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I am fiddling with porting a strategy game called Battle Tower Defense (BTD5 currently) ported into a FPS engine, quite fun to code I must say

I took this Little screenie from one of the maps:
I know that the Towers sight radius is WAY oversatturated and maybe in the wrong color scheme too, but right now it's serving good for testing purposes as I have to deal with mesh drawscale vs sightradius in unreal units ... haven't quite figured out the equation yet

But, as said, it's very fun to do this step by step, especialy the AI of the balloons have been a very educating for me to figure out hehe, they have to move through a forced route via a pathnet grid.

I've used a lot of time on getting the Towers right, man way too many hours of gameplay to test those hehe, but I'm currently done with 6 towers. Each Tower has 3 upgrades (you may notice the marks on their base? You can see that the Krall Tower is upgraded to level 3 while the Ring of Fire Tower has only been upgraded to level 1). You will need Money to buy Towers, weapons and upgrades, these Money comes from popping balloons

So ..... I shooting strategy game, but ..... a very non-violent one as in the fact that not even the smallest child can get nightmares from popping a balloon, or am I wrong?

The texture in this hallway looks interesting.

And popping balloons is a nightmare for children ...remember back when you got a balloon from the funfair as child. And then come this drunkard and POPPED it with his cigarette!! I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM!!!!!

*cough* ...I mean ...

nice concept.

Explain this grid system please.

papercoffee wrote: Explain this grid system please.

Well, the grid is made up of these pathnode actors just like the pathing in a regular map. But since I want the route to be forced I had to make this new actor (BalloonPathNode) and add a few variables to it, a boolean to tell the balloon if this point is the last in line, and then look for the map exit, and then an integer to set the pathnodes number. Then I coded the Balloons AI (The balloon is a subclass of ScriptedPawn) to start out by heading toward pathnode #1 and continue to next point once reached, if the point was the last, then it should head towards the exit actor (The pink spiky one on the sshot). The grid is working as I want it to now, but I may recode it as I have had some ideas lately I need to test.
About the textures for the corridor, they are all up on my texture website if you do a Little surfing there ( http://www.textures.unrealtournament.info )

Edit------------------------------ by papercoffee

papercoffee wrote:And popping balloons is a nightmare for children ...remember back when you got a balloon from the funfair as child. And then come this drunkard and POPPED it with his cigarette!! I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM!!!!!

I was wrong then ...... darn!

Sounds interesting, and I do play BTD5 from time to time Looking forward to it.
BTW, how will the towers work?

GEx wrote:Sounds interesting, and I do play BTD5 from time to time Looking forward to it.
BTW, how will the towers work?

Well, first I tried using UT's own menu system to open a window where you could select the Towers, but that looked odd and didn't feel very user friendly. So I've made a new GUI system that simply just draws to the HUD using keybind commands (NONE assigned to the player, but tracking UT's own input system to navigate). Once a Tower is selected you get the translocator weapon with the tower to throw instead of the translocator device. Then you place the tower where you want it in the map. You can see the sightradius of the Tower before you release it from the translocator weapon, this way you can make sure it's placed exactly where you want it. For now the Tower fires towards the nearest balloon (as default in BTD5) some of the Towers can be upgraded to fire against the nearest two balloons. But I plan to make use of the menu system somehow to control if you want it to fire against the nearest, last or strongest balloon. Coding wise I can do it, but I don't know how it will feel in the game I must be carefull to not cause an overuse of the menu system so the player looses the FPS feel of the game.

That looks fun.

So fresh idea ! Im looking forward to it. Please inform about progress. Cheers

I've just added one more balloon type and thought to share a Little screenie with some of the balloons. The new one I added will have a little twist compared to the BTD vesion, this one will fire back at you
The two at the top with the basket underneath is the new one that fires back, the basket is still empty as I haven't figured out yet WHO to put in it that fires at you

The Zeppelin classes are those with the highest level of protection and will demand lots of firepower to shoot down. The Heart shaped ones are the regen ones, they will slowly regain the layers you pop so you must deal with them at once. The others are hard to tell on this screenshot i admit, those are normal, clay, metal and liquid balloons - those will make you have to think ..... yup, you read it: THINK!! As in not all weapons beeing able to shoot clay, metal or liquid balloons gnagna..... So, you must shop weapons according to what balloons are spawned ..... and you don't know when what will spawn untill you have played it alot! .... then add that some balloons can wear camouflage ..... so you have to shop for camo detection at some point - or die!

The other balloons are ok but I like the zeppelin and the hot-air balloon the most.
Maybe putt an auto-cannon in the hot-air balloon?

papercoffee wrote:The other balloons are ok but I like the zeppelin and the hot-air balloon the most.
Maybe putt an auto-cannon in the hot-air balloon?

I'm trying to find a monkey pawn I can use and have it throwing bananas against the players no luck yet, but maybe I can use it as an excuse to invest +10000 hours to learn blender

I've started the 4th map for this mod, and when that's done I think I'm gonna focus on getting the code together and ready to do the first beta version as I will for sure need to bughunt

A screenie from the new map (just to check balloon AI pathing):

OK, I've decided to soon throw all my available time in to finish this mod. I will be needing fellow gamers to beta test the mod in its current state and give constructive feedback.

more info about the mod here: http://www.forum.unrealtournament.info/ ... m.php?f=21

The beta version can be downloaded here: http://www.forum.unrealtournament.info/ ... f=10&t=207 where I will also like to recieve the feedback, this topic will ofcause also be usefull for feedback

"Help me Obi Wan Kenobi - You're my only hope!" ... ehmm .. sory, wrong quote!! ... "Help me my Fellow fragger - your the best to test!!" is the correct

Put it on Moddb ... many beta tester there as well.

it is on moddb, but because of zero interest there and because I have posted a few updates that for some reason got archived instantly I have chosen not to use that place.

but if anyone cares, here's a link: http://www.moddb.com/mods/pop-them-friggin-balloons

But there has been many changes since last update there, so you should instead read up on it at the link I posted above. I'd like to spend my time on developing and not updating multiple sites with every update - that stuff is draining. I will finish this regardless of the interest, but if people assist me with testing and feedback the mod will become much better

Well watching a clip of the real Battle Tower Defence, leaves me thinking this will be rather different to play, and that I'm not going to understand it from that.
I better just jump in and just see how it flies.