Constantly respawning rockets to use however you want.

 I have issues with DSTech...

[Sean Mirrsen]

I don't know what issues you speak of, but they're still one of my favorite "races" to test things with. Especially if "things" tend to kill the user upon firing. During testing, I somehow made a weapon (rocket launcher of sorts) that managed to dismember the MPAM that was holding it, throwing it across the grassland map twice and embedding it in my bunker's roof. I then realized I made the thing's thruster shoot invisible, but tangible blunt projectiles of several metric tons' weight, at supersonic speeds. To the weapon's credit, it did leave a neat tunnel through most of the ground on the level, so it wasn't all bad.

[Duke 2.0]

 That is just the thing. If a weapon requires DSTech to use then it will destroy too much terrain for my likings. Granted playing some superpowered world-destroyers fighters is nice, but modifying the activities file to drop other DSTech units just means the world ends that much quicker. At least with AAL you can play as elite forces and get away with it for a while.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Well, the later DSTech added small drones with acceptably small weapons. There's no harm in getting to deal with superpowered terminator-killer robots every once in a while. I liked to see how long I can hold out against a purely DSTech skirmish sometimes. (Answer - even in a heavily fortified base, not too long. With extra superweapons and territory control devices like the blizzard gun, a little longer. With the OMFGDUMMYROCKETBAZOOKA, indefinetly unless someone survives the landing.)

[Geti]

That's cool. I thought it was dead, though that was about two months ago. What are you working on at the moment?

It is dead, as such. The other guys working on it vanished.
Currently, I'm redoing everything. I'm boiling both sides down a bit more, and making it more focused on fun than "oh my god so much content", I want a small amount that's polished. Currently what I've got "done" is completely remaking the zombie actor (there's only one as of now), and porting/tweaking a few weapons, and making some new ones. I want them balanced and simple for now, I might add some more rediculous ones in (for late game stuff, if it all works out how I'm planning, with more of a "hold the fort oh god the zombies are coming they just got fred oh god" feel than the Z09 "look at my guy, his gun is amazing, give it a lick ooh its killing the zombies etc". I'll likely reuse some of roon's yummy sprites, but most of it is getting redone. It's a shame to drop allens concepts, but he isnt around to help much anymore, and I dont have the drive to sprite and code something I only have half the idea for on top of my own games.

[Aqizzar]

I'm a lazy lazy man, and just understanding the pseudo-code construction of CC models is a bear and a half, but let no one say I quailed under pressure.

Oh man, I'm gonna waste so many afternoons trying to learn to mod this myself.  Cave Story Mod ho!

The arms are confusing the Hell out of me, but by God I think I know where I'm going.  UDPATE: Going indeed.



I have absolutely no idea how the walk systems or limbs work, so I hedged my bet and just made the leg graphics (of the Coalition Soldier model I'm altering) completely blank.  Mimigas just kinda waddle on they're stumpy little rabbit-feet, and this model actually works fairly well, in terms of the feet moving back and forth.  Now I need to scrunch everything in, learn how to properly place the arms and hands, and decide what to do with the jetpack.  Oh and make an added-part-extension-thing for the tail, if I don't just weld it to the torso.  If I make the tail work okay, I might do the same for the ears, so they hang with gravity.

[ToonyMan]

Finishing that will be awesome.

[Footkerchief]

*thread implodes into a black hole from excessive indie cred density*

[Sean Mirrsen]

Leg walk systems work like IK chains, except without the IK.

You've noticed that leg animations are essentially just different lengths of a leg. These are used whenever a leg needs to contract/extend. Inside the leg attachment definitions, you define the min/max length of the leg, which should match the graphics. Once you have done that, you should make the walkpath, which is what gets many people confused but is actually pretty straightforward if you've ever done per-frame IK animation. You basically set a series of points that a foot must follow in relation to the leg's origin.

