Custom Map #1719: Hovership Commander Mission 0. By: Argonwolf

[svartmes]

Wow this is really something! So much potential!
My only gripes are that building feels kinda bad and inacurate, which goes double for terraforming, any reason why it can't be at the cursor? having to use the bomb cam adds unecessary complexity imo.
I'm also bummed that you are using spacebar for ascent since I have that set to pause normally. I would have prefered the altitude to be set at Z X, but this ofcourse is just my preferences, though any chance you could set the ship controls to the "custom keys" ?

[Up-Level]

This concept and the execution is amazing! I'm curious how you made those raster textures, is there an external program that can create these?

[Argonwolf]

This concept and the execution is amazing! I'm curious how you made those raster textures, is there an external program that can create these?

There IS an external program that can create them. It's a script I created in Unity engine that takes a Texture2D and reconstitutes it as an uncompressed base-64 18-bit color string. If you (or anyone) wants the script or some textures converted, just ask. I'll help you set up the raster script to render them too.

[SteveCarlo]

All I got was a screen with the hover ship there,  with no ability to do anything. Mouse, keys, all zero effect. I couldn't even exit the level until I realized "Esc" worked enough to bring up that menu, at which point I finally had a mouse to click exit.

i couldn't even get escape to work

[Argonwolf]

All I got was a screen with the hover ship there,  with no ability to do anything. Mouse, keys, all zero effect. I couldn't even exit the level until I realized "Esc" worked enough to bring up that menu, at which point I finally had a mouse to click exit.

i couldn't even get escape to work

You'll need the Mverse beta to play this mission and future ones properly due to bugs with the UI. I've since updated the maps' tags to reflect this.

[CS Z]

I was able to play this mission without issue on non-beta, regular ol' 1.4.8.  There is an initial rendering issue but pressing 'n' a couple of times to step forward a few frames to get to the initial dialog seems to clear that all up.

"WIER" - I am winner.

I think a LOT of mapmakers would love to add custom overlay meshes/textures to their maps for the posted screenshot portion even if that is all they ever use CPACKs for.  If it were made relatively easy to do, more maps would use it.

Having made a number of custom maps myself with 4RPL, this obviously took a ton of time to make.  Custom units for pretty much all aspects of the hovercraft (the unit itself, weapons fire, floating cursor, etc) and custom textures both in CPACKs and embedded into the 4RPL itself.  Not to mention, debugging 4RPL once it is inside a CPACK is a nightmare.  I wish there was a 4RPL Console for CPACK scripts.

That box in the corner though is nuts.  It looks like you are drawing every single pixel with BlitRaster() - a 4RPL function I'm not particularly familiar with.  Including the tutorial text.  There are a lot of really interesting bits of code in both Tutorial.4rpl and RasterCheck.4rpl to look at.  I would love to see more core game functionality for custom menuing rather than having to do stuff like what you did, which is basically making your own 2D texture drawing engine inside a video game scripting language...

One thing to note is that clicking on the raster box apparently zooms it in to 2x size.  Clicking again results in zooming into something like 4x size (and a bunch of the box is no longer visible on the screen).  Clicking again restores it to 1x size.  I assume the zooming behavior is baked into the core game itself.  Maybe that box was originally intended as some sort of debugging facility for sprites, hence the zooming bit?

[Durikkan]

One thing to note is that clicking on the raster box apparently zooms it in to 2x size.  Clicking again results in zooming into something like 4x size (and a bunch of the box is no longer visible on the screen).  Clicking again restores it to 1x size.  I assume the zooming behavior is baked into the core game itself.  Maybe that box was originally intended as some sort of debugging facility for sprites, hence the zooming bit?

Yeah, that's baked in to the base functionality of the raster.  As for speculation on its purpose, the raster actually defaults to the size of the current map (and the crash bug for non-beta is because part of having it bigger than the map size was overlooked).   So perhaps it was to be used as an informational display of some sort, with every map tile  represented and changing color based on.. something.  So clicking on it would effectively be zooming on that map display.

[qwazzy]

Pretty intriguing mode. Normally I'm not too excited for new modes since that seems to be overly popular compared to the regular style of play I prefer, but this one's very interesting - reminds me a lot of Battlezone Combat Commander. The idea of doing RTS stuff while also being part of the action is a fun, albeit difficult, idea to play with.

I was able to play it in non-beta, after a couple retries to figure out how to start it due to the already well mentioned bug.

My only gripe is the way terraforming is handled. It's so clunky and unintuitive that I feel I won't be using it at all unless absolutely necessary, so I hope your future maps of this mode don't make it a core necessity to progress.

[Argonwolf]

One thing to note is that clicking on the raster box apparently zooms it in to 2x size.  Clicking again results in zooming into something like 4x size (and a bunch of the box is no longer visible on the screen).  Clicking again restores it to 1x size.  I assume the zooming behavior is baked into the core game itself.  Maybe that box was originally intended as some sort of debugging facility for sprites, hence the zooming bit?

