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Post your nominations for who you want to see in the new story committee.  Anyone can be nominated, but you cannot nominate yourself.  When nominated, I will add the nominee's name to this thread and PM them to see if they would like to be on the committee.  If they accept and are vetted by the modding leaders, the name will be moved to "Accepted."  If the nominee declines or is not accepted by the modding leaders, they will be moved to the "Rejected/Declined" section.

Please do not use this thread to discuss nominees.  If someone thinks that a nominee shouldn't be accepted, for whatever reason,

You can nominate more than one person, but please try to use one post, unless you decide to nominate someone after someone has posted in the thread.

If someone is already nominated, accepted, or rejected, please do not resubmit the name.  It will not increase their chances of being accepted.  If anything, it will just annoy the people deciding who is accepted.

Requirements for nominations:

• Nominee Name
  
• Why they should be in the committee.
  
  I will not automatically reject a nominee based on my opinion of them.  Everyone will get due process.
  
  Nominated:
  Iron Maiden
  Mr X
  VSMIT
  General Black Dragon
  AHadley
  Zero Angel
  
  Accepted:
  Nielk1
  Avatar
  
  Rejected/Declined:

This topic has been moved to Maps and Modding.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10322.0

This topic has been moved to Battlezone 2.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10113.0

This topic has been moved to Overdrive Terminal.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10106.0

This topic has been moved to Comm Stats.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10101.0

This topic has been moved to Overdrive Terminal.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10063.0

AHadley and Mr X wrote what is featured in this thread.  I looked it over, asked questions and more or less did nothing to it.  Remember the rules: no drastic changes to the story, no flogging deceased equines, no flaming.  I'm also adding a new "rule."  Please try not to use Christian religious figures (I know that the whole "Adam and Eve" thing from Full Circle was liked a lot, but we don't need Christian Zealots breathing down our necks), if you're going to suggest a character or something based in religion, make sure that it is from Ancient Greek religion, not modern religion.

First up is the proposed backstory for the 3rd Cthonian (read: new) faction, written by Mr X.

As of now, the 3rd Cthonian faction is unnamed, and is currently called [NN] so we can actually reference them.

In the long history of the Cthonians, there were many attempts by members of both sides to set up a third faction next to the long standing feud between the Olympians and the Hadeans. Many of these were merely short lived foot notes on the long history of a constant war; they were either destroyed by the larger factions or were simply starved of resources when they became isolated from the more civilized worlds of the other factions.
One breakaway faction stands head and shoulders above the rest though; they set up a utopia for those who no longer wanted to fight. This is their history.

Origins:
As the Hadeans and Olympians expanded their empires, the solar system that they began in became full. It is for this reason that both sides began sending colonists to other solar systems in order to become even bigger, evidence for this being the still existing Cthonians who have been encountered by the EDF and Scions in recent years.
The world on which the [NN] faction existed is in one such solar system. The Hadeans and Olympians had both sent colonization teams, each with a medium sized military escort, as they would be too far from other worlds to get support quickly (in fact the traveling time was several years), and scientists who had refused to turn their talents to creating weapons of war.
What neither side had anticipated was that the other would be there, and so the leaders of both colonies met to try to convince the other to leave. As one would expect neither were successful. The outcome was therefore the start of a confrontation, with the military escorts fighting each other. Eventually the fighting became so bad that the escorts were worn down and began trying to conscript the civilians and force the scientists to help. Many of them on both sides became very unhappy with this, and so many of them tried to flee.  At some unknown point two large groups of refugees (one from each side) encountered each other, their leaders talked and eventually they decided to join each other and form their own faction that wasn't constantly at war. They found a world that was just outside the area of space that had been explored by the other Cthonians and colonised it. The better of the scientists among them worked together and succeeded in terraforming the world so that they could inhabit it.

The golden age:
For the next decade or so the [NN]s prospered, their scientists creating ever more brilliant feats of technology thanks to them not having to concentrate on war. All the while the two colonies that they had come from had become full blown military bases, and had fallen into a stalemate with the wider scale war preventing reinforcements from being available.
The [NN]s finally decided that they were ready to re-introduce themselves to their former allies, with an offer of remaining neutral. At first this seemed to be going well, but then the leaders of both sides heard of how great [NN] technology had become. They decreed that their rivals must not be able to get it first and so the colonies (being the only ones near enough) were ordered to attack.

