Hi guys,
first of all: I didn't play MWLL for some months (was ver.2 i believe) and the progress is very nice. Played yesterday again and it went visible smoother than before, everything more polished. Especially the level design is great. Awesome work from the artists and coders.
I have always been thinking about some kind of custom mech creator since the very first day I played MWLL. What I want to present below an inspiration for the team how it could possibly look like.
Unfortunately I never really worked through the structure of the Crysis code but for this concept the flowgraph system in the Sandbox 2 did just fine (also the MWLL source code is untouchable anyways). I used Cry-Vlok Flowgraph Plug-in system to be able to save the new mech loadouts as an actual new modification for the PUMA mech.
Result:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_hrsV5tP5k(how do I integrate the video?)
In the video you can see how the mech is build up. First of all you choose the pod for the left arm and then the load-out. After that you go on modifying the front weapons etc. NOTE: Some weaponry is placed wrong. I wasn't sure about. And also the tonnage had to be calculated but heck...
You control everything with WASD.
After you finished the weaponry additional stuff like GECM and heatpipes can be configured.
With a matching HUD which displays the current price and stats this would be awesome.
The editor could be launched with the "Singleplayer Game" - it would actually get a function and everything would be integrated nicely in the mod. (Not everyone wants to make it with the vehicle editor in the SB
)
Now come the issues:
with the Flowgraph system the editor is still very static (its only inspirational for you), and making it work with all mechs... whoo much much work. Right now you only switch some geom entities and the XML code is written consequently.
-> could be streamlined and done dynamicly with C/lua code, if for example only the XML files are changed and the mech updated regularly (right now you'd need to reload scripts for every change with the normal vehicle editor integrated into the Crysis editor)
The code I save can either be a new "custom" mech, which could be on top of the list in the buy menu. I think it's tactically quite interesting to only have one custom mech, so you can only use it at a certain time (f.ex. a good start-up or a superheavy assault)
Or it could be saved as a "custom" variant of already existing mechs, though that is harder to implement dynamically.
The biggest problem is the network compatibility (some nice challenge for your coders), so that every other player is updated with your custom mech. I guess I would try to give each player a number (already done, but I don't know if they change throughout the game.) and then make everyone download each others custom XML files (f.ex. custom25 is from player 25) and display the correspondent mechs.
Next problem:
Balance. However I think this is the smallest thing. I guess you'd just have to pay 10% more for your custom ones and it gets fair again. But I don't care for that if there was an editor ingame.
