Ok, from the suggestion by Polemarch to have a thread happening for programmers interested in contributing with the mod. Let us know if you're interested, and what areas you'd like to cover so others know what's being worked on.
You can pretty much look into modifying the game right away, so feel free to dig right into it. We'll get someone to collect and keep track of contributions, so it's all good!
I should be able to help out. Would mean I would have to buy it. That may be a few more weeks as I just shelled out for school fees and books. As for time I would not want to take anything too "major" on for myself as I would hate to let others down if I was not able to complete the tasks. That having been said I have done some basic GUI/HUD stuff and would not mind taking that on again. I have not done anything like a radar before where it would show other members or AI positions so that could be a bit of a challenge....
I am curious - do they have gui editors as part of the engine? Is it 2D or 3D?
I really can't answer, but it looks like there's some 2d helper functionality.
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/wiki/Interactive_GUI
i've got mutators that show enemy possitions on the map, so the code mustn't be to hard to find somewhere in the editor if you just want to rip out epic's...
on that note: pretty much all the game code is in the editor, so you can just make classes from that rather than write your own stuff where possible. dunno if that's the terminology, i'm not a coder [:)]
Pretty much a lot of things have already been done before. It may be even worth looking into what other mods have done with similar things. eg Unreal XMP with character classes etc. There's a wealth of information on the net, so I'm sure you can find answers somewhere.
Like what was mentioned earlier, this stuff can be done now. You can use unreal's assets as temporary placeholders for, say, guns or player models if you want to modify the gun aspects or character classes..
quote:Originally posted by LiveWire
if anyone one wants a little practice with modifing unreal script i need a little help with my samus model. i need to make it so the weapon is invisible for this character only (so it looks like she's shooting out of the arm cannon).
Might be a bit hard,
you'd probably need to run a mutator on the server you're using that model on for this effect.
That aside, I'll probably start by playing around with some more stuff... maybe the radar, not sure what's involved in that yet though.
He beat me to it by a day or so :)
I've been mulling over the coding side of things for a while now, and it seems we really have the following requirements that we need to get done. This is not just for programmers, this is the nuts and bolts of how the mod will work. However, it's up to the programmers to make it work, it'll be the bit that we point to and scream our wretched mantra - "Scope creep! Scope creep!".
I think we need to talk this through, then we can start putting together a more detailed set of requirements and divvying up the work.
Menus
- Allow people to select classes (and perhaps weapon loadout)
- heavily graphical - can display cinematics or models...
- Describe map objectives
- Possibly use a loading screen for each map?
- Allow people to select new class to spawn as when they next respawn
- light textual/symbolic, quick to use.
- At-a-glance summary of objectives
- perhaps use maps to select 'waypoints' for HUD...
- Show objectives satisfied etc.
- (pet hate) show time in-game and results even for people who have since disconnected.
HUD
- Show team postition (except when cloaked?)
- Show opponent postition when certain condiditons met
- show team health in realtime, MMO group style?
- show path to selected waypoint a-la UT's CTF?
Classes
- Weapon/Object pickup restrictions based on class
- Trigger/Objective restrictions based on class
- speed varies by class
- armor level/efficiency varies by class
- default weapon loadout varies by class
- firing on remotely 'marked' targets.
- spawn ammo packs
- construct (spawn) defenses
- disable (destroy) defenses
- cloak/camouflage
- heal team member
- 'hack' systems. (ie: activate trigger)
Maps
- triggered? (ie: call for vehicle from dropship)
- timed? (ie: vehicle spawns every minute if no vehicle on map?)
- for vehicles-to-area maps, an objective is met via proximity?
- trigger radar tower such that enemies appear in your team`s HUD.
Weapons
Probably the easy bit - we know they'll be limited to individual classes - we just need to work out what they are and what they do!