Forged Alliance Forever

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

Nomads Dev Diaries #12

Hello everyone,

A few weeks back we about Nomads in 2020, and if you havent yet read it, read it now. Today we are talking about a couple of difficult models, and some of our advances in the code. Lastly, check out our development streams.

As always, this content you can spy ahead in the Nomads Development Discord, so if you want to get the exclusive info before everyone else, chat to the devs, ask questions or even contribute, you can do that here.

Static Anti Air

Previously, we have worked on the models for the anti air and point defence turrets. These would end up as secondary weapons on various units, as well as T1 static defenses. One longstanding issue was that there was no base to these, so thats what we have been working on.

T3 Amphibious Tank Model

Since last weeks sketch, we have got a nice little model from Marlo. Its pretty simple so far and has a long way to go, but it might be finally a tank concept that might get finished. We will see what the future holds, as always. Meanwhile you can have a look at the model and the sketch its based on.

Lots of Refactoring

Recently we have been working pretty hard on cleaning up the code for the mod. The existing code base has been rather old and had many fixes on top of fixes on top of fixes. This led to it being pretty bloated, laggy and hard to maintain. So throughout the last year or so we have been fixing it as we went along. In the past week or so thanks to speed quite a lot of stuff got fixed. Here is what was done so far:

  • A bunch of one line functions has been replaced, making the game run a little bit faster overall
  • The building beam effects of all nomads units were rewritten, making the code a lot smaller, and a whole lot faster. We previously fixed a similar bug which we fixed by reducing the effects of these beams, but now things should be even faster, so thats great.
  • Quite a lot of files got cleaned up, with random lines removed, random file imports, old useless code deleted. Again, things should become faster thanks to that.

Theres more coming in that department as usual, so great job speed! Be sure to thank him when you see him as well.

And thats it 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!