Wirehead Studios

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Six new combatants have been summoned to the Arenas to join the Strogg Ranks!  Formerly utilized as common guards, these particular units were a bit above-spec and were successful in eliminatng many marines before being ultimately claimed by the Vadrigar.  Though they still prefer the guns they were originally programmed for, their built-in prosthetics have been replaced with a standard cybernetic arm capable of handling any weapon, and they'll gladly use whatever they can find - or pry from your steaming corpse.

From left to right:

Light Guard, Shotgun Guard, Machinegun Guard, Laser Guard, Hyperblaster Guard, and Ripper Guard.

Watch out for that Laser Guard.  Since there's no laser in the Arena, he's taken a liking to the Railgun, and his aim is just as good as ever!

What's next?  Is the invasion over?  Not quite.

Good things come to those who wait! So we have Earth Soldiers, Doom Warriors, Slipgaters, and as far as I can tell, now Strogg Troopers completed! Is there anything else that needs to be done before 1.0 is ready?

Yes.  Primarily Bug fixes, menu work, and getting the original Q3 Single Player campaign working again (this was broken in previous builds when the HUD and Team Arena-style menu system was implemented), along with optimizing the file structure and a major change to the engine for better support of modern OS's and video modes. It's a lot of "under the hood" work so there probably won't be much to show off other than changes to the menu system.

So great to see the Strogg Guard roaming the Arenas once again! I always thought Tabun did an exceptional job on them. :bfg:

Indeed!  It's one of my favorite models.  Tabun was gracious enough to send me the original photoshop files so I could put together the extended skin set - Laser, Hyperblaster, Ripper from The Reckoning mission pack, and the WHS team skins, and get the model animated for the Strogg Troopers class.  I hope I did his model justice!

You absolutely did! Do the WHS skins have unique bots as well?

Not at this time, and it might be difficult to do.  We have skins for multiple models across all five classes per team member name, so to add a wh-con bot, for example, it would require writing at least 5 different bots, all with different names, or restricting that bot to a single class and skin.  I could throw some generic bots together just for testing purposes, but for something official I'm not sure exactly the best approach for that just yet.

It's been awhile since I knocked around at that framework.. Does the code allow for objects? ie - could you "just" do one bot script with case entries for class, or some sort of intermediary that makes those changes between the call and the return?

You know, the more I think about it, you'd pretty much be writing 5 bots and then cramming them together into 1 file delineated by what amounts to a pile of case statements..

I think I've figured out a way to do it without any code at all.  The way it's set up right now the bot logic loads the file, and the class determination is made by what model is specified in the bot files.  I think the easiest way to do it would be to write 5 separate bots with the same chat lines and just specify a different "fun name", which overrides the bot's explicit name, so for example, to do a multi-class Angs7 bot, you would have:

Angs7_Earth
Angs7_Doom
Angs7_Slipgate
Angs7_Strogg
Angs7_Arena

When the bot spawns it would use the "fun name" of "Angs7".  This would allow for the possibility of having multiple Angs7's of different classes fighting each other, but that's no different from adding multiple bots across teams, like Doom on Red and Doom on Blue, or 5 Doom bots on red.

Just tested and this idea works, so the capability of doing bots for the Gen skins is there.