McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
I wasn't going to respond to the "You Suck" themed posts, messages, and emails I've been getting (from more than one person); however, the malcontent in them has me seething with anger right now.
It sounds like this could have been fixed by the creator in a week or two but wasn't due to being partly busy and procrastinating for so long, i would be a bit ashamed to let it go on this long considering ...
McGlaspie please get it sorted, this is really starting to look bad, not just for mvm but for the ns2 modding community in general if such a popular mod simply fails and the creator can't be bothered, we only got to play it for like a month or two?, you posted saying it was coming along and then nothing, don't you feel even a little bad about it?
I find the presumptuous statements thrown in here insulting. I'm impressed by how much you know about how my life has been going. You do don't you? How else could you say things like "partly busy", or "procrastinating for so long". You must have acquired a Crystal Ball of All Seeing. Very impressive...
To all the naysayers and pessimists: Deal with it.
I've had to bury family members and find new employment among many other things these past months. So, to be completely honest, I don't give two shits what your opinion on the matter is, or how you feel a mod should be managed and updated. Frankly, creating a modification of a game for YOUR entertainment is so far down the list of importance, it is not even funny. I'm astounded at how much people can complain about receiving something for free.
This does not mean that I've given up on it, nor do I want to. I still genuinely believe the MvM concept has some fantastic gameplay potential, even though it is symmetrical. I still have a long list of new game mechanics I want to create (Infiltration Kits, ECM/ECCM, Communications hacking, Sensor grids, Improved map territory system(s) via Power Grids, Assault Armor, and Exo Varients just to name a few). I will never make this a top priority. Simply put, I have too many truly important things to worry about right now to just stop it all for the sake of a video game mod. If you feel this makes me a douchebag, well, we all have our opinions...
It will get updated, when it's updated. I genuinely hope that will be sooner rather than later, but with the way things have been going of late...I can't say with any confidence when exactly that will be, hence my sporadic updates. Anyways, I don't want a flame war. That would serve no purpose.
McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
Now that is over with, back to the show...
In hopes of getting this back on track, I'd like to hear some people's opinions on a ECM/ECCM (Electronic Countermeasures and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures):
Idea - Sensors, minimap, and Voice/Text communications jamming.
The idea behind this is this is "sensor" jamming fields created by a new commander ability and/or a passive feature of Observatories. Once it's researched of course. Although, I'm tempted to bring back the idea of upgraded structures; however, this would need quite a bit of new content to be visually explained and understood easily. I see this as being a two level system, so ECM (Levle 1) fields/effects could be "punched through" with an ECCM (Level 2) effect. In other words, Commander's Scan ability could be upgraded to have ECCM properties to see into jamming fields. This would mean marines moving into an enemy jamming field would lose voice/text communications and their minimap would no longer function, and their med/ammo pack requests would not be received by their Commander.
My thoughts : Concentrate on getting this mod working and playable for everyone for the current NS2 build before adding new gameplay features. People either don't know about this mod or are slowly forgetting it and moving on to other things. I personally stopped playing NS2 when this mod first was released and was workng , briefly : It was Amazing.... I am waiting patiently for the update.
Sorry to hear about IRL problems. These, of course, are top priority in life. Don't listen to the negative impatient kids who troll every part of the internet.
Im also sorry to hear you've had problems but i don't think my post was unreasonable considering how long this has gone on, your last post was at the beginning of may, we just want to know whats happening, it's up to you whether to be insulted by such posts but id expect them if i let people down for this long, good luck sorting it because ns2 needs some variety now more than ever, the way things have gone with mods and ns2 in general doesn't look too good.
It seems to be the developers fault though, they welcome modding by releasing full mod tools but then break the mods with their game updates, Mozilla Firefox is known to do this often as well, it's frustrating.
Nearly all the vanilla custom maps made for NS2 so far are not designed for Aliens, all of them are big and beautiful but because they are big, Aliens have no where to hide and they just get killed from a distance, so this is why Marine vs Marine is so important for NS2, it will allow for balanced game play on the majority of custom maps.
I'm sorry to hear about all the shit that's recently happened to you McGlaspie, i hope things get better.
I patiently await further developments on the mod although i definitely echo Lerchiosi's comments, forget about new features for now, get the mod working and then implement new features later.
Also don't forget people may make negative sounding posts sometimes but it's only because they care and like what you've done, surely that's better than if no one was even interested, a few mods have ended up a bit like that.
McGlaspie, while I love your work, you need to think what is needed gameplay wise and not what is cool. What is cool is, well it is cool. Once one gets passed the, damn that's cool, it needs to have a reason to exist. Right now I feel like the mod needs to be in working shape so people can see the gameplay again, and then one can figure out what is needed.
McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
edited July 2013
For the record, I'm not going to add more stuff before things are working again. I've been bugging the devs to add version locking back in so I can force MvM to always work. They apparently removed it during their mod-jam week to make something else work (quick fix). No idea on the specifics. If MvM is locked-down to a version it "might" not work with other mods. Considering my recent schedule, I think it's the best compromise to actually keeping it playable in the future.
So, my whole post about ECM stuff was to play with the concept, not detract from anything. I'm not sure how many people interesting in MvM do any kind of development, but looking forward to the "new stuff" is one of the biggest sources of motivation for software boffins.
It's awesome that you are not giving up on developing MvM. I also have stopped playing normal NS2 as i discovered MvM which was just awesome to play. Take your time and of course: have fun creating (i hope..)!
@McGlaspie don't stop being awesome. Forget the haters.
Also the delay in this mod is seriously due to every game update breaking almost every mod. It must be ridiculously frustrating to try to keep up with.
Also the delay in this mod is seriously due to every game update breaking almost every mod. It must be ridiculously frustrating to try to keep up with.
Oh...you have no idea...
I was actually planning on making two new mods, but after the experience with MvM and RL crap...I really doubt I will now. Frankly, it's not worth the stress.
I wasn't going to respond to the "You Suck" themed posts, messages, and emails I've been getting (from more than one person); however, the malcontent in them has me seething with anger right now.
It sounds like this could have been fixed by the creator in a week or two but wasn't due to being partly busy and procrastinating for so long, i would be a bit ashamed to let it go on this long considering ...
McGlaspie please get it sorted, this is really starting to look bad, not just for mvm but for the ns2 modding community in general if such a popular mod simply fails and the creator can't be bothered, we only got to play it for like a month or two?, you posted saying it was coming along and then nothing, don't you feel even a little bad about it?
I find the presumptuous statements thrown in here insulting. I'm impressed by how much you know about how my life has been going. You do don't you? How else could you say things like "partly busy", or "procrastinating for so long". You must have acquired a Crystal Ball of All Seeing. Very impressive...
To all the naysayers and pessimists: Deal with it.
I've had to bury family members and find new employment among many other things these past months. So, to be completely honest, I don't give two shits what your opinion on the matter is, or how you feel a mod should be managed and updated. Frankly, creating a modification of a game for YOUR entertainment is so far down the list of importance, it is not even funny. I'm astounded at how much people can complain about receiving something for free.
This does not mean that I've given up on it, nor do I want to. I still genuinely believe the MvM concept has some fantastic gameplay potential, even though it is symmetrical. I still have a long list of new game mechanics I want to create (Infiltration Kits, ECM/ECCM, Communications hacking, Sensor grids, Improved map territory system(s) via Power Grids, Assault Armor, and Exo Varients just to name a few). I will never make this a top priority. Simply put, I have too many truly important things to worry about right now to just stop it all for the sake of a video game mod. If you feel this makes me a douchebag, well, we all have our opinions...
It will get updated, when it's updated. I genuinely hope that will be sooner rather than later, but with the way things have been going of late...I can't say with any confidence when exactly that will be, hence my sporadic updates. Anyways, I don't want a flame war. That would serve no purpose.
Don't sweat it dude most of us are not impatient and we are not going anywhere. Even if it is never updated it was still a pretty fun mod so thank you for bringing it to us.
JektJoin Date: 2012-02-05Member: 143714Members, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow
Updating this and then having all that work destroyed by whatever the next content patch will be in September would be devastating. Honestly if you're not close, I would either wait until that patch. Maybe some sort of mod friendly version lock would be in by then. Probably not though.
It was a great experience, very enjoyable. Would truly like to play it again one day.
GhoulofGSG9Join Date: 2013-03-31Member: 184566Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, Forum Moderators, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Reinforced - Supporter, WC 2013 - Supporter, Pistachionauts
edited August 2013
And for all the ppl who complain maybe upload your current state of work to github and let them fix it up if it's "such a simple" mod. In fact i would love to follow your work progress by that way
McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
Update (of a sort): I am waiting to see how much damage the coming Aug 30th content update does to mods/modding. I will most likely have to "rebuild" the mod from scratch to get it working. I've been bugging the devs to give us version locking back so mods won't crumble every time an update comes out.
tl;dr
This mod will be actively worked on again after Aug. 30th content update. I won't let my and Ulmont's work go to waste.
Forewarning: The first update after Aug. 30th will almost certainly be an imbalanced mess. I'm going to be more concerned about making everything work correctly again (without errors) than gameplay balance...at first. I'll try to get a few balance patches in after that. Then, hopefully, move on to some new content / systems.
On this note, if anyone out there is a modeler / animator, and interested in contributing, please PM me.
