[MOD] [DLL] Red.Queen's "Not So Assault Transports"

[Red.Queen]

   Yeah, they want $200 for the full license and theirs is the only one that dies, the two free ones open it in seconds.  It hardly even hit my CPU/RAM, it just... ignored all that free power and fizzled.  Oh well, saves me $200, moar caffeine and sugar for me. 

Checked out Anakrino, I didn't realize that was by the same guy originally behind Cydia... and half a dozen other things that half the web uses.  Impressive list!  Sadly looks like his decompiler was abandoned ages ago.  No worries, I hunted down a March 2015 beta build for the ILSpy/Reflexil combo since Telerik's lagging behind on compatibility with working on Unity projects... and things are looking up.

Tested out rebuilding a function from an existing class and sticking it in a temp class I injected, and got it to recompile a decent-looking assembly.  Going to take some getting used to working with a tool that wants me to actually *use the GUI* to set up its variables and properties, everywhere else it's just been pop open a text editor and rock out, for years.

I think this will probably still require some ancillary MSIL work in spots, especially for editing parts of existing functions in-place, but the larger scale stuff can probably happen strictly in C# with a little care.  That's going to make serious work a lot less burdensome -- as much as I admire MSIL in some ways, quick to write it is not.  Thanks for prodding me to take another look at the reflection route, that situation's improved since last summer and I might not have noticed and taken advantage of it.

Going to do some more tests over the next few days to make sure this cocktail of tools is able to do what I want it to do (they're even free), and if it comes up right I'll throw out an intro thread walking through some basics.  It's about time there was something out there to at least point people in the right direction on this kind of work.

[x4000]

That's pretty darn slick!  Very very cool.

[Red.Queen]

That's pretty darn slick!  Very very cool.

 

Definitely rough around the edges, but so far it mostly gets the job done, outside of a few problem classes where it's easier to switch back to oldschool MSIL editing for small tweaks.  Holding off on the intro to ILSpy/Reflexil thread for now as there are enough gotchas that I want to be more familiar with them so I don't accidentally lead people astray.

***

But the part people have been waiting for...

20150517 update posted!

There are now *5* variants of Assault Transport fun for everyone's testing pleasure!

Including a plain-vanilla patch that leaves damage/functionality unchanged except for smashing the infamous, elusive "ATs forget to update their contained strength when unloaded" bug!  Yes, I managed to find that and kill it, so no more phantom fleets powering your ATs. 

Original post updated with the details.  There are also now two download options -- the copy attached directly to the post (it's under the 8 meg size limit still), or from my Mega locker.

Still contemplating where/how I want to make the source for my changes available as I don't currently have a public Subversion repository handy.  I also have to bounce between three different methods of working (it's the "Git 'R Done" philosophy of programming  ), depending on the given change/addition, so I'm not sure how well tools designed for sane, traditional workflows will respond to that nonsense. Worse comes to worse, I can always manually build nice little textfile exports of the new C# and/or MSIL and host it in my Mega locker, or even just attach it to a Mantis report.  I'll try to avoid ever posting only MSIL to minimize the hassle, and just use it as a sanity check companion to the resulting C# for any parts where MSIL was the language I actually wrote in.

[Robyn]

Damn I write a really long post then forced the browser to close. Typing on a phone can be problematic.

I'll be short now. Thanks for the mod I signed up here just to voice my concerns over the Assault Transports. It's nice to see a mod already in place.

Secondly I notice you mention raycasting back to the player to determine LOS (in another project). Isn't this really ineffecient? I guess if you are only calculating this sometimes it would be OK but for deciding every object to render I'd have thought it would just crawl.

I remember having to feed vertices to the gpu in a clockwise manner and forcing the renderer not to draw backwards facing polygons. In addition to modifying the view matrices. Oh god that was a nightmare :s I still don't understand the maths.

[Captain Jack]

I'm just going to point out that Red Queen hasn't logged on since May. 

[Robyn]

Oh thanks! Hmm does that mean the mod no longer works? I can't test until tomorrow.

[Pumpkin]

Oh thanks! Hmm does that mean the mod no longer works? I can't test until tomorrow.

Technically AI War didn't change since then. So I bet the mod is still working with the current version.

[hoderr]

Hi,

I would like to try the mod, but the link does not seem to work...
Could someone post a working link to the files, please?
Would the mod work in Version 8.024?

TIA!