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 ] Posts: 132
Yes this means I've decided to revive the BF242 mod! However I will be removing all non BF2 assets (mainly static objects used on the old maps, even the old BF2 conversions since I'm redoing the BF2 assets as well) and have removed all the maps. I'm basically rebuilding the mod. The only stuff that will remain unchanged (mostly) are vehicles. handweapons, the menu, and other global assets. I've already merged my 2 new BF2 conversions into the mod.
The main reason I decided to pick this mod back up again, is because I FINALLY found out how to merge the load screen with the Ready screen! Something the previous developer (Sting was responsible for most of the menu changes to this mod) had failed to do. I also got rid of the "white boxes" that appear on the loading screen until the map finishes loading. The team flags that used to appear on the loading screen will instead be displayed on the ready screen.
The simplest way I can explain this is that I "copied" the load screen and make it the new "Ready Screen". The screen you see immediately after the load screen vanishes. However now, I've removed all the original Ready Screen elements except for the Ready button (since had I removed that, you would be stuck on the ready screen forever. ), and replaced it with the load screen minus the loading bar.
They are still separate menu elements but I've disabled the "transitions" that cause the load screen to fade out and the ready screen to fade in. Technically the transitions are still there. I couldn't outright remove them since when I did, the Ready button stopped working and the would be stuck on the ready screen forever. However I found the float values that define the "time" it takes for the transitions to occur and simply set them to zero. I've also removed some unneeded cull nodes in my load screen duplicate and removed a few effect nodes that related to the alpha fading. So now it instantly transitions to the new ready screen with no noticeable effect to the end user. This is because the ready screen is now an exact replica of the load screen (code wise). Since the ready screen contained pretty much all the same information that Sting already added to the load screen, I just had to copy and paste the load screen nodes into the new ready screen split node. I've also added some new text and renamed the Ready button to "Join Game".
Another improvement is to the load screen it self. I solved the white boxes issue and altered how the load screen is presented. Instead of there being the static background with the minimap being the only thing that changes per map, I've altered the layout so that the "background" that appears behind the frame is part of the same texture file as the minimap. I redid the loading screen frame so it has some alpha so that the new load screen image can appear behind it. The only part not obscured by the top loading frame will be the minimap of coarse. I saved a template of the new layout to a GIMP xcf file so that I have all the layers in the right place when I build new loading screens for new maps. So not only does the loading screen look better, I've added the "background" image that BF2 uses for each map so the background can be unique per map as well as the minimap that is shown. So overall big improvement.
As result of removing most of the old DC static objects and other non BF2 assets. The old maps WILL NOT be compatible with the new version of this mod. Due to this, I've changed the mod id from "BF242" to "BF2". The lexicon still has it localized as Battlefield 242 however. I may change the name of the mod if there is some good name suggestions. But Battlefield 242 must be part of the new name.
Ok here's a video that shows the new menu.
(I've also removed the Campaign button from the single player menu just like with my BFH'42 mod. I have no plans to support this as the load screen for campaign mode a separate menu element and remains unchanged in the mod. It would be too much work to adapt it into something that looks like BF2 since not many people use that feature anymore. Plus BF2 didn't have a campaign mode anyway.
I'll post more as I get stuff into the mod. There won't be a release until I get one or two additional maps into the mod. The booster pack maps don't count. I'll wait until I get some vanilla maps in before I get it released.
EDIT:
Been too busy with other things right now so haven't worked on BF242 mod in nearly a month. However I did finish Strike at Karkand and tied up all the loose ends in the mod, so there's nothing incomplete in it that I know of. So I went ahead and uploaded it as it stands now. It's only got 4 or 5 maps I think, but they look really good, so have fun!
1. Commander UAV trailer for commander assets similar to BF2. 2. Full Bot support on all available maps. 3. Fixed more bugs that were present in original BF242 mod. 4. Stripped out unused assets. Old BF242 maps will NOT be compatible with this mod! 5. Ported new stationary weapons from BF2. Stationary TOW and Stinger weapons replace the old ones. 6. Wasp Carrier object (present on Dalian Plant) now have the Anti-Aircraft minigun and missle launchers present in BF2. 7. All maps now use DDS DXT1c format textures for lightmaps. This should improve game performance on low end graphics hardware. 8. Revamp of main menu to look more like BF2. 9. Rebuilt loading screen. Now looks more like BF2. 10.Replaced the "Ready" screen at the map's round start with a copy the loading screen. There is now no transition from the load screen and the ready screen so it's even more like BF2's load screen system. 11.Menu mods to singleplayer menu enable more then 64 bots in Instant Battle mode. No EXE hack required! Just set the slider to something above 400% to get more bots! (exe hack still required for more bots in multiplayer) 12.Replaced meshes on Anti-Tank handweapons. Now use the BF2 weapons with matching shell ejection effects. 13.Replaced all dropped kit geometries with those from BF2. 14.Mod uses Ragdoll animations. A couple animations were redone just for this mod. 15.Maps have CTF game mode. However note that currently the capture radio prompts are all in English currently as BF2 doesn't have them localized in the MEC/China languages. 16.Made changes to ingame HUD including the ability to have more then 6 handweapons on a kit and a revamped minimap area. 17.Many other improvements/additions I can't recall at the time of writing this document.
Registered Member #2587 Joined: [ 17:13 ] [ 07 Oct 2013 ]
Alright, a small update to show you. I've finalized the load screen layout. I've changed the loading bar and a few other small details to make it look more like BF2's loading screen.
Load Screen while loading:
Load Screen when at ready screen: (the "Auto Ready On" checkbox is cosmetic, it has no functional purpose other then to make this screen more BF2 authentic. )
As before, there's no visible transition from the load screen to the ready screen, so the second image you will see immediately after the load screen finishes. When you click the "Join Game" button, you are then presented with the spawn/kit selection screen as normal.
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.