APB Dev. Blog :: July 13th, 2009 Options

Here you go, another hopefully-great blog despite being a tiny bit late due to a combination of being busy, and playing through Final Fantasy 9 again. Heh heh. To get things started, I'd like to mention that we'll hopefully catch the eye of the French C&C community more now thanks to the efforts of MartinMb and his buddy BoneWerks over at www.CnCSaga.com, a very large and professionally handled community site. BoneWerks is translating all of our blogs to keep people up to speed (for example, this one from a couple weeks ago).

Also, MartinMb's now started a French-speaking clan that is appropriately called APB-FR. The brand new clan/playergroup has got a clan server online already, click the link to find out more details. It's primarily community-focused instead of a heavy focus on competitive play. It is always great to see people get involved like this.

About our own site, we've had some connection/speed issues lately but I believe Crimson from n00bstories.com (our host) is looking into this. Apologies for the service disruptions.

Gap Generator WIP

What's tall, metal, annoying as hell, and isn't the Tesla Coil? Why, the Gap Generator of course. Quick sidenote, Tesla's birthday anniversary was a couple days ago... but back on track, we've got some work on the new Gap Generator and its shroud effects thanks to TheBeerinator, Jonwil, and TruYuri. I believe we've already shown the horribly annoying new shadowing effects the Soviets get to enjoy, but the outer view of the disrupted area is now pretty impressive and I wish I had a video to show you because a still image doesn't do it too much justice.

The Generator itself has also been improved substantially, although some of the proportions are a little bit off right now and will be set correctly. Have a look!

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SAM & RPG WIP

R34ch is kinda sorta back and modeling like a madman, popping out things left and right which is pretty cool since he's good at this stuff and is tackling little things we need to get done that'll add a bit of polish. For Gamma we wanted to redo all the base defenses, and he decided to redo the SAM site itself in addition to the actual missile you saw the other week. It will, of course, be all textured and animated at some point. I'm not sure if you noticed in the video the other blog, but they now fire their missiles in pairs.

R34ch has also been refining the new RPG, look for it next week. They're pretty fun soldiers to use although they are pretty poor when it comes to fighting off infantry. Amazingly, the Soviets can now field a competitive infantry rush during the early game, or actually put up a defense of their Ore Truck thanks in part to these new weapons.

Co-Op WIP

I'm sure you've seen zunnie about, asking for volunteers to playtest his attempts at setting up some cooperative play maps. It's actually pretty impressive looking and quite the departure from the normal game style, but some of the gameplay concepts within the co-op maps may end up making their way into future counter-operative (ie, normal) maps too.
Download the map over here if you have not already done so.

Arming the Troops Continued

Much like the other weapons we showed the prior week, the M16 is now rigged up and ready to rock with some work started on its animations. Possibly next week we can show off some video of the various animations; right now they're a little rough but show great promise.

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I like the look of that coop map. Seems to play better than the rest.

Also 'wow' at Badger bombers and MCV. Zunnie I have a paramomb model If you want it

The GAP looks awesome and the new SAM site just looks amazing, very nice work there.

I love the RPG and the M16 does looks epic ingame, great work guys!

M16 looks good. =D

Ready to knock some turrets of with that new RPG!!! and also wow at those badger bombers my jaw nearly fell two feet when i saw them

This post has been edited by Major552: Jul 14 2009, 03:11 AM

You can never play too much final fantasy 9! =D

Seriously, 8 years later it's still my favourite ever game, with APB a close second.

Also Soviet_Invasion_Coop looks AMAZING now it's finished, I can't believe I missed the best tweaks!

Lastly, NEW BUILDING MODELS = WIN WIN WIN :V

Looking very good. Loving the new models.

Btw, I didn't quite get the co-op, where you just meant to fed off the soviet waves of attacks?

goow work guys.

Lastly, NEW BUILDING MODELS = WIN WIN WIN :V

This

Wow lovin the pretty Gap Generator! The most useless building against ai. lol And the new allied coop map is epic win!

I love the effort going into improving the appearance of APB.

The Gap Generator, RPG and SAM Site look amazing. Although I am unsure about the arms and M16; the texture doesn't match the Allied Rifleman (unless that was changed too), and the M16 seems odd held that way.

Regardless, the detail on both the arms and M16 are great, and really show in-game.

The M16 seems odd held that way.

Could you elaborate on what looks odd/how it could be improved please? I'd like to take as much criticism on these poses as possible. Thanks

Could you elaborate on what looks odd/how it could be improved please? I'd like to take as much criticism on these poses as possible. Thanks

Personally its the arm, I've just realised. Take any long object and hold it like a gun. Now try and outstretch your left arm like in the picture. It's very uneasy and sore after awhile.

It feels more natural to have the arm bend under the gun so to speak.

the texture doesn't match the Allied Rifleman

Good eye. We have arms for every infantry, Eggman just likes using this pair (which is for the Techie) to test the rig with.

Yeah exactly that. The rig is universal however, so we can easily change the arm models if we wanted to, and they'd still fit correctly.

I always FFIX to be a little slow playwise...

...so I play it on ePSXe. Nothing better than FFIX with a speed controller.

Blog looks good, and the soviet invasion was FREAKING EPIC. I pity the fool who didn't show up for it.