Halved Marines for DC

[IBBoard]

Carrying on from my previous Halved Marine Mod, I've started work on a Halved Marines for DC. Several people have asked whether/when there'll be a version, so I thought I should get started amongst everything else I want to do!

My first stage is to make the textures, so I've now started work on the new DC textures. I've updated the Grey Knights already - nothing too major there, just halved tabards. The Force Commander is proving a little more awkward through.

My plan is that I'll make him as team colourable as possible, stealing bits from the old Force Commander where they fit. For those bits that work better gold (such as some, but not all, of the new additions/wargear) I'll hopefully be borrowing Hangar-8's Golden Eagles base. As anyone who has looked at my Generic Marines with Golden Eagles texture will know, it'll give much better results!

Quartered Marines will follow...

[IBBoard]

The textures were finished in fairly short order - I've come up with a reasonable approximation for the Force Commander (Primary coloured body, legs and arms with a halved backpack and cloak, and a pair of Trim lines on the cloak).

I'm now working through the LUAs. Most of the original Halved Marines were just overrides for important values (mainly requirement, research/addon and weapons paths) with everything else being inherited from the main Marines so that any future changes by Relic made my job as easy as possible. I'm keeping with that style and using the very useful GnuWin32 DiffUtils to get access to the 'diff' command in Windows to find out what Relic have changed between DoW and DC (although there was a WA hotfix there was never a WA release, so all stats are still DoW stats).

All that needs doing now is research, SBPS (Squad Blueprints) and Weapons, then testing, auto-extraction and release

[IBBoard]

Quick update before I go off and watch Hogfather (we've been visiting family, so they've leant us the copy they recorded): The first version of the DC-compatible mod is now ready for burning to RGDs!

There's still a few niggling little issues (almost all to do with WXP files, which is probably just me not having set up the DC Mod Tools correctly) but other than that it should be ready to burn and test shortly.

Any volunteers for initial testing, once I've given it a quick skim? I need people willing to give useful feedback who know the Space Marines well, and who are willing to extensively test everything to make sure I've not left any trailing Space Marine references in the Halved Marines that leave units/weapons/researches unbuildable because they want a Space Marine requirement filled instead of a Halved Marine requirement.

[IBBoard]

The first burn has now been made - I just need to test it. I'm still awaiting volunteer testers as well.

Now to go and watch the second half of Hogfather

[IBBoard]

Initial in-game tests are looking good. Currently the mod is using the old 'Gabriel' Force Commander for the front end model, although I may replace him before the release so he matches the style of the others.

The main thing now is win conditions and AI (which I know there's a multi-race compatible version of on Relic Forums - I've just got to read up on it)

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Another daily update (even though it means I'm the only one posting in the topic!):

The Halved Grey Knights have had a minor texture tweak (the purity seals now have pure brown, so it doesn't look like they dropped something on them)
The Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian now use my Halved Codex schemes.
The banner has been improved slightly, although I may still do some other minor changes.

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YAU (Yet Another Update): There was one bug in the initial burn - the Fortress Monastery couldn't be built (and didn't show) because it had the Space Marine version of the upgrade as a pre-requisite instead of the Halved Marine. That's now fixed and everything seems to build okay (although I thought there were levels of upgrades after Bionics and the Plasma Pistol, but probably not).

Now to sort out the win conditions and AI.

I'm still looking for beta testers, though, since I don't play enough to be certain that all upgrades are showing up and that the weapons are working correctly etc

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YAU: The win conditions now seem to be almost working (last I worked on them on Thursday evening). I've taken Finaldeath's modular win conditions and fixed a bug in it. I'm just having a slightly strange issue at the moment where it's trying to notify the human player of the win conditions as if they were AI. Hopefully I should get that and the AI finished today

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YAU: Win conditions have been updated without a problem and have been released for the community to use. AI is proving a bit more difficult.

Unfortunately, Relic hard-coded a lot more stuff in the AI files, and I can't use the same functions to get a list of player races in the AI as I did in the win conditions (as it's run earlier, I believe). Hopefully something should be sorted fairly soon, though.

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Despite it getting a bad reception on the Relic Forums, the modular standard AI is now taking shape. It don't know if it's working properly yet - I've only given it a couple of runs through on Easy - but it doesn't seem to be crashing yet!

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Having successfully tested the Eldar, I've made the changes to the other races so they're all using common AI inheritance. It went well at first, but then I discovered a couple of minor mistakes. Clearing those out has lead to the Guard failing when trying to use one of their abilities. AI development is continuing.

[edit] Cause of the ability failing now found. Seemingly I made a bit of a rush job when extracting abilities to the race-specific files. A read-through and re-check of files should solve all those problems and hopefully give a beta-testable AI.

[IBBoard]

Okay, so all of the AI for the abilities seems to be correct. There were a couple of typos/misclassified abilities from my modularisation, but they've now been picked up. Some abilities were already working (I saw Eldar using grenades and the Farseer using a psyker power), so abilities in general are working for the modularised version.

Hopefully I'll get some more AI testing through the week and have a beta worthy version by next weekend.

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Further testing (mainly initial testing of the fixed abilities) seems to be working. The Guard and Necrons are currently slogging it out in the background having defeated a third opponent. Unfortunately it's currently slow testing as I haven't managed to get Dawn of War to drop in to dev mode in Linux, so I can't speed up the play rate. Beta testing release is still looking promising for the coming weekend.

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The Halved Marines currently have a bug somewhere in their AI that causes them to crash the game as they select their strategy. I've yet to find the cause, but chances are the same problem will exist in the Space Marines at the moment (since they're a copy and replace).

Unfortunately 'crash to desktop' doesn't give you much information about where the problem was. On the plus side, four other races seem to be working okay.


[edit] Okay, so it's a Halved Marines only issue. Should hopefully help narrow it down a little.

[edit2] A re-copy and re-edit seems to have solved whatever the problem was. I'll try to get some more testing in this weekend, but for now it's time to watch Formula One qualifying from Melbourne!

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Good news - the mod now appears to be in a suitable state for beta release!

I've tested the game at all difficulty levels today and not encountered any problems (other than a simple issue early on where the Halved Marines were missing some small changes to the AI and so couldn't increase their squad cap). Using some "increase game speed" code I've tested at least six hours of game time without any crashes or error messages.

All that remains now is to work out what needs packaging and what can be extracted, and I'll ship it out to the beta testers (all two of them at the moment, I think)