Project Reality Forums - Blogs - [R-DEV]AncientMan

Epic view distance is epic

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Mon, 23 May 2011 15:29:51 GMT

Since unfortunately the BF2 engine seems to be limited to ~3000m view distance, I had to stitch together multiple images to fit in all of Shijia Valley's amazing detail. Took a fair while to do, and cruising about at around 10 fps because of the huge view distance doesn't speed things up either, too many trees :(.

It looked something like this once stitched together, then I had to do some work in photoshop to fix up the edges. The above image is then used in the map overviews for displaying gameplay related information.

Congrats to [R-DEV]AFsoccer for this amazing looking map, and also on his recent promotion to Mapping Manager. Hopefully everyone will enjoy the map in v0.96 :).

Some random blog entry

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:27:32 GMT

So, I already posted a PR Highlight today, so I dunno what else to say.

Oh, I know, I'll just say join IRC, because IRC is awesome, and awesome stuff happens on IRC.

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f10-...n/52324-t.html

My First Vehicle

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:12:00 GMT

With my first real venture into the BF2 Editor (believe it or not, I've done all this work on PR without actually doing anything in in the editor :p), I decided to spice up a vehicle I found in BF2.

A bomb truck :D. Basically it's just an alternative to the current big red semi bomb truck, but more awesome :p. With any luck, you might see this in a map or two in 0.9 :).

Some messing around... (Part 2)

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 22:57:12 GMT

Some more testing of new content in v0.9. This time, Chuc and I are checking out the new IDF and Hamas factions against some bots on Asad Khal. The usual disclaimer of early content and it's all subject to change :).

Too many numbers :(

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:26:10 GMT

Some messing around...

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:29:20 GMT

Thought I might show off a bit of new stuff for v0.9. Chuc and I had a bit of a run around on a very early build of v0.9 earlier today. Just seeing if my fix on kit geometries drawing at range was working, checking his awesome new animations, testing the ironsighted variants, etc. You can see it all in this little video. Of course, this is very early stuff for v0.9, so don't be surprised if this stuff is different in the final version :).

News Ticker

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 12:12:52 GMT

Haven't written a blog entry for a while, so I might write one for a little something that I've been working on for the last day or so. Nothing too exciting, probably more boring :p, but it's just a little insight into the backend of things in the PR Dev world.

I'm sure everyone knows of the new news ticker in the PR main menu that was introduced in 0.86. Due to the flash engine in BF2, certain things don't work, so workarounds have to be done in order to get things working. This basically means for the news ticker, instead of loading dynamic text for the news ticker, it works by loading images from a website. The images are of text, so it basically looks the same :). For the linked websites for each news item, since we can't update the menu every time we want to update the news ticker, the links go to a static redirect website, which we dynamically change to send you to the appropriate link.

Now, the problem with using this method, is updating the news ticker would be a fairly heavy task. You would have to write up a message in Photoshop or whatever, save it, upload it, then edit the redirect page, save it, upload it. Then do that multiple times for the 5 different news ticker items. Not really that great, more of a chore updating the news ticker, leaving it go unused and ending up with no one reading it :(.

The solution is some sort of web form that allows any Dev easily update the ticker in a matter of seconds. So, through the wonders of PHP and JavaScript, you end up with something like this:

Anyway, I really like how it has turned out. It's turned a 5-10 minute task into a 20 second task, so hopefully we'll end up with a constant stream of dynamic info going straight into the main menu, which means more advertising of news, events, competitions, whatever :).

Auto Deploy

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:07:14 GMT

So, as mentioned and shown in the Dev Journal, I've managed to make an auto deploy feature. It only took 40 hours as well! (That is a pretty accurate figure, it took forever to get working right...).

To keep things clean in the Dev Journal post, I'm going to go into some more detail here.

What this feature does, is select the server, grabs the server name, filters only that server, then refreshes the list every 5 seconds. It then selects the server, grabs the player data, then feeds that into a simple check: If current players < max players, join server, else, repeat.

That's it in it's simplest form, it's much more complex really, but yeah, that's the simple explanation :p.

So, since it's using the server name as a filter, there's a main limit. The server name cannot contain really messed up characters (like the GibThis server), and cannot be too long (like the servers that put lots of spaces in and then say "Not this server and that server". If it does contain that sort of stuff, it will put out an error message and stop you from using the feature. So, for the server admins who want the feature to work, your going to have to fix up your server name :).

Also, there are some times when it refreshes the server but someone else gets in a millisecond before the function tries to join you. There's not much I can really do about it, but you'll just have to try again I guess :p However, it's pretty much as best as you can expect from the BF2 engine, so deal with it :p.

Anyway, so I'm sure there'll be some questions about this, so post them below and I'll try to answer them (if I feel like it :p).

Main Menu Update

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 06:55:27 GMT

Well, I'm posting this quick blog to get some opinions on from the community :)

First up, we have a news ticker, to replace the MOTD popup graphic. This rotates between 5 news items, and links to the right pages upon clicking them. I'm hoping that no one will miss the popup box :p.

Next up, we have an updated server browser. What I've done is removed the players and server message/graphic from the main screen, extended the server list, and put all the other stuff in a popup window that comes up when you click on a server then click on a server info button. It's still pretty WIP atm, but I'm hoping that people will like the extended server list, and if they want to see who's playing, etc, they'll be fine with clicking a button to get it to come up.

So, what do you think, do you like the changes I'm working on?

From Community Member to Interface Design

[R-DEV]AncientMan — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:38:09 GMT

Well I may put something in here since it's here to use.

