Nali Weapons 3 - Preview 2 (includes Nuclear Explosion)

[GenMoKai]

Owke... this really looks awesome! it looks so damn sweet!

[>@tack!<]

sec i have to change my wet pants.......... HOLY SHIT IT LOOKS AWESOME

[JackGriffin]

You guys do realize that once this gets released we will lose him? No way will the various companies overlook what he has done and NOT offer him a job. Take your time Ferali, I like having you around!

[Creavion]

In that case extreme well mappers like Revelation and Swanky would have already gotten a job as level designer. Have you ever seen Chronoshift for example? Beats any UT2004 Assault map I have ever seen. Swankys maps on the other hand are well known for their nearly perfect layouts and his maps also beat a lot of ut2004 maps in design and amount of detail sometimes. I would never be able to create something like that, not even in 20 years. There a lot of people who dont like those guys as "human" (long time ago I talked e.g over icq with one of the ONP mappers - I wont tell you who it was, since it does not matter anyway - but I can tell you, he was extremely arrogant "everybody wants to talk with me", I ended the conversation quickly and never chatted with him ever again), but from the designer aspect they are just and simply good.

This just does not work on that way, unless he (Ferali) would port his stuff to UDK for example or would just do something with modern game engines.

I admit I would have loved to become a level designer, but I sadly missed my chances, since I got my first computer rather late - compared to those "geeks" in the industry. When they started with modding I could not even spell the word "computer". And today my free time is rather limited and it does not get any better - rather worse. UT is still a fun game and its rather easy to mod or make a custom level for it. (although if you look at map-factory you can spot a lot of 2 hour crap maps). Modern game engines however requiere a huge amount of work if you want to create custom assets for it or you do it like several other "08/15" ut3 mappers for example. Using the stuff which is available at the very start resulting that most start to complain about the maps later which look very similar somehow.

[Feralidragon]

Thanks all

Thanks Jack, however I agree with Creavion, I would need to be able to pull something really impressing for them in an old engine, but like Creavion said, many people did and aren't in the industry (btw I also know PCs only since 2006, only knew the game 1 year later or so, and another year later here I am starting to pull my first crappy mods lol, which was when I got my first home internet connection lol).
As long people like them on release and somewhat play with them, that's all I need to be happy with it atm (many don't have even that).

Plus, I have 3 great personal ambitions to achieve for this game "development-wise", NW3 is still simply the 3rd one if I rank it regarding dificulty and potential popularity, and is the 1st phase of the one I am ranking 1st, so if I somehow "left", I wouldn't be able to pull the other 2 off, would I?

[Rakiayn]

wow thats very impressive
I woould love to see it in action
and also can I take alook at the code of the cybots sometime?
I am very curious how you did some things, like how do you prevent the bots from attacking the cybots of their own team

[iloveut99]

Check my post at the unreal admin.

[UT Sniper (SJA94)]

Looks fantastic did not think it was possible to make stuff like this on ut. it looks like it was made on udk or ut3.

[Feralidragon]

and also can I take alook at the code of the cybots sometime?
I am very curious how you did some things, like how do you prevent the bots from attacking the cybots of their own team

Well, once I release the pack you're free to look into the code and use it if you like (it will be open like all the mods I released so far), however I can tell now how it works (there's no need to keep secrets about it lol):
- Basically, you "don't" prevent it at all, that's impossible without a custom gametype: bots check if either a pawn is friendly or not by calling a function from the gametype class itself, and in team games it just checks the playerreplicationinfo, and obviouslly cybots can't have those otherwise they would be considered players and would be shown in the scoreboard.
What I did instead was a bit "hammered", but it works: generally bots ignore cybots in their AI code, so the cybots are coded so they atract enemy bots to forcefully attack them (as scriptedpawns and enemy cybots), however sometimes a bot from its own team attempts to attack the cybot in its own team, so what the cybot does is simple:
- Once bumped or damaged by a "friendly" bot, the cybot checks if the bot is taking it as an enemy, and if so the cybot sets the bot Enemy (and OldEnemy if also set to the cybot) to its own current enemy: a true enemy to consider or simply no enemy, and it works greatly: enemies attack the cybots, friends do not or when attempting they quit imediatelly and move on.


Like I said, not a very "beautifull" way to do it, but it's the only reliable way I found to do it in the standard gametypes. To this to be well done, I would need to make custom gametypes instead and change the function (which btw, gives access none errors everytime they see a cybot because the dummies at Epic didn't make the good old programming practise of validating the playerreplicationinfo references in object oriented programming, nothing I can avoid, but also nothing to be worried about in online games since generally there aren't bots running).

Check my post at the unreal admin.

