playable advent mod: details, feedback

[davidlallen]

We want the viper to use any of the three XCom weapons. For each one, a copy of the viper animations has to be attached to a copy of the weapon. Our animator is very talented but he has many things to do. Are you familiar with animation and weapons? If you can help, that will be fantastic.

[dronmk2]

Unfortunately I never worked on it.
I just do not understand why complicate your job.
It can take a standard viper weapon and simply change the stats and if it is possible to model but do not touch animation.

After all, following your path will have to create a new animation, which I know is more difficult.

P.S. Do you plan to work on a model of the wiper armor? The current version looks like plasticine.

Edited March 27, 2016 by dronmk2

[Maclimes]

Because the animation is built into the weapon archetype in the UDK. So if you change where the mesh of the weapon points, you are also automatically changing the animation as well.

 

The only way to fix it is to go into the UDK, create a new weapon, and manually pull the animations from one with the mesh/material from the other. THEN you can go in and set up the code.

 

Yes, it absolutely can be done. And frankly, it's not "difficult", per se. But it is time-consuming.

 

So will it happen? Probably yes. Will it be immediately? Probably no.

[dronmk2]

It same principle as in Fallout 4. On the other side, it did not seem to interfere to make cosmetic changes to the mesh and textures.

[gaultesian]

Can 'gun outputs' animations be substituted for different guns (e.g. the turret 'shooting' animation for the MEC cannon?). It's really interesting to ask these questions (whether they are doable or not is not relevant), as I have not delved that far into the rabbit hole.

 

Cheers.

[Maclimes]

Sort of? It depends on a lot of factors. If you have more questions, shoot me a PM (so we don't distract from the purpose of this thread).

[davidlallen]

I have succeeded in creating a mission to rescue a mec. Here is the quest reward screen (sorry large window size). But, now I am not sure what to do with it. The current setup is a research project with a high intel cost, which is available as soon as you research Resistance Radio:

 

Commander, Resistance Radio has picked up an interesting transmission. It seems there is a MEC which is behaving oddly. It has concluded that Advent is wrong to hold power over humanity and destroyed part of an Advent base. Advent has imprisoned the MEC and is planning to study it. We can organize a rescue mission, but it'll eat up a lot of our intel and supplies trying to do this.

 

When you complete the project, you get a "council mission, rescue vip" mission with this mec as the reward. The mec can be in a cell or in a truck, just like other rescue missions. When you rescue the mec, it has no weapon or skills, just like a soldier rescue mission. After the mission success screen, it appears in your armory at the appropriate level.

 

I am not sure how to add this to the existing mod, where you can build a mec as a proving ground project. Shall I leave this feature out of the mod for now, until we have a useful, playable muton to rescue?

 

EDIT: would not have been possible without this mod to show the necessary changes:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=646124583&searchtext=mission

 

 

http://i.imgur.com/V6pIcl2.png

Edited March 28, 2016 by davidlallen

[Phaserburn]

Is there anyway to console line in a mec? If so, how?

 

I have no other mods installed. Currently I've tried manually installing, and mod manager installing, this on two different game installs. Sadly I don't see any of these unit's available at the proving grounds. I've tried setting the ini file section to true. No change. I do get a red error screen on my save game load. I also notice there is no mention of your mod in the launch.log file.

 

Thanks for any help.

[davidlallen]

@ phaser, are you able to use other mods? Are you installing via steam or nexus? When the mod starts successfully, there will be a number of lines in the launch.log like "davea debug". If you don't see any of these then the launcher did not launch with this mod properly. Some people have reported this after installing from nexus, but much fewer people have reported this after installing from steam, and steam has a 5x higher download count.

 

If the mod is not even launching, then there is no way to add a unit via console. Anyway, there is no way to permanently add a unit via console, not that I know of. There is a tactical command dropunit; you could do "dropunit pa_mec 0". But, a lot of the setup of a mec is done when the proving ground project completes, so I do not recommend that.

Edited March 28, 2016 by davidlallen

[PepprmintButler]

I have succeeded in creating a mission to rescue a mec. Here is the quest reward screen (sorry large window size). But, now I am not sure what to do with it. The current setup is a research project with a high intel cost, which is available as soon as you research Resistance Radio:

Commander, Resistance Radio has picked up an interesting transmission. It seems there is a MEC which is behaving oddly. It has concluded that Advent is wrong to hold power over humanity and destroyed part of an Advent base.

That's great ! I do think this would be great for all alien types, possibly others more than the MEC (being able to rebuild/deprogram them is believable enough, while cloning Vipers seems a bit more of a stretch).

I think the project -> mission -> reward structure is perfectly fine.

 

I do think the project text is a bit too dry right now. Maybe adding something about a secret lab doing experiments either on advanced AI or on uploading a human consciousness to a MEC unit would help. I do find the latter a bit more interesting ; it's better motivation for the unit to defect, and adds to the "aliens are toying around with the human race" vibe that's already in the game. There's some lab that's working on better understanding the human brain, they managed to insert a human mind* into a MEC, but it turned out to be *too* human and as such hostile to the aliens.

 

*(either some snapshot through whatever technology they could have, or cutting out and wiring in an actual brain up there ; again, my personal preference goes towards the latter)

 

I would very much like to see similar missions for Viper and maybe all other aliens.

Gameplay wise, this is particularly relevant to MECs I think due to the heavy shortage of wrecks up until later than I'm personally comfortable with ; however there are other workarounds to that particular issue - I've started lowering the wreck requirements for the project, even testing with no requirement at all besides the autopsy and supplies+alloys which doesn't actually seem that unreasonable (provided higher cost).

 

I say put it in the next version ASAP, with an ini-unlock that's off by default if you're worried about "the general public" having issues with it. This requires testing.