About Me

Projects

This project was a mod for Savage, a 3D game that was a combination of an FPS and a RTS. Each round has two teams of players facing off against each other, with one player on each team taking the commander role, playing a RTS game, and the rest playing a FPS game and fighting against the other team. One of the features of this game was that FPS players could request gold (a resource) from their commanders so that they could purchase more advanced weapons and units if they did not have enough of their own. Typically, commanders would end up leaving this on, approving all requests automatically, as players without even the cheapest weapons were at a huge disadvantage. The problem with this however was that some players would abuse this and hurt their team by spending the team's gold to purchase the most expensive units and weapons every time they died.

What this mod does is create a feature which allows the commanders to restrict which requests are automatically approved, and which will show up on his screen for manual approval. When the newly created menu is opened, the commander has a list of every request that can be made by his players, and can set them to to be automatically approved for everyone, automatically approved for only officers (players the commander has promoted) or not automatically approved for anyone. In addition, each section has a set of buttons which can be pressed to quickly set all the possible requests from that section to a certain type of access.

Typical uses of this would be to make weapons and some items available to everyone, powerups and the remaining items available to just officers, and units available to noone at first, progressing to tier 2 units for everyone, and tier 3 units for officers at the end of the game.

This mod was compatible with standard servers, though it also included a bug fix that allowed two items which were mistakenly not requestable in the normal game to be requested, if installed on a server. Mostly though, it was just run on clients by players who intended to play in the commander role.

The changes involved in this mod were largely script based. Scripting the new GUI to handle all the options took up the largest portion of development time. The art assets used by this menu came from the already existing assets in the game. There was also a new game.dll created for this mod that contained the required code changes to make the mod work. It was built using the SDK provided by S2 Games, the makers of Savage.