To the current modders.

You have been busy little buggers! I'm having a hard time keeping up with the daily additions in here.

I personally am waiting to see the server files before making any conclusive decisions about what I do or do not wish to add to the game and how possible it can be.

Well let me throw this out then, what do you want to see on the server side? Since we are still working on it we can take feedback!

I'll admit up front that all this code stuff goes right over my head, but is there anything specific that would be needed server-side to help Support Total Conversions?

Mike

Well to make a TC what do you need to be able to do?

- new units? this is as simple as dropping them in the directory at the moment
- change the UI? already moddable through js
- scenario / game mode setup? Will be modded on server side using script
- new maps / planets? Already easy to add by dropping files in.

Anything else?

Sounds good, the only other aspect I'd like really doesn't directly relate to the topic, luckily I already made a thread for it, Having a Mod Launcher of sorts. This would be mostly useful for a TC(or at least a "full" TC) and could maybe help even larger mods like BlackOps for FA where there is a Main Mod and several of "add-on' Mods.

But yeah, I don't think that has as much to do with the server side stuff.

Mike

Yes, there will be a mod config setup thing. Also command line override so you can make a TC.

One goal is to try and make mods play together as nicely as possible, when possible.

Sounds great then, I can't really tihnk of anything else really off the top of my head then more specific really.

I'll make sure Hawkeye and Exavier see this.

Mike

Can models be controlled with script? Or is it only animation at this point?

Also, is there any built-in IK Solver for legged units?

Can units be attached to one another?

Ultimately, this depends on what kinds of mod you want to support. Starcraft-style mapping would be relatively simple and offer a lot of bang for the buck. Here, we're mostly talking about offering lots of events that users can handle (frankly for ideas just look at the stuff available in the SC2 map ed, but simple stuff like unit death, unit enter region, etc) and the ability to alter the sim's state in relatively simple ways- set/get unit hp, spawn unit, issue order to unit, set unit stat, associate random data with unit, communicate with UI, that kind of boring stuff. I think that aiming for serious total conversions is possibly overkill. The primary issue is the terrain- it's going to be more difficult for modders to adapt spherical terrain. Inevitably, someone will want a DoTA mod, and I don't think that spherical DoTA or Sphere TD is really going to work out. (Also, people will probably want some sort of transportation system).

For the UI, man, that Knockout stuff is super confusing. It's even worse than WPF. But I *think* that you could rip most of it out. I'll know more once I've rebuilt, say, the live game UI.

The main things I am looking for that SupCom did not offer are things like sandboxed persistent storage (double points if we can offer cloud Steam storage or some other form of cloud storage) and the power to connect to the Web and servers through the UI (already offered, I think, with sockets/ajax in WebKit).

what about functionality to convert PA into a "god game" or "4E" game?

I saw one mod thread about the "replicator bot" that could create copies of itself. It required some server side changes to enable and has since been broken by more recent alpha updates

this is tough to explain so please bear with me i promise there's a crazy cool game idea buried in here

no past RTS has simulated total warfare. They always simulate battlegrounds that are contained boxes. With the full planet maps of PA and the massive unit count the sim is going for, we have the opportunity to simulate a full planetary war INCLUDING the civilian home-front

My pipe-dream total conversion mod for PA would be a simulated society game on a planet of perpetual war. You'd have cities of "civilians" where you don't issue orders to the civilians directly, and instead manage the different structures, which would change how the populations act. The cities are your resourced base, and protecting these vulnerable targets becomes a big part of the game. A full standard RTS war would be going on as well, but your home base would be cities full of civilians you need to run your military industrial complex

it opens the opportunity to simulate civilian populations of thousands of independent agents each with their own "personality" (think the Dnd style good-evil law-chaos grid) that affects how they move about. Because PA has the flow-field system where the environment contains all the true intelligence, maybe we could mod the units to just have a changeable "mind-state" of goals that they would go about their lives doing. This would mean that the player could issue propaganda that would sway the minds of the individual civilians. Different political agendas could create different behaviours in the population (lawful evil fascism would cause crowds to organize into regimented grids and march about, whereas chaotic good democracies would inspire mob-like protester clumps)

That's the nugget of the idea hastily typed from my desk at work. I'll be doing more writing and trying to organize these ideas into a cohesive document, but as we're on the topic of what we want to do with mod tools I thought I'd throw it out here and see if any of this sounds remotely feasible

Looks like deadmg beat me to it, +1 to everything he said.

Here's a rundown on the StarCraft II trigger system. It's vastly superior to StarCraft 1, I think the main approachability problem with the GalaxyEditor was actually their data (units&abilities) editor. It was not user friendly at all, often confusing. I think a less complex, albeit less powerful, amateur friendly tool would better - like WarCraft III.

I'd like to be able to mess about with economic and intel systems (more than just twiddling dials). I've been curious about many of the ideas proposed in the fora. Experimenting with a few might be fun.

That said, when we have access to the server code we'll be able to tell you what we want better.

I am not a modder (I would want to be if a more experienced person would want to work together and help out explaining stuff), but I am a fan of shield structures and shielded units.

So I would like to ask if the server and the client could support shield structures/units.
(if possible)

Exactly why novice-friendly mod tools are such a homerun.

Shields are a simple question of a trivial mesh, and a collision volume, then add some animations and shaders and ****. If PA allows us to define our own collision volumes, it should be relatively simple. I think that this would also (relatively) effectively introduce triggering regions as well.

Looking from a TA conversion perspective, the following would be needed (Some of these might already be possible or planned)

• The ability to (globally) toggle automatic targeting of radar blips (i.e. Radar Targeting Facility)
• Texture Scrolling/changing (such as on the TA Energy Storage Structures)
• Event-based bone visibility show/hide
• Event driven state changes (e.g., Solar collector - OnHit => Closed State. X seconds later => Open State)
• State Based Damage Reduction (Closed state = 50% damage reduction) & energy production (Closed State = 0 energy production)
• Paralyser buff on weapons (Spider)
• Unit cloak with variable energy drain
• Manually define wreckage & multi-level wreckage (e.g. wreckages of wreckages)
• Seaplanes
• Kill-count tracking, veterency buffs
• Map-based custom parameters that can be read from unit scripts
• Variable metal yields (full yield on metal point, smaller yield off)

Well, I'm extremely into map making, so I'd like to know about the map formats, voxel building blocks, maybe even planetary geometry (flat maps?)

Not sure if it's just implied and accepted or not, but I'd like access to modify as much as possible of the game logic itself, as much as or more than we could with Supcom. Replace the core unit classes, script in new behaviors etc as a base.. and then, the area in Supcom I really struggled with, was to give us access to put things in the map itself - floating text, UI markers, building ghosts, etc.

as we are talking about server side stuff , will we be able to add new function to the game e.g create a UI button that will call a models animation , for an example , put the unit in a defence mode and then boosts it defence and lower its attack