the droideka model is a projekt i am working on quite a long time, but since JA and the vehicles i got a great step forward. so now i want to show you what i am working on and bring up some questions we need to solve, so we will enjoy the droideka in future MP games.


here two pics first:

http://io.meskinaw.net/images/Droideka/droideka_06.jpg)

http://io.meskinaw.net/images/Droideka/droideka_07.jpg)


there are some older pics on my project site too.
http://io.meskinaw.net/droid-proj.php)

the droideka is working as a vehicle in JA quite well, but there are still some things i dlike to solve.

fist, all vehicles are not turing when not moving, even there is a parameter in the .veh file. turnWhenstoped, but it seams not ot work, does somebody bring a vehicle to turn when standing?

second, when a droideka is rolling, it normaly cant shot. how could i code or add something in a file so the droideka dont fire when rolling. i thought of letting the weaponmuzzles disappear while it is in rolling animation, but how? i tried to delete it while animating, but the tag was deleted totaly. is here a good 3ds max animator who knows this detail in animation. or somebody how know an other solution.

third, shields. it would be fun if the droideka had an energyshield, there is something like that on the starship vehicles like the lamdashuttle. does somebody know how it work, and if its possible to deactivat while rolling.

fourth, toggle walking/running. does somebody know how to permanenty change the moving mode? i have set it so that when i want to walk i have to hold >shift<. in JO it was possible to use >caps lock<, does that work in JA somehow? i couldnt figure that out :(


i am planing to make the droideka very strong when standing and shoting but slow when walking. when it turns to rolling mode, it should be not able to fire and be quite vulnerable.

i dont know if this all is possible without coding the JA source, but it definitly is fun already. any comments, suggestions?

looking very nice, cant wait for this to be released, i think the possibilities with the vehicle system are endless

Hye man that looks great. I cant wait until u release it so I can use it in my movies. Keep up the good work.

Just awsome :)

i was just wondering, would there be a way to turn the little bar off that is on the bottom? im guessing it would be like view something or something like that

Looks good.

well I have a three day weekend and no money so I'll just be spending it at home so if you want you could send it to me and i can try my hand at fixing it up some, and the turn while stop only works in SP, not MP. I don't know why they didn't add it's function in MP. Probably because most people using them would be running around like in seige when you get the speeder you'd be moving the whole time so you could win... but if you want I can try my hand at it. I've always been wanting the droideka, I remember when you started the model in JO.... wow, time flies by sometimes. anyway enough nostalgia. glad to hear it's working pretty well.

cool a droideka.keep up the good work.

looking great, duncan. will it be able to fire from both arms? if possible, you should try and have the blasters stagger the shots (left, right, left, right, etc.).

The assassin_droid in JA has a fine energy shield. It would work for the droideka as well (i think:o)if you could remove the electrical effect.

Originally posted by The Cheat
i was just wondering, would there be a way to turn the little bar off that is on the bottom? im guessing it would be like view something or something like that

i dont know, i havent tried to deactivat it yet. on the other side it gives you importent information. as i have the droideka set now, it can shot about 10 seconds, the he have to recharge, its good to see that on the bars.

InsaneSith, i still need to do some more animation an bring the skin to a testable stage, but i could sent you an in work version if you realy have no money for going out this week end :)


Originally posted by t3rr0r
looking great, duncan. will it be able to fire from both arms? if possible, you should try and have the blasters stagger the shots (left, right, left, right, etc.).

in fact my droideka is fireing from four blasters on both arms. and its staggering this way upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, etc :)
i just needed to add four muzzles, that was it.


Originally posted by CraZy_B
The assassin_droid in JA has a fine energy shield. It would work for the droideka as well (i think)if you could remove the electrical effect.

yeah, i tought of that to. i will try to extract the model and see how it works. that effect would look good. i hope its not coded somehow.

It would be quite an exciting experiment for me so go ahead and send it. who knows I might figure somethig out, atleast through dumbluck, ;). (atleast I'm honest :p )

Originally posted by Duncan_10158
in fact my droideka is fireing from four blasters on both arms. and its staggering this way upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right, etc :)
i just needed to add four muzzles, that was it.
sounds sweet.

If you want an energy shield like the Assasin Droid, wouldn't there be a line in it's NPC file which allows that shield. ?

