91st Assault Corps: The Battle of Coruscant (beta 1)

[Xfire Keenmike aka cull]

i would like to try and host a map with custom sides if i only knew the letter to put in for the side. maybe the dedicated server that was made (by the way thank you for making it where ever you are now) can only play the standard sides? maybe one night i will try each letter in the alphabet to see if i can find the side.

[SchTicK]

[Champing at the bit]

[Napseeker]

you could make the last gcw map a huge one with tons of reinfocements and 2 or 3 capitol ships per team-primarily for dogfights and ony spawn on your own ships...

There probably wouldn't be more capital ships (just because the amount of work would be quite tedious) but there is definitely a likelihood of increasing the reinforcements.  Right now the map uses about 375 reinforcements and they die off fast due to heavy combat and of course, once you blow up the enemy ship's vital systems that really causes the numbers to drop.  I'll see what people think would be a good higher number after beta 1...

Update on status:
- I've now tripled the number of turrets on the cruisers to create an effective blanket of laser fire between the two cruisers (with a periodic pause in firing so flyers can traverse without worrying about getting hit)
- the fx for faking a huge battle in the background fleet doesn't work (I adjust the LOD/ farscene/nearscene but any effect which is too far away from the main battleground just doesn't appear) so this will be abandoned for now unfortunately
- still some problems with AI pathing but they do attack one of the interior cruiser targets and destroy it without any help from me...
- all Jedi starfighters now fire green laser bolts (as seen in RotS)
- all Vulture Droids now fire missiles which have a blue smoketrail (again, as seen in RotS)
- made some new victory/defeat endscreens for the mission since the standard SWBF2 ones were awful

Am hoping to release this by Wed or Thursday night.

[Jon415]

cant wait till wednesday

[Napseeker]

Ooops, it will now probably be Thursday or Friday... am almost done but need a bit of time to test some basic AI behavior and to write the documentation (otherwise pilots may not know what parts of the ship to attack).

Here are some new HQ pictures until then:








Below: one of the new ending screens - you can see a fake fleet that I put into the background of the sky to give the impression of being surrounded by other cruisers. Unfortunately since the effects don't appear if they are too far away from the gamer's camera there's no way to put in background explosions and lasers to make it seem as though there's a lot of fighting.


Below: you can see the layout for some of the CIS fighters here. In the far end of the hangar are two (fake/prop) Republic gunships which are used to unload clones onto the hangar.


Below: each cruiser is being raided by a boarding party from the enemy team.  On the REP cruiser is a CIS droid gunship MAF and on the CIS cruiser are two REP gunships.  Both are actually props and not flyable or destroyable. They're just intended to explain to the gamer how the enemy forces got onboard the hangar....




Below: This General Grievous is a reskinned version - it's pure white and based on GG from his appearance at the end of the 2D Clone Wars cartoon when he kidnapped Palpatine from Coruscant.  Always preferred the white coloring to his eventual beige look...




Updates:

There will be 5 targets on each ship that can be destroyed; 4 are exterior ship targets and 1 is inside the ship.  The AI bots will attack half of the exterior ship targets and the interior target for you, but it's still up to you to attack the other 2 (and help the bots destroy the other 3).  Whichever team loses all 5 to the enemy will begin losing reinforcements VERY quickly (but it's not a guaranteed win - if the successful team just stands around doing nothing, the losing team can still fight back to regain their losses, especially if they have their hero turned on).

I've set up the map so that there is a locals team (General Grievous and Magnaguards) helping the CIS.  In most cases, these guys will appear by jumping down from the ceiling rafters down onto the ground and often throwing their EMP staff weapons at the REPs as they are jumping down.  So the clones not only have to stare all around them to fight the normal battledroids, they should also keep an eye UPWARD for the appearance of the magnaguards!

As mentioned before there is one uncapturable CP on each ship which is what you use to spawn from. This CP will randomly put you (and any AI bots) on either ship, so this randomizes the battle on each cruiser every time since you never know which cruiser may end up with more units than the other team's units. 