The war:
They arrived at the same time and when the [NN] refused to co-operate with either side the Hadeans ordered a mass extermination, with missiles fired from orbit to take out the citizens of this world. The fighting would probably have ended the [NN]s there if it were not for one crucial detail, the Hadean and Olympian armies were fighting their former friends. A fraction of both of the offensive armies rebelled and tried to go to the aid of their former comrades. Though they could not save any of the settlements on the world they succeeded in saving some of the populace, including most of the scientists who had made the world so great (this had been a priority for the rebels, whichever side had them would have an enormous advantage). They went underground, forming a resistance movement, and striking at the attacking armies' weak points where they could.
Soon the fighting took both sides to the quarrying areas of the planet, where they found some heavy duty mining lasers. They took these and turned them into brutal weapons of war, and each side used them to shoot down the other's carrier craft. The war became a "Do or Die" situation, as without carriers retreat would be impossible.

Comment, another part will be added later.

This topic has been moved to Overdrive Terminal.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10033.0

This topic has been moved to Battlezone II Mods.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=10000.0

This topic has been moved to Overdrive Terminal.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=9912.0

This topic has been moved to Maps and Modding.

http://www.bzuniverse.com/forum/index.php?topic=9950.0

Obviously, the 1.3 Community Project will be developed for 1.3 Public Beta 5.1.  Modelers should start looking into making higher poly models now that we can use up to 20,000 triangles per model.  Not saying that everything's going to be 20k tris, but it would be nice to see something higher than 2700.

This list is derived from the So, what can YOU do? thread.  It is a basic listing of jobs and who can do them.  Here we go.  (Note that these names are not in any order, other than the order of posts in the mentioned thread.

Modeling (Skinning is included here):
VSMIT
Nielk1
bigbadbogie
Warfreak
General Blackdragon
Clavin12 (Provisionary.  Get your stuff in-game.)
Smiffy Bagels
Rocket
GreenHeart

ODF Editing:
VSMIT
Nielk1
bigbadbogie
AHadley
TheJamsh
Warfreak
General BlackDragon
Steeveeo
Dark Scion Soldier
Smiffy Bagels
squirrel
Zero Angel
Rocket
GreenHeart

Sound Creating/Editing:
VSMIT
Nielk1
AHadley
TheJamsh
General Blackdragon
Dark Scion Soldier
Smiffy Bagels
OvermindDL1
Zero Angel
sabrebattletank
Hemming

Story writing/editing:
VSMIT
Nielk1
Clavin12
Mr X
Steeveeo
Dark Scion Soldier
Rocket
AHadley

Voice Acting:
VSMIT
Angstromicus
Clavin12
Mr X
Dark Scion Soldier
Smiffy Bagels
squirrel
Zero Angel
Rocket
AHadley
JonathanS
Bigbadbogie

Effects:
Angstromicus
bigbadbogie
TheJamsh
General Blackdragon
Steeveeo
Hemming

Weapons:
Angstromicus
TheJamsh
General Blackdragon
Rocket
AHadley

Mapping:
Feared_1
Nielk1
bigbadbogie
AHadley
TheJamsh
Warfreak
General Blackdragon
Dark Scion Soldier
Smiffy Bagels
squirrel
Rocket
IBM
GreenHeart
Mr X

Texturing:
Nielk1
bigbadbogie
AHadley
TheJamsh
Warfreak
Smiffy Bagels
Rocket
GreenHeart
Hemming

Programming (DLL stuff):
Nielk1
bigbadbogie
General Blackdragon
OvermindDL1
GreenHeart

AIPs:
bigbadbogie
TheJamsh
GreenHeart

Shell:
TheJamsh
General Blackdragon
GreenHeart

Concept artistry:
Mr X
Rocket
Clavin12
AHadley

Stealing Air:
Zero Angel

As people add onto the roster thread, I'll add to this.  If you want things added, reply here.  When I make changes, I'll remove the pertinent posts, so as to keep things clean.

