56 replies to this topic

[R3ven]

Hello all, to the debut of Advance Wars: Frontlines, the Red Alert 3 mod that brings you a full 3D cartoonified Advance Wars. We will have all five of the factions, Orange Star, Blue Moon, Black Hole, Yellow Comet, and Green Earth!

We have finished most Orange Star ground vehicles yet, and we show them off in our release media pack!



All 8 housecolors to choose from


Night time showing of some vehicles and their headlights


Sea side Orange Star base


A Recon and Infantry assault


A group of Tanks and Medium Tanks


Seaside assault in waiting


Any feedback is greatly appreciated, our ModDB isn't up yet, when it is, it will be here!

January 1, 2011




We have reached a point now where we have a playable product and need community feedback for us to continue so we are creating a New Year open beta, the download will be available on New Years Day. This is NOT the full mod, it is NOT bug free and is NOT perfectly balanced, though we've worked it to an acceptable standard. That is why we need YOU to help us by arranging and playing online matches and posting your thoughts and replays on our forums!

What this mod WILL NOT HAVE
- Blue Moon, Yellow Comet, Green Earth and Black Hole armies.
- Air units, naval units, silos, pipes, the missiles ground unit, the Neotank and any AWDS units and structures.
- CO's and associated powers and stats.
- Custom maps but we have adapted Temple Prime (2) and Pool Party (4)
- Music and custom voices.
- Destruction animations.
- Custom menus.
- Custom infantry, mech and vehicle pilot art (though we are using RA3 infantry models for now, the units are functional)
- Terrain effects and bonuses.
- Working AI. Playing a match with any level of AI will cause the game to crash.

Why are these not included?
For a number of reasons, primarily it's because we want to balance the mod in layers starting with the basic land units without CO's or terrain getting in the way. Once we're happy we've balanced them, we can go on with introducing terrain, CO's, air and naval units and other game changing factors. The lack of destruction animations and fully finished UI is down to the fact that we wanted to get this beta out for New Year with all the important things that are needed.

What this mod WILL HAVE
- Playable Orange Star land forces.
- Working game play mechanics for the standard game mode inducing cities, bases, HQs, property capturing and fog of war toggle.
- Relatively balanced units (from internal testing)
- 2 working skirmish maps, Temple Prime (2) and Pool Party (4) all adapted for Frontline game play.
- Custom loading screen.
- Unit/building descriptions, icons and portraits.
- Unit decals and new team colours.

Please leave feedback here including bug reports, balance concerns, over used and underused units and general replays here!

We advise you arrange matches via this forum thread or via our steam group. To keep order and make matchmaking much easier, we suggest that everyone should use casual 16 for Frontline matches!

Installing Frontline:
To install the mod, drag the "Frontline" folder into the "Mods" folder found in "C:\Users\ USERNAME \Documents(or Documents and Settings)\Red Alert 3\Mods", if the "Mods" folder does not exist, create it.

Launching Frontline:
To launch the Frontline, open the Red Alert 3 Control Center(to get to the Control Center, make a shortcut to RA3.EXE and add the -ui parameter), select "Game Browser" then open the "Mods" tab, select Frontline and press "Launch Game".

In the event of the skirmish screen not allowing you to select a map, army or team colour, delete the "skirmish.ini" file from "C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Red Alert 3\Profiles\PROFILE NAME" then relaunch the mod, this should fix the problem, though we advise that you create a profile specifically for AW: Frontline use to prevent this from reoccurring!

To finish off I'd like to stress how important it is that you give us feedback while our fanbase is still small so we can improve Frontline and get an even larger community!

See you on the battlefield!

Download Here

Edited by R3ven, 02 January 2011 - 01:20.

[GuardianTempest]

Awesome, well what about those UBER-units?

[Pav:3d]

Oh thats great! The colours are a bit bright tho. But overall thats awesome

[R3ven]

We only work so fast, and we aren't going to do those until at least two of the factions are done(thank gosh the art style is so easy, so this isn't actually a difficult feat).

Respond to Pav3d EDIT: Yeah, we're aiming for a bright cartoony feel. Fun warfare

Edited by R3ven, 23 December 2010 - 23:51.

[GuardianTempest]

TT_TT Wish my pc can run this.....

[R3ven]

If your computer could run RA3 on at least very low, you could run this easily :3

[Destiny]

No Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...no Neotanks...



...otherwise, awesome work guys! I can't wait to see your battleships and the Green Earth/Blue Moon rocket artillery.








Edit: The more I look at the Orange Star stuff, the more I keep thinking that are permanently under the iron curtain effect

Edited by Destiny, 24 December 2010 - 01:02.

[R3ven]

Here's our official first news post.

[Destiny]

Not bad...it's nice...

[TheDR]

Some nice 2D art

I hope you finish this mod, i have seen so many Advance Wars mods in the past that just disappear. You definitely have the right engine, AW really fits the art style.

[n5p29]

yeah, hope this project will not suffer same fate as those previous mods.

btw, can you explain more about the gameplay details?

[R3ven]

It would be easier to explain once we have a custom map(we currently have an edited temple Prime we are using for testing and it works pretty well so far) but I could try.

The first main gameplay element is that every custom map will have a Day version and a Night version. Day versions are without the Fog of War, but Night maps have it.

