Kilkakon

Hi there guys--sorry to be out of touch. I've been working on the mod and a new site for it but I had to go dark for a bit while some nonsense blew over. But I'm fine and almost ready to unleash the new site complete with all the C&C pages you guys can geek over. While working on the pages today though I noticed a bug in the way I was assigning factions the various helicopters, which means I'll need to re-evaluate the Apache helicopter. I wanted to give it to Japan, USA and Russia, but looks like I can only give it to Russia. This gives me the opportunity to give it a more fitting name for Russia as well as try out something a bit... new. Thing is, I'm not sure what would be best! So I decided to make a few different tests and threw them together into a video for you guys to check out. Have a look and let me know what you think of each of them~ My hunch is the anti-tank shells or the ballistic charges, as the honest john missiles seem a tad overpowered and steal the role of the SSM Launcher, but figured it'd be a cool vid anyhow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElpWtJzYYX4 Enjoy boys! :laugh:

Thanks guys! I'm glad you all love it! Annnnd after some poking on Skype, Nyer forced me to tweak the damaged frame of the powerplant a bit. He demanded saggage! And here it is: I also put the original one back in for use in campaign maps, like this small Company of Answers installation located in Ukraine: In other news I've also made two videos, for the remaining two faction logos. I've yet to upload them but will give you guys a preview soon~

I've gone ahead and done the cameo and the buildup animation. The new building is now complete! Hope you guys like!

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions guys! I've done some more work on the power plant, incorporating your suggestions slightly, making the chimneys a bit taller and adding a pipe to make the building more complete-feeling. I did try another colour palette but I couldn't find anything I liked, so I've stuck with this. Fixed the shading, fixed the remaps, made a damage frame. Here's some screenshots! Russian power plants standing proudly in a Russian military outpost Civilian-owned Power Plants in the middle of a city These Terrorist Power Plants have fallen into disrepair. Thanks Messiah This means I've succeeded in making a Russian-looking power plant. The Advanced Power Plant is only for the Company of Answers. Here's a breakdown of power plant by playable faction:

Though my life is currently nothing but trials and tribulations, thank God I can keep carrying on. I've got 2 things to share with you guys. I'll start with the most exciting, a new building idea I had. I was inspired to make this on a lunch break today as there's one thing that always bothered me with my current building set: the civilian power plant, which is also used by Russia. it's the blue one in this screenshot: As you can see it's the Red Alert one recoloured blue. While this is fine and a nice touch, it bothered me that I was using the advanced Red Alert power plant and the regular one on different factions. Doesn't make sense thematically. Replacing the power plant with something new is a tricky task. It still has to scream Red Alert, as I really want to tap into that nostalgia factor, it being on the Russian faction. While this is still WIP, I think this is on the right track. I've made this by modifying the Ore Refinery and adding a few things. What do you guys think? Cool? Not cool? Any ideas on how to make it even awesomer? Opinions on the colours? I want it to fit the RA look and feel like a power plant without it being the same building. If that makes sense. Hopefully. :laugh: The other thing I can share is this: This is the current idea for how the world map will look at the start of the first campaign. My problem is that Russia and USA really have no reason to expand! XD The map will mainly be tracking the player's progress I guess. Feel free to throw feedback on this one as well. Hope you like guys!

Poor guy in the middle haha

Gah sorry for not thanking you guys earlier. Ever since CNCNet moved its domain I've not received any email notifications so I have to check everything manually. Thanks for the positive feedback I noticed there's a few stray pixels I'll need to clean up (XCC seems to butcher the palette slightly, somehow) but I should be able to address that. Next update I should have some territory coloured in for you guys to see what you think~ I've had a few delays due to some legal problems I won't go into detail here. If they don't get resolved I'll have to switch to finishing my website redesign earlier rather than later.

That I did! Animation's all done and working

That's it guys. Just sell the whole base and minigunner rush the enemy base. Every crate that contains an MCV, sell it for more minigunners.

Are you ready to select a target Commander?

Seems good to me Blade! I've yet to try messing with palettes for choose.wsa just yet but the new file seems to be working fine. Started and aborted the campaign a bunch of times without problem, and it animates and loops just fine. Seriously, thanks for helping to get this tool functional. It means I can have the campaign work properly rather than have a "please ignore the logos you click on for starting the game" problem. It'd break immersion pretty fast I'll report back if I have any issues, but for now I have to make the real content...