[highly distilled]

Since the previous thread seems to have devolved into simply respelling the current stories, The Management is going to try something different.

The story authors for the current stories should post here first, with a highly distilled version of their story.  Basically what we want are the main points of the stories, basically a, "What sets one story apart from the others?" kind of thing.  Once we have all of that out on the table, we can start seeing exactly what aspects of a story are liked/disliked, and from there we can begin weaving the 3 stories into one coherent plot.

One rule in this thread: Don't beat a dead horse.  If your point has been refuted before, don't bring it up again, without good reason.  On that note, don't beat a live one, either.  If something's already been said, don't repeat it.  If a point has been neglected, you can bring it up again, but don't just say, "I like/dislike time travel, do something else," endlessly.  That will simply earn you the ire of everyone involved, and will cause your posts to disappear.

Go at it.

The poll will be edited once we get replies from the authors.

EDIT: Once AHadley responds here, I'll go through and distill everything some more, and enable/edit the poll.

I have a unit here that I'm working on, and everything's working out great except for these lights.  Nothing I do to them makes them work in-game.  I exported from Max, the materials were set correctly in Max, had "__e" appended to the end of the object name, the objects still show as untextured in-game.  Just white, no colors.  I even did a copy/paste of the material from a stock unit and it didn't work.  Any suggestions?

And with today, story submissions are now closed.  The time for the first vote has arrived.  These are all of the stories we have received.

Mr X's Time story
AHadley's Perfidious story
General_Hoohah's FE Sequel
Clavin12's story
Bigbadbogie's story
TheJamsh's Fall of the Empires story
ScrapPool's Full Circle story (Late entry)

If you cannot make a clear decision, or you just want to explain your decision, you can reply in this thread instead of using the poll (like if you wanted a certain part of more than one of the stories in the final version).  Your comments will be taken into consideration.

You are free to vote for any of the stories (including your own, if you're an author), so think about your decision before you make it.  There may be more than one winner in this round of voting.

This poll will run for two days.  After that, no more votes will be counted.

If you have not read all of the stories, please do so before voting.

BZ2MD Votes:
     ScrapPool's Story: 1

BZ2Maps Votes:
    N/A

[1.]

This is a list of (obviously) free 3D modeling programs.  This list is mainly for those who wish to learn how to model, but people who already know the basics but haven't found a good program can use this, too.  Of course, if you're really masochistic, you can write your own XSI files in Notepad, but who wants to do that?  Note that only one of these programs has an XSI exporter, but that's easily worked around.  If you've not attempted modeling before, or have tried it but not liked an interface, try these.

1. trueSpace.  I've not personally used it, but I'm sure BNG Da BZ Fool could help you here.  DL at http://www.caligari.com/downloads.html.
2. GMAX.  This is a stripped down version of 3D Studio Max.  It can only save as .gmax files, which can't be opened by anything, and can only export as .p3d files, which I've never seen used.  However, you can download and install the Tempest game pack from Turbosquid, which has an MD3 exporter (Which can be opened in a couple of modeling programs), and there is also a workaround for exporting as an X file, which I will go over after I finish this list.  DL at http://www.turbosquid.com/gmax.
3. Blender3D.  A pretty powerful 3D program, but the interface can get some getting used to.  OvermindDl1 has developed an exporter for Blender that exports to BZ2's version of XSI, but it needs testers.  DL Blender at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/, DL the exporter at http://www.overminddl1.com/forum/index.php/topic,694.msg4731.html#msg4731.
4. Wings 3D.  A subdivision modeler, it's very easy to get high-poly fast.  May have a suspect poly counter.  Can export to 3DS.  DL at http://www.wings3d.com/