Im going to look through all the npcs today, i just extracted the entire Assets1.pk3, thats 700+ meg wasted. :D

This is a wild guess, but put it's class as CLASS_ASSASSIN_DROID and see if that gives it a shield, i doubt it will work though. :(

ok well i'm looking at the games animevents.cfg file and animation.cfg file. I must say this is incredibly huge... some of it I cannot make out what it does. I'm gonna play around with some stuff in the veh file since that's the stuff i mostly know right now.
I'm wondering if there are things that i should add to the animation.cfg file for the droideka... I'm not sure, anyway I'll keep in touch with you duncan.

ATST_vehicle
{
weapon WP_BOWCASTER
weapon WP_ROCKET_LAUNCHER
weapon WP_EMPLACED_GUN
playerModel atst
playerTeam TEAM_FREE
enemyTeam TEAM_FREE
class CLASS_VEHICLE
height 272
width 80
health 3000
} hmmm perhaps it's the emplaced gun part that allows it to be aimable also... just a thought.

any update duncann?


The Cheat type "cg_draw2d 0" in the console and all the HUD will disapear, and type "cg_draw2d 1" to make it reapear

yeah, its time to come back to this. i have still to do the skins and make a usable verson of a deflector shield. now with the JA sdk released we can make the droideka work the way it should. is there a coder who could help me to code a new vehicle class for the droideka? if you are a coder or now somebody who could help me, contact me.

what we need to make the vehicle class to work like:
1. make to use other or all animations finish the hole sequence. now a vehicles amiation is interuped trough a new comand, it should be possible to code it so an animation have to be finished befor a new one can be executed. this to show the hole stand-to-role animation befor it can role. same with standing up.
2. make the droideka not be able to shoot while in rolling mode. thats its weakness.
3. make the deflector shield be active in standing mode and not active in rolling mode. visualy i alredy did this, but we need it be in the code. the droideka should have some shield points to protect it when standing and those points shouldnt be taken into account when taking damage in roling mode.
4. make the droideka turning when standing. also it should be possible to sett some bones of the model to follow the crosshair like it works on the ATSTs guns. this would be cool for vertical and horizontal aiming.
5. make all sounds be usable, so we can use completly new once.

it would be cool if we could set the vehilce up so it works with and without the mod, modelers can then use the vehicle in thier maps and can decide if they will use the mod and meke their maps a mod or a simple map with a not that correctly working droideka.

last but nearly most importent, if we could figure out how to rise or eliminate the vehicle number limit. this has priorety, as long as there is this limit the players out there will not realy use vehicles, cause its too much work to keep an eye on their own vehicle number or they even dont know about that.


with new vehicle classes, we can make some realy cool vehicle models now. i got some alredy on my project plan :)

Awesome :eek: if you could pull this off man you would be the yoda of moding.

Ill post this on my site duncann.

Thanks seks03, i hope with the help of the community we can change this vehicle limit and creat new vehicle classes. with this i hope we can make completly new animated vehicles or player models like ATTEs or ATATs. thanks again.

as soon i got the skin more or less finished i hope i can release a first beta version, so everone out there can see what i am talking about and what cool things now could get possible.

It doesnt look good! there was nobody contacting me about working we me on this project. only you, seks03, helped me to search for some help, thanks. i posted a thread on vehicle limit and on new vehicle classes, but nobody at least replied. i got lots of mails as reaction on seks03 post on jedimoves.com, but none offerd to help me, all asked me if i could do something for them.

i realy doubt about working on on my JA projects, i got so much to do on my other lives work and most of the JA projects i am working on is for others asking me for help. i am not sure if it has any sense if anyone (seks03, you surly not) is thinking only on thier own project. i dont know :confused:

Come on people help Duncan out, show some freaking gratitude for what all he is able to do and have done. Duncun, I will talk to the AOTC TC team, im sure they have some coders and would love to have a Destroy Droid among other things you plan to make.

Bah! You know I would help if I could! Seriously Duncan, I don't know @%$# about coding or modeling. If you need me to do a mindless task, like Beta for find reference pics, then I am most certainly in. Sorry, man.

Dude, if you havent seen the pics from the first page you should look now. He doesnt need to refference pics. He needs some one to help him to get the shields up and a few other things.

Look, I was just trying to help...now, seeing as THAT didn't work, I will give you somthing I noticed. The shield is inherant to aircraft...perhaps taking a look at that coding could yield some clues. As for not firing, perhaps remove the firing tags? If that doesn't work, try changing the attack into a boost...if you figure out how to do that, then you probably could use that to turn the shields off and on as well...