Hi there guys, Has this problem happened for anybody else? My email is still correct in the settings, and it's set to instant/if unread in settings.

Hi there folks, I can announce that I have returned to active development on this project. I didn't want to say anything until I had something to actually report, as we've heard those "I'm back"--only to disappear declarations before. So what's new, I hear you ask? I've commissioned the fourth logo animation, this time for the Company of Answers. It's pretty fancy! Still have to do the Tomorrow one, which I'll handle myself, however that's been waiting on voice work I have to do. (I'll touch on this in a bit) In the WSA department (campaign intermissions), I've been working with Blade to get a version of his tools that works well with C&C. So far, I've managed to replace two of the three wsas I need to replace, and I've figured out how to change the palette of one of those files. Jury's still out on choose.wsa, but I'll be able to work on these now that all the technical problems have been resolved. There's also the question of "which factions should be represented on the map?:--I mean, USA and Russia don't control the world, haha. So should I leave everything neutral? Seems boring. While I'll think about this one further, feel free to give some opinions guys! There's some errors I need to correct, as well as just finishing off the stuff graphically, as I stopped working on it when I hit the aforementioned tech issues. I've also started to remake my website. I really want this project to be a success. Everything I've worked on to date has either released with a whimper or been a dramatic flop. So as a part of that I want my website to be up to date and really promoting C&C the best it can be, rather than it being a single page, having all the tech trees and unit descriptions and everything that's fun to read and explore. Finally, I have tried to do some more voice work for the game. It's been a big struggle. I unearthed my ancient XP laptop to try and get the voice work as close to the original samples as I can, but I just can't do it. The problem isn't the voice artist--my voice, the problem is the equipment and the processing. The original clips (which I love!) have distortion on them because they were recorded on a rubbish mic. The new ones, they don't have this distortion, and nothing I can do with my nooby Audacity skills gets it close enough to not sound like a different voice. I'm honestly stuck on this one. I know it's an audio processing problem, but I know next to nothing about how that sort of thing works. Over the last two evenings I've been recording for hours upon hours to try and match a voice clip that's impossible to recreate with my current equipment I don't mind the campaign videos sounding a little different, but the EVA ones do need to match up. At any rate, that's what's new! I am back in action and working away on the website and C&C. This will be the best release I can make it, and thanks to everybody that's helped and submitted maps and other things along the way. Once I have the voice EVAs done for both factions (I'll commission the CoA ones) I will do a few videos to show off the maps that were submitted during the 2014 contest.

Looks like I don't know what palette file to replace XD I managed to create a paletted WSA that was non-standard, looks fine in XCC, but ingame it's not using my palette, and through trial and error I think I've managed to replace every single stretch table pal file except the one I want, haha. Still that is not an issue with WsaSet. When I crack it I'll try the optimised version. EDIT: Yeah, seems to be a C&C thing that I'll need to investigate further. As a test I replaced africa.wsa instead of hearth_a.wsa and my custom palette worked fine (glitchy, but something I can work on for sure). In saying that... I think I might be able to get away with not having that issue fixed. I can replace africa's palette, but not hearth_a, but I can make do with hearth_a's stock one. Alright! I will try out the opt version tonight and report back again.

Starting to see some good results with this build! I've been using the reg variant, and so far have not tried any new palettes or anything, but my simple test has worked! Success! Charmander spinning on top of the world haha. I'll try with palette changes and with the opt variant as well and report back. Eventually it would be great if we could handle the choose.wsa one as well, but will keep working on this for now.

Speaking of, just did They seem to be working fine. Shaved off about 400 KB each.

I've tried the new version and sadly have found there to be little difference ingame, the new game screen crashing on the second to fourth "new game" press. One execution didn't crash at all, but the wsa is not animated, staying on the first frame. The loop switch is required to stop it crashing after 2 seconds but that is all it does. I'll give it a try. My radar animations are SHPs rather than WSAs though!

Thanks Blade. I'm trying to do everything I can to make this project awesome. Looking forward to whatever you can figure out.