Anywho, I'm Gavin, or AncientMan, I am 18, Australian, and I'm the Interface Designer for PR.

Interface design... Not as well recognised as a Level Designer, or an Animator, or a Modeller, but still a part of the game which is often overlooked.

So, how did I get to be this guy?

Well, back in 2007, when 0.61 was still the version being played, and I decided that I wanted to help PR out in some way. Not having much experience except for some basic Photoshop skills, I didn't have that much to contribute. However, I saw a post in one of the forums asking how to increase the view distance, and that got me started. I edited a few levels, increased the view distance, and took a couple of screenshots. They were alright, but they were just that, screenshots. So, after seeing the loading backgrounds being a dull, blurred, black and white image, I decided to edit the image a bit then replace the backgrounds on each map. The result was this:

http://www.realitymod.com/forum/f66-...g-screens.html
(Download links are dead now, but the preview images are still there)

Why I increased the view distance for the loading backgrounds? Don't really know, but they look more interesting then seeing a few meters then fog.

I happened to get [R-CON] status for doing that, so I was pretty stoked. But yeah, it was just one thing that I had done, and I wanted to keep on doing something to keep my [R-CON] status.

So, keeping with the load theme, I decided to work on the map overviews. I still didn't have that much experience in Photoshop, but I tried anyway. In the same thread I linked before, you can see the original ones. They were pretty bad on some maps. You can also see some of the first attempts at making my version of the map overview. The first attempts were pretty bad as well.

But, with help from now [R-DEV]Chuc, a few tutorials, and constant persistence, I learned, and they got better.

And, finally, 0.7 came to release day, and both my new load backgrounds and map overviews were included, for every map. Many long days turned out to be worth it.

So, after 0.7 was released, I was stuck again trying to think of something to do. And then along came a developer linking to the BF2 Menu Flash files (think they were in reply to then [R-CON]Afterdune trying to edit the MOTD box to have a PR image). So, since I had nothing better to do, it was time to have a look at them.

I'd never used flash before, and really didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I was determined to do something with them, so I kept at it. After a few days I figured out what things did what, and I got an idea to have a "PR Tip" to the loading menu. With some help from Sir. Elxx (From BF2 Sandbox, BattleRacer, etc.), I had done it, random tips that are shown at load. So that was included in 0.75.

Along came 0.8, and after learning more about Flash and the BF2 menu, I decided to completely redesign the loading menu (since it was simpler to edit), then later do the main menu in another release (since it was much more complicated due to more frames).

I whipped up a design plan in Photoshop, and the end result was this:

Original Photoshop design plan of the loading menu. Ignore the text used, was place-holders for size and alignment, to make sure everything fitted.

After seeing the Devs were pretty interested in this, I started getting to work in Flash. A few days later, quite to my surprise, I was promoted to [R-DEV] along with various other [R-CON]'s. So now I had even more reason to keep working at it, as now I wanted to keep my [R-DEV] status.

Work was quite quicker than I expected, and after a day or two I had it working ingame:

From Photoshop to Flash.

Obvious changes were made in the process of making it work in Flash, but it turned out pretty well. From there, I got to work on the other frames of the loading menu, and ended up with the following:

WIP of the "Score List" frame.

WIP of the "Top Squads" frame.

WIP of the "Briefing Room"

From there, it was tweaking and refining to get it to what it is looking like now (haven't really touched it since I first made it, 0.85's loading menu is the same as 0.8's).

So now, it's 0.803, with a lot of time of nothing to do. So, I decided to have a crack at the main menu and see how quickly I could do that, and see if I could squeeze that into 0.8.

Another Photoshop plan...

The original Photoshop design plan of the main menu.

I had hoped to get some sort of news ticker to replace the MOTD screen (similar to BF2142), but after much effort, I decided to can the idea since it just wouldn't work.

Anyway, about a day later I had it ingame and working:

Doesn't take that long after all.

But, that is only 1 frame, out of quite a lot. The rest of the frames looked something like this:

The joys of redesigning a menu, it's never done until everything is done.

After about 1 week of working on it as much as possible, it was done, at last. So much quicker than I expected, and the end result was still fairly decent. Was done by 0.804. Oh, as a side note, maths and calculators are actually pretty useful in this type of work dealing with alignment and coordinates.

From there, a new background movie was made by [R-DEV]AfterDune, tweaks were made, bugs were fixed. I also completely redid all the map overviews and loading backgrounds to fit in with the updated menu's. And 0.809 was released.

So from there, the community got their hands on it and gave some feedback, and I made a bunch of tweaks to it. Removing the background from the main navigation buttons, moving the buttons to the bottom left, tweaking the server browser to remove filters and have a map overview button, fixing up the damned 800x600 CTD bug (bloody fonts), and various other tweaks, and we ended up with 0.85's menu.

I also decided to take a step into the in-game interface, with some various edits such as the CP Font and colour, the background removal of the ammo counter, and some other small things to get started with that was needed.

Trying to figure out what colour looked best. In the end it was white. Had to make a custom font so it had the outline.

And that's pretty much where we are at the moment. For 0.9+, I'm looking into font's with the menu's, a better control menu (maybe), and in-game interface editing, like replacing the horrible yellow with the PR theme of grey. Maybe some other suggestions might help with regards to the PR Interface?

Anyway, this is getting pretty lengthy, so I might stop this here. I hope it's been interesting to see the "shortened" story of me going from a community member with no forum posts and very basic knowledge of Photoshop, to a PR Developer with many more skills in Photoshop and Flash. I also hope it's inspiring for those people out there who are interested in getting into game development, but lack the skill. Constant persistence and asking for help will get you there in the end.