Updated Mods for FAF and Vanilla / Steam

[stashrider]

Hey, my first post here on the forums. Is there an interest for Mods? My friend Sprouto and I along with several others have over the years been working on a Mod (the LOUD Project) so that we could play against a competitive AI on 40km maps. Sprouto has posted a few things about it here on the forums. We are considering releasing it but were not sure if there would be interest. It is unrelated to the FA mods and lobbies and is stand alone. It combines most of the common mods like Black Ops, Total Mayhem and 4DC etc... We have created an updater that allows people to switch between our mod and their saved config so people could bounce between ours (when they want to play the AI) and FA Lobbies when they want to play ranked or other modded games. Its a total conversion which is why it is standalone and would be difficult to integrate.

There is about eight of us who have been involved over the last several years who routinely play together on the weekends which is why we have spent so much time working on the game because we like to all play together.

I haven't seen too many mods on AI improvement so I dont know if that is even of interest anymore, but generally we are playing 40km maps 5 or 6v6 against the AI and can routinely get up to 5000 units and sim speed slowdowns at around the 2 or 21/2 hour mark. The benefit of improving the AI was that it lead to other changes that drastically improved sim speed so that we can play such large maps and have thousands of units. This also works for PVP and the performance is even better but we generally play team games against the AI.

Sorry for the long post, this was one of the first posts I read through and liked the discussion so it seemed appropriate to throw it out there here.

[Exotic_Retard]

welcome,

the only issue i see here is potential copyright issues since you mentioned combining mods like Blackops - for which one of the authors expressed discontent at other people using their work

other than that you should know that a large portion of faf plays against ai and with a large number of mods, so you should have no trouble getting a playerbase.
it would also be great to see what improvements you guys came up with over the years and have a look at integrating them into FAF for everyone's benefit

the improvements you mention are very interesting indeed, and i would say that the reason there arent any ai improvement mods is that sadly there isnt anyone with the knowledge and bravery to delve into the ai lua code. but it sure is something that would be nice to improve

[stashrider]

Thanks Exotic--we talked about the mods, one of the reasons we weren't sure about releasing ( I will have to take a look through the forums, I dont know if the original modders are still active). Because we combined the various mods some balance to their stats were needed to bring them all in to the same universe alongside the stock units. We have been working on it for several years, all in all (and I am sure Sprouto could confirm) but we have probably made thousands of changes for better AI and optimization which is really our primary focus.

You can usually play a two and a half hour game and run between 0 and -1. The unit count is often between 5-6k. We have had it get to 8000+ but then guys start running out of memory.

[Sprouto]

Hey Stashie !

I was hoping someone from the crew would post here.

Just to be clear, LOUD takes no ownership whatsoever of any modded materiel we may have incorporated. We give clear and full credit to those authors, and LOUD appreciates and fully acknowledges the intense effort put forth by them. In simple terms, we just made them compatible with changes we made to the codebase, and the LOUD canon, which governs the game universe.

[Violins77]

Greetings! I do not know if it is the right place to post this, but I really love this mod (Orbital Wars), and this is my first time trying it. However, I have an issue where the space ships will not go in the orbital layer, instead flying really close to the ground. I did build the satellite to compare, and the satellite works fine.

Is this a known issue, is there any workaround?

Also, how to I build the orbital factories?

Thanks a lot!

[Tanksy]

Orbital Wars is a really "meh" made mod and one I've been working on improvements to for a while.

There is no actual "Orbital" layer as far as I can tell, and no way of setting units to only be targetable by units that can target that layer. So it's a little disappointing. I've checked the files for the Novax satellite and that simply flies in the air at a much higher elevation than other air units and has the "UNTARGETABLE" category. I've so far managed to make Spaceships unable to engage air units, and vice-versa, so I can begin implementing the unfinished orbital fighters burried in the mod files. But I have no luck so far in telling Anti-Air turrets that Spaceships shouldn't be considered an Air target. I've even removed all the Air categories and made Spaceships strictly built on the Orbital layer (The only ever time this "layer" appears to be mentioned is in the Build Caps. Which doesn't seem to actually affect anything at all ever.)

[Violins77]

Thank you for your answer. I was wondering if the orbital layer was really a layer in itself like aquatic or air. I still wonder why the spaceships don't go higher though, as in the screenshots and video of old OW versions, they do get quite high. For the time being, I disabled the mod as Xtreme Wars made these spaceships available in the experimental section.

[HTKatzmarek]

Hi,

First post on the forums here, but I've been playing Forged Alliance since the game came out. I'm also part of the LOUD project, and having been playing and working on the game with Sprouto & Stash for maybe 5 years. The AI is awesome, it actually gives an experienced player a very challenging game. The sim speed improvements are another huge improvement over the original game, 5000+ unit games on 20 x 20 and 40 x 40 maps are possible with many games experiencing little slowdown. We would love to have more people test our version of the game and give us constructive comments, and perhaps become involved with our group.

If you have interest, it'd be great if you post, and one of the members of our team will get back with you. We play games using TeamSpeak almost every weekend, so if interested, we can also chat with you there.

[IceDreamer]

So yeah errm, this is impressive work. Come join Slack. We want to use your time/skillz/code etc in an official capacity

[Blackrobe]

Hi,

First post on the forums here, but I've been playing Forged Alliance since the game came out. I'm also part of the LOUD project, and having been playing and working on the game with Sprouto & Stash for maybe 5 years. The AI is awesome, it actually gives an experienced player a very challenging game. The sim speed improvements are another huge improvement over the original game, 5000+ unit games on 20 x 20 and 40 x 40 maps are possible with many games experiencing little slowdown. We would love to have more people test our version of the game and give us constructive comments, and perhaps become involved with our group.

If you have interest, it'd be great if you post, and one of the members of our team will get back with you. We play games using TeamSpeak almost every weekend, so if interested, we can also chat with you there.

Hey Stash, Sprouto, HTKatzmarek,

While I have little to no coding knowledge, I'd be keen to try a version of whatever mod you have that improves AI, and especially the speed of the game. Do you have a download link?

Blackrobe