Checked and replied

[GenMoKai]

Agree with crev... but still i think ferali should have his chance

[JackGriffin]

If you guys run down the list of talent that the different engine developers have hired from the mod community (I'm talking Epic's Unreal, Valve's development in Source, even EA and studios that port to console) very few "mappers" get called. Time and again it is the coder/developer that gets offered. It happened several times in Source, enough that now they offer monetary support to properly developed mods sold through Steam. Some of the developers working directly on Source games came from the mod community, same as Epic. I can assure you that this release will certainly be on their radar.

http://www.unrealplayground.com/forums/ ... hp?t=53573

from gamesindustry.biz ................... Epic president Mike Capps has said that competitions for the modding community are in part designed to help the development scene survive and grow in a rapidly changing PC market.
...
"Many of our folks were hired right out of the mod community," said Capps, speaking in an interview published today . "Watching the PC games market dip meant that the mod community was dipping as well - it's harder to get people to make a mod for a game when you don't have two million units out there.

"That's scary for us, because that's our next generation of game developers, and it's not likely to be the guys who made a Match-3 game in their basement and tried to throw it up on iPhone," he said. "It's more likely that the people we're going to hire are the ones that made 3D models for characters in a game engine - those are the ones we need for the kind of games we do."

I'm quite sure Ferali's single person effort rivals anything made by another single person, and is better than the majority of group work that comes out. Yeah, he's going to get attention if he markets this as a presentation of ability.

[Feralidragon]

Well, it's true that companies hire many modders (moddb actually supports and encourages other companies doing so), but let's place our feet onto the ground again and let me say this:

The truth is, I "would like" to develop games professionally, that's no secret, however personally I don't believe for 1 second that I will go anywhere with just a weapon pack. For me to convince anyone with an old engine, I would have to do really great unbelievable things, I really mean over the top, something not scalable relative other mods, and no matter how you look to this mod in particular, it's still a weapon mod addon to the game, nothing more, nothing less, it's not a TC, nor a campaign, nor an SDK, nor anything "big" like that.

For me to go anywhere with this mod alone, then Shadow , Dots, Smirf, and a few others would already have contacted for that reason, and afaik they weren't.
The way I see it, what makes me different from other modders is the fact that I can do both design and coding at somewhat the same level. In the development world, generally these 2 crash, you either are an excellent coder and suck at design (Dots for instance is a great example of that, as is/was Usaar33), or you are an excellent designer and suck at coding (there are too many within the community for me to count as examples, being mappers in that category as well). Personally I am slightly better at coding than I am at design. However, I am still a long way to be good enough to professionalize in either fields (although I already make some programming professionally since January of this year: PHP, JavaScript, ActionScript and I already made my own ShellScript in Linux to compile my UT packs exactly as I want, yet I don't know almost anything in C++ and there are lots of concepts I would need to learn first before doing anything greater.

For instance, do you know the real reason why Mr. Prophet from unrealsp is developing that big wonderfull SP? He said himself on public once: he wants to use that mod to enter the game industry at a professional level. But even so, it's hard doing so with such mod, unless other non-Epic companies look at it.

For anything to be noticed by Epic for instance, only with the UDK or UT3 mods, and with Valve the competition is just too much (thousands and thousands of mods, at the rate of at least 2 being updated every day). I prefer to stick with UT and keep doing my mods for it. Some people are getting crazy with this mod in particular, well, it's normal they expect me to achieve greater heights, but that's not going to happen for now, there's a bigger probability me shaking hands with Chuck Norris imho. As I said previouslly, I am already happy with the fact people find this mod interesting, and that's all I should expect imo, so don't think I will go anywhere after the release of this mod (I am used to people having great expectations over me in RL already, and surpass them somewhat, but that doesn't apply to this imo).

Thanks for your huge support, but let's not dream awaken.

[papercoffee]

You suck .....in making screen shots.
or
I suck ... in calibrating my monitor

I can't really see your beautiful cybots ...dammit.
Can you send me a sneak peek? hu? huh?? yeah??? I don't wanna the whole mod ...nohohoho ...only a tiny little bit... Come on! I'm addicted ... pleeeeeeeease ... one shot.

[Feralidragon]

lol, just brighten up your monitor, I took these shots in a very shitty bright LCD monitor, so they will appear very dark in any CRT monitor or any proper LCD monitor(I should have brighten them and add more contrast, but then the images would look better than what they actually look in-game (this happenned with NW2), this way it's the "raw" screenshots with some pretty borders and text lol).

Unlike when I promoted NW2, this time I don't need to take shots directly from the 3D render from MilkShape, I can take them directly in-game as they look much better now relative NW2 imho lol, so they get darker than what I wanted lol

[papercoffee]

Can you send me a sneak peek? hu? huh?? yeah??? I don't wanna the whole mod ...nohohoho ...only a tiny little bit... Come on! I'm addicted ... pleeeeeeeease ... one shot.

I meant a beta of your mod so I can write a preview ....... ........... I can't wait to use the Flame-Tracker.