Campaign Experience

[cdxbow]

Hi everyone,
We are still waiting on our animator who is struggling exporting an md5 mech model, so while we wait we have been working on maps and in particular the Campaigns. I played the alphacampaign and it was a bit of a let down at the end (Marvin - "where's the kabooom?") So we had a go a making some ourselves. The most finished is a big airport map (arport7) and we had a lot of fun building and tweaking. I found a few things that may be useful to folks making SP maps for Red Eclipse

A. Altering enemies behavoir
The enemyspawntime (default 60000) turned out to be vital to get the level to work. This variable determines when enemies respawn. Otherwise the entities respawned (which we didn't want) and showed their 'cattle going to pasture' behavoir where they wander off and don't interact. Very unconvincing to see a line of tanks heading off to pasture. So if you want them to spawn only once then set it longer than the level will take. I have used 900000 for the mekarcade airport7 map and this seems to work well. You can finish the level without the entities respawning. This can be set it your script, we do when we launch the level from a custom campaign menu, or on the fly at the console, or even as a server variable sv_enemyspawntime.

Other global enemy variables you might alter - untried and straight from vars.h:
enemyspawndelay (default 1000) time after map start enemies first spawn
enemyspawnstyle - 0 = all at once, 1 = staggered, 2 = random, 3 = randomise between both
enemyspeed
enemyscale
enemystrength - scale enemy health values by this much
enemybalance

For a mecha game the bots/entities code needs a bit of tweaking for more convining but thats for another day.

B. New entities
We added a mech and tank entity. Ironically the mech that we can't get to animate as the player character works beautifully as an NPC! Lifes a bitch, huh! Having some different opponents really adds to a better campaign feel.

I also added tried adding a 'destructible' entity, the aim being to add 'destructible objects', for example at the end of the airport 7 campaign you have to destroy an orbital gun (basically a clone of the turret entity code with a big gun model instead). It still lacks the kaboom factor cause it just has standard entity explosion and none of it's own. One option is to add an exposion animation to the model and trigger it as a death animation. Then I thought, maybe I could try using a mapmodel, without making an entity, and triggering it linking it to another model, but found no way to intercept hits. A question for the devs. Am I right in saying there is currently no way to intercept weapon shots with just triggers and map models and I would have to use a custom entity to make destructible objects?

C. Ending the level
Campaigns need a decent end. So we tried a few things. As the scripting docs are lacking and you can't always assume sauer stuff works. I couldn't find any script examples in the release maps, so this may be helpful to people. Broadly there are 2 ways to end:

1. Reaching a point - We have done this OK with triggers, tiggering both scripts, loading maps and md5 animation (but not md3, what is it with md3's and RE!) Anyway this technique works well, it works launching maps, custom guis, animations etc. see simple script below, this loads a campaign map with a few mutators. You need to have set up a trigger with index 2 (mode 1 action 0 radius 0 action 2 index 2 id 1) on your map

"on_trigger_2" = [
echo "Trigger 2 - test run alphacampaign" // feedback to the console that you have triggered the event.
mode 2 64; map alphacampaign // do the businesss
]

2. Reaching a value - Another option is when a value is reacked and I quickly tried scripting something to use 'frags' in the old Sauer way but that's not what it's called now. I haven't proceeded any further. Other than deaths and times other potentials I noted are the pointlimit, capturelimit, defendlimit that could be used.

D. Starting a level
Being able to set the scene before a campaign always helps, this script also goes in the map config and pops up a custom gui on loading map plus some feedback in the console. We use it for storyline or instructions. It can be extended in many ways.

"on_start" = [ echo "^fyTesting Grounds: House Euphrates 3712 AD"
echo "^fyTest your Mek, weapons, time trials and check out the models."
//I tried putting the newgui code in other places but when you saved the map it was wiped. it is safe here.
newgui Launch [
guititle "The Testing Grounds"
guitext "PUT YOUR TEXT AND BUTTONS HERE"
guibutton "Close" "cleargui"
]
showgui Launch
]

Other than the playermodel issues the project is proceeding well and hope you will be able to enjoy it sometime in july.

Cheers

CD

[Kitsune]

So where's the downloads? Has it been commited to svn? I can probably help some, more so with the gameplay than the modeling and such.

[cdxbow]

Kitsune,

Theres not a lot of source changes, mainly added entities, weapon mods and names of a few of the config files. So really the source is not a big deal. In fact I have been trying to reduce the source changes and I can almost do it with none. And thank you for the offer of help, soon as we have a working mech I can release expansion pak, and I will let you know; we would be very happy for you to help with gameplay. Because we have been focused on 'technical problem' and art production we haven't done much tweaking.

[Kitsune]

Oki! Once It is released or there is a testable version, please let me know and I can record how it plays out and post it for review on how difficult, etc.., it is.