Community Project 2

[jaydenbz2]

Hi People!!

The BZ2 Community Project is indeed NOT DEAD and is making great progress:

-Aenean Vehicles nearly completed...
-Making steady Progress on Aenean buildings
-Many environments and maps complete or in Asset creation stage.
-James Baxters Serenesis Weapons being merged into Community Project 2 (Thankyou James) !!
-Much more content from Baxter to be implemented, plans to UV map and texture his AAN assets to be fully playable MP vehicle!!
-Part 1 of story close to completion.


What's going to be different about this mod?

- In short this mod will implement many new dll based techniques in order to add much more diversity to the races...
- HD textures
- HD Environments
- More Worlds than any other mod known
- Extremely Immersive Single Player
- Never before used DLL Enhancements

Where will you find updates?

Updates can be found on our moddb page...see here:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/bz2-community-project-2

MOD UPDATES will usually come in the form of images text or any little nifty tools n1 comes up with.

This is a community Project!!

YOU!! Yes you!

Feel free to contribute, now control will of course be excercised but of course contributions can come in any form really, and all are welcome for consideration, GOT Any IDEAS???

SHARE THEM HERE!

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Stay Tuned.

[TheJamsh]

It's good to be able to use that stuff, hopefully I can tart up all the weapons and FX to equal levels of awesome. [This is Baxter btw ]

< I miss this thing in my Avatar. Be cool to finish that

[Ded10c]

I'll publish some short synopsis teasers once I can write them, and then once the full Part One storyline is finished to the satisfaction of both Nielk1 and I we shall release it to people who are interested in making the missions themselves.

[Red Spot]

I really dont want to sound negative, but how can you develop a 'CP' in privacy?

[Ded10c]

I don't know how much you were around for its development back on BZU in '09, Red Spot, so I'll tell the whole story in brief.


CP2's original ground was a single public board on BZU. The result of that was ideas from every side, and nobody was willing to see their idea not make it into the final product. To offset that, a private board was created where a group of forum staff members, developers, and more serious individuals from the public board (those I clearly remember being there were VSMIT, Mr. X, Nielk1 and myself) formed a committee of editors to merge them all together.

Needless to say, that didn't work either. A story was created and published, but once it received public exposure people started to identify faults in it. The community had almost given up when a former BZ2CP developer (I think it might even have been Chipotle) showed up and said that that wasn't how they had done it.

This developer told us how FE had come about; a central team of developers had done most of the work and sent individual tasks out to the community. At that moment, a unanimous agreement was made between the editor committee that we'd do things much closer to that. In fact, we've done it more openly than that; the story we've developed is an amalgamation of nearly all of the ideas that had appeared in the original CP2 board.

TL;DR: Thus far, CP2 is actually more open than CP1 was.

[jaydenbz2]

Indeed, and I believe key people like Slaor and Gray done took it upon themselves to do a lot of work in FE, but as said before, contribution is valuable, that's why I made this post. We meet on Skype...it's handy and quite efficient, so PM me your skype if you'd like to help out

[Huib-Bloodstone]

Who needs Gamespy or GOG whatever...

If the community contributes then everything is possible

[Red Spot]

Indeed, and I believe key people like Slaor and Gray done took it upon themselves to do a lot of work in FE, but as said before, contribution is valuable, that's why I made this post. We meet on Skype...it's handy and quite efficient, so PM me your skype if you'd like to help out

Still havent had a good answer to my question, but I see your motivations.
Either way, I have no interest in mod-development in this sort of way, specially not after what has happened in public in regard to the 'CP2'.
(Just my motivation.)

[bigbadbogie]

I really dont want to sound negative, but how can you develop a 'CP' in privacy?

That is actually a good point.

Can it really be called a Community Project when all of the assets are locked up tight and only a select group of people can do anything with them?

[jaydenbz2]

We are following the way the first community Project was made which is a few ppl do most of the work, We've made numerous posts asking for help and any content, so it just comes down to who really wants to help. Currently that's not many, hopefully more people can come, obviously all source assets can't just be made available straight off the bat, I'm open to assistance...but the get that...we need people.

The fact that so few have offered to assist speaks for itself, the project was named when it was started on bzUniverse...but things happened since then, the situation will become ridiculously complex if control isn't exercised, there must be plans and ppl must follow certain style etc...it is ...difficult to say the least, consistency is important, So as I said, I'm willing to look at any submissions forum goers have to make

And Considering we have 5 people working on this Project it is slowly living up to its title.

[MrTwosheds]

Well I have been, for some time, reworking the stock (data pak) bz2 textures for the Hi res pack, terrain textures, sky, sprites are mostly done. Unit/building skins are more difficult and are taking a long time.
I see no reason why these assets should not also be used by CP2 as well, they are after all intended to look just like the originals but with more detail.
If anyone wants to help, please go to work on the scion skins

[General BlackDragon]

I'd love to see high res Stock textures.

As long as they're not orange.

[MrTwosheds]

I'm not going to change their colours, the whole point is to produce hi res versions of the original textures, not to Mod them. All I really try to do is add fine detail and repair fuzzyness caused by upscale.
I hope the end result will look just like bz2 always has done, but with fine detail added. The skins are the hardest textures to do and the buildings seem to be the worst.

[Zero Angel]

Have you tried running any missing skins through the xbr upscaler? Works great for most things but can round edges a bit aggressively on anything that's meant to be very angular.

Also, as doubling the physical dimensions quadruples the filesize, and increasing the physical size too much has rapidly diminishing returns, a 2x resize should be sufficient for most things.

[MrTwosheds]

No i'm using the hq upscaler in gimp , a plugin. Its fairly good, but like all these things it cannot actually do what needs to be done, intelligently adding detail. Really it would have been much better to get hold of the original artwork (before it got downscaled to 256x256) and do it properly. Please take note all game devs and artists, take care of your work and don't let some mayfly company entity own it completely, it will forget about it, lose it, or just throw it out as trash when it inevitably folds or gets taken over, and not even be aware of itself doing it. Should your works make it to iconic historical artifact status one day, your work could become worth astonishing amounts of $$$ Just like any other work of art, people think it won't happen, they never do.

I am being fairly sensible about sizes skys get 2048x terrain gets 1024x sprites and effects mostly get 512x. I don't see any point in going any bigger because you just won't ever see the biggest mip maps under normal game play circumstances. There is no point doing lots of work adding detail only to have bz2 undo it by showing the 2nd mip map all the time.