Author Topic: Just Another Day Development Blog  (Read 234001 times)

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Offline Axem

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Just Another Day Development Blog
If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs, just watch the video! It's about an hour compressed into 5 minutes of FREDding and playtesting to get a bunch of questions working with the prompt box script. So minor spoilers abound!

I had a large sense of dread that everything was going to go haywire on the first test, so I was quite happy that it worked so well and managed to get it 90% done in only 6 playtests! (The last 10% was boring refining and tuning that's even more boring than what you see here)

Maybe if I've got a future mission sufficiently planned, I'll do one from bare bones to "mostly done".
« Last Edit: July 02, 2013, 08:43:38 pm by Axem »

 

Offline Rodo

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
oh damn, massive sexps.

btw, Copy/Paste in fred2..



share your secret oh mister Axem, as you did with mighty spacebar!
el hombre vicio...

 

Offline Darius

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Spoiler:
The video isn't sped up. Axem really does FRED an hour's work in 5 minutes.

 

Offline An4ximandros

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
 Advanced Xenogenetically Enhanced Mapper

Awesome.

 

Offline Oddgrim

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
I just saw that long line of text which made little sense to me and blacked out, when I woke up again it was all over! (awsom vidya bah teh wuy :p)
[GhostOfMjn: I can provide hi res vasudan ass]
[Hades]: we have so much in common we should bang.
My models page:
http://p3d.in/u/Oddgrim

 

Offline Arpit

  • 27
Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Love the AXEM.....
But hate the EXAM

Spoiler:
Soooo, a Rahu gas miner is the tenth beta tester who has stolen the Titanic.  :lol:
BTW what's that akrotiri for ?

 

Offline Axem

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
oh damn, massive sexps.

btw, Copy/Paste in fred2..

share your secret oh mister Axem, as you did with mighty spacebar!

You mean uh, ?


Arpit: All will make sense when JAD2.22 is released... wait this is JAD... It'll make... JAD-sense?

 

Offline Rodo

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
ouu nousss, I though you had a shortcut for that!

I hate right clicking on every frikking sexp to do that :sigh:
el hombre vicio...

 

Offline Cyborg17

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Definitely better than looking up all the options you need in the menus.

 

Offline swashmebuckle

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Aaaaaaa high speed flyout menu sensory overload

 

Offline Arpit

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Axem, can we win in this JAD ?  :)

EDIT: Also will there be cake? I heard that you have put some candy bar stuff in there.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2013, 03:39:28 pm by Arpit »

 

Offline Axem

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Re: If you've ever wondered how Axem FREDs
Can you win? Well, since the subtitle to the next part will be "You can(not) win" I would say... maybe.

And we'll see about all the food!

 

Offline Axem

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
I'm turning this into a Dev Blog type thread. People like that kind of stuff.

Fun with Backgrounds

I have a love-hate relationship with backgrounds. I love looking at them, who knew coloured clouds of gas would look so nice. But I hate making them, especially with FRED's painful "1 degree at a time" placement. So its no surprise that I like to spend the least amount of effort as possible on backgrounds. For JAD3, I just ran each mission through a random background generator and the results were... good enough. There was no semblance of artistic vision, it was just random nebula backgrounds, which is what I would probably just do anyway! Since these were the days before Lightspeed's nebulas were a normal addition to the mediavps, I was just dealing with either Volition's backgrounds, or the slightly touched up ones that were in the Mediavps. It didn't help matters anyway.


Even the new Arcadia cannot save this picture being a travesty

For Vassago, seeing as the campaign took place in Capella, I just took a background from a mediavp upgraded mission that takes place in Capella. It was pretty sparse though, but I didn't want to waste time with them. I like a background that you can see from any angle you're viewing it from. It may be less "real" but it helps build a familiarness to a region of space, and it can help see ships that are far off in the distance (even though the low poly-ness can hurt that). Then I got a slightly "fuller" background from someone on IRC (I forget who!), and the only thing I changed were the bright orange-red nebulas to a not as bright tan. The more desaturated scheme, with that small batch of red, fit will with the campaign.


The Arcadia looking slightly better here... Can we do better?

So now we're in JAD2.21. As I was building the first mission, which was like a FreeSpace remake of the beginning of Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0. I sort of had to make a new background as a result. So I went with a just using the nice bright blue nebula backgrounds, scaling some of the simpler ones up high so they would be a good background to the other more detail backgrounds. And it worked pretty nicely. So nice, that I decided to use it as the primary background for the FRED Knossos system.


Better... better...

But it wasn't perfect yet! I still felt the background could be better, needed to be brightened up a bit. I had already released JAD2.21, but I could get away with slightly retconning the background a bit. Well, I was getting a little annoyed with how I could see the fuzzy pixellated edges on some of the highly scaled bitmaps. So I decided to try my hand at using Spacescape. It took a bit of tinkering with, but I finally was able to get something that had the same color scheme as the original bitmaps. No, thank YOU, eyedropper tool. The only problem was that I didn't like how Spacescape did stars. I liked Herra's starfields so much more.

Luckily, I knew that without an alpha channel, skybox textures render additively. Thus it was just a simple matter of taking the skybox from another model and making it into a subobject of my main colourful nebula. I loved the result so much, it was a no-brainer to make the switch.


Ah, there we go!

Thinking about nice skyboxes made me think of the first mission again. The first mission takes place at the Beta Prime Research Facility, which is supposed to be in another system (Cause like the 4th Beta Tester jumped in from there!). What to replace it with? Sins of a Solar Empire had very beautiful skyboxes that I had been eyeing for quite sometime.



