Forged Alliance Forever

The community-driven lobby for Supreme Commander : Forged Alliance.

Nomads Dev Diaries

Hello everyone!

We thought it would be a fantastic idea to summarise the work we did in these dev diaries, so that everyone can keep up to date with the progress, as well as get an idea of the thoughts that go through our heads while we work on the mod. We will be making these posts every one or two weeks, so stay tuned!

We are posting content that you can see and get sneaks of in the Nomads Development Discord, so join that to get the juicy news in advance, or even to contribute!

Experimental transports

Today we are going to talk about the T4 transport for nomads, and some of the adventures we had with it! Below is the finished unit, which you will be able to play with in the next patch! The patch is going to be released soon, along with a bunch of other goodies so you can enjoy it as well!

So we have been working on the new model of the T4 transport for quite a while now. However we ran into an issue pretty early on. When we added all the transport slots we wanted, the game just crashed instead of loading the model. So for a bit the transport was going to have fewer of them, and not load as many T1 units. So this is what the transport looked like at that moment:

However Balthazar showed off his fantastic land transport, which has a lot more slots than we had, proving that what we wanted was possible.
So now the challenge was on! Balthazar uses the 3dmax exporter, while we use the blender one. After spending an afternoon looking through the plugins and working out the differences, it turned out that the plugins save the bones in different orders, which was causing the issues. (If you like maths: it was an interesting problem of how to split one simply connected graph into two, then write them down in a particular order.) After rewriting that part of the blender plugin, the imports worked, resulting in a most terrifying ghetto gunship:

And thats all for now! If you want to see top secret stuff, join the discord server where you can chat to the devs, ask questions, spy on the process and get all the exclusive goodies and more! Also feel free to leave feedback either on the forum thread or in the discord. Remember, feedback is very important!

Lastly, we are always looking for more contributors, so if you are interested in creating things, whether thats code, 2d art, models, music or anything else, do get in touch! We also provide all the resources and guidance needed, so don’t worry if you think you are missing any skills, we will be glad to see you!