Hi Vikings, I bear gifts.

[Gorzakk]

Hi. I am a tweaker of maps and a modder of vehicles who has recently come a cropper from posting my stuff around ONS purists. Fast scorpions? Hellbenders with driver weapons? "Blasphemer" they cried! "Popular with the people? NEVER!!! Well, ok but the people are mistaken!" And so here I am.

:cheers:

Another mapper from Titan (for that was the place) suggested I try them here. And so here are 2 of my best tweaked lovingly to what I consider to be a pretty playable frag fest.

Scorpion Canyon and Coldfusion

You'll need some of my Mod pack to play them. The following files.

GorzScorps.u
GorzScorps.ucl
GorzScorps.utx
HellHound.u
HellHound.ucl
HellHound.utx

And away you go. If anyone even takes a look at these I would be very grateful.

[DW_WailofSuicide]

Hi. I am a tweaker of maps and a modder of vehicles who has recently come a cropper from posting my stuff around ONS purists. Fast scorpions? Hellbenders with driver weapons? "Blasphemer" they cried! "Popular with the people? NEVER!!! Well, ok but the people are mistaken!" And so here I am.

:cheers:

Another mapper from Titan (for that was the place) suggested I try them here. And so here are 2 of my best tweaked lovingly to what I consider to be a pretty playable frag fest.

Scorpion Canyon and Coldfusion

You'll need some of my Mod pack to play them. The following files.

GorzScorps.u
GorzScorps.ucl
GorzScorps.utx
HellHound.u
HellHound.ucl
HellHound.utx

And away you go. If anyone even takes a look at these I would be very grateful.

What's up Gorzakk, seen some of your stuff over on the Titan forums and such, and played on Scorpion Valley on the Titan servers once or twice. I've been getting into Uscript for vehicle and weapon modding recently. Hopefully we'll get the chance to try out some of your work here soon.

[Gorzakk]

What's up Gorzakk, seen some of your stuff over on the Titan forums and such, and played on Scorpion Valley on the Titan servers once or twice. I've been getting into Uscript for vehicle and weapon modding recently. Hopefully we'll get the chance to try out some of your work here soon.

Hi WallofSuicide. I've become very good with vehicle code, so give me a shout if you need help. :)

My stuff got pulled from titans main server after some arguing about custom content. I am therefore touting my business elsewhere in the hope of seeing my babies once more on a popular server. Whos the man around here to talk to regarding this?

[kaeolian]

Hey dude, sounds good id like to have a go on those maps. Toxicwaste runs DW spam vikings and provides us with the best UT ons servers around :cheers: .

[DW_WailofSuicide]

What's up Gorzakk, seen some of your stuff over on the Titan forums and such, and played on Scorpion Valley on the Titan servers once or twice. I've been getting into Uscript for vehicle and weapon modding recently. Hopefully we'll get the chance to try out some of your work here soon.

Hi WallofSuicide. Inspite of, maybe because of the popularity of my stuff there it got moved to a special "junk server" they set up in my honor.

http://ut2004.titaninternet.co.uk/forum ... php?t=7296

I am therefore touting my business elsewhere in the hope of seeing my babies once more on a popular server. Whos the man around here to talk to regarding this?

ToxicWaste runs the DW servers, does a damn fine job of it too from what I can see.

Gorzakk, took a look at the threads about the "Custom Vehicle" server -- I think it's a foolish and backwards mentality to segregate "custom" content from stock content. I can understand an administrative position of wanting to please the server's community, but I do think that if a person dismisses custom content out of hand they are being superficial and dogmatic.

What I find most confusing is that you will find people opposed to custom vehicles who will also plainly admit that the default Scorpion is hardly useful. The Scorpion is the prime example why a simplistic formulation of "Stock = Good/Balanced" and "Custom = IMBA/Crap" isn't appropriate. I don't understand the usefulness of maintaining the status quo just for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

The game might be played in a certain way on one map, and while there is a vested interest in maintaing a consistency of experience, that does not mean that every map must follow the exact same formulas. If that were the case we would not have, for example innovative Assault maps incorporating vehicle and space combat. If mappers only followed the whims of the established community from UT99 all the UT04 Assault maps would be are empty cubes where people shieldgun jump to an objective. Instead we got awesome and innovative new stuff, new stuff that means one assault map is very distinctive yet also maintains consistency. In general I feel like the ONS community hasn't really stepped up to the plate as far as providing really cool twists on the traditional ONS gameplay, but I've got some ideas that I think could change that if I ever get around to implementing them. You seem to think the same way, as I've noticed from Scorpion Canyon.

I am hoping that when UT07 rolls around, the modding community will be able to take control of the vehicles immediately and work on them and establish a situation where players do not feel it is necessary to have exactly the same vehicles from map to map. In a map emphasizing air combat it may be appropriate to make those vehicles more sturdy, for example. In large maps, such as your Scorpion Canyon, it may be appropriate to increase vehicle speeds to keep the pace of the game high. I don't want vehicle combat to turn into "Zark Rapidfire Assault Tanks!!!!" but I do think it is appropriate for mappers to do customization to ensure good gamplay -- frequently the easier option is to tweak the maps, but that doesn't always work. There's no way to tweak a map to make the Scorpion good, for example, that doesn't involve seriously degrading other aspects of the map (layout, pickups, other vehicles, etc). Vehicle alteration is just another tool in an arsenal of techniques to improve and balance a map.

