Kind of stuck making simple air death match for BZII 1.2/FE

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I got one map made using the bridges map set to deatmatch01.dll and played it a bit with my nephew over our home LAN. Then I tried using a couple of other FE based maps, but they don't seem to run under just bzone.exe. I have a couple of questions do those maps need to run under FE? Also, for a 2 player air death match map what inf file should I use? Almost there, but need some feedback on how to get things straight for my air dms...tanks BNG. PS: I'm also getting bad assets on the FE based maps using bzone.exe The 3 air units are talon based variants equipped with chain gun salvo rocket combo and the chopper has sp pulse cannon with salvo rockets. The jet types are faster the chopper. The black air unit is called hog, the yellow jet is called dog, and the heli is called ahsting. Sure could use some assistance sorting the dm maps out so I can play my nephew; he really enjoyed playing the other day and wants me to add more weapons to the units.

[Warfreak]

FE DM is its own species.

If I remember correctly they use their own DM.DLL

(BTW: Nice heli. )

[Nielk1]

Just put your units on a custom MPV list and add a shell button to set the list to your list.

SRV does this so you can look at that.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

To help reduce bad assets I uninstalled and reinstalled 1.2 and FE, both are patched and now identical in terms of  matched assets; did this as one installation had all kinds of extra assets I've been adding for years with my own stuff. I had to reinstall on the other system as I remove BZII from it years ago. The only thing that is missing now is the other 1.2 mods like COW, ZTV, etc.

The units listed above used some ZTV assets like TV's air chain, charge pulse cannon and a few others. Should I reinstall them as some of the weapons don't appear now where before they worked fine? Also, the ISDF chain gun gun appears on the units on my system but not on the units on my nephews computer even though the assets are equal on both systems; can that be corrected? Also, I've yet to reinstall TV's map editor addon. Would reinstalling it help get things moving along?

When I get stuff in order I'll release the air dms publicly as they are pretty intense air combat maps from what little I played with the original Bridges map. My nephew's pretty good too as he managed take me out of action on several occasions. The only drawback we both noticed is that air dms need to be fought in a more open arena as the units had a tendency to get bogged down in the tight mountainous terrain of the Bridges map. FE, has some really open maps more suited to air based dog fighting death matches. The trick seems to be most problematic in getting good assets on both systems. In the meantime I'll try changing some of the weapons to stock assets.

Hey, it just occurred to me that the cvtalon odf refers to Cerberi assets in the build requirements. As I recall this created problems in the past when trying to change weapons that the Cerberi didn't use. I'll have to check that out and possibly modify my odfs removing the entries that refer to them?

PS: the dll I'm using is the stock deathmatch01.dll and not the FE version. The FE map I used was loaded using MM5 with noscript=off and nobdyhome=on. I added several pspwn_1 objects, several Scion Dower's for resupply as air units fly too high to pickup stuff on the ground as well. I think the bad asset thingy may be related to now missing ZTV assets, but plan to add them to my addon folder on both systems again, and changed the resulting empty.dll to deathmatch01.dll.   

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

The bad assets were in part caused by a cannon hp that was on the model, but not in the odf. Deleting it in Truespace and reprocessing the the x file again to xsi fixed the bad assets issue.

Also part of the bad assets issue was related to MM5 messing up my multiplayer folders by renaming the stock bz2 mission folder to addonmulti.bak and placing FE multiplayer maps in the wrong place. Fixed that and the air dms are working again.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

I finally determined what was causing the bad assets issue preventing my air dm from working right. Apparently, some of my other model assets under addon were conflicting with each other, i.e., having multiple odfs variants of the 2 models I made for the game. Once I moved the offending folder bng assets out of addon to the root of Battlezone the conflicting models worked again; not at first but when I loaded the dm map afterwords and discovered the map worked fine minus my model spawns. When I moved the model files back to under addon/missions/multiplayer/mapfolder/bngairdm1; they spawned again. Then I copied the bngairdm1 folder to my nephews pc; adding a folder under multiplayer also named mapfolder. I also removed the bng assets folder out from under addon and started a new multiplayer dm using my map and got the green light on the other pc that revealed that the assets looked good and the map loaded just fine.

The default weapons of each model are the ion gun, stinger missile, quill cannon, and static charge special. The map itself however included a variety of power ups to chose from including the dreaded fountain mine; I learned to hate that one after I realized my nephew loved to use it to make short work of my ship. I may reedit the map again and remove it as this is a dog fighting air dm and weapons of mass destruction are a bad thing right?