Originally posted by Duncan_10158
It doesnt look good! there was nobody contacting me about working we me on this project. only you, seks03, helped me to search for some help, thanks. i posted a thread on vehicle limit and on new vehicle classes, but nobody at least replied. i got lots of mails as reaction on seks03 post on jedimoves.com, but none offerd to help me, all asked me if i could do something for them.

i realy doubt about working on on my JA projects, i got so much to do on my other lives work and most of the JA projects i am working on is for others asking me for help. i am not sure if it has any sense if anyone (seks03, you surly not) is thinking only on thier own project. i dont know :confused:

Duncan, you know what the problem is? I think Jedi Academy lost alot of the modders from Outcast. Jedi Outcast had already been bled dry by the top modders... Personally I think Jedi Academy has alot to offer, and most modders would come back if they only knew. The problem is (believe it or not) your posing questions to a community that is short on "interested craftsmen". You can see this when you go to sites like "Jk2files.com"... At one time these sites hosted some fantastic work, These days you see less and less quality work. Dont feel bad though... your not the only one, currently AOTC/TC is trying to get its hands on some more talent. Id be glad to help you out a bit, but I am currently working on a few projects. As you know, most of my skills are in the skinning/modeling dept. Anyhow, I'm not trying to discourage you... Keep posting, I think the more we get this work out there, the better chance the core talent will come back. I'll keep an eye out for someone that can help. Mars out

Duncan I may be able to help. But I'd also like to take a crack at making the droideka a player character. Which would give you access to all the transition animation options.

Marz I agree, JA has alot to offer. But the thing is we have to figure out how to use it to our advantage. The shields on a x-wing is different from a Destroyer Droid. Think Force Field. Duncan wants to do the rounded shield around the droid to make it look like the real thing as possible. Also making it a player model, it wouldnt be right. You dont wanna see Destroyer Droids with Lightsabers, Force, etc. It would only be best as a vehicle.

Think Seige class. RenegadeOfPhunk wants to add it as a player character in the next Movie Battles Mod. He can code it so only certain animations are used. So no lightsabers. ;)

And it would save me the time to animate someone else's Droideka myself.

Zappa_0, thanks, i know most of you out there realy encourage me in going on with this project and suggesting helpfull things like you did, Usurpo, and i thanks for that. but this isnt a problem of us modelers, its more that mapper, coder and modeler doesnt help each other or doesnt take knowledge of the others work. i posted two long threads on vehicle limit and new vehicle classes on the codeing forum but but didnt get even a reply. i am dissapointed, i realy dont understand that. but i could be wrong in my point of view, the hole vehicles thing perhaps isnt that importent for a great improvment for JA, as i think it is.

back to the droideka it self, Usurpo, your right, shields are part of the aircrafts, but its working for all the vehicles in some degree. i added a shield to the droideka model and it worked, but not correctly. a part of the model is a rounded shield around the droid, so the visual part of the problem is solved. the droideka is finished as model and animation. nothing what i need to help as something to do with the modeling part, i only need to do the coding things. also not-shooting in role mode cant be solved though modeling, i tried to remove the muzzle tags, but that doesnt work. right now i am using the walker class so boost isnt possible eighter.

i made the droideka originaly as player model as you suggest it, keshire. the difference in fact isnt that big, to make it a player model we have to creat a differnt player class like we would do it for a vehicle. we could use it as a siege class, set up from the start. but the thing is coding again and i need help for that.

just to say it, the droideka is playable right now, model and animations are done. i could release it as it is now and it would work quite well BUT the first one using it in her/his siege map would do a mode for it allowing it be used as player model and correct all the code thing i am talking about. i just want to do the coding part now instead of every mod maker on thier own.

keshire, every help is welcome. did you already take a look into the vehicles classes? or also in creating as spezial player class? i can sent you my leatest version so i can take a look at it? i can sent it to everyone how wants to see what i am talking about.

let me know
Thanks for your support

Sure let me take a looka t it. I'll also pass it along to RenegadeOfPhunk.

http://forums.jk2mods.com/)

jmattison@scottrade.com

Hey guys.

...me and Keshire are on the job ;)
I've been sent the current droideka work, and will let you know as we make progress on getting the nessesary code done to get the droideka working properly in-game...

Nifty!

i am dissapointed, i realy dont understand that. but i could be wrong in my point of view, the hole vehicles thing perhaps isnt that importent for a great improvment for JA, as i think it is.

