[WIP][Server] Orbital Warfare Overhaul

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Purpose:

The purpose of this mod is to improve the state of orbital warfare to a point where it is actually fun, interesting and balanced. We have added more unit and structure variety to the orbital layer, and improve orbit-surface interaction, without just shifting the focus of the game into the orbital layer.

New Units:
Excalibur:

Long-range orbital sniper unit. Great against larger ships, and smaller amounts of High-HP targets.
Main features:
-Long range
-High damage
-Very low ROF
-Low speed
-Medium HP
-High cost

Hailfire:

Medium-range anti-surface/air ship. Good for besieging enemy bases from orbit or defending a beachhead.
Main features:
-Medium range anti-surface/air missiles
-Medium-High damage
-Medium ROF
-Low speed
-High HP
-High cost
-Anti-surface tactical missiles can be shot down by snipers.

Hammerhead:

Medium-range anti-swarm ship. Good for protecting your fleet against swarms of avengers and wraiths.
Main features:
-Medium range homing missiles
-Low damage with AOE
-High ROF
-Medium-Low speed
-Medium-High HP
-High cost

Wraith:

Advanced scout/support ship. Good for scouting enemy planets with it's radar stealth, also shoots down incoming tactical missiles.
Main features:
-Short-range laser
-Very low damage:
-Medium-High ROF
-Anti-tactical missile weapon
-Radar stealth (doesn't work against orbital and deepspace radar until uber fixes that)
-High speed
-Low HP
-Low Cost

New Orbital Structures:
Sentinel:

Anti-ground defence satellite. Shoots lasers at land and naval units, slight AOE, good against armies.
Main features:
-Medium-range anti-surface laser
-Medium-low damage with AOE
-Medium ROF
-Structure
-Medium-Low HP
-Medium cost
-Slight ground vision

Guardian:

Anti-air defence satellite. Shoots missiles at air units, good for defending beacheads.
Main features:
-Medium-range anti-air homing missiles
-Medium-low damage
-Medium ROF
-Structure
-Medium-Low HP
-Medium cost
-Slight ground vision

Orbital Mine:

Anti-orbital mine. Good for defending areas from orbital transfers.
Main features:
-Medium-low AOE
-High-damage AOE explosion
-Structure
-Low HP
-Low cost

New Surface Structures:
Lancer:

High-powered anti-orbital railgun. Good for defending against larger orbital units, or shooting orbital structures out of the sky.
Main features:
-High anti-orbital damage
-Long range
-Very Low ROF
-High energy cost per shot
-Medium HP
-High cost

Tesla:

Advanced generalist defence turret. Can hit air and ground at short ranges, but has the added bonus of being able to shoot down tactical missiles.
Main features:
-Medium-low damage against surface and air
-Short range
-Medium-high ROF
-Can shoot down tac missiles
-Medium-low HP
-Moderate Cost

Ingame-unit Changes:
Advanced Radar Satellite:
-Is now an orbital structure

SXX:

-Now has a nuke-like explosion
-Is pretty much an Ion cannon
-Is the coolest thing ever
-Is really expensive

(thanks to @Alpha2546 for the particle effects)

Ingame-structure Changes:
Teleporter:
-Much lower HP
-A bit higher cost to maintain
-Basically, you need to actually be able to defend it now, for beacheads.

Anchor:
-Can no longer shoot air, land or sea.
-No longer has vision of the surface layer

Umbrella:
-Minor ROF changes

Orbital and Deepspace Radar:
-Is now advanced

Halley:
-Now need 4 per engine slot
-Half as much HP
-1/4 the cost
-Area builds in a circle

Catalyst:
-Gives constant energy drain of 10000
-Costs 5000 extra

Jigs:
-Don't explode on death (or at least, they don't do damage, death effect is still the same because it's cool)
-Don't provide energy, or energy storage
-Cost energy to run (2000)

What you can look forward to when Playing Our mod:
Orbital will take longer to become a stalemate, and combat in the orbital layer will be much more interesting. Planet smashes will hopefully be a bit more frequent, and look better, while metal planets will be harder to activate. The new orbital content will be hard to ignore in multi-planet matches, but in 1v1 games will be used just as much as it is now. IE not that much.


Coding and basic particle effects are currently done by: @emraldis
Models are currently done by: @nicb1
Models and code and texturing done by: @mgmetal13
Particle Effects currently done by: @Alpha2546
Major bugfixes done by @emraldis and @stuart98 . (mostly @stuart98 it seems)

We have now released the mod. It is in an BETA stage, so feel free to tear the balance to shreds and let us know what is wrong!

Sounds interestingly vague........

Fun and interesting is a great idea, but how does it fit in with the rest of the game? What's orbital's intended progression in the flow of a 1v1, FFA, or large team match? Did you change Planetary Expansion? Is there a Unit Cannon? Wouldn't a long range unit just ruin avengers, especially if they are spammed? Are Adv. Sats and Solar Panels buildable by Orbital Fabbers?

Interestingly vague because it requires a lot of new units and we just started!

