Doing Battlefront Research

[Michaeluj]

Hello!

I'm making a retrospective for the entire Battlefront franchise -- it's development history, interviews, publications, historical context, mechanics, and even mods. It's currently at 300 pages and not even close to finished! I would like to make it into a video essay (or many), but a text document is priority for now.

Here, I want to obtain advice from the community to create a comprehensive list of mods as well as a basic guide for how to manage them. [At the moment, I'm testing out any halfway decent mods to see if I want to include them. Once that's done, I'll list them and ask you guys for other suggestions).

In addition, I am exploring the files to see what secrets I can unearth At the moment, I'm fascinated by how critical hits on vehicles are implemented -- the damage done, how their locations don't seem to match conventional wisdom, how some vehicles seem to have none at all, etc.

[Dark_Phantom]

Well, a great place to look is the files that are in the modding toolkits.
A direct answer to your questions can be found in there.  For BF1 and 2 the source .lua files and .odf files would be great to look at, and observe.  If you have questions about a line or section of code, most likely someone here can answer them.  For example, Critical Hit locations in BF2 are defined in /Sides/sidename/ODF/vehicle.odf, and correspond to a bone (not sure if correct term) on the .msh file (the model).  When Thrak Gorshun hits the neck of the AT-AT with his missile launcher, it does more damage because it is defined as a critical hit location.

Slightly sidetracked, I found that Tow Cable attach points are actually done the same way using their own .odf command.  I did not know this and now really want to see how hard it would be to use tow cables on AT-TEs.

[Michaeluj]

Thank you. I've actually been having some success with reading files (both MSH and ODF), and the community was quite helpful.

I still have to figure out whether p_crithit 0 in the ODF means that "base" critical hit damage is received or whether the critical hit function is turned off. The ODF guide I read doesn't make that clear.