Hard Light Productions Forums
Archived Boards => The Archive => Blackwater Operations => Topic started by: Vasudan Commander on September 13, 2008, 10:46:06 pm
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Hi,
Rather then negatively moan and groan in the obvious 'whens it coming?' manner, i thought id make a positive contribution , if i can at all, to BWO. I understand that perhaps as 'keepers of BWO' , there may be secrets regarding the campaign you do not wish to share, which is quite understandable given the time and effort you've put into it.
Nevertheless I wish to ask if there is any way I or anyone else with skills related to making missions/coding/model building can contribute to helping finalise BWO and bringing about one of the most overbearing Juggernaut-class of campaigns.
so...need some help?
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Nevertheless I wish to ask if there is any way I or anyone else with skills related to making missions/coding/model building can contribute to helping finalise BWO and bringing about one of the most overbearing Juggernaut-class of campaigns.
so...need some help?
I think all they've got left to do is finish up the voice acting and to update a bunch of models into so-called HTL versions. So if you can contribute on either front it'd probably be good. All the missions minus testing are done. I'm trying to do a model for them myself if I can ever find some free time (I'm sure I can find some when I'm unemployed in a month or so). But, I'm not a project member so don't really speak for them. But yeah, let's help get this bad boy finished.
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I could contribute to the voice acting certainly. :D
I would really like to see a good lot of people rally around this campaign/game in itself and finish it once and for all.
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Right now I believe their primary need is for modellers and texture artists.
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Those were my thoughts also - voice acting would be much easier to do compared to texturing, modelling and the like.
Unfortunately i have no skills in that department :sigh:
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Those were my thoughts also - voice acting would be much easier to do compared to texturing, modelling and the like.
Unfortunately i have no skills in that department :sigh:
So go download Sketchup, Blender, Truespace or one of the other freely available 3d modelling programs and start developing those skills! :D There's lots of modelling tutorials out there. And ask lots of questions on the forums as well.
Given your forum alias it would be great if you learned modelling as well, because man do we need more Vasudan modellers. They never get any lovin'
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Nevertheless I wish to ask if there is any way I or anyone else with skills related to making missions/coding/model building can contribute to helping finalise BWO and bringing about one of the most overbearing Juggernaut-class of campaigns.
so...need some help?
I think all they've got left to do is finish up the voice acting and to update a bunch of models into so-called HTL versions. So if you can contribute on either front it'd probably be good. All the missions minus testing are done. I'm trying to do a model for them myself if I can ever find some free time (I'm sure I can find some when I'm unemployed in a month or so). But, I'm not a project member so don't really speak for them. But yeah, let's help get this bad boy finished.
Missions have been tested. However, once the new models are finished a final passthrough will be needed to make sure that nothing became broken, etc. by altered ship geometry.
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Basically what everyone else said: models, textures and conversions is what we need. I myself have been pretty inactive work wise in the last year, due to RL stuff, but I'm still here to help coordinate stuff related to models :)
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Those were my thoughts also - voice acting would be much easier to do compared to texturing, modelling and the like.
Unfortunately i have no skills in that department :sigh:
So go download Sketchup, Blender, Truespace or one of the other freely available 3d modelling programs and start developing those skills! :D There's lots of modelling tutorials out there. And ask lots of questions on the forums as well.
Given your forum alias it would be great if you learned modelling as well, because man do we need more Vasudan modellers. They never get any lovin'
Well whats more needed ; terran ships or vasudan ships?
either way - it'd take some time to learn to try to mod - anyone have any hotlinks or suggestions where i can start?
p.s looked at the modding section - wasn't much help. Perhaps some advice from BWO veterans would be appreciated?
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Well whats more needed ; terran ships or vasudan ships?
either way - it'd take some time to learn to try to mod - anyone have any hotlinks or suggestions where i can start?
p.s looked at the modding section - wasn't much help. Perhaps some advice from BWO veterans would be appreciated?
Well if you want general modding advice your best bet is the modding forum, not BWO. BWO deals with a specific mod, their main need right now is for people who know how to model to upgrade a bunch of their stuff to higher-poly versions. That doesn't mean BWO members won't help you, but if you post in the modding forum you might get help from them, and from all other sorts of modellers. Here you're likely to get far less responses.
In general, there are lots of Terran ships, there are quite a few less Vasudan ships, and even less Shivan ships after that.
As for some help re: modeling
Well . . . some tutorials:
Freespace Oracle is a place to start:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/modding.html (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/FAQ/modding.html)
Here's one tutorial that talks about modelling in Blender (freeware program as far as I know):
http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs2/mods/fighterguide/ (http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/fs2/mods/fighterguide/)
There's a little bit on the wiki about modelling:
http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Modelling (http://www.hard-light.net/wiki/index.php/Modelling)
Main thing of interest is that it talks about some programs you can use (ie Blender, Sketchup)
There are lots of tutorials on the internet as well, some for Blender here for example (there are also some for lightwave, which I think is free????)
http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Blender-3d/Modelling/1 (http://www.tutorialized.com/tutorials/Blender-3d/Modelling/1)
And yeah, a lot of the tutorials just talk about crap like . . . making a coke bottle, or a wine glass, but the lessons can still be applied to something a little more interesting like spaceships and whatnot.
