FAIL! Deadline ... What Is A Deadline?

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It has been exactly 365 days x2 ... which equals ... er ... 2 and 2 is 5 ... erm ... er ... say about 2 years - exactly - to the day - that I started Project BADGER OF DOOM ... maybe it needs a better name :/

Sigh ... so, it's been 2 years exactly, to the day, since I started my current project ...

Originally it was entitled "His Royal Majesticnesses' Royal Corps Of Dirigibles And The Might Struggles For Supremecy Of The Pan-Dimensional Lands Of Pangea" ...

... okay it wasn't ...

But it was originally entitled "Royal Corps Of Dirigibles". The rest of the "fluff" was very much added for amusement as a sub-title, due to the Steampunk notion of the whole thing.

That eventually changed to "Royal Dirigible Brigade", a very much shortened version which still implied the Steampunk aesthetic of "royal", "dirigibles" and a "brigade" ... presumably a brigade of dirigibles ... possibly aquainted with royals.

That in-turn ... inturn? ... not sure if one word or hyphenated ... became the much easier "Dirigible Brigade" ... after all there are SIX playable faction, only one of which is called "Royalist".

I was fine with that for months, right until I woke up today and thought AIRSHIP DRAGOON ... and that was before I got to the pub ...

So ... we still don't really have a title ... only it needs to includes airships/dirigibles/zeppelins and some sort of military detachment like Brigades or more cavalry orientated like Dragoons ... or maybe Huzzars ... my late-grandfather was a Huzzar ... and an Irish Huzzar at that ... and a Royal Irish Huzzar. He wasn't Irish.

Also ...

... Deadlines ... and the utter lack of them. Thank the great magnet - 'cos I'd have missed it if there was one.

So 2 years to the day after I had started ... where about are we? ... that's the royal "we" of course ...

All Character models are done - all hail the great magnet - because it's been a 2 month - checks old blogs - looks more like 3 months - death march of 3D character modeling. But finally we are complete on that score.

I had to complete the Dastardly Pirates of Pangea - cue play on words about the pirates of penzance ... get it? Look, I did drama at school in the '80s ... when I say "did", I mean "took as a skive from doing real lessons" - and thus failed at exam time. Everybody wins!



This is the common enemy in Single Battle Mode and the insurgent if you don't keep the population happy in the Campaign modes. He's a red bearded hell-raiser, wearing a shiny jade smoking jacket, with a white stripe across the face giving him a New Romantics vibe.


What do you mean you don't know what the New Romantics were?




What do you mean "What The Hell Did I Just Watch!?"

How about this?



What?


Still no recollection? Never mind, let's continue.

Pirates done, I needed to sort out the Heavy Armour character for all 7 factions.

Having already bled my fingers to the bone on making light and stealth armour, I decided that heavy armour would be a single character model, using variations on the same texture. That's when "base_my_lovely_material_option" really came into it's own. Swapping "base" with "faction name" meant that I could load the correct material at spawn and it would then have the dominant colours of the regime. I decided that the face mask of the armour should patriotically (you spell that like that right?) have the regime's flag and the back shoulder plate should also carry the flag - as a basic way of checking for identification from behind to prevent Blue-On-Blue - something I'd done for character models in "ye olde project"



Yeah ... that one ... awww ... look at them ears ...

But back to the now ...

Whilst all 6 playable factions were VERY loosely based on great powers of the 19th Century, I had wanted to make variations on the flags, to give the factions and the game it's own unique fantasy/Steampunk identity.

The US flag was kind of easy, the double cirlce of stars circa 1877 is kinda cool. Thanks to Nebraska for that. As seen in Dances With Wolves - the only good Costner film. Sorry if you're reading Kev, but .... well ... it was. :|



I almost changed it to something else but them realized that was actually the REAL Malaysian flag ... so we scrubbed that idea ...

So turning the US 1877 flag into a double ring also looked cool. And here it is on the heavy armour character type for the US Republic faction.



The British Flag has been the one to be awkward. I ummed-and-ahh-ed for some time thinking up a new design.



That was cool :) ... positively freezing ... oh hang on that's Iceland's flag ... They ate our cod in 1971 - Nevar Forget!

Let's try a version on the theme.



GOD DAMMIT NORWAY! Fuuuuuu -

So, I ditched that idea and went back for the classic Naval Ensign. It's the British Royalist - so some sort of ... crown ... seemed right. And here's what we got.



It shows off the predominate red of the red coats, has a crown, Union Jack - If I was a Redcoat in a past future that never was I would be proud to leap out of a zeppelin all guns blazing with that on my shirt!


I've still got 4 other flags to design but I feel that they're gonna go much more smoothly. For the Tactical Battle part I am almost complete, with just 3 more weapon systems to finish the models, scripts and GUI's for. Here's the US Republic again, left is a Recce class trooper in Stealth Armour (camouflage) holding a "Telephonicatron" to bring in artillery, and a Sapper class trooper next to him with a single shot, FlameRocket.



In other news, I've fixed MORE bugs - where the hell do they come from? - found some others, which thankfully I know how to fix, sorted out a whole load of new stuff and enjoyed using "base_material" so much I've converted a whole load of stuff done at the start of production 2 years ago to use it, thus ridding myself of various mildly repepitive datablocks.

I encourage all T3D MIT users to embrace the power of "base" in your materials.

base_barrel
blue_barrel
green_barrel
awesome_barrel

Can all be done with just one model. And even one texture if you use the diffuse setting on the material datablock.

So, I've got all that and 4 more post-it notes of issues to sort out. And then port it over to a finalized code-base (still using an experimental one).

So ... we missed our deadline ... but thankfully we are not beholden (is that even a word?) to external forces ... or some such gibberish. Production continues unabated. It has been exactly 2 years to the day since we began.