Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Another screen to show:
I've redone the HUD area around the mini-map. The game can't do the round minimap like BF2, so I took a little creative license on this part of the HUD.
Not shown is other UI improvents. I've added new nodes to the ingame hud to allow more then 6 handweapons on a kit since I plan to add a spawn deplay weapon back to the squad kits. But they are already maxed out to 6 handweapons due to the addition of the vehicle drop handweapon I added awhile back. But that shouldn't be an issue now.
I also added additions to the HUD to allow for the setCrossHairIcon command to work on vehicles. This means the 1p HUDs of the commander assets like the artillery and UAVs are much improved as they are now using the menu system to display the textures. Handweapons already work with this command, but Dice never added the needed cullNodes and other needed tweaks to the ingame meme file to allow this on PCOs. This was something I had added to my BFH'42 mod so I decided to bring it over to this mod since I was on a roll with the new loading screen. There's still instances where using a geometry for HUDs is prefferred. Especially when playing the game on widescreen displays since HUDs on the menu system get stretched while meshes do not (provided you have a modified EXE that fixes widescreen properly). I've setup my new mesh based HUDs in a way so that they should appear correctly in both 4:3 and 16:9. I can't guruantee anything super wide like 21:?? something type aspect ratios. I've only covered the basic ones that most players use.
One last tweak I did was removing a check box menu element from the sounds option page. Since I've decided to drop support for 11kHz sounds from the mod to make the mod smaller and to quicken future sound conversions from BF2, I've removed that element from the menu system so that folks playing the mod won't even be able to select that option in the menu anymore. I thought about removing 22kHz too, but decided not too as there might still be some out there that use that. BFV for example already removed 11kHz support as I don't recall ever seeing any option or sound files for it in that game. Don't worry about this borking the remaining options. If you somehow set the game to 11kHz while in another mod, the 22Khz and 44kHz check boxes still work correctly when you are in the BF242 mod.
Another thing I noticed is that the AI seems more responsive then with the DC versions. I hadn't altered the AI much on the maps, so it probably boils down to the AI improvents that had been done to the main BF242 mod.
Also, I noticed that I my IK attachments for the left hand were suddenly working on my stationary weapons. When I ported the ATS_TOW and the stationary stingers from BF2, I had setup the skeleton IKs so that the soldiers would hold the weapons. However in DesertCombat, for some reason the left hand just refused to attach. BF242 doesn't have this problem.
I'm curious as to why this occurs. I'm betting it has to do with something DC has done in the weapon animation coding that likely borked left hand IK attachments. I think the problem was present on steering wheels to. But don't recall now since I haven't touched the DC versions of the maps since I have started on BF242.
BF242 had a lot of stuff copied and pasted in from DC by the original developers who made the mod. I guess it was just pure luck that the offending code hadn't been copied over as well.
This leads me to believe it might be a simple fix to solve this issue for mods that have it.