*Program* to XSI:
1. trueSpace.  I believe trueSpace can export to .x, so you can use the X2XSI utility found on BZScrap.
2. GMAX.  There are 3 ways to go about this.  One is Slaor's way, found here: http://www.bz2md.com/fishdotxsi/Slaor2xsi.htm.  The next is Greenheart's way, found here: http://www.bz2md.com/fishdotxsi/gmax.htm  The third is the Direct2X way, which I've found to be the easiest.  I'll diagram that here.
     1. First download the 'Gmax gamepack SDK' found at this link: FlightSimulator exporter plugin. Size is about 15Mb. Although only 3 files are actually needed, they are not available as separate downloads, so unfortunately you'll need to download the whole thing.
     2. Next, download programs 'MDLCommander' and 'Middleman'.
     3. After download, you'll see that the 'fs2004_sdk-gmax-setup' is an exe. If you install it in the default gmax directory, you'll end up with a lot of extra stuff that you don't need. So create a new folder somewhere on your hard drive and install it there.
     4. When done, open the folder, go to gamepacks > fs2004 > plugins. And copy all 3 files: 'FSModelExp.dle', 'makemdl.exe' and 'makemdl.parts.xml' to your main ../gmax/plugins folder.
     5. You need to rename two of the files. Right click on 'makemdl.exe' and rename it to to 'mkmdl.exe'. Then right click on 'makemdl.parts.xml' and rename it to 'mkmdl.parts.xml' (without the quotes).
     6. Next, unzip 'MDLCommander.zip'. Then copy 'mdlcommander.exe' to your main ../gmax/plugins folder. This file also needs to be renamed. Right click on 'mdlcommander.exe' and rename it to 'makem.exe'.
     7. Finally, unzip 'Middleman13beta3.zip'. Then copy 'makemdl.exe' to your main ../gmax/plugins folder.
     8. To convert your gmax model to .X format. Go to 'File > Export' and select 'Flightsim Aircraft Object (.MDL) from the file type dropdown. Type in a filename and click Save. The Middleman dialog window should now appear. Click the 'Options' tab and check 'SaveXFile' (this saves the x file) and 'nocompile' (this tells mdlcommander to only create an .X file not mdl/bgl). Then click the GO button.

After a few seconds the dialog will close and your newly exported .X model should be in the directory where you saved it to.

3. Blender3D.  As I've said previously, there is an XSI exporter, just DL it, install it to the correct place, and have at it.  I don't know where the "correct place" is, since I haven't used Blender all that much, so you'll have to experiment.
4. Wings 3D.  As I've said previously, Wings can export to 3DS.  DL Blender, and import the model into Blender.  Do whatever you need to here, like place HPs, set up a hierarchy, or UV map, then export using the XSI exporter.

Any questions about this can be asked here.  I'm sure there are people who would be happy to help you.

We now have an IRC channel for the CP.  This is a place where we can bounce ideas back and forth between people.

The information is thus:

Server: irc.gamesurge.net:6667
Channel: #bz2cp

Before joining, please go to http://www.gamesurge.net/createaccount/ and create a profile, preferably with your BZU username.

Follow the directions given to you by Gamesurge in the activation of your account and how to log into the IRC server.

Please get a discrete IRC client.  Mibbit has been G-lined (Permabanned) on Gamesurge.  If worst comes to worst, you can go into BZ2 in any of the 1.3 patches, go into multiplayer, click chat, then once you're in the BZ2 channel, type

Code Select Expand

/join #bz2cp

A good general client to use would be either Miranda IM or Pidgin.

Note: I am currently the only moderator for this channel.  At times I am away, I may appoint a person who's online at the time to work in my stead.  Also note that I own this channel.  Therefore I reserve the right to kick for stupidity or mute the channel so as to stop arguments.

EDIT: We also now can use a Teamspeak, here's a banner with the info needed to join.

For anyone interested in helping with production, please post in this thread with the following information (in this format, if you please).

Username
MSN email (If one exists)
BZU Jabber (Miranda IM or PSI can be used as Jabber clients)
Current skills (pertaining to BZ2)
Skills you'd like to learn (pertaining to BZ2)

Note that depending on what you say your skills are, you may be asked for an example.

Also, if you're comfortable with it, please PM either myself, Angstromicus, or Feared_1 your personal email, in case we need to contact you.

Please try not to screw this up.  It's an important list to have.  Your email will not be freely distributed, and none of the people who have it will sell your identity to someone else. for anything less than $10,000,000US

Remembering those who have fallen protecting their homeland.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10248763-1.html

The overlay only shows casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, and works best in Google Earth 5.