If you want any help updating the mod to use new mixins and sewlek's 'hooks' frameworks just let me know... After releasing two stable mods, I've worked out some good ways to minimise the knock-on breakage effects of NS2 updates.
If you want any help updating the mod to use new mixins and sewlek's 'hooks' frameworks just let me know... After releasing two stable mods, I've worked out some good ways to minimise the knock-on breakage effects of NS2 updates.
Cool, the modding community should really help each other on this issue, of course uwe should of done something a long time ago to prevent broken mods every update.
Is there any chance we might see a combat version of mvm some day?
Until the developers put back in version locking, it isn't worth the time and effort working on a mod like this as it's just going to be broken with the next big update in 6 months time (if they get the funding of course).
Until the developers put back in version locking, it isn't worth the time and effort working on a mod like this as it's just going to be broken with the next big update in 6 months time (if they get the funding of course).
Eh, not exactly. The problem previously is I just didn't have the time to commit to something like modding, or gaming in general. That's changed (thank god!) recently, so I'm going to get this sucker back up and running. Hopefully, in such a way that isn't painful to update when patches come out. No ETA on a release yet, I'm just getting back in to the swing of things.
McGlaspiewww.team156.comJoin Date: 2010-07-26Member: 73044Members, Super Administrators, Forum Admins, NS2 Developer, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Squad Five Silver, Squad Five Gold, Reinforced - Onos, WC 2013 - Gold, Subnautica Playtester
Bleh. First big snag encountered. The model multi-skinning method I was using before no longer works. There is apparently now a hard limit on the number of textures that can be used in a material file. So, I've had to figure out a pure shader-based method to provide skin support. This will hopefully open up a slew of options: Face paint, Game-code controlled team colors, dynamic world entities (power sensitive machinery, etc), and more than just two texture-restricted team colors.
Here is a short video of the prototype system in action. The colors being cycled through are being determined by Lua code, and not hardcoded in a shader file or baked into a texture.
The next version I'm working on "should" allow three primary things:
1) Allow the artist to change the brightness of the Albedo map (base diffuse texture)
2) Allow artist to control the saturation and hue when the Color is applied to the Albedo, Specular, and Emissive layers
3) Allow for up to three colors to be applied to each color channel of the color map texture (RGB) and blended via the Alpha channel
Now, to some people this may seem like this is a lot of work for not much gain, but as it stands right now; I can get the game code working, but the team's won't have different colors so there would be no visual way to tell friend from foe. I don't think a hive-sight like outline of enemies just wouldn't be enough. To put it simple, MvM requires a skinning system to work from a gameplay standpoint. Not only do we end up with a more robust system, but this should also decrease the size of the mod (zip compressed) by roughly 40%. So, down to somewhere around 40MB, versus the current 98MB.
I'm going to try and wrap up the skinning system into an stand-alone mod that will allow other mod authors to use it in their own projects.
That's the ultimate goal anyways. If I can get it to the point of being re-usable, I'll post it along with an explanation of how to use it.
Stay tuned, more to come in the next few weeks (after I take a two week vacation).
Comments
I find the presumptuous statements thrown in here insulting. I'm impressed by how much you know about how my life has been going. You do don't you? How else could you say things like "partly busy", or "procrastinating for so long". You must have acquired a Crystal Ball of All Seeing. Very impressive...
To all the naysayers and pessimists: Deal with it.
I've had to bury family members and find new employment among many other things these past months. So, to be completely honest, I don't give two shits what your opinion on the matter is, or how you feel a mod should be managed and updated. Frankly, creating a modification of a game for YOUR entertainment is so far down the list of importance, it is not even funny. I'm astounded at how much people can complain about receiving something for free.
This does not mean that I've given up on it, nor do I want to. I still genuinely believe the MvM concept has some fantastic gameplay potential, even though it is symmetrical. I still have a long list of new game mechanics I want to create (Infiltration Kits, ECM/ECCM, Communications hacking, Sensor grids, Improved map territory system(s) via Power Grids, Assault Armor, and Exo Varients just to name a few). I will never make this a top priority. Simply put, I have too many truly important things to worry about right now to just stop it all for the sake of a video game mod. If you feel this makes me a douchebag, well, we all have our opinions...
It will get updated, when it's updated. I genuinely hope that will be sooner rather than later, but with the way things have been going of late...I can't say with any confidence when exactly that will be, hence my sporadic updates. Anyways, I don't want a flame war. That would serve no purpose.
Now that is over with, back to the show...
In hopes of getting this back on track, I'd like to hear some people's opinions on a ECM/ECCM (Electronic Countermeasures and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures):
Idea - Sensors, minimap, and Voice/Text communications jamming.