Anyway, hope some of this helps. And if you need more, just ask in some of the proper forums. People are generally pretty helpful.
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Just like to reiterate that its definitely the texturing/modeling part that we're lacking on right now (and have been for some time). Once those are to a certain standard and the missions are retested its just a matter of the voice acting. There is some division on which point we'll decide to release on...we may be better able to get voice actors after an initial non-voiced release but that would be a huge problem for people playing the early version because there is just so much text!
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p.s looked at the modding section - wasn't much help. Perhaps some advice from BWO veterans would be appreciated?
For modelling you can try hitting 3dTotal.com or cgsociety.org, their the best around. But the main skill needed IMO is always a good sense of design (pleasing forms, finding out how a ship would be built etc).
And of course during development the staff gives guidance\advice on things (we always want things better :D )
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we may be better able to get voice actors after an initial non-voiced release but that would be a huge problem for people playing the early version because there is just so much text!
IceFire isn't exaggerating, it's the Planescape: Torment of campaigns :)
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Then they can pause it and read it like I do and deal with it. It is better than having BWO delayed for another 2 years or more just to have a non-essential component like voices added immediately. It isn't vital and can wait.
Given the amount of dialogue there is supposidely is maybe it is essential.
Regardless, you only ever get to experience a campaign once for the first time. If the experience will be so much better with voices I can understand them holding off on it.
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Texture artist? What about freespaceking? :)
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Tell that to the people who play The Procyon Insurgency. Lots of dialog, no voices, but very popular.
Yeah PI is great, and probably the campaign to most accurately capture the feel of Freespace 2 imo (In terms of mission structure, story progression). Flames of War is pretty similar to but it follows info from the FS2 campaign so, cheats a bit :) haha.
PI isn't character driven though. BWO is as far as I know. Think about playing WC:Prologue without the voices. Wouldn't quite be the same.
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I think you don't get his point.
I think it would be better to release the campaign ASAP. We can all wait for a voice acting and model upgrading patch. These two features aren't the most important thing. We'll hardly play through BWO once, we'll have the possibility of enjoying the voice acting later, when it's done.
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I think you don't get his point.
I think it would be better to release the campaign ASAP. We can all wait for a voice acting and model upgrading patch. These two features aren't the most important thing. We'll hardly play through BWO once, we'll have the possibility of enjoying the voice acting later, when it's done.
You don't get my point. You only play something for the first time once.
Playing a campaign with Voice Acting for the first time, is not the same as playing a campaign for the second time with a voice acting upgrade.
Of course it's up to BWO what they want to do.
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But you understand that I(and many others) prefer a campaign without voice acting over a voice acted campaign that will be released who-knows-when?
Derelict became a must-have without voice acting.
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Just because the old audience has moved on doesn't mean there won't be a new audience to reap the rewards of an eventual release. I don't think about BWO or any other mods, there's like 30-40 campaigns i've never even played. I have to play through all of those and run out of things to play before I start caring about any of these in-progress mods personally. The biggest risk to any MOD isn't the public losing interest, it's the modders themselves losing interest. That's what really kills a mod. Because whenever something's released, people will still play it, whoever's around at the time.
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It is always worth finishing something the right way the first time no matter how long it takes.
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Why do we even need to have continuous interest in the project until it's released? When it comes, it comes, and we can rave all about it as we finally get to play it. Until then, we don't even particularly have to think about it, other than the occasional pondering of when it will finally be released. So long as the mod team keeps working, it'll make it out at some point.
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All I have to say is we have been waiting for 8 years so far and we are tired of waiting. The project will eventually lose public support and people will decide to give up waiting if this keeps up. People will eventually decide to forget BWO and move on if they get too old and have more in life to deal with in the future and it still isn't released, and then BWO will lose complete public support thus making it so it will never be released or get worked on and at that point far into the future, even if released, the fans' lives would have changed so much that they wouldn't care about BWO. That would have made all the work in vain and it isn't worth the risk. I'm sure the BWO forum was much more active and the progress speed was much faster in 2002 than now. Most people got tired of waiting and forgot about BWO and moved on, I think. I have to admit that I don't think about BWO much anymore like I did back then because thinking about it and thinking it will be released soon is pointless and waste of time when we all know it is very unlikely to be the case and I'm getting older too. I first heard about BWO when I was about 18 and now I'm almost 26 and BWO is the least on my mind. Maybe I get interested in other things in life and other games and also want to focus more on the future in my life.
We're really not out for popularity contests although its certainly nice to know people want to play what we've been working on for all this time. If people move on...they do. Its not like we can stop them or help it either. We do what we do on the limited resources we had...we lost most of the staff on the project several times or everyone went away for a while and then came back. We had some more recent infusions of new blood which helps. But its a large project...nobody is getting paid...so everyone does it when they can. So we're not living up to certain individuals requirements for timeline...thats ok.
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And it's not like we don't wish we couldn't have given it to you yesterday. It's just that it's not done keeps getting in the way.
I'll close this, any help we need, we'll ask for.