Welcome to the hell system!

In fact, I had already nabbed the skybox files and even had a skybox model that would show the graphics properly. Their skybox files are mapped really weird, so when I showed one to Herra them. SO crazy that he did some magic stuff to it that better utilized the mapping space and filesize, while sacrificing very little quality. BP: Tenebra was going to use a recolored version as the background to the Jupiter mission before I thought the majestic clouds were a little too visible for a gas giant. So things went full circle for a bit and I thought the original was perfect for the Beta Experimentation Testing/Analysis Zone System. So in the next big release, you'll be seeing that in the first mission!


Oh and this one, you'll be going here next time Holley goes shopping.

Gee Axem, are you just teasing us with all your pretty pictures? Are you just hoarding them?!

How dare you, good sir! Why, I had this nice package of 3 skyboxes to share! Now I'm hurt. Nah, I can't stay mad at you.


Axem's Skybox Pack 1! - Includes Bright Blue, Bright Green and Blood Red skyboxes.

Bright Blue and Bright Green skybox textures made by Axem
Starfield textures made by Herra Tohtori
Blood Red skybox texture from Sins of a Solar Empire, modified by Herra Tohtori.

Note: The Bright Blue and Blood Red Skyboxes use the mediavp starfield (starfield0001, included in the download), while the Bright Green skybox uses the Blue Planet skybox textures (SBTOP etc etc). The Blue Planet skybox is a lot more dense with stars, so you may like it more or less. You can use PCS to edit the skybox textures if you want something a little different.

Have fun!

 

Offline Shivan Hunter

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
Quote
Then I got a slightly "fuller" background from someone on IRC (I forget who!)

That was meeeee (back when I was still DarthGeek on IRC)

I really liked the SoaSE background from the Tenebra mission. Have you ever considered using EVE Online nebulae? I really like their cloudy look.

My favorite background by far would have to be Herra's one from the BP:AoA DC. I know how he made it, and I've tried to copy it with other Hubble images, but it never looks very good since I'm patching a bunch of images together. Herra didn't need to, he found the one gigantic and interesting image with no blurriness or graininess or huge stars obscuring the view.

 
Re: Just Another Day Development Blog

Oh and this one, you'll be going here next time Holley goes shopping.

:eek2: GENIUS! Let's all get our mods ad-sponsored! That way modders can make a living of it and fully invest their time into EVEN BETTER mods, while they'll still be free for all to play! See? Everyone wins!

(Next step: in-game purchases ;) )

 

Offline Arpit

  • 27
Re: Just Another Day Development Blog

Oh and this one, you'll be going here next time Holley goes shopping.
[/quote]

*Arpit is searching for image named as Shut up and take my money*

Win.  :nod: :yes:

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
in-game purchases? Great. Just fuuuuuuuuucking great. Not even FS2 mods escape the virus.

 

Offline MatthTheGeek

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
Resistance is futile.
People are stupid, therefore anything popular is at best suspicious.

Mod management tools     -     Wiki stuff!     -     Help us help you

666maslo666: Releasing a finished product is not a good thing! It is a modern fad.

SpardaSon21: it seems like you exist in a permanent state of half-joking misanthropy

Axem: when you put it like that, i sound like an insane person

bigchunk1: it's not retarded it's american!
bigchunk1: ...

batwota: steele's maneuvering for the coup de gras
MatthTheGeek: you mispelled grâce
Awaesaar: grace
batwota: oh right :P
Darius: ah!
Darius: yes, i like that
MatthTheGeek: the way you just spelled it it means fat
Awaesaar: +accent I forgot how to keyboard
MatthTheGeek: or grease
Darius: the killing fat!
Axem: jabba does the coup de gras
MatthTheGeek: XD
Axem: bring me solo and a cookie

 

Offline Arpit

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
in-game purchases? Great. Just fuuuuuuuuucking great. Not even FS2 mods escape the virus.

No taxes in-game, please.

 

Offline Axem

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Re: Just Another Day Development Blog
Good news and bad news!

Good news first, JAD2.22 will not release this year, as was my own intended goal! Wait, that's bad. The second part is much larger, at last count around 22 missions planned. Which is funny, because the first half was only 9 missions long. There's also a chance of the second half being split... again... So who knows! (How this silly idea got to be nearly 30 missions long is a mystery to us all)

Now for the bad news, you're still getting some JADness! Announcing...

Just Another Day 2.2 Xtreme Arcade!
Coming soon...
All the fun of JAD2.22 without the actual waiting for actual releases! Its WIN-WIN!
The release will consist of a hub mission plus 4 simple missions with two modes each. So really, its like 8 missions!
The missions give a preview of how things will play in JAD2.22, though there will be legit story based reasons why things are different! (Except item drops, those are getting retconned as "always were there")
Your scores are recorded so you can compete against yourself or... others! If all goes well, I'll be setting up a leaderboard of sorts where you can submit your scores and compete with other forumites.

And look, pretty pictures!
Flying through a race course!

Facing off against a theoretically infinite number of enemies!


LASTLY! I am looking for a few people to help me test this. Each mission will have a rank that you'll be graded as and I need to know what are some good ranking spots. So I need people even if they play on Very Easy with a Joystick or on Insane with a mental connection to their computer. And also I need to know if I've made some weapon super cheap and OP that nothing else is worth using. I know, balance in JAD? Wat?!

So if you have some free time right now and know how to test and break missions, send me a PM. But I'll warn you, if you do a bad job at Beta Testing, guess who's getting used as inspiration for new Beta Testers in JAD...  :drevil: