[WIP] The Realm Community Balance Mod

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Hello Modding Forums!

We in the Realm Community have been doing a bit of work putting together our design document for our first Mod: The Realm Community Balance Mod. This mod is designed to be the first part of The Realm's foray into modding Planetary Annihilation and the foundational core that all our other mods will use.

We've given you our Design Document, but now we're heavily into testing!
If you're interested in joining us then you can download the latest Pre Release from the PA Mod Manager!

Even if you don't wish to get it for yourself, we've made as many changes on the server-side as possible, meaning you can join anyone who's got a Lobby waiting for players without needing to do anything other than changing your Server Browser filters to include "Modded Games".

We're looking to get as much feedback as possible, so please, don't be shy and give us your impressions, suggestions and condemnation/praise (as you see fit) in this thread.

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For anyone looking to support our changes, here is a free badge that you can put in your signature:
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Code:

[center][url='https://forums.uberent.com/threads/wip-the-realm-community-balance-mod.58942/'][img]http://i.imgur.com/6B02xLS.png[/img][/url][/center]

I really hope this mod gets invalidated because Uber changes everything so basic/advanced are core/specialized rather than weak/strong. I really don't like it how the community is already working to try and fix the game that isn't yet released.

That being said, I volunteer my services for helping balance. TheWrongCat also asked me a while ago to help with UI for the mod. Specifically, html/css/js, and I still volunteer my services for that.

That's very kind - I don't envisage we will need to make many (any?) UI tweaks for the rebalance mod, because really where possible it should just be numerical adjustment.

We'd a number of other mods planned that will require some fairly extensive UI work, on which we'd be grateful for your assistance

It may well be invalidated, but we have no idea on that. Even if this mod turns out to be completely unnecessary, this still serves as a fleshed out and comprehensive idea of what we believe is a good example of how to do "Basic - general purpose, Advanced specialised" with no inter-tier power increase. Overall we feel that this gives a good enough example that people can refer to it if they need to describe a specific case, and opening these ideas up for feedback could help crystallise some of the undirected creativity on these forums into a more focused vision.

I suppose that's what you were asking me about then. Well, UI design and frontend development is literally my job. So I'd be very happy to assist with those mods.

Since we don't have server access... what is there to be done for the mod?

That's what the Design Document is for. There's a comprehensive list of changes that we'd like to make and we'd like some directed feedback on it while it is in the conceptual phase.

I'd test the living fudge out of that mod.

PAStats would need an check which balance is atm used by both players...
because else it would be just an big mess...

Sign me up. Balance and strategic diversity are the very things I have been arguing for since alpha. I do believe I can bring some solid input to the table.

They'd be different ladders, certainly, because the game would play quite differently and potentially could reward entirely different playstyles.

Even only for the stats page it would be cool if I could display "balance mod X was used"

and because of that PAStats would need such an addition.

A current technical question. It is not currently possible to add new units, however I have seen examples of players replacing the model of units in a purely client side manner. Has this been done yet with an entirly new model? If so, what does it require?

Myself and Nanolathe have created a simple model for one of the units in the mod - the Artemis Exo-atmospheric kill vehicle:


Although we cannot get this in as a full unit yet, it would be interesting to put it in as a model replacement for the avenger, just to see how the art looks in game. It's an extremely simple model with no real animations. Has anyone successfully done this before, and is willing to share how they did it?

Assuming the bone structure is correct, you can do one of the following:

• Name the file the same as an existing model and overwrite it;
• Modify the "filename" property in the "model" section of the host unit's blueprint.

Note that the host unit can't have animations etc, or you'll likely crash PA. If the host unit has weapons, you'll need to also alter the weapon portion of the blueprint to match the bone names.

@maxpowerz replaced tree models with houses.

Didn't you also replace trees with christmas trees?

Trees are probably easy to do and since you don't have animations anyway, why not just replace trees with your art just to see how it looks in game?

not the same, I just changed the texture, 2D-only, no 3D.

Currently, I want to test by replacing the wall with my model. I've been trying to convert the model to a .papa format, but I've not had any success. With the model and texture assets renamed to "land_barrier", running papatran.exe with

> papatran.exe -o test.papa art/land_barrier.FBX

returns

Code:

art\land_barrier_diffuse.png: could not find resource-root setting
1 error

while trying the --no-materials option:

>papatran.exe --no-materials -o test.papa art/land_barrier.FBX

leads to a crash with the following output:

Code:

uncaught SEH exception at 0x000000014000E5FC, code=0xc0000005 [EXCEPTION_ACCESS_
VIOLATION]
while reading address 0x0000000000000060

0x1400386e8
UnhandledExceptionFilter+0x160
MD5Final+0x1de8
_C_specific_handler+0x9c
RtlDecodePointer+0xad
RtlUnwindEx+0xbbf
KiUserExceptionDispatcher+0x2e
0x14000e5fc
0x14000d895
0x14000dba4
0x14000dbe6
0x14000e098
0x14001eb3c
0x1403fa40f
BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd
RtlUserThreadStart+0x21

followed by the program becoming unresponsive.

The question is, is the problem with my model or the textures?

I don't have anything of import to note, except that the proposal for the Mobile Flakker does seem like a rather cheap shield to handle any and all Missiles (including Nukes). Surely a flak turret of any type wouldn't stop the projectile from detonating near the ground (thus causing shockwave damage at least)?

That's a needlessly specific concern, but I took the time to read through the document. Interesting changes, at least.

I don't have the time to commit to such a project, unfortunately. I just wanted to caution the implementation of new unit types just to counter perceived threats that should, in fact, be actual threats (and not easily countered).

I never got papatran to work for me, but then I was trying to make FBXs from blender - neither various plugins to export as fbx or the official fbx converters were able to get me a format that worked.

But in case it since works, or you are using a different tool than blender, have you confirmed that you are using the right bone structure? Also try the blender exporter.