Battlefield 2'42: Redux

[Apache Thunder]

There are definitely some issues still present in this mod. Some of which BF242 mod originally had when I started working on it. (Remember, I did not create this mod. It was created by the SuperDC team). I just ported new vehicles from BF2 to replace the existing ones. The big difference however is with Battlefield 2'42 Redux. The redux version doesn't have as many maps as the original because I rebuilt alot of the mod by removing out unused assets and using only maps I directly ported from BF2. Since I had the ability to do so, I ported the BF2 maps inplace of many which where just maps using other mods from Battlefield 1942 to sorta replicate the BF2 look and layout of the map.

This mod aims to replace that with actual full on ports of the maps and the static objects present in this mod I ported direct from BF2. Excluding some of the aircraft, I also ported most of the vehicles (some of which courtesy of help from DACV who already ported a few of the tanks into BFV and allowed me to use them. I just restructured their code to work in BF1942).

BFV would have been a superior platform for both this mod and the Battlefield Heroes'42. But the modding scene with BFV wasn't as large compared to that of the mainstay Battlefield 1942 game. Plus I never really liked the way the game "looked". I still don't know why, but it just looks and sounds "off" to me. It feels incomplete. I never had a motivation to work with that game engine despite the advantages it had with newer features and such. Felt like a standalone expansion pack that should have just been added to BF1942. Would have been nice to see BF1942 get some of the upgrades BFV had. Perhaps it wouldn't have looked as "off" for me since they would have had to tone down some of the changes to avoid really messing with the way the original vanilla maps and existing mods operated.

Also most of the handweapons (except maybe some new ones and the claymores which I heavily altered and used the BF2 assets to replace to originals) are still the ones that the orginal BF242 mod had before I started working on it. Most of which are hackjobs brought together from a bunch of other BF1942 mods. Much like most of the mod was at that point in time. I just never put in the time to look at replacing the handweapons since there was so many.

Though with Battlefield Heroes'42, I built that mod from the ground up, so it was easier for me to add weapons as I progressed in adding content into the mod. BF242 was an existing project so it already had tons of handweapons, so was a pain trying to keep track of all the assets. One reason I didn't touch most of the handweapons. They all appeared to work for the most part (except for perhaps the grenade launcher attachment weapon for some of the rifles, but I fixed that a bit in the Redux version of BF242)

Now a days however I'm pretty much retired from modding BF1942. So unfortunately I plan no future changes to this mod nor Battlefield Heroes'42. The game that mod ported content from is also starting to wind down and looks like that game may die completely in the next few years giving how much new content I see them adding. There hasn't been a new map introduced in Battlefield Heroes in well over 2 years almost. Perhaps slightly less. It's been so long I lost track of when the last map was added. I don't see any indications that game will see any new life put into it as most of the dev team for that game moved on to other projects within the EA studio branch.

So that being the last thing that motivated me to still work in modding BF1942 winding down a year or two back, I had nothing left to do with BF1942. I've moved on to new hobbies now I'm afraid.

Thanks for your input on the mods though. It's good to see that there is still interest in the mods I worked on. My only regret is that I really didn't advertise my mods very well. I just dropped them into forum threads and that was about it. Didn't really try and use Moddb and the like. But that's all in the past now.

[Caparzo]

Wel..., thats depressive =(
Sad to hear that apache, still, if you wanna play heroes 42 with actual people, i'm gonna try to put it on my server in a few weeks, ill let you know in here

[GoodDayToDie!!]

Yep, no regrets buddy.

Too bad the 16 Squares project has fallen short.

[Apache Thunder]

It has been quite some time since I last worked on this mod. While browsing my hard-drive I came across the project files I had built up while doing the lightmapping process. A lot of my patented voodoo went in this.

bf242_lightmapbasemaps_final.rar

I had an older version of this uploaded, but it was pretty outdated. This included a couple of text files I made at the time one of which explains how to use this for creating lightmaps for the BF242 Redux mod. The basic jist of things is that I used a lot of batch processing to sorta automate the process as doing it by hand would have taken ages and I'm great and doing things in a way that requires the least amount of effort.

The batch files included I edit using Notepad++ which allows me to update file names and such in the command list in batches. I think I did it by using the column feature and batch replacing of file names. It's been awhile so I forgot the exact process. I uploaded that as it was when I last used it for others to potentially look at if they decide to do more maps for this mod. These files will definitely be a must as it contains the "basemaps" for all the exiting BF2 staticobject assets I ported over. I had created a system where the detail UVMap was relocated to channel 1 with the "color map" uvmap moved to channel 3. Since the color maps used the least detail usually, that's where I put them since the lightmap channel can't carry too much detail. That was how I originally achieved getting the BF2 statics to look correct in the BF1942 engine. In theory this process should work for BFV too, but I'm not familiar with how the lighting system is setup for that game and I hear that while the lightmap system is the same, there is a lot of new code in the map's init.con among other things that can drastically alter how the game blends the lightmaps.

There was a lot of steps I went through to get a BF2 object ported over so I'm sure there is much I have already forgotten. I did go through extra steps for certain objects that had signs or things with extra detail in the colormap then normal. (the billboards for example). Usually I migrate those parts of the object to new materials and exclude them from the UVmap swap. (You can do this by selecting all the other materials and then creating the uvmap unwrap modifier in 3DS Max. Max would then only select the uvmap for the selected faces thus allowing one to exclude the unselected faces. I used the material section to select faces by material to speed up selecting the correct faces for this)

Of coarse this was only a small part of what I went through to port a BF2 map. I preserved a lot of the original BF2 coding like object positions and stuff. (I used a lot of tricks with max scripts and stuff to correctly offset things so they are positioned correctly in BF1942. This was a much faster process then trying to place the objects manually in a editor. A lot of what I did was done solely in notepad which is a testament to how efficient I got at doing projects like this at the time. I grew up on MS-DOS, so of coarse I was more of a keyboard person then a mouse user. So I tried to avoid using Editor42 where I can. I tried to minimize the work I had to do in Max as well. )

Then there's the road meshes. I found some neat features in Max that allowed creating meshes from splines then using a conform modifier of some kind to mold it to the terrain mesh that I had imported into the scene. It created very accurate results so I was able to achieve almost BF2 like detail in the road meshes on the maps. I forgot the exact stuff I used in Max though, so like the rest your on your own on that.

In either case I can't really provide help for users hoping to look at this as it's been too long since I've last worked on this. I put this up here in hopes others might figure out the voodoo I did and do more BF2 maps.

This will be my final contribution for this mod. The above upload is how I had organized things to make it easier to work on. Thus it's not organized in a way for new users to get a handle on easily. All I can say is just experiment and use trial and error with it until you make progress. That's basically how I started out with modding and should be the best approach with this as well. Just take an inventory on what I already ported and work off from there.