[Concept] A yet unnamed mod(R's mod)

[R01]

Hello, so far this thread is just about the concept(and possibly about beta versions) about this mod. First of all I'd like to say that I can't guarantee if you will ever see progress of this mod or if it will be finished. I know it's disappointing and most likely unwanted(I did read the mod rules before, else this thread wouldn't be here).

Another reason why I made this thread is that I have quite a lot of modding questions and wouldn't like to flood the questions subform with tons of threads or huge question lists. Help would be really nice.

About the Mod
My goal is to create a modified stock/vanilla game with more balanced components and more info(each component will show it's stats), encouraging players to build more RW like robots and not stack thousands of razor tips.

Together with a remake of all AI bots(I do plan to possibly increase their difficulty by a bit, but not DSL2 strong) some RW teams will be added from different series, having remakes of robots. Note how I said remakes and not replicas, I don't plan to use custom "fake" armor parts and instead actually rebuild them in RA2. Sure they won't look too great but you'll be able to build something similar as well.

Now for questions:

Open Questions

It's not recommended to use too many parts/objects for multiplayer or arenas, but what's exactly "too many"? If it's just those "30 razor tip" bots, then it's totally ok, but currently I'm worrying if 10 small battery packs would cause issues(I do know that the power value isn't sent over)

Is it possible to completely adjust the weight limit?(the main points here are the chassis weight and weight classes, are those editable?) I'd like to make it so that 100kg is heavyweight, 60 middleweight and 30 or so lightweight, all components will of course get lighter.

Is it possible to adjust both burst swing speeds(the forward/backward speed)?

Answered

I'd like to remake every stock component/arena, however for that I would need to import/reverse engineer them to get them and their collision files back into 3ds max. Is this possible and what tools are required?
Another thing that would really help here is if 3ds max(or any 3d model editor) had a grid with the option to snap placed vertex to the grid.

Not sure, need to check out the tools page, 3ds max hopefully has a snap to grid option.

Recreating Co2 flippers isn't really possible, but is it possible to create a custom burst motor that uses Co2 instead of battery power? If that's possible I'll add Co2 bursts which emulate real Co2 flippers in different sizes and powers(increased power for increased usage)

Not possible.

For motor balance, is it possible to fix the "energy usage" bug in the game engine or is that just hardcoded(all motors use the same amount of energy from what I've read), also can Servos be strong enough to actually lift something/can lift power be increased?

Energy usage can't be fixed, Servos are possible with heavy counterweights.

Thanks for reading this far.

[Mr. AS]

Recreating Co2 flippers isn't really possible, but is it possible to create a custom burst motor that uses Co2 instead of battery power?

Nope.

For motor balance, is it possible to fix the "energy usage" bug in the game engine

Nope.

also can Servos be strong enough to actually lift something/can lift power be increased?

Probably not.

There's a few 3DS max plugins on the downloads page but idk if any of them do imports and not exclusively exports.

[cephalopod]

Pretty much the only way to get servos to lift is to use counterweights iirc

[R01]

Pretty much the only way to get servos to lift is to use counterweights iirc

In what way?(I guess you mean having them on your own bot so it doesn't fall over? I tried that once however vanilla servos were too weak, are custom ones strong enough?)

[cephalopod]

Lifting arm is blue, counterweight is red. Servos don't tend to be strong enough on their own so you need to help by evening out the weight distribution.

[Badger]

It's not possible to make burst motors use CO2. My advice would be to increase the power of burst and spin motors a bit (since they're pretty weak in default RA2, especially burst motors) and to make a baseplate anchor without a collision mesh, like in IF, since it allows much more interesting and intricate designs.

[R01]

(Image removed from quote.)

Lifting arm is blue, counterweight is red. Servos don't tend to be strong enough on their own so you need to help by evening out the weight distribution.

Oh I see, thanks for explaining that. Thought that weights couldn't be placed on extenders as they never wanted to do that before. does this trick have use with burst motors as well?

[cephalopod]

Ballasts can't be placed on extenders, just use a heavy object (eg sledgehammers).
Burst power is all in the txt files though, no point counterbalancing there.

[Badnik96]

Ballasts can't be placed on extenders, just use a heavy object (eg sledgehammers).

They can be if you edit the gmf...

[cephalopod]

Yeah but that's unrelated to the statement R01 put forward :L
If we're going to go full ' hey look component editing' mode, I'd just say make a tiny very heavy component for counterbalance.

[R01]

Ballasts can't be placed on extenders, just use a heavy object (eg sledgehammers).
Burst power is all in the txt files though, no point counterbalancing there.

Oh, for a second I thought counterweights=ballast, by the way, is it only the missing weight which keeps them from working?(and the burst question was about unmodded, I should've made it more clear, probably works but I can see it being difficult to properly add)

[Naryar]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

[R01]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

That's basically the idea, a beginner friendly stock with more parts and possibly having some RW(not sure about Battlebots) remakes.

Update:
Added two more questions that I forgot yesterday:

Is it possible to completely change the weight, so that 100kg would be heavyweight, 60 middleweight, 30 lightweight and to add different weight classes(that actually work in events?) The main points here would be to edit weight classes and component weight calculation.

Can the speed of burst motors(swing forward/go back) speed be completely adjusted? I'd like to maybe have super fast(but weak) hammers or powerful flippers that do have a small cooldown.