Each ship also has a second CAPTURABLE CP which controls the spawning of starfighters, this is the Hangar CP.  If you capture the hangar CP, this will not affect the reinforcement count of your enemy BUT half the fighters on the enemy cruiser will turn into fighters from your team (this seems to help the AI bots of your team jump into the fighters and fly off into space battles).  The second benefit is that if the REPs can capture the CIS hangar CP and the REP fighters destroy the CIS (external) bridge, then the loss of both of these will prevent the locals team of Grievous and Magnaguards from respawning when they die (otherwise the locals will respawn forever).  This gives the REP ground forces a bonus goal besides just trying to destroy the interior ship target.

However, if the CIS lose the locals team because the REPs captured the CIS hangar CP and destroyed the CIS bridge, the CIS team can get the locals team to spawn again if they can capture the REP's hangar CP on the REP cruiser!  By capturing the REP's hangar CP, this activates an additional spawn source for the locals team.

Hope that doesn't sound too confusing. I wanted to explain this now so people don't spend too much time reading instructions when the map becomes available.  It's quite difficult to give interesting goals for both the ground and space forces but I think this should keep things fun no matter where you are.  You can play this map and still win without having to fly a fighter to attack the enemy ship targets (just play like normal by flying back and forth between each cruiser and hunting down and kill all enemy units). 

Because there are 3 distinct battlefields, it can be frustrating to figure out where the last few enemy units are hiding, so if you play as Anakin, or the CIS demolitions trooper, or the REP heavy weapons trooper, you will be able to see 80% of the entire map all at once and will know where every enemy is on the entire map.  Or, if you hop into any fighter, you can instantly see where EVERY enemy is everywhere on the map.  I did this because I noticed sometimes I can be flying in space and not even know if there are other enemy fighters are around for me to hunt down.  So I gave a wide scan range and you can tell if you're all alone out in space or not.  You can even tell the difference between CIS and the locals team since I gave them different map icons so you don't waste time killing locals when you want to hunt down real CIS units.

Whew.

[Jon415]

 
wow

cant wait till friday!!!

[Xfire Keenmike aka cull]

if you include me in the beta testing i wouldnt need a readme file.

[Giftheck]

Was that an MAF? Are you using both the MAF and Droid Gunship?

[Rhino]

 

Must... play...

[Unit 33]

Must... play...

I share your pain Rhino... this shows that Napseeker has well and truly out-done himself again.

[Napseeker]

Was that an MAF? Are you using both the MAF and Droid Gunship?

Whooops - you are correct, that is the MAF not the Droid Gunship.  I keep getting those two mixed up (and I even own the titanium toy for the droid gunship too...)   

Update: progress has been great. I will be working on the documentation tonight since I think the AI is finally doing what I'm trying to get it to do (although the CIS is now getting stuck in the corners of the cruiser but it's not too bad). 

To make it a bit easier for human gamers, what I've now done is set up the Hangar CPs so that when you spawn from them, there is a slightly better chance that you will spawn on that cruiser. So if you are on the REP team, want to spawn on the REP home cruiser, pick the Hangar CP to spawn from instead of the uncapturable CP.  The hangar CP will give you a 60% chance of spawning on the REP ship. Hey better than 50%....

So far this map plays more or less like the Bespin Platforms map if that's any indication. I may have to put in some crates or other items on the CIS hangar just to offer up some cover since it's basically an open arena at the moment (which isn't so bad in itself).

[Jon415]

Napeseeker, you are the best

[Xfire Keenmike aka cull]

i hope alot of us can all be able to play in this map at the same time.

[Jon415]

we souuld have this map on one of the servers for day of swbf

[Hardcore]

I've often thought some "docking bay" props of the link would be in a cruiser hanger might have made the SWBF2 maps a bit better. but thats just a thought.