The idea behind this is this is "sensor" jamming fields created by a new commander ability and/or a passive feature of Observatories. Once it's researched of course. Although, I'm tempted to bring back the idea of upgraded structures; however, this would need quite a bit of new content to be visually explained and understood easily. I see this as being a two level system, so ECM (Levle 1) fields/effects could be "punched through" with an ECCM (Level 2) effect. In other words, Commander's Scan ability could be upgraded to have ECCM properties to see into jamming fields. This would mean marines moving into an enemy jamming field would lose voice/text communications and their minimap would no longer function, and their med/ammo pack requests would not be received by their Commander.
Thoughts?
Sorry to hear about IRL problems. These, of course, are top priority in life. Don't listen to the negative impatient kids who troll every part of the internet.
Nearly all the vanilla custom maps made for NS2 so far are not designed for Aliens, all of them are big and beautiful but because they are big, Aliens have no where to hide and they just get killed from a distance, so this is why Marine vs Marine is so important for NS2, it will allow for balanced game play on the majority of custom maps.
I'm sorry to hear about all the shit that's recently happened to you McGlaspie, i hope things get better.
I patiently await further developments on the mod although i definitely echo Lerchiosi's comments, forget about new features for now, get the mod working and then implement new features later.
So, my whole post about ECM stuff was to play with the concept, not detract from anything. I'm not sure how many people interesting in MvM do any kind of development, but looking forward to the "new stuff" is one of the biggest sources of motivation for software boffins.
http://www.team156.com/156/mcglaspie/mvm/index.php?progress
Progress tracker is working for me.
@McGlaspie don't stop being awesome. Forget the haters.
Also the delay in this mod is seriously due to every game update breaking almost every mod. It must be ridiculously frustrating to try to keep up with.
I was actually planning on making two new mods, but after the experience with MvM and RL crap...I really doubt I will now. Frankly, it's not worth the stress.
Don't sweat it dude most of us are not impatient and we are not going anywhere. Even if it is never updated it was still a pretty fun mod so thank you for bringing it to us.
It was a great experience, very enjoyable. Would truly like to play it again one day.
Look, hope things are brighter for you man, keep up and up, and keep fighting.
Family is most important, so i hope all is well on that front. Stay healthy stay safe.
Also, about your ecm idea. I like it! Would totally mess people up : )
tl;dr
This mod will be actively worked on again after Aug. 30th content update. I won't let my and Ulmont's work go to waste.
Forewarning: The first update after Aug. 30th will almost certainly be an imbalanced mess. I'm going to be more concerned about making everything work correctly again (without errors) than gameplay balance...at first. I'll try to get a few balance patches in after that. Then, hopefully, move on to some new content / systems.
On this note, if anyone out there is a modeler / animator, and interested in contributing, please PM me.
If you want any help updating the mod to use new mixins and sewlek's 'hooks' frameworks just let me know... After releasing two stable mods, I've worked out some good ways to minimise the knock-on breakage effects of NS2 updates.
Cool, the modding community should really help each other on this issue, of course uwe should of done something a long time ago to prevent broken mods every update.
Is there any chance we might see a combat version of mvm some day?
Until the developers put back in version locking, it isn't worth the time and effort working on a mod like this as it's just going to be broken with the next big update in 6 months time (if they get the funding of course).
Eh, not exactly. The problem previously is I just didn't have the time to commit to something like modding, or gaming in general. That's changed (thank god!) recently, so I'm going to get this sucker back up and running. Hopefully, in such a way that isn't painful to update when patches come out. No ETA on a release yet, I'm just getting back in to the swing of things.
Here is a short video of the prototype system in action. The colors being cycled through are being determined by Lua code, and not hardcoded in a shader file or baked into a texture.
The next version I'm working on "should" allow three primary things:
1) Allow the artist to change the brightness of the Albedo map (base diffuse texture)
2) Allow artist to control the saturation and hue when the Color is applied to the Albedo, Specular, and Emissive layers
3) Allow for up to three colors to be applied to each color channel of the color map texture (RGB) and blended via the Alpha channel
Now, to some people this may seem like this is a lot of work for not much gain, but as it stands right now; I can get the game code working, but the team's won't have different colors so there would be no visual way to tell friend from foe. I don't think a hive-sight like outline of enemies just wouldn't be enough. To put it simple, MvM requires a skinning system to work from a gameplay standpoint. Not only do we end up with a more robust system, but this should also decrease the size of the mod (zip compressed) by roughly 40%. So, down to somewhere around 40MB, versus the current 98MB.
I'm going to try and wrap up the skinning system into an stand-alone mod that will allow other mod authors to use it in their own projects.
That's the ultimate goal anyways. If I can get it to the point of being re-usable, I'll post it along with an explanation of how to use it.
Stay tuned, more to come in the next few weeks (after I take a two week vacation).