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RS Faction A vs Faction B: Crowd-Source Brainstorm

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Nestor Makhno

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Feb 25, 2006
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#1
Some of you may well be aware of the allusions Yoshiro made recently to a "Faction A vs Faction B" scenario for RO2/RS.

A facile response would be "Well these factions are already in game, it's got to be very simple to bring them together".

The more experienced modders, especially coders, will see right away that, with a codebase as huge as RO2/RS's, this is a very long way from the reality of the situation. In short, this is a HUGE task.

Somebody in another thread has already pointed out potential problems with the insults - for example, A Russian in Khalkin Gol would not call his enemy a "German pig". What I would like to do here is tap into the collective smarts of the RS modding community and brainstorm other potential problems with all kinds of stuff....

Classes for CD, weapons stats DB, campaign mode etc etc.

I hope that this can become a very constructive thread where the community and we at Anti-Matter Games can work together to make the 'next big update' more awesomerer :)

So, any comments about potential pitfalls/solutions for bringing 2 existing factions together?
 
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#3
1) Flamethrowers. RO2 factions are not coded to burn and char like RS factions. Germans should also get their own flamethrower if going up against Americans.

2) Weapons. I find that the RO2 weapons feel easier to handle than RS weapons. I think this would give Germans a great advantage against Americans, especially due to the Garand's smaller clip size and clunkier sights (can we please make them semi-transparent in an update?).

3) Vehicles. It wouldn't feel complete to have Americans without tanks or some form of transport vehicles. This could probably be added later, but it would be much better to have it right away.

4) "Switching sides" dialogue. I've noticed that when playing SD in RO2, the narrators say "Allies and Axis switching sides". However, in RS, the narrators say "USA and Japanese switching sides".

5) Enemy weapons unlocked by heroes. Americans shouldn't be able to use Japanese weapons against Germans and Germans shouldn't be able to use Russian weapons against Americans.

6) Native voices. Would Germans still speak English if native voices was disabled? This probably isn't too big of an issue.

7) Faction color on scoreboard, killfeed, etc. Americans and Germans are both some shade of green. One of them would probably need to be recolored to make the distinction easier.

8) Honor levels. Would you use RO2, RS, or both honor levels? RS honor level when playing Americans? RO2 honor level when playing Germans?

9) What about those that don't own RS? Will they have full access to the German side but limited access to the American side? This would probably cause people to teamstack. Or will this be another paid expansion? I think you guys deserve the extra money, though it would probably need to be a more affordable price point than RS.

I'll try and add more stuff to this list as I come up with it.
 
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#6
The mutator that we use on the TWIL servers does have the ability to exchange classes by other classes. For instance replace the EliteAssault by a Rifleman class. It's full working as long as both classes are from the same faction. Just out of fun I once tried to use it to exchange a HOS class with an RS class. It does show up correctly on the class selection screen, however selecting is will give a "This class has already been taken" even though the counter still indicated 0/1. This was on a HOS map. I never tried to replace a RS class by a HOS class on a RS map. The chance of that working is a bit higher due to the inheritance tree of the HOS vs RS classes. But then still the HOS class would have characteristics of the RS faction due to all other objects being RS class instances.

In short, I think a lot of coding is required to get the factions to work as they do on their original maps.
 
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#11
Moskeeto said:
Did their captured Russian weapons make it out to the Western Front?
Click to expand...

7LAvsJPC3n8.jpg

this for example
 
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#14
Nestor Makhno said:
That has definitely been our experience so far, Ducky :)
Click to expand...

Careful there, Nestor. You're violating forum rules ;)

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#16
Germans vs Americans would definitely make this game span across so many amazing theatres, it'll be amazing if we can do this.

As for suggestions, I'd probably say that the main priorities would be voice lines, uniforms, and weapon handling (in reference to Moskeeto's post). And then tack on all the other aesthetic stuff like proper classes, UI colors, win/loss music and voice lines too.

It would be really fun to test this out in raw form, just to see the feel of Germans vs Americans or Russians vs Japanese would play out in terms of weapon handling, which I think would be a big issue considering how different the atmosphere is from RO2 to RS in terms of that.

I don't really have much else to say except wants (like vehicles and map suggestions) but I'll be sure to update if I have any other ideas.
 