Whelp, forum ate my post. Yay. Here we go again! So I've been returning to working on my mod, and today I tried to figure out WsaSet again. I've been attempting a test with taking one of the original wsas, decoding it and recoding it to test if the tool works out. Unfortunately, it seems to have failed my test, so I'll explain what my process was and then you can see if it's something I did wrong or if it's WsaSet at fault. I've been working with choose.wsa. I used XCC Mixer to copy the whole thing into clipboard and then pasted it into my image program (XCC's copy as PCX frames gave me rubbish). Manually cutting out the first 6 and saving them as PCX, I then copy/pasted/renamed these in Explorer to get choose 0000.pcx through choose 0029.pcx. I then ran this through WsaSet with both loop and palette options enabled, with coordinates 0, 22 as per the original. Ingame, I saw no visible animation. Clicking one of the logos to start the game was fine. However, upon returning to the main menu and trying again, it would crash on either the second or third new game. The animation plays fine in XCC Mixer. Notably, my file is 56425 bytes smaller than the original one, although that could be because of less intense animation. I've zipped up my files and the end result and put them into this zip here: http://kilkakon.com/kocb/Shapeset.zip Anything I'm doing wrong? These aren't even my images and they are using the original palette. I'm becoming increasingly concerned that maybe it's the tool that's at fault. Any ideas?

Hi there all. It's time for an update--sorry to have been so long without one! I hope you all had a safe Christmas and are enduring the new year successfully. I've had a bit of a minor meltdown over the last week or so with both of my computers breaking, back pain and other such circumstantial nonsense. Slowly getting back into gear and I want to finish this mod so badly! I do have some good news to report, I did get some work done over the Christmas period, specifically in the cinematics area. I've written all of the Tomorrow campaign out and just need to get started on the Company of Answers one. I've also had some videos commissioned to help speed things along (this part of the project is going to be costly, voice actors and all!). Check out this preview I've uploaded! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkP8G9jzGxk Looks great! I've worked out how my videos are going to look as well. They'll be using sprites and have subtitles on screen. Fans of the Ace Attorney series will note similarities with my approach, although I will be including voice overs.

I'm okay with my urban environment being used by others once I've finished my mod. It's not 100% a new theatre as there's some cliffs and buildings I've not replaced as my mod cannibalised civilian buildings into regular buildings for the extra factions, but it should work fine enough. There's no custom palettes or anything. If you do go with South America and use that sick Jungle scheme, you could also consider the Barren theatre that guy did. I've had no use for it but I think it looks great, it depends on your setting of course. Also... good luck!

Pretty well done Urban environment And man that map is massive haha

Yeah I'm not sure what's going on. I might need to try some more control tests with westwood original stuff or just wait for you to figure things out on your end. Thanks Goatmessiah! I've been playing around with the cinematics a bit, having got a video ingame with audio syncing up correctly. I'm not 100% sure if I should stick with the default 320x156 resolution or go to 320x200 for a bit more detail. My leaning is towards the 200 so that the style I'm using will work a bit more smoothly (characters would be more centred that way), even if it means some stuff will be widescreen and some not. Feel free to throw in your 2c people!

It's time for an update! It is with a great sense of accomplishment that I can announce that all of the maps have been completed for C&C: Dawn of Tomorrow. I've been quite active with C&C over the last few weeks; trying to experiment with getting WSAs working (nothing yet alas) as well as finishing the aforementioned maps. Both of the 2 remaining maps had buggy AI that was fixed with the addition of 2 wide horizontal river crossings. Thanks to Nyer for hexing the change. For Temperate and Snow I've used RA's graphics, for Desert I made my own. But let's start with some screenshots! First off is my Japanese map, Sunrise, in which Japanese forces invade Siberia: And last but not least is GoatMessiah's desert map that he submitted in my contest this time last year: This particular map was very challenging. I've spent days and days on this one--it's quite a relief to see it finished, I can assure you! Making a Tomorrow map difficult takes a lot of work due to how strong Tomorrow is in general so the AI aggression needs to be kept up throughout the game. So what's next for the project, I hear you ask? Well that's movies and campaign transitions! I need to master these WSAs (they still aren't working ) so I can get the campaign and faction selections down pat, and then I can work on casting some voice actors and storyboarding. And finally, a redesign of my website so C&C has a prominent and worthy place online to reside.

I have a semi-theme with the Japanese cameos going of having them at night or in urban environments. Tried to give a sense of consistency. You're welcome to provide more feedback on the full version of the image here: The background is quite desaturated to try and enforce some contrast between the Japanese coloured vehicle and the terrain.