FA general modding questions

[MattyWS]

Hello all! A small introduction... I'm new to these forums but certainly not to the game nor it's culture and origins. I've travelled from TAUniverse Where I reside as an admin and an active modder and I've been playing TA on and off since 1998, then continued to play SUPCOM and SUPCOM 2 on release. I'm impressed there's still a solid FA community. We've just passed SUPCOM's 10th birthday and we're about to hit TA's 20th this year!I recently started asking myself the question of TA vs SUPCOM as the be all end all RTS game/engine. ie, why TA over SUPCOM for some people. As such, I started finally looking into modding SUPCOM (took me a decade to start looking into this).

There's some decent documentation out there for editing or adding units but I was wondering about modding more than that, so I'm hoping you guys can answer some of my questions so I can hopefully start wrapping my head around a few things. I am not a total noob to all of this, as game developemnt is my full time job (which I gained as a career with no qualifications thanks to modding TA!), so don't worry about keeping things too simple. The more info the better!

First question! I've used a 'hook' folder to successfuly edit some unit's .bp files within my own mod, however I'm trying to edit some strategic icons and using hook seems to not work for that? Am I doing something wrong? I've put the edited images within the same folder structure but just within hook instead but the game still uses the original icons. Is there a limit to this hook route? I plan on replacing a lot of images including map textures so I'm hoping that using a hook folder will just work as I'd rather not be replacing original files straight up if I can help it.

Which brings me to the next question! I own photoshop and I have the dds plugin from nvidia, am I safe to use whatever dds settings I see fit or is there specific settings for certain images? Take the strategic icons for example, I see it's just rgb8 with an alpha channel, what settings would I use when saving my own icons in.dds?

Models! Is there any documentation of how to produce the correct unit textures? and what each channel does for the current unit textures? I noticed units have an alphawhich just seems to be lines from the gaps of the texture but no idea why. Normal maps seem unusual as they only use seemingly two channels, both of which look to be casing the same direction... I'd like to make my own models from high poly and bake them to a low poly model with normal maps but I'd like to know what all their image channels are doing so I can set up a pipeline.

Model format! The .scm seems mysterious, I can use 3ds Max but I'd prefer to use Maya if I can, is there a simple way to get models to and from maya and supcom? failing that I guess I will just have to cope with Max. There seems to be just as little documentation about this as there is about models textures.

Maps! About features, I haven't looked into maps yet but I'm wondering how possible it is to have 3d modelled cliff faces etc, how does the collions and pathfinding work with huge map features like this?

Camera! I'd like to change some things about the camera but I have been struggling to find the right place to edit. I'd like to first change the amount of perspective (making similar to orthographic but not that far), the angle and min/max zoom amounts. I'm hoping this would be simple but so far I have not really found anything on it (or at least nothing I could make sense of after a day going through text files). Hopefully you guys may know. I also wonder if the game has any form of colour grading or tinting/saturating etc for the camera, but that's really not important yet.

VFX! Particle systems in todays game engines have me spoiled, I've used Unity and Unreal for many years to make particle effects and I'm *hoping* that SUPCOM can support at least animated spritesheets, for explosions for example.

Sorry for asking so many questions in one go. I'm not promising any big ambitious mod, I'm just a curious modder. If something comes of it then even better. My end goal here is to end 'icon wars' and try to provide a look and feel that's similar to TA and the first supcom concept art.

Anyway, if you made it this far through my wall of text, thanks for reading.
MattyWS

[Exotic_Retard]

huh. lots of questions.

1. if you havent checked out the wiki yet, do so! it contains nice info about various topics, theres some page about modding and one about mission scripting, you might find both interesting:
http://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?title=Modding
2. if you add new files then dont use a hook folder - hooking only functions for existing files. put them into the folder you want and then hope for the best. in the case of strategic icons i ran into some trouble with them myself. i think that a regular sim mod wont cut it, you need to have an scd style mod which is run via init. those dont work on the mod vault so i would avoid those unless absolutely necessary.

3. use dxt5 no mip maps and everything else default. should work. if you have enablediskwatch on then it will even reload the texture as soon as you update it so no need to restart the game every time. very helpful.

4. sorry there isnt any documentation, but fortunately im on the nomads mod team as "art overlord" or something like that so everything there is to know to make models and textures can go through me. if you take notes and write them into a wiki article that would be great xD
so textures first - the blueprint can store references to multiple meshes for each unit. normally you want an lod0 mesho for closeup and lod1 mesh for far away. but you can put any number in there. note this is for referencing your resources so the game can find them
you should have 3 textures to go with each mesh: an albedo map, a bump map, and a spec/team map.
each texture uses all 4 channels. they are a little strange so you need to get this part right:
also i get these confused sometimes too so yeah.
i made textures in substance painter and i have an export setting which churns out these for you and packs them mostly into the correct channels. it needs some extra packing but it does save time. if you want i could try sending you that. but its only for substance painter.
albedo rgb = base colour + lighting data
albedo a = something. it might be nothing. i forgot.
normal map rgb (yes) = y vector
normal map a = x vector
spec team r = specular
spec team g = reflection
spec team b = glow/bloom
spec team a = team colour (replaces albedo with a faction colour)

models have a proprietary scm format. enjoy.
there is a plugin for 3ds max which converts lets you model in it. its buggy. i dont know where to get one. ask biass he should have one.
there is a plugin for blender which lets you model in it. its also buggy, i feel this one is less buggy. its on github. somewhere. i also have it.

there is also an sca format for animations. supcom units have bones, and animations move strictly those bones and associated vertices. refer to the above 3 lines.

5. you can make custom assets - models textures whatever and use them as things in your maps. i dont do maps but people like tokyto and speed2 do. mapping is a huge topic. what you say sounds like it should be possible by just painting immovable terrain under the prop or w.e. there are some nice maps with custom props and stuff already.

