Greetings... and the Art of Battlezone...

[Zero Angel]

Those turbine looking things on it always reminded me of speakers. BTW was that SS taken on an EPIC style map?

[bigbadbogie]

No, thats ZEmod.

[Sol-Journer]

Wow... Saying hi and disappearing for half a month... I'll try to make sure that happens less often. 

Anyhoo...

A sketch, good or bad, does tend to open interesting possibilities, and watching where it goes is a little like the proverbial box of chocolates, from a Forrest Gump-ish point of view. While it's good to end up with a cool idea you were going for, it's sometimes even better to end up with a great idea you weren't going for. It's amazing how much concept sketches can differ from their (finalized?) ingame counterparts.

I recently saw the intro movies for Battlezone and The Red Odyssey again on YouTube and the BZ Wiki site. It has been a while since I last saw them, and they made me wonder... Were any of those super-cool hi-poly models of the Grizzly, Razor, or that alternate Black Dog Grizzly ever shared or reproduced? After all, as cool as the cutscenes were, it was kind of difficult to make out the details most of the time, as the clips themselves were more than slightly blurry. Wouldn't it be cool to see them with greater clarity?

If not to port into some other more modern game engines to drive around in and blow stuff up, maybe someone could make scaled replicas to park on their desks just for bragging rights. In fact, many years ago, I thought I saw a blurry pic of an office with what looks suspiciously like an ISDF walker on the table, but I'm not sure if that was ever confirmed or cleared up.

While we're on the topic, the Razor is most likely the first BZ unit every BZ fan ever piloted, that is if you started with the training course. As such, it probably holds some special significance, sort of like your first car. Besides, Razors are probably one of the coolest-looking ships in the game. Speaking of those turbine-things, I always figured they were some sort of heat sink system, and not jet intakes. After all, most of the time, they're in space.

I had an interesting thought way back some time before the first Transformers movie hit theaters, and most have probably already seen the teaser for the upcoming sequel. I had mixed feelings about the first one, as the film itself was not nearly as good as the CGI work that clothed it. Similarly, with the same director at the helm, I'm less than optimistic about the quality of Revenge of the Fallen. That aside, has anyone considered the possibilities of everyones favorite hovertanks being transformers? While it may not be possible to fully achieve ingame, a hovertank transformer would still be a very novel concept. A quick search on various search engines and art sites turned up nothing so far, but that doesn't mean the it wouldn't be an idea that could take off. 

So... Thoughts?

[Nielk1]

The TRO into was outsourced and hence the models look... different.

It is on my list to get some BZ1/2 units into the source engine with more realistic hover physics.

[bigbadbogie]

I heard Warfreak already did that N1.

[Nielk1]

WF converted some models and they crash a lot when used as anything other than props. I am the one who is supposed to find a way to make them move as hovercraft and perform like BZ2.

[Warfreak]

I'd finish the job and make them work correctly as vehicles, however the Source SDK hates me and will only run for me once every 10,000 Years. 

[AHadley]

I don't like it at all, it bluescreens