Oh, I changed the map from the bridges map to the alien dunes map as mountanous confined terrain is bad for aircraft types. Which reminds me that changing from a talon type to a true flying type called the gull; which could actually land was far easier to collect power ups with. It was also a good choice for dog fighting manuevers like climbing and diving on unsuspecting players. Both have a top speed of 100 and they cruise at a speed of 50 slow enough get a missile lock or blast the other guy with cannon and gun fire. The models are also snipeable if pilot feels lucky enough to attempt it though I wouldn't recomend it as the other pilot can just mow the sniper down pretty easily and sniping a moving object is pretty hard to do unless the other guy is coming straight on at you.

The air dm's are not quite ready for public release just yet, but I plan to release them for online testing if I can get enough other players to participate.  

PS: One side effect is that standard dm vehicles also spawn as in a normal dm, i.e., scouts, tanks, etc. Perhaps someone could suggest a means of disabling this quark and perhaps suggest a means of making only my map models spawnable in game?

[General BlackDragon]

Thats easy, use a custom vehicle list.

copy mpvehicles.txt, edit it, rename it, put it in ur map's folder. Then in ur maps inf add svar4 = "blabla.txt"

blabla being whatever you named the vehicle list text file.

[GSH]

I finally determined what was causing the bad assets issue preventing my air dm from working right. Apparently, some of my other model assets under addon were conflicting with each other, i.e., having multiple odfs variants of the 2 models I made for the game.

1.3 will note such a problem and bother you when you start BZ2. 1.3 is also much better at providing feedback about other modder errors. Not sure if 1.2 supports svar4 to change the vehiclelist.

Bottom line: your life as a modder will be MUCH easier if you use 1.3 to check for common problems in your MOD.

-- GSH

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

In the mean time could I just add my 2 air units to the existing mpivehicles.txt under 1.2 or would that screw things up for other dm games; I was thinking of renaming the original file something like mpivehecles.bak and using my version for lan games which I mostly play 99 % of the time any ways.

I have yet to install 1.3 on my nephews system as I'm the only one in the family that really plays and mods for the game. I like 1.3, but when it saw the introduction of some very overly powerful weapons and countless revisions making most 1.2 players heads spin in circles of utter confusion; I know cause I'm one of em? I pretty much was getting used to the original 1.3 and started playing it a bit, but with every new revision; I sort of got lost in the madness to create the next version of the game. More then likely, I'll probably install 1.3 up to the original version on my nephews pc and reinstall 1.3 on my own system as well. That way we can try playing my air dms under 1.3's basic improvements.

[General BlackDragon]

Never change stock files. If u change mpvehicles.txt it will cause bad assets.

Yes, 1.2 supports svar4.

1.3 works just like 1.2, if you don't use the new features. Just look at the stock map's inf files for info on how to setup the new map vars. If you do it wrong, it shouldn't break too badly as long as you keep the same format.

If you want any help updating for 1.3, or have any issues, feel free to ask or pm me.

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Awesome, I'll try changing the inf's and create a copy of mpivehicles.txt rename it BNGMPVehicles.txt and put in my custom air units. I noticed that there's an

ivar4 = 255 // Bitfields saying which vehicles out of mpvehicles.txt are allowable. 255 = all hovercraft

Do I just need to add another line and type

svar4 = BNGMPVehicles.txt under the ivar4 entry?

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Adding svar4 did nothing...do I need to change ivar4 to svar4 GBD? Was svar4 refering to playing the air dm under 1.3? I have 1.3pb4a on my system, so I'll try copying the air dm to the 1.3 install and see what happens....

[General BlackDragon]

-.-


svar4 = BNGMPVehicles.txt

should be

svar4 = "BNGMPVehicles.txt"

works in any version

Remember that any exe is very particular about formatting.

Then in ur maps inf add svar4 = "blabla.txt"

[BNG Da BZ Fool]

Oh...I forgot to add quotation marks to BNGMPVehicles.txt. I did a fresh 1.3 install on my system and installed the same on my nephews too.

The only thing I didn't do is upgrade to more then the original 1.3. I'll reserve that for later in a seperate BZII install so I can play mods like fleshstorm for now and then later on install for TA which sounds very cool, but for now I really need to keep what I have currently straight.

I'll make changes to the INF svar4 thingy and see what happens, and thank you GBD for your assit on my little air dm issues.

[General BlackDragon]

What do you mean the "original 1.3" ??

Use TA5.