6. supcom uses emitters for particle systems. what you do is you define a bunch of properties and it spawns a 2d texture in a special way. you then combine these into lots of different things. sounds vague but theres a lot you can do with it. dont expect as much magic as unity but imo its pretty good.
check out: http://wiki.faforever.com/index.php?tit ... g_Emitters
another thing is trails and beams. these are similar but rather than using a point, these have a line and do emmitty stuff from there. i dont know too much about this.

7. welcome to the forums.

oh and also i do lua mostly. i know things about that and since i and the boys are working on nomads i know some things about modelling. thats about it.

[MattyWS]

Thanks Exotic_Retard! Now you mentioned what the channels do in the textures it makes perfect sense. I was planning to use substance painter too so I'll be setting up the same pipeline. I guess I can safely model the high and low poly models in Maya, bake and texture them in painter than use Max or Blender for an unfortunately slow 'middle man' export into the game.

I'll be investigating maps at some point but you've given me hope that I'd be able to do what I want to do. As for particles that sounds like something I'll have to spend a day playing with, but it sounds like there is no support for using 'flipbook' textures? as in a layout of frame by frame explosion animation in a grid in one image. If not then that would be a shame.

I started off having a bit of an issue with .dds, the company I work for uses it's own image format which is saved out with scripts in photoshop and my previous company used targa/png so dds is rather new to me. I have been trying to use DXT5 with no mipmaps, everything else default, however my files don't save out with an alpha channel. This is from opening an image from supcom files (a strategic icon), which has the alpha channel, but then if I save it with the settings mentioned, open it again there is no alpha channel. I can actually make a new image in photoshop and save out as dds and that retains it's alpha... Im hoping I dont have to reconstruct every image I edit though.

I suppose using a hook folder wont suffice afterall, although I know not much about the other method of which you speak, I'll be looking it up though. Will it allow me to replace already existing textures (ie map ground textures, strategic icons)?

Again thanks for all the insightful information! I take it editing the cameras angle, zoom values and perspective is not something people have tried to do much?

EDIT: That channel use for normal maps is a huge waste! What were GPG thinking when they used 4 channels for basically only 2 channels worth of information...

[Exotic_Retard]

ok so the alpha channel is called alpha 1 and is a separate channel in the channels list. its interpreted as a mask in photoshop. the inbuilt transparency feature is ignored completely. put alpha data into that channel. if you open any supcom texture it should contain it already, and random crap in areas where the alpha value is 100%

no there are no flipbook textures that i know of. its all particle systems, the game is 10 years old after all xD

the scd style mods im talking about is how nomads/ equilibrium works for example - it also applies to the faf mod. some things just need to be loaded before the start of the game. a sim mod starts after the lobby part, these load before and let you change the lobby too. really i would drop the strategic icons changing, its not worth not being able to be put into the mod vault. you can however remove strategic icons, if that helps at all. other textures are loaded after the start of the game so its a few instances of weirdness more than anything else.

also about the normals - i suspect its actually a greyscale image with 2 channels - value and alpha. its also because gpg uses 2 channels for normals rather than 3 - the 3rd vector can be calculated at runtime. its used in maps and other in game rendering, and looks like this part was carried over from there. but whatever i guess.

[MattyWS]

Oh I know about alpha channels, it was just that the alpha channel was being lost when you open a dds and save it again. My work around was to save the file as a psd first then a dds, seems to have resolved the issue. That's a good point about normals, I guess opening the file in photoshop is getting a bit mistranslated.

Thanks for all the information! So far I'm off to a good start. I'm still wondering a couple of things, is it possible to edit the strategic zoom to only hae two levels of zoom? As in, zoomed in to see units or fully out to the whole map and nothing inbetween? I can't seem to find any exact values to edit for this.

Also, and this one is a stretch... I found that the terrain.fx controls shadows cast on maps by blurring the shadows, I guess because they were low res shadow maps, but is there a way of upping the resolution of the shadow maps?

[MattyWS]

Sorry for the double post. I found the Graphical enhancement mod! Solved the shadow issue for me and more. I do have another noob question though..

How easy and possible would it be to set a default lighting direction/colour/lighting multiplier/shadow colour across all maps, replacing any map's lighting with that one?

[Franck83]

Code: Select all

How easy and possible would it be to set a default lighting direction/colour/lighting multiplier/shadow colour across all maps, replacing any map's lighting with that one?

You can edit map environmental for light and fog in supcom map editor. To change it, don't know if it's hard coded or not at the map loading.

If you want to make it dynamic, you need to know shader programming. With just a little shader programming experience, i tried last year making day/night cycle by making the light variables incrementing. And i succeed partially (it misses the shadows on the units, but the trees were ok), i think it's possible but you need big time to investigate the shader code. You need to modify light on trees, ground and units separately.

It's on my long term to do list. I'm dreaming of true spots and lightning and night missions in FA. But it 's a big time invest if you start from ground.

https://www.shadertoy.com/browse

[MattyWS]

I managed to do it in the Terrain.fx file, I twisted it a bit to my will but I managed. I ended up replacing whole variables in the file then making a new variable with the original name, then I set a value for my variable. I had to keep the old one in there because it'd crash the game if I didn't. For example;

float3 SunColorM = float3(1,1,0.9);
float3 SunColor;

I did this with a few of them so that I could set my own values that would work across every map. I like consistency....

I've changed a lot actually, editing all the UEF team colour and albedo textures along with resizing all of the units, features and some buildings is the biggest task here. I already made the trees a bit smaller if you're wondering about the screenshot below...

[EcoNoob]

Wow that is quite the graphical change, cool work man!

[Farmsletje]

It reminds me of supcom2