Duncan_10158 you are wrong. The best thing that happened to JA mp was vehicles support and siege mode (mp objectives). You see the gameplay of JA is almost identical to JK so it is easy to learn for new people and easy to adapt for old players. Vehicles is a new feature introduced into mp with a hole new mini-game. It also introduces a new idea of making larger maps so vehicles can be well manuvered without hurting fps to much. I am not familiar with the JA SDK yet so I haven't really found a way around the vehicles limit and the sad truth is the amount of coders in the JA comunity is very limited.

I think its really a matter of time before someone will come up with it. Im looking foward to getting all your models. We run servers with an rpg map called bdc-racing-b3 (http://www.blackdeathclan.net/files/maps/bdc-racing-b3.pk3) which is just incredible for using vehicles. It is a t2_trip style map in a much bigger shape that allows new players to spawn vehicles and use them at will. It also has the size to manuver and the fps to handle it. We also use all new vehicles that have been released in pcgamemods and as soon as the vehicle limit is increased we will start creating custom vehicles.

There are mappers in our clan working in rpg-ffa-siege style maps that will 100% support spacecraft & ground vehicles.

Duncan & everyone else keep up the good work.

http://www.pcgamemods.com/3518/)

OmniMod 2.0 with vehicle limit increased to 64 along with a lot of other nice features.

Hmmm I hope it works. If it does someone would probally should make it by it self. Im sure not all will want to use omnimod all the time to use the 64 vehicles allow limit.

It was a simple one line change. Most mods will probably include it from now on.

back to the droideka again.

the coding of the droideka is making great progresses, RenegadeOfPhunk is working on it and sent me a first recoded version. not shooting in roll mode, fold in/out animation showing and some other features are implemented and workin perfect. these new coded features will be part of the Open Jedi Project. take a look at the new vehicle classes thread in the OJP Forum:
http://www.lucasforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=119505&perpage=40&pagenumber=1)

as everybody knows, i am not that good at skinning and the droideka needs a skin. i have made some trys but all turnd out crap :( is here somebody how could and would like to make a skin for this model. let me know.

Scouttrooper answered my call and started to skin the droideka. also here, thanks for your help Scouttrooper.

here are some first pics Scouttrooper posted on the droideka in the request forum. i post it also here so everyone can see the great progresses!

its pretty nasty to skin it very good, I just started with it here are some shots :
http://www.boomspeed.com/scouttrooper/droidekaskin1.jpg)
http://www.boomspeed.com/scouttrooper/droidekaskin2.jpg)
http://www.boomspeed.com/scouttrooper/droidekaskin3.jpg)

as you can see, it still needs more detail on the chest parts and arms, im still figuring out how to make those "oil blur" colours better on his head and "wings",

more updates later

Looking good and im glad you have gotten the help you needed.

Are you using shaders?

well just spec map the whole thing, that should be all you need

IMO anyway

first off, it looks fantastic!

on some of the reference pics i used the wings have holes. i didnt made those in the model to keep the polygone count low, i tried to make them as black dots on the skin. did you think of doing something like that?

some shining shader effects on the armor plates would look cool, yes. but not too much of it. as i remember most of the Federation techology looks a bit rusty, right?

the energy shield is part of the coded things. i dont know if we can another skin for it. perhaps Phunk knows if its posible to change the energy shield skin. do you think we should use another one then seen on the two pics above? i could redo the skinmap so it fits better?

wow those shots look awesome. Good job!

I didn't code a different skin for the energy shield - I just changed the last line in the model_default.skin file:

i.e.
energy_shield,gfx/effects/shield.jpg

..if however, your talking about the effect which is played when the vehicle actually get's hit, there is this .veh parameter defined in code:

shieldShader

...with the description...

//What shader to use when drawing the shield shell

The only thing is, it's not mentioned in the template.veh example, which makes me wonder whether it's coded in right - although I checked, and this parameter certainly seems to do something in code - so it's probably worth experimenting with...

New skins can be done by adding a new entry in the veh file. Just put whatever.skin for the custom skin entry.

You can stack them

droideka_plain
blah
blah
blah
custom skin = blah

droideka_rustic
blah
blah
blah
custom skin = blah_rustic.skin

then you can spawn whichever version you want.

Holy crap that is awesome work man great detail too!

Wow, nice skin work!

Sure more round, but at the expense of Poly's