I am being literal here. I will give some examples. Some of this will be theoretical since we do not have server assets. Thus try to use anything you can present to support your answer. I may try to answer myself. 1) How easy would it be to modify a unit, and what things could you modify? Could you modify rates of fires of dox, ranges of cannons of ants, speed of shell travel for pelters, turning speeds for bombers or fighters, the speed at which the commander moves his waist? 2) How easy would it be to create a unit based heavily on an existing unit? Could you make your t2 bot fabbers build like a structure a giant dox, based solely on copying and changing numbers in the game? Could you just use the same model like that and adjust it's size and the unit's animation speeds and such? 3) How easy would it be to create a new unit from scratch? Besides borrowing a template of other existing unit, could one make a model, config, weapons and projectiles, and place them alongside existing ones in the folders, and simply use it ingame afterwards?
Making a nice looking model + balancing it right should be the hardest part. If not PA failed as a game that meant for modding imho
Yeah. I looked at the files myself. All familiar, yet different. Has anyone else seen a game with this type of engine? It is incredible this can actually all be HTML programming, why don't all games use this? That being said, it is all libraries and that is all familiar, but all the hooks are files and html code, so it looks like standard libraries with configs attaching units to a model and weapon and ammo and behaviour, except it is very wierd seeing it straight referenced as html referencing file locations. Is there a comparable game on comparable engine, and if so is that said game as flexible as it sounds? From my theory, the hardest part won't be players making content, it will be the transmittion of data to make it work for everyone, and if Uber or a player quickly after release puts together a good mod manager then that will be that. Renegade never had one originally, 10 years later eventually a player made one that simply allows a server to own a folder and transmit the custom maps and such to a player who has a game patch cooperating with it. Minecraft has a mod manager, just not a mod sharing patch, yet this last patch allows players to get texture packs recommended to view in servers, so hopefully one day minecraft will install necesary server mods for any random whom joins the server. That all being said, that is my only percieved roadblock. The distribution of mods with no effort on the clueless newbie joining player, so we can all enjoy random new content players make.
I don't think making new units will involve any html. Making new units has nothing to do with the UI. I'd wager that the units have to be defined in json files and maybe have some sort of scripting for the behavior.
If you have no previous modding skills i would say making a unit would be difficult. You need to learn basic 3D modeling skill's, Then if you want animation's in your unit you need to learn about how the bone system works. Taking a pre-made unit and modifying that is probably an easy place to start, but it still require knowledge of some form of 3d modeling program like blender that can export compatible models. I think the easiest beginner mods for unit's would be just be modifying the .json file that set's it's stat's and weapons. cloning unit's and changing something small maybe in the 3d model so it looks different from the stock unit and then change it's weapon or stats.
That answers 1) 2) and 3) then max. 1 would be mundane to do, very simple to read and change a number. 2 would not be much harder compared to any knowledge at all of other games. I bet it isn't so different from other library based games, although again I know of no games with this engine so the library parts are familiar but written differently but basically I can tell what everything does as long as I don't have to write one from scratch. 3 would be possible for me to do I think as long as I could start with an existing thing and replace every feature of it one at a time, from model to animation to behaviour, until nothing is the same as it was. Again, as long as I didn't have to write from scratch. Another game to compare the engine to would be useful on asumption testing. Generally, it is agreed that if someone made a custom configuration for units right now, it would theoretically work by all logic if loaded when the server was released. There is just a lot of arguement based on how nobody can test it, if it would actually work as we thought. I don't see any fallacies myself, and generally the simpler one goes the less problems likely to occur. Blender models are difficult and bones are currently sketchy, but existing models with numbers changes should read right on load. Speaking of, how exactly are models "sized" and animations "scripted" in this game? Never looked in on that, is the size of the model adjustable, and how so? Are the animations possible to speed up and slow down by an arbitrary number, or what is the method of editing those?
I'm using 3Ds MAX to export my models as blender is a fail for me my end when i try to export .papa and the FBX i export all seem to break. I make the model in blender and then i import it into 3ds max and use that to export it, i also import a PA unit into 3ds max before i export for size comparison, i then scale my model accordingly, i then delete the PA unit from the scene and save/export my unit.
i cant do anything animated yet, im still learning how the bone system works myself edit. all my current unit's are flying ones .. lol .. no animations.
I just opened it a json and looked inside... The structure reminds me a lot of how ZeroHour handled creating units. If you can make the models and skins making a new unit with old mechanics is fairly easy. The challenge is making new behaviors. It's easy to make a new tank with above average range, but if you want that tank to constantly retreat to keep the enemy at max range you may run into trouble if none of the existing unit flags result in that kind of behavior. When modding zerohour there were already hundreds of flags and behaviors you could assign, but the real trick was in finding creative ways to combine them that resulted in game mechanics that *looked* unique, but were secretly mis-using code under the hood. ZeroHour had no mechanics that could support a shield generator, but it was possible to create an AOE weapon that destroyed enemy projectiles within your radius. A weapon doesn't have "durability" but you could make it look like you overloaded the shield by giving the weapon a max clip size and the reload animation hides the model of the "shield bubble" while it's vulnerable.