After you've chosen which map you are going to play, you can choose what money setting you want. Since we have maps scripted to start a player off with cities and Bases, you can to default to starting with 0 Credits(which is the balanced money setting, as 10k is to C&C games).

Then you start the game. Infantry can capture Bases and Cities(we haven't done Ports and Airports yet) that are scattered around the map. Cities and Bases cannot be destroyed, but can be captured back and forth.

[Destiny]

I believe they'll give off a healing/repair aura around them, yea?

[R3ven]

Yes, Bases, HQs, Cities, Ports, and Airports all give a healing radius around them

Onto more updates, we have posted renders of all the units that are ingame at this time.

[R3ven]

Greetings AW:F followers! Today we released a Post Christmas Pack, complete with 6 ingame images, all displaying our new Orange Star unit decal.










We will release a video of an ingame match very soon.

[TheDR]

They look cool.

Just wondering, why don't the vehicles have infantry poking out of them, that was quite a big part of the AW style imo.

[R3ven]

We haven't modeled them yet, infantry are rather hard to do.

[Pav:3d]

Your renders need a lot of work, the vehicles look a hell of a lot better in-game.

Those simple inf shouldnt be too difficult

[R3ven]

Infantry aren't simple, you also have to go through all the trouble of animating them and then coding those animations. The infantry that will poke out of vehicles will be simpler, but will still move around.

Also, the renders are because the 3DS Max renderer doesn't render the DirectX Shader Material(it shows up black), so we have to use just the diffuse map for rendering. So our renders can't be helped.

[Destiny]

The rocket smoke is...horrendous Too thick/big/sharp IMO.

[R3ven]

I've fixed that since the build that was used to take those screenshots

Anybody going to comment on the faction decal? We thought it'd be a cool idea to help make things pop more. When we do COs, each CO will have a spinoff version of the faction decal.

[Destiny]

Blue Moon should have a blue cresent moon, while Green Earth would have a green earth (complete with random color blobs as continents), yellow comet would have a yellow comet...






...what am I saying?!

[Madin]

R3ven, on 27 Dec 2010, 0:30, said:

Also, the renders are because the 3DS Max renderer doesn't render the DirectX Shader Material(it shows up black), so we have to use just the diffuse map for rendering. So our renders can't be helped.

Since you have W3X versions of your 3D Max rneders, W3X viewer may be of use for both improved renders and Cameos\selection portraits.

1. Load up your vehicle\structure render in W3X viewer (If your vehicle has a muzzle flash or multiple treads that will show up in W3X viewer and look weird, then hide these sections in max and then export a W3X render that is named in such a way that you'll be able to differentiate it from your 'in-game' model).
2. Go to the lighting tab and make sure that the 'Enable worldbuilder lights' option is ticked, this will allow you to preview your model with their shaders 'On'.
3. Read the W3X section of the SDK documentation to learn how to move the lighting & zoom\rotate your model till you are happy with your 'render' look.
4. For the background colour, I'd suggest making sure that you avoid colours that are on your diffuse (it should not matter, but why risk it).
5. Once you are happy with the final look of your 'render', if you feel the need, you can minimise menus and move and hide task bars until your W3X 'render' takes up your whole screen (this is not necessary although it will make a later step easier).
6. Take a print screen using your keyboards 'PrtScn' key.
7. Open up whatever graphics program you use for texturing your models ie Photoshop and then start a new file (Photoshop automatically defaults to the size of the image in your 'clipboard') and then paste your render into that new file.
8. If you bothered to minimise all the additional menus, task bars etc from out of your 'render' then you can go straight to the 'Magic wand' (or whatever equivalent your graphics program has to select a certain colour in an image) and make sure that it has a setting of 1 and that continuous is selected (you'll eventually learn when its better to leave it off). If you never cleaned up your render, then make a rectangular selection of an area around your model that excludes the task bar, menus etc, but that includes the W3X viewers 'background' colour, then delete everything OUTSIDE this selection, so only your model and some of the W3X 'background colour remains, then move on to setting up the 'Magic wand'.
9. With the Magic wand set up and selected use it to pick the W3X background colour (because it's a single colour background, you'll get a crisp precise selection around your model), then either delete the now selected background colour or inverse the selection so only your model is selected and then copy\cut and paste this on to your pre-made render template.

Edited by Madin, 27 December 2010 - 20:12.

[Libains]

Just a quick post off of me really:



Seriously, really loved Advance Wars back in the day, so I couldn't be looking forwards to this more as long as you get the mechanics right. It's lovely and simple, and looks really well done. Obviously needs some work, but seems like you guys are steaming through it.

[R3ven]

We've posted an ingame match of what we have so far.

Do note that these changes have happened since the recording of this:

-The city and base locations have been jumbled around to make them more managable.

-Players now start with 1 city, 1 HQ and 2 bases, not 3 cities, 1 HQ and 2 bases.

-Balance changes that primarily affect the recon and medium tank though all units have been tweaked.

-Rocket trail FX intensity lowered for improved performence and quite frankly for much better visibility, rate of fire decreased.

-HQ and Base textures have been cleaned and improved.

-10 second capture delay introduced.

-Income rate lowered.