Autogun Turrets (Gun Turret graphics/sound/weapon mod)

[Fey]

Ever feel like Gun Turrets kind of suck?

Well, they don't, but I've got another new thing for y'all anyway. This is a standalone mod that turns your traditional long-barreled cannon turret into highly responsive dual guns that mow down infantry and can be generally oppressive against vehicles. That's all this mod does.

Here are some screenshots of all 32 frames in the three main colors, and their sidebar icon:

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Here are some gameplay tips:

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What's good about these things?
These are inexpensive, build pretty fast, don't have much of a power cost, and are available as soon as you build a Barracks, just like the old Gun Turret. They are devastating against infantry and light vehicles in general, especially Trikes or Raiders. Unlike the old Gun Turret, they serve a different purpose, bringing more variety to your arsenal!

What's bad about these things?
Even big scary rapid fire bullets are not so effective against armored units, like Combat Tanks. They also have an inferior range to the old Gun Turret, but only by a little. They're not quite as durable as the old Gun Turrets either.

How do I use these things?
Support them with Troopers, Combat Tanks or Missile Tanks, and drop them to support Rocket Turrets. You can use them to temporarily fortify a position until you get more stuff set up, like more units at the location or place a bunch of Rocket Turrets, then sell them off to put the cash towards more important things. If the enemy is attacking your base with Missile Tanks or Deviators and they are too far into your territory, try deploying one of these next to those units. It will shred them!

What do I do against enemy Autogun Turrets?
Just like the old Gun Turrets, their power can't be taken out. Infantry are still great against these things and can even overwhelm lone Autogun Turrets easily (see start of original Harkonnen campaign mission 5 for a demonstration). To make sure the Troopers can safely get in and wreck them, make sure you get their attention with something tough, like a Combat Tank, first. Otherwise, bring Missile Tanks or other long-range units and outrange them entirely. Good luck!

Design theory rant below spoiler:

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The original Gun Turret and Rocket Turret were much too similar in terms of their function. They both dealt considerable damage to vehicles while being mostly ineffective against infantry. I remedied this somewhat in my expanded mod by improving Rocket Turrets' attacks a bit so their precise strikes can take down lone infantry quite fast, and by making Gun Turrets fairly well-rounded against all targets, but the latter felt quite out of place. That's the Duelist Tank's gimmick, and that's a special Ixian weapon for the Ordos and smugglers. Not fitting for the Gun Turret for all factions, and not fun to fight.

With Rocket Turrets available so early in the tech tree as well, Gun Turrets kind of become obsolete. They are inferior anti-vehicle turrets. All they have going for them is that they stay online with the base power down and are available on earlier missions, but with all the custom campaigns out there now, we need to see more variety in the game.

Gun Turrets needed a distinct and useful role.

Now, you might be asking, what the hell do I need a weaker Gun Turret for? If it uses bullets, it sucks against armor, right? And you'd be correct. It deals significantly less damage versus armor than the old Gun Turret. It only has an effective range of 4 tiles, slightly inferior to the old Gun Turret. Siege, Missile and Sonic Tanks can outrange them quite easily, so it's not very useful against Missile Tanks or Deviators like other bullet-based weapons are because it's totally immobile. And sure, it's nice against most infantry, but those are easy enough to deal with anyway most of the time. So, what's the catch?

Well, here are the specifics about their benefits:
 - It has half the power cost of the old Gun Turret.
 - It builds a few seconds faster than the old Gun Turret.
 - It costs only 450 Solaris, 100 less than the old Gun Turret.
 - It's waaay more useful against infantry and Trikes or Raiders.
 - They have a super high rate of fire. The moment you build one, it's already firing.

So it's less effective to just drop a wall of turrets and watch the enemy feed itself to the meat grinder. That's a pity, but the new Autogun Turrets are amazing for more proactive defense. If dropped DURING an attack rather than BEFORE one, they absorb much damage for how little they cost and can block Combat Tank shots from hitting your buildings, or they can be dropped right next to enemy Missile Tanks that normally outrange them and shred them, as bullets do to Missile Tanks. And because they're much more effective against infantry and Trikes or Raiders, they're especially potent defense against early rush attacks.

You can still pile up Autogun Turrets and Rocket Turrets for an effective defense, although their design does reward proactive use as described.

Regarding their animation / sound design:

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As many of you know, I am not an artist. I mostly just edit things that already exist because I can't get the perspective right for D2k with original work, and editing existing things means I stay loyal more easily to the original style of D2k.

The basis for these sprites originated from what I understand to be an obscure foreign mod no longer in development called "Dune 2000 Hardcore," which is also the source for the Flame Tank spriteset I touched up previously. I happen to have a copy, but no maps will load with the mod; they all crash on startup. And, I can't find any info about it on the web. I assume it's no longer in development. In any case, I'm not entirely sure if the mod creator is the one responsible for these sprites, or if he, too, found them elsewhere. Still, I must give credit where credit is due, and all I can say is that the sprites I touched up were found in this mod.

Even editing something is not the easiest thing, however. Besides working closely with a total mess of pixels in every frame...


Making it difficult to dissect exactly where each pixel should go, there are also other obstacles, such as palette conversion. Palette conversion refers to the way Dune 2000 digests colors. That particular shade of pink is transparent, a specific shade of black makes semi-transparent shadow pixels, and various shades of gray become faction color. This can differ between spritesets, often demanding I plug in a first draft only to have to replace multiple pixels around the frame that are not supposed to be faction color, and correct the pixels that are meant to be faction color with a different shade of gray.

In order to get these new Gun Turrets, I started with the spriteset for... I