Operation SHOCK (Full Mod + Campaign)

[Revan9190 132]

I've been drinking tea the whole time, it's no wonder I can't get anything done. But the last time I drank coffee whilst editing I ended up putting predators with flying saucers in my missions. Which is cool, but doesn't really belong in a cold war crisis scenario. Or maybe it does...

Yeah. I tried to recreate the hill battle from the 2005 version of War of the Worlds with all the alien mods I found and ended up using Martians from the 1953 version to attack modern day U.S. Army groups that had M1A2's, M2 Bradley's, and Strykers. Caffeine definitely helps the brain go whacko, although I've been cutting back and have been drinking tons of Gatorades instead.

 

In relation to this mod - I love placing Robots and turrets down and having members of the U.S. military... or even SWAT or FBI teams rush in against them (until the National Guard arrives).

 

Back to War of the Worlds: I wish there was a mod closer to that of H.G. Wells' original story with Ironclads (or... Torpedo rams) like the HMS Thunderchild (easily one of my favorite fictional U.K. ships of all time) and have maybe Jeff Wayne's Tripods be attacking the world. 1890-early 1900's tech would come in handy with this. Might have to use the WW1 mod. :P That'd be a cool scenario.

[krzychuzokecia 719]

(...) predators with flying saucers (...) doesn't really belong in a cold war crisis scenario. Or maybe it does...

 

The government hides the truth!

 

And...

 

He who controls the caffeine controls the modding scene

[Apocalypse 83 47]

OK guys I see I'm not the only nut job here :P

 

@Revan, I'll message you about the mods when I've had a think about it, sounds pretty interesting. I'll try not to SPAM Leyogas thread with my negativity.

 

We can all still talk about caffeine abuse in modding though, I think it's pertinent to the thread. Good for getting things done if you know what you're doing but can sometimes send the brain into overdrive when you're trying to be creative. Stay away from the cheap energy drinks, I've heard stories about those, not very nice ones...

[Macser 776]

I'm lovin what I'm seeing in those videos Lenyoga. Really great looking stuff. :)

[Lenyoga 326]

I've gone back to tea, too - laziness is what has followed. And the heat, man, the heat... but hey, at least I got to write down the mostly final plans for all of engineering. And I got rid of yet another demoralizing job, so that means some more free time. By Discordia, I should buy some more coffee soon...

[Lenyoga 326]

A few updates:

- explosive FPS barrels (I don't know why I didn't have those in the demo, they're essential)

- Engineering layout done

- work on a somewhat complex section mostly finished (geometry still to be done)

 

The Engineering level will have a certain degree of verticality, now that I've re-remembered how to do multiple ladders properly. Also, if anybody has a working elevator script, don't hesitate to notify me - the current grav shaft system is dependent on a stable frame rate, there is a good chance of it messing up now and then.

 

 

Also, lots of death by radiation is planned.

[R0adki11 3949]

All i can say is Wow, this is mighty impressive work on the OFP engine. Makes me want to install OFP again :)

[Lenyoga 326]

Update again:

 

- functional melee system with two weapons based on the strokeGun (cue Beavis and Butt-head laugh) class. The only downside are disposable magazines and grenade smoke effect when hitting Roadway sections (the latter will be corrected by altering the main config soon)

 

- surprisingly functional inventory system which allows for higher carrying capacity and storing weapons. Minor problem thanks to the magazine command counting empty ones (ammo command not entirely applicable here due to multi-magazine weapons)

 

[Lenyoga 326]

UPDATES!

 

-Progress: inventory is fully functional, storage crates for protocol droids (with appropriate destruction and opening effect for added horror), first level progress is about 60%, slightly higher-res head model is in the works, Shodan avatar is finished.

 

-"Challenges": grenade smoke effect could not be pinpointed in config - still looks crappy when hitting roadway objects with melee weapons, Retry/Load causes object animations to be reset (also doing tests on loops in scripts and so on), that disgusting bag of meat I call a body which is holding back my potential (trying to transfer into the digital 100%)

 

-Plans: finishing things, what else.

 

 

Some pictures:

 

Protocol Droid storage crates

 

Shodan avatar (rendered in Blender, edited with Gimp)

[Macser 776]

Those storage crates look really well done. Did you bake some light into the texture at the top? Whether it's intentional or not it looks like the glass is picking some up. And I love that render of Shodan.

 

that disgusting bag of meat I call a body which is holding back my potential (trying to transfer into the digital 100%)

 

I'm afraid you'll just have to wait for the singularity. Could be a while though. :D

[Lenyoga 326]

Those storage crates look really well done. Did you bake some light into the texture at the top? Whether it's intentional or not it looks like the glass is picking some up. And I love that render of Shodan.

 

 

Thanks! I didn't have to bake any in, I just used a texture which already had some sort of dirty reflection effect on it [for the glass, the rest of the lighting comes from in-game light sources].

[Lenyoga 326]

I never thought I'd say this in connection with OFP, but the final boss fight is pretty much done (animations for custom unit will be done this week). I'd rather not post too many pictures of that yet.