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#17
I have an idea about the flamethrower materials and effects, voices, and uniforms that I've actually been working on already.

The way skins work in IOM is an attempt to eliminate the need for those ~180 different subclasses of ROPawn and RSPawn and in doing so greatly simplify the process of adding new skins (and new factions if so desired!)

Right now we have:

ROPawn -> RSPawn -> RSAlliedPawnLevel1-> RSAlliedPawnArmyLevel1
->RSAlliedPawnArmyLevel1AntiTank

and so on for every Team, Faction and Role in the game. At each level of the class tree certain aspects of the pawn's skin are hard coded.

I've changed this by defining a class (UniformVariant) that contains all information an RSPawn / ROPawn needs to create a skin. So, string paths to the mesh, fieldgear mesh, headgear mesh, headgear physics asset, all relevant MICs, which roles may use it, etc. I create subclasses of UniformVariant and those become definitions of skins that the server logically selects on a per team, role and temperature (winter skins!) basis and replicates to clients.

When the player spawns, he is told everything about what he needs to look like right then, without it being hard coded in the definition of the Pawn class.
This greatly simplifies the process of adding new skins, allows more variety among teams, and it could be easily extended to the voices as well. You could even take a system like this and link those uniform definitions to the instances of RORoleInfo that the maps use, giving mappers control of weapons and uniforms on their maps. This may also alleviate the problem of unlocking the wrong hero weapons; you could define two possible arrays of weapons to unlock for the Axis, for instance.

I've also found that I can eliminate most of the MICs that are used by the current system in IOM. I simply hard code the battlewear values and set those parameters based on the player's rank at spawn. So you can eliminate the Rank2-Rank5 MICs for each uniform and save some space!

Setting the parent of all the RO2 uniform MICs to M_Gear_Master (Rising Storm players) and reassigning all the textures in them brought the burning textures to the RO2 players and the flame effects were a matter of copying the relevant code from RSPawn. Unfortunately there aren't any burning screams for the Russians or Germans.

Totally ignoring the UI changes and new voice acting and all that, I think the problem can be thought of as adding new skins with different voices and weapons to RS. This is especially true if from now on RO2 uses the RSPawn class, because all the new functionality like the bonzai charge and burning effects and so on is already there. Some changes would need to be made for the German and Russian charges...

I hope this all makes sense... I walked 18 miles today so I had a long time to think :D
 
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#18
dibbler67 said:
I hope this all makes sense... I walked 18 miles today so I had a long time to think :D
Click to expand...

Those were 18 miles well spent.

Moskeeto said:
1) Flamethrowers. RO2 factions are not coded to burn and char like RS factions. Germans should also get their own flamethrower if going up against Americans.

2) Weapons. I find that the RO2 weapons feel easier to handle than RS weapons. I think this would give Germans a great advantage against Americans, especially due to the Garand's smaller clip size and clunkier sights (can we please make them semi-transparent in an update?).
Click to expand...

Regarding Moskeeto's first point: I would like to see a little more nuance to possible wider usage of flamethrowers. Should Germans get an amount of flamethrowers equal to that of Americans, irrespective of attacking/defending? The thought of three FOs on both sides of an attack/defend map strikes me as being a thoroughly fun-dampening cluster****. Given current flamethrower mechanics in-game, I think that flamethrowers should be deployed sparingly and only to those in offensive positions to ensure they retain some semblance of their niche role.

Regarding Moskeeto's second point: I very much doubt that Germans will have an advantage against Americans as far as gear goes (When you mention the Garand you're comparing it to the G41, right?). If anything, the Americans will have a slight upper hand with a wider range of semi-automatic and automatic weaponry. I think the initial approach for role/weapon availability should be as Extension7 put it: implement role and weapon availability as they are on extant maps and see what happens. As far as "special" weapons (M2 Flamethrower and Type 89) go, I think the first response to their implementation, in the event of them being overpowering, should be to rein them in by lowering availability.
 
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#19
I agree with most of what moskeeto said except for weapons, I think the germans would only be moderately out gunned instead of the Japanese being completely outgunned.

As for flamethrowers, I would like to see them on both sides, but don't have them available on every map.

Also, if this is a paid expansion, I think most of the people here will be more then happy to buy it.
 
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