[The Red Blur]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

That's basically the idea, a beginner friendly stock with more parts and possibly having some RW(not sure about Battlebots) remakes.

Update:
Added two more questions that I forgot yesterday:

Is it possible to completely change the weight, so that 100kg would be heavyweight, 60 middleweight, 30 lightweight and to add different weight classes(that actually work in events?) The main points here would be to edit weight classes and component weight calculation.

Can the speed of burst motors(swing forward/go back) speed be completely adjusted? I'd like to maybe have super fast(but weak) hammers or powerful flippers that do have a small cooldown.

You can't change weight class requirements (which is the main issue with IF), because you need to directly modify the .exe to do that.

Burst motor speed can be adjusted via the .txt file, I think.

[09090901]

you can change what weight class a bot is classified as through BFE. like TRB said, you can't change the games built in weight requirements, so you'd have to manually change each bot's weightclass.

for modding component stats, i would have a look through here
http://beetlebros.gametechmods.com/modding.htm

[Naryar]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

That's basically the idea, a beginner friendly stock with more parts and possibly having some RW(not sure about Battlebots) remakes.

that's what DSL is supposed to do...

burst motor speed can be changed in the txt, yes.

change weightclasses... just change manually the weightclasses in the bot file, and say "LW is X kg, MW is Y kg, HW is X kg" like in ironforge.

[R01]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

That's basically the idea, a beginner friendly stock with more parts and possibly having some RW(not sure about Battlebots) remakes.

that's what DSL is supposed to do...

burst motor speed can be changed in the txt, yes.

change weightclasses... just change manually the weightclasses in the bot file, and say "LW is X kg, MW is Y kg, HW is X kg" like in ironforge.

I am aware of that, however when I entered DSL I had a hard time finding the right components, too much antstuff(they can be fun) but only two drive motors?(I know that Stock doesn't have that many more and that I should give DSL more time, which I'll definitely do, however it actually seemed harder to find useable parts in DSL) Didn't help that my robot drove in circles when going backwards(some weight problems with batteries) and that DSL has so far challenging AI, so imagine this to be a bit more beginner friendly, aimed at people who want to build semi realisic bots, like probably intended by the original RA2 team.

I guess weight per square is hardcoded and the only way that can be changed is via armor? Also thought that the 7 part attachment limit was changeable but it's apparently hardcoded?

[cephalopod]

DSL has plenty of drive motors, not sure what you're trying to say there.

You can make custom armour to change the chassis weight but it's not all too useful without weightclass changes.
Also if you change your weightclasses to be very low, you'll likely run into a lot of havok issues.

And yeah, Rule of 7 is a Rule for a reason :P

[Naryar]

A balanced stock mod would be interesting.

That's basically the idea, a beginner friendly stock with more parts and possibly having some RW(not sure about Battlebots) remakes.

that's what DSL is supposed to do...

burst motor speed can be changed in the txt, yes.

change weightclasses... just change manually the weightclasses in the bot file, and say "LW is X kg, MW is Y kg, HW is X kg" like in ironforge.

I am aware of that, however when I entered DSL I had a hard time finding the right components, too much antstuff(they can be fun) but only two drive motors?(I know that Stock doesn't have that many more and that I should give DSL more time, which I'll definitely do, however it actually seemed harder to find useable parts in DSL) Didn't help that my robot drove in circles when going backwards(some weight problems with batteries) and that DSL has so far challenging AI, so imagine this to be a bit more beginner friendly, aimed at people who want to build semi realisic bots, like probably intended by the original RA2 team.

I guess weight per square is hardcoded and the only way that can be changed is via armor? Also thought that the 7 part attachment limit was changeable but it's apparently hardcoded?

What I was trying to say is what are you trying to make has already it's niche taken, by DSL. It will be extremely hard to make your mod better than DSL and more popular.

A balanced Stock mod with new stock replicas would be cool, however, since there is no popular mod who does this.

Also did you not click the dropdown menus ? About 2/3 of the DSL components are in dropdown menus. You know, there's a little arrow when you select a component, like in Windows :P

Standard armor weights and strengths, and as such strength/kg, can be changed. You'll notice that the DSL and Stock chassis armors are quite different.

[R01]

What I was trying to say is what are you trying to make has already it's niche taken, by DSL. It will be extremely hard to make your mod better than DSL and more popular.

A balanced Stock mod with new stock replicas would be cool, however, since there is no popular mod who does this.

Also did you not click the dropdown menus ? About 2/3 of the DSL components are in dropdown menus. You know, there's a little arrow when you select a component, like in Windows :P

Standard armor weights and strengths, and as such strength/kg, can be changed. You'll notice that the DSL and Stock chassis armors are quite different.

I did understand that and I'm not trying to be a rival to DSL, this mod will have stock components remade, so imagine it as a remake of the original game, trying to keep much of it(similar to RA3), having more balanced components, more AI bots(it is possible to give each team 2 light/medium/heavyweights, right?) and some bot remakes(not replicas) to give people new ideas, basically a "fixed" stock mod.

I do know about the dropdown menus, still didn't exactly find what I was looking for, but I'll try it again :P

As for armors, I did know about that, I thought more about having some kind of base weight or making the weight difference between a perfeclty fitting and more open chassis less significant(then again you do get more HP for the bigger one).