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The PPM Ini Codes
April 07, 2003 - 17:11
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Unlike the majority of the other mod groups, PPM has tradition in researching new and uncovered features in mods. This attitude resulted in a lag, but a great improvement in the quality of the mod. Thanks to the old Intelligence Research Group leadered by Banshee, PPM has gained several victories in things which we considered impossible before.
The MCV Bug For New Sides: New sides used to start with 2 or more MCVs or, in some cases, even without a single MCV. Most of the TS modders still hasnt found how to deal with it yet, however the Research Group uncovered that in january 2002, thanks to the initial idea from Greyfox and the great implementation from Banshee. Reports said that the first people to find it out were some ex-PPM members in june 2001, however their attempts had some failures in lower starting units. Banshee's method works perfectly when Unit Count is higher than 1. However, the current solution is creates minor other bugs, but they does not degrade the gameplay.
AI Researches: The Research Group has also made a heavy work with the ai.ini files. Thanks to external help from Deezire's guides and Final Alert 2 and also internal research with Banshee, our knowledge of the AI is quite advanced and it's shared with the community in Entertainment Explosion at the Tiberian Sun/Firestorm Modding Tutorials.
Ships: Our attempts to make ships in Tiberian Sun worked, however the normal warfactory suffered bad consequences even loosing the rally point. Results can also be found at here. However, thanks to some recent researchs from the good people from Tiberium Odyssey (thanks Morpher and Jah), we can finally say that ships can be a reality. The solution is available on Morpher's Tutorial.
Third Side AI: We could even make 2 new AIs in the game: Neutral and Special making an 8 player game have 10 players. The results were extremely bizarre and inneficient, since Special was allied to all sides and Neutral was destroyed in milisseconds. We currently have new plans to bypass it, but we never tested that and, so far, it`s not a priority in the moment. Recently (02/2004), we've managed to find out a way to 'bypass' this limit
However, we are not perfect and we've failed in several researches which we are still working on:
The Air Transport: Air transports were usually a real trouble for mod makers. Few people (like Blade) already had the knowledge of fixing it, but it was completely unknown most of the community. Banshee found it out without outside tips in july 2001. 11 months later, an ex-PPM member spreaded it to the community. Some months later, we've received reports (and confirmed ourselves) that our method makes the unit be invencible and insignificant when it's flying. We started working in a new research to fix that. You can check it here if you are registered in our forums, but it failed. After a new try with aircrafts, it still failed too and we might end using carryall line.
Superweapons: We've created new superweapons which were possible in Muk's tutorial, however, we didnt found out a completely new way to make a superweapon and some of the superweapons that we created bugged the old ones. We've started a public research about this in the TS Research Center. We had some nice progress in december 2002, thanks to One Of a Kind who was able to make 8 new working multi-missiles and posted the code for us. We've failed when we tried to customize them. There were several limits found and the codes that makes the superweapons be launched were had too much hard-coded functions. The results of the tradional superweapons researchs are already shared with the community. Then, we attempted to bypass these limits with the Superweapon Emulation Researchs. The method which we tried to apply showed to have some irregularities with moving and dead targets and also with automatic trageting (if the target doesnt die) and some other troubles. We have stopped to research it for a while until we get new ideas. You can still help in the TS Research Center.
TLB Files: We have worked in the translation of the variables and classes from the tlb files, however we`ve found no clear results of benefits of it yet, so, we stopped to officially work on it, but you can still check the TS Research Center if you want to see progress on it. It requires some knowledge of C and C++...
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