But essentially the flow of interplanetary expansion will remain around the same, we're just adding more to orbital combat. Orbital will still probably see less play than other trees in 1v1's just because it requires the orbital launcher to start, and a deepspace radar to detect, but we intend it to play a bigger role in bigger games, especially at the interplanetary level. There is just as much of a unit cannon as uber is willing to let us have. The idea behind the long range unit is to be a low-fire rate unit that is good at sieging structures from afar, but isn't very fast, so avengers can catch up easily and tear them apart, It's like dox vs. gill-e's. Any structure in orbit is built by an orbital fabber of course.

Well here's one of the new models I've been working on recently for the Hammerhead. Let me know if you have any suggestions or criticisms. There are still a few parts of the model which I will be adding more detail to.

Looks like a bit like an Hyperion

It feels a bit odd having separate two sets of different turrets, would it be possible to have one of each on both sides instead? Like stubby turrets in the back and the longer barreled turrets at the front?

Never mind I was looking at it wrong.

Was just about to say that all the turrets are the same type. Saw your edit once I clicked on reply.

Woah, I just took a look at it... you may want to clean up those polys in the turrets, because there's a lot of useless ones that'll just make the unit use more resources.

The Hammerhead is giving me a StarCraft Battlecruiser vibe. Which is a very good thing.

Yeah, part way through making it I noticed the similarity as well. Been told by quite a few people that it looks similar to the Terran battlecruiser. Originally it looked more like one of the ships from halo, but I ended up changing the front in order to better fit the name. Glad you like it.

Halo mod community, pls.

Sorry for the lack of updates, I've had a large amount of work piled onto me recently so I have not been able to work on creating many new models or spend time working out how to texture for PA.

Anyway even though i'm supposed to be working I got bored recently and decided to start working on a new model for the excalibur artillery ship. We already had a model for it, but I didn't like how the design was so different from the hammerhead. Anyway here's a shot of the original Excalibur model and the new model which I have just started work on. At the moment the new model is in the concept phase and still has a lot of work to go.

Let me know what you guys think, of my progress on the new model so far.

Old Model:


New Model Concept:


Edit: Also Squishypon3, I attempted to lower the poly count for the turrets on the hammerhead, but maya threw a fit and kept screwing up the lower part of the turret everytime I attempted to remove some unnecessary polys. So I may end up redoing the turrets in the future when I have a bit more time.

Notice: If anyone here knows how to texture for PA and is willing to help out with texturing for the mod please let me know as that would spare me the pain of learning how to create PA textures. Just send a PM to me if you are able to help out.

What is the model supposed to do? I don't see any obvious weapons or features.

What is it you don't understand? Is it how to texture, how to turn it into a papa, or both?

The details for what the unit is supposed to do is already listed in the op. Basically a slow long range artillery piece. The front is supposed to be the main gun. Remember the model is not done yet, this is just an early wip. I may try out a few variations of the front gun if it does not stand out enough.

For the textures I don't know how to create the pa style textures yet. Looked at a thread for it a while back, but I haven't really had enough time to really work out how to create the textures.

Hmm.. is there no dissolve verts function in maya?

Edit: Ooh I also have to mention.. You'll need to triangulate all your faces at some point because otherwise the game only imports half of each face when in game.

There is a delete edge/vertex tool in maya, but the issue is I tend to get strange results like this.
Original:

Attempt 1 (Just a few edges selected):

Attempt 2 (All unnecessary lines selected):


The top three boxes are always fine, its the bottom three boxes that always cause issues.

Also thanks for letting me know about having to triangulate the faces, I wasn't aware of the problem you mentioned.

Ah well blender has a function where you can select all verts, and then do one of a couple versions of dissolve, I believe I do limited dissolve. What this does is it the makes all unnecessary tris go away, so if I have a block and it's split into three connected parts- the dissolve will remove the two lines formed by the connections and such all the extra tris.

The only reason that I learned to use maya instead of blender is because 3d animation at university requires us to use maya in our assignments. Maya 2015 is a buggy mess and I really wish that I could have started off with blender instead. (Only have very limited blender skills.)

Anyway I'll attempt to import the model into blender then try limited dissolve. (Hopefully it works out). I will let you know if I have any success with doing this in blender.

Thanks again for your help. Saving me a lot of pain trying to work this out.


Edit: I ended up just deleting the bottom half of the model, cleaning up the model and then just mirrored the top of the model. Ended up with this, which i'm quite happy with.

Will start work on cleaning up the rest of the model fairly soon.

I´ve got a suggestion for a new orbital-to-ground unit; It will be a Rods from the gods type of unit, Spending large amounts of both metal and energy building these rods in between each bombardment. Of course, a new type of anti-orbital unit must also exist, probably a tank, or maybe a naval unit aswell. If you dont know exactly what it is, you are probably going to google it, but if you´ve played COD: Ghosts it is the Odin. Maybe also make these rods targetable.

Sounds like an interesting idea.
When you say make the rods targetable, do you mean make it so you can target an area like for example a nuke launcher can?

I may look into something like this though, basically the orbital equivalent of a nuke launcher. So it would be a stationary orbital structure where you have to build the rods and then can launch them much like you could with a vanilla nuke launcher. Most likely if this is done, it won't actually deform the terrain like it does in COD (dont play cod, I just watched a vid of the odin).


Edit:
On another note, sorry for the lack of progress recently. Had a lot of work to complete over the last few weeks and am still going through that work. I should start posting models and concepts again within a week or two.