Placing attachments on the body, be they arms, legs, or jetpacks, is also rather easy - in the attachment definition you define the "sprite offset", which will normally be dead center on the sprite (so you put half the sprite's width and height for X and Y, in negative because you're starting from a corner), and when you add the attachment to the parent, you can define "parent offset", which places the object relative to the parent's origin.

If you want a tail or ears, you can define additional attachments in much the same way the jetpack is, and add them to the object you want with AddAttachable. Make sure to assign proper materials to the attachments, and don't forget you can also make them animated.

If you want a similar-looking jetpack, you'll need custom pusher particles instead of the usual jetpack exhaust, but you can easily define those.

Ask me if you hit a snag anywhere.

[Aqizzar]

Ask me if you hit a snag anywhere.

Prepare for snags galore.  Actually, I've barely started messing with the file, so I'm not asking for help yet.  I understand the theory behind how the walkpaths and attachments work, I just haven't done any experimentation to learn how the fine details work.  I don't have any experience with Inverse Kinematics (thanks Wikipedia), but I can count Pixel-Sprite-Making among my list of Dabbling level skills, so I do have a very small handle on this already.  So far, my biggest question is just understanding what parts of the existing models are necessary.  If I understand correctly, the different frames of each bodypart are cycled through in equal time with movement, and that all a part really needs is one frame.  Or maybe I'm wrong.  Also, my hands are all over the place.

The sprite-making is a different question, but mostly a cosmetic one.  I can forsee a problem with these tiny-ass mimigas, that their legs are going to be too small to clamber around on Cortex-terrain, nevermind how hard they'll be to hit.  I'm trying to decide whether to base the models on the original Dokutsu Monogatari sprites (where characters fit within 16x16 frames) or on the new Wii port (where mimigas are about 28 of 32x32 pixels tall, 2/3s the height of humanoids like Dummies and Soldiers).  Of course, if I was nearly as competent as I claimed to be, I'd just make my own sprites, but whatever.

[Sean Mirrsen]

Go with the PC version, they're supposed to be much smaller than normal humans.

The parts don't need frames per se, but unless they're so small that it has no effect, they'll look odd when walking. Arms don't animate when walking, they animate as they change position to aim or hold different weapons.

[Omegastick]

Yo, bumping this topic because I just rediscovered the beautiful carnage of this game. I've been playing with Crobotech, Unitec, Smartbrain and many other mods in my most recent game and I thought about something. This Smartbrain AI (you can probably get a hold of it on the forums somewhere) is amazing. It's incredibly simple but several times in that game I trusted it with firing high powered weapons over my head and defending the passage to my brain single handedly and it never failed to please. I was playing as the Unitec faction (with some other mods thrown in, for instance the mod with the health routers) and being attacked by the onslaught of Crobotech robots. From the first robot teleported in I thought that I was going to die on the first wave. Crobotech robots have an energy shield on both them and their weapons that can shrug off masses of small arms fire before going down, and then the have plentiful amounts of armour and health. On top of that they have immensely powerful weapons, if rather slow to fire. The first robot killed my two snipers before they could react and jet packed up into the face of a CPU controlled assault unit. Much to my surprise, the assault unit ducked as I fired a high energy laser (the only thing I had that was capable of penetrating the shield without having to disable it with much small arms fire) over it's head (I was aiming to shoot through it) and then it proceeded to finish the robot off with an SMG. From this moment on I knew that we were going to make an excellent team, and I survived a whole seven minutes against the numberless and powerful foe before something very bad happened. They dug through my walls and into my health router system. They started to take health off the router system and killed everything but two turrets that I hadn't hooked up and my brain. I let the AI control one turret and I the other and we blasted away at the horde for a whole minute and thirty seconds before being overrun. At eight minutes and forty seven seconds the brain was destroyed and I wrote this as a tribute to my AI friend.

EDIT: Just for clarification, I was limiting myself to a fund limit of seven thousand and I wasn't buying anything throughout the game. What I started with was what I got.

[Saint]

Why bump it, not like the creator is going to ever finish it.

[forsaken1111]

Why bump it, not like the creator is going to ever finish it.

You say this on the DF forums?