 

The only thing I'm still too stupid for is creating a custom rig in Blender for standard OFP units - every time I try it out, the resulting RTM is completely weird (works without issues for custom units, though.) Arma Toolbox users - did you have similar issues? Could it be the inverse kinematics modifier? While the animations and poses look fine in Blender, the various body parts seem to be completely off in terms of rotation and position in OFPAnim... :o:

[Macser 776]

A lot of folks have used Sanc's ww4 units as a base. These are based on a mix of the resistance civ and some elements from the default soldier meshes. Is that what you're using yourself?

 

To date I've probably done a few hundred animations. A lot of them using the strange "base" pose. Hands down by the side. Feet wide apart. Apart from some small errors on my part, initially, export was trouble free. I'm at a point now where I don't bother previewing the results in OFPanim or O2PE. I just go straight to game. Static poses are incredibly fast to get together. Dynamic animations where the character moves require a couple of extra steps. But nothing that would make me go back to OFPanim. No matter how handy it was. I have so much more control over the process. Just the ability to create a library of animations within one blend file is enough. But there's also the flexibility you get from constraints and drivers. And the fine control offered by f-curves.

 

If you'd like a hand with anything relating to that, I'd be happy to help out. Either post here, or send me a pm. :)

[Lenyoga 326]

Thanks to Macser, all the animation-related problems have been solved and workflow efficiency for those matters is at an optimum. One of the boss battle units is completely done now, currently one of the good old System Shock 1 enemies is under construction, the cyborg elite guard (only sounds, config and armature corrections left to do).

 

 

I'm also thinking of redoing the head system, using a few custom faces and all that. I'd rather get caught up in fighting out the details than proceeding with the necessary elements...

[Macser 776]

That looks like it should be a fairly tough nut to crack.  :)

[Revan9190 132]

That looks like it should be a fairly tough nut to crack.   :)

Ironic, considering it looks like the cyborg in the picture seems to lack...those. But yeah, I wouldn't want these guys facing me down in a dark alley way...or anywhere for that matter.

 

Great job, lenyoga!

[Lenyoga 326]

Ironic, considering it looks like the cyborg in the picture seems to lack...those.

They could apply for a custom nutjob...

Does anybody know if BlendAnims are supposed to be modifiable? I added a new entry with the names of the cables included, yet this has no effect at all... I ended up modifying the mod's main config.bin, this didn't work out either.

[Macser 776]

Blendanims are used for procedural animations. In practical terms that's the tilting of the upper body sections when the player or AI look up and down. It takes what ever animation is playing and offsets it by the required amount. Blendanims gives you a bit of control over that. so you could in theory reduce extremes in the offset between the selections in the torso. Abdomen, chest , neck and head.

 

But it doesn't relate to the weighting of the model. Not directly at least.

 

Because of this procedural type of animation, and the fact the bones affected by it are hard-coded, anything above the waist will not be included in the tilting up or down. Although you can add new bones. You can't add them to the hard-coded bones. 

 

For example, if you added finger bones, they'd animate fine and maintain their positions as you key framed them. But as soon as the character looks up or down the fingers will stay exactly where they are. Even if you include them in the hand selection. I assume they work like config based anims. 

 

This is based on practical experience, rather than reading.

[Lenyoga 326]

Because of this procedural type of animation, and the fact the bones affected by it are hard-coded, anything above the waist will not be included in the tilting up or down. Although you can add new bones. You can't add them to the hard-coded bones. 

 

Ah, that would explain quite a few things. I think I'll go the lazy man's way on this one and set it all to "aimingNo" for that specific nutcracker - it would look too weird, otherwise.

[Macser 776]

So how much range of motion were you hoping for in the cables? I mean have you tried using the standard bones and blending the weights between the selections? Without extra bones it wouldn't be perfect. But it may be possible to get something acceptable at least.

[Lenyoga 326]

So how much range of motion were you hoping for in the cables? I mean have you tried using the standard bones and blending the weights between the selections? Without extra bones it wouldn't be perfect. But it may be possible to get something acceptable at least.

I'm considering this right now - with two of the cables this would be a problem, with the other two it would work out well enough. I thought about substituting the additional bones with some of the unused facial selections, but those aren't mobile bones as far as I know.

I think I'll go with modeling the 2 problematic cables along the elbow and shoulder (that's where they cause issues, due to the heavy bending) once I'm psychologically up to it again (I have to refine the basic animations and parts of the model anyway).

 

I swear, by my last seizure, that the residual cyborgs won't get that many cables, we're out of cable budget.

[Macser 776]

Yeah. Where I've had similar issues I've run the cabling along the back of the arm. Not following it exactly. But close enough that it can flex in line with it, rather than countering it.

[secondlt2 12]

is the links up there updated?

[Lenyoga 326]

12 hours ago, secondlt2 said:

is the links up there updated?

 

Not yet, I will probably try to update to version 0.87 this year - a lot of the basic features were improved or expanded, that would make the demo mission a bit more interesting, too. I'm only a bit torn about it, because there's lots of material related to later levels in the current files - I pretty much finished the boss fight and I'm working on bits of the last level right now. Hm, maybe I shouldn't have started to work from end to beginning. But where there's some green tea, there's a way.

Oh, there's some good news too - the cyborg elite guard is now semi-competently rigged and the animation/attack system works. I'll just take some time to make the animations look as good as possible before I post further updates on it.

[Marc13Bautista 60]

Looks like a awesome campaign! I'll be looking forward to trying it out once the final build is released. Very glad that OFP isn't dead.