Edit: PS, sorry for the essay, I tend to be kind of verbose when I get down to writing stuff here.

[DW_ToxicWaste]

Hey guys, thanks for the props. And Hey Gorzakk, I'm a big fan of your work.

My only concern with this, and it is a very big one I'm afraid, is are these mods that will remove me from the whitelist?

I've tried stuff which removed me from the whiteist before, and my playership dropped 50%. I've chatted with piggy about this before. I think there's a different mentality here in the states, where there's always 50 servers within a playable ping, and no need to bookmark anything. I have some very loyal players, but I get a lot of "walk up" traffic, where if they don't see it in their list, they assume it's down and go elsewhere.

Now with that being said, I do have another 32 player server called 3 point land. It used to be a server with mods on it, but alas, it wasn't on the whitelist and therefore did not get much traffic. I have had requests to re-instate that to the mod server, and this is a perfect excuse to try it out.

Let me know about the whitelist issue.

TBH, my personal opinion is that this game is running out of steam even for people who love it. And we have at least 9 months to go before UT2k7, so if we can spice it up I'm all for it. And if I know my players, they will agree.

I've had some custom vehicle maps on the server before, unfortunately they were too big to download, or too laggy. I think one map was called PMC-Beta. Had two vehicles I absolutely loved. It had a fast manta with machine guns, and a light, fast tank with 500 health. I think these vehicles were so well done, they fit naturally. Unfortunately the d/l was 21 megs (compressed!) so there were plenty of times the map was over before most people could d/l it.

You can see a little more info here:

http://forums.unrealplayground.com/prin ... 9567&pp=40


Also, theres a space fighter in a map called Galdari system, or something like that which is very cool. The only problem is the map lags the server horribly. You can see that here:

http://www.unrealplayground.com/downloa ... apid=10469

If you can embed yours, and these vehicles in appropriate places in appropriate maps without removing me from the whitelist, your damn right I'll host them on SV. And even if they do remove me from the whitelist, I'll start up the modded ONS server and run these proudly.

Glanum is a map which comes to mind. Nice map, but too few nodes and too few vehicles. A couple of light, fast tanks in there might make for much better play.

Are you glad you came here? I can keep you busy for 9 months, no worries. :compress:

Oh and I apologize in advance. I'm not that responsive. I will respoind eventually, but it may be a couple of days. I have a very full RL, and I dedicate every last second I can to this game, but sometimes I just don't have many seconds to spare.

Rich (TW)

[Gorzakk]

My stuff wont remove your server from the whitelist and I can embed anything you like into any map you like. No prob. I can also adapt vehicles for you on a map for map basis no prob.

I'll knock you up versions of these will all rides embedded if you want. Probably take me 2 or 3 days. The reason I like them seperate is you can use them in multiple maps and that keeps map filesizes down as you will only get the textures, code etc once. Previous versions of coldfusion and scorp canyon were pushing the 10-11 meg size. Seperating out the files has brought them down to around 3 meg each.

One prob is, I suck at doing actual terrain mapping! So I can go into other maps and fiddle if you/I have permission to change. Building from scratch? I never know where to start.

[DW_ToxicWaste]

As long as it does not remove me from the whitelist, I'm happy to give it a go. No need to embed. I don't know if I'll be able to do it tonight, but I'll try.

Thanks again Gorzakk. Let's start here, and then we can work on "other" projects. :clown:

[DW_WailofSuicide]

Just played another game in Scorpion Canyon to refresh myself and see what the latest version is like.

The new Scorps are awesome. This is definitely how the stock Scorpions should have been. My one complaint is outrunning my own energy web when I'm going at a full clip -- Not sure if you consider this an issue but I don't think a vehicle should ever be able to outrun its own projectiles.

I feel like the HellHound is kind of unnecessary in a map like this, but it doesn't detract from the map at all. Excellent choice of music for the map too, gotta love it. I think the map could stand some differentiation from Dria, particularly in the bases -- I remember when I first played the map on Titan and felt extremely disoriented because I thought it was Dria. You've done a good job of making the new vehicles distinctive by their coloration (and I'm glad to see the flame textures are gone, those were kind of cheesy looking), but I think similar attention should be paid to the map to make it a little more distinctive looking in areas (mostly the base and first nodes).

Gorzakk I think you should make a post here with some basic info about the vehicles you've created, it would be helpful for those of us who read the forums but may be too lazy to play the maps offline, heh.

[DW_ToxicWaste]

Hi Gorzakk, I loaded up both maps tonight. As I suspected, my players give the new vehicles a big thumbs up. And they want as much new content as you can pump out (as long as it is balanced, well thought out, etc.)

I think if we can get the permission of the maker of PMC-Beta, I'd like to get those vehicles and use them as well. Then we could have a map with all fast vehicles (mantas, scorps, light tanks)

I'd be happy to discuss any ideas you might have. Send me a mail. You can see my email address on the home page under DW clan roster.

Thanks Gorzakk! You have a job here for life!

Rich (TW)

PS, our resident mapping genious is Wraith. I'm sure if you two got together, you could make a really cool map between his mapping skills, and your kick ass vehicles. I suggest you hit him up as he's working on a new map as we speak.