Yeah, that's baked in to the base functionality of the raster.  As for speculation on its purpose, the raster actually defaults to the size of the current map (and the crash bug for non-beta is because part of having it bigger than the map size was overlooked).   So perhaps it was to be used as an informational display of some sort, with every map tile  represented and changing color based on.. something.  So clicking on it would effectively be zooming on that map display.

The raster scales with the UI when the setting is changed in the pause menu. I just assumed being able to resize it was a way to further customize it since the smaller UI might make it difficult to read.

[Argonwolf]

I was able to play this mission without issue on non-beta, regular ol' 1.4.8.  There is an initial rendering issue but pressing 'n' a couple of times to step forward a few frames to get to the initial dialog seems to clear that all up.

"WIER" - I am winner.

I think a LOT of mapmakers would love to add custom overlay meshes/textures to their maps for the posted screenshot portion even if that is all they ever use CPACKs for.  If it were made relatively easy to do, more maps would use it.

Having made a number of custom maps myself with 4RPL, this obviously took a ton of time to make.  Custom units for pretty much all aspects of the hovercraft (the unit itself, weapons fire, floating cursor, etc) and custom textures both in CPACKs and embedded into the 4RPL itself.  Not to mention, debugging 4RPL once it is inside a CPACK is a nightmare.  I wish there was a 4RPL Console for CPACK scripts.

That box in the corner though is nuts.  It looks like you are drawing every single pixel with BlitRaster() - a 4RPL function I'm not particularly familiar with.  Including the tutorial text.  There are a lot of really interesting bits of code in both Tutorial.4rpl and RasterCheck.4rpl to look at.  I would love to see more core game functionality for custom menuing rather than having to do stuff like what you did, which is basically making your own 2D texture drawing engine inside a video game scripting language...

One thing to note is that clicking on the raster box apparently zooms it in to 2x size.  Clicking again results in zooming into something like 4x size (and a bunch of the box is no longer visible on the screen).  Clicking again restores it to 1x size.  I assume the zooming behavior is baked into the core game itself.  Maybe that box was originally intended as some sort of debugging facility for sprites, hence the zooming bit?

Thank you for your kind words! Debugging is a bit of a nightmare (I only recently discovered the "go to line" function in Windows Notepad, before that it was totally insane, hah) but that's par for the course. I'd love it if Virgil added the ability to just feed a string into the 4rpl compiler, then I could make my own in-game code editor in the raster with auto-complete on method names (it would be equally as cool if he put a code editor in himself, but that's asking a fair bit more lol).

The texture thing wasn't hard, I have a script in Unity that turns a Texture2D into the 18-bit color string the script contains, and all the code that turns it back to a bitmap is in said script for all to see. Same Unity script can spit out a pipe-delimited string of character sprites for use in the 4rpl script as a raster font for printing text. That one was slightly more complicated but luckily I already had both the sprite drawer and text printer already made from a still-unfinished earlier CPACK for drawing character images and text a la Creeper World 3 as a sort of continuation of its storyline.

Click-to-zoom is indeed built-in functionality and I figured it was so you can shrink the normal UI while still having a big raster display, but that's just my best guess since the zoom level can't be controlled from script.

[CS Z]

I only recently discovered the "go to line" function in Windows Notepad, before that it was totally insane, hah

:o

That's even more nuts.  Notepad++ has 4RPL syntax highlighters for it...and all the other useful things code editors have such as what line number and character the keyboard caret is at and code autocompletion.  Notepad works in a pinch but I wouldn't want to write too much code in it.

[CyberDyneSystems]

I'd really appreciate it if someone could walk me through opting into the the "mverse beta" as Google, Steam, and Knucklecracker forums all seem to come up empty on that search. Thanks in advance.

[Argonwolf]

I'd really appreciate it if someone could walk me through opting into the the "mverse beta" as Google, Steam, and Knucklecracker forums all seem to come up empty on that search. Thanks in advance.

1. Open Steam library.
2. Right click on Creeper World 4 in the large vertical list at the left side of the screen
3. Click Properties
4. Click Betas
5. Change the drop-down box from None to mverse - mverse
6. Play CW4 and it will auto-update

[Up-Level]

Debugging is a bit of a nightmare (I only recently discovered the "go to line" function in Windows Notepad, before that it was totally insane, hah)

By the way, there is a powershell command that can monitor the print output file and display any changes, effectively working like a console output. Detailed here: https://knucklecracker.com/wiki/doku.php?id=4rpl:commands:print

[CyberDyneSystems]

I'd really appreciate it if someone could walk me through opting into the the "mverse beta" as Google, Steam, and Knucklecracker forums all seem to come up empty on that search. Thanks in advance.

1. Open Steam library.
2. Right click on Creeper World 4 in the large vertical list at the left side of the screen
3. Click Properties
4. Click Betas
5. Change the drop-down box from None to mverse - mverse
6. Play CW4 and it will auto-update

Bless you Sir! I was messing around on those pages for some time, I never would have thought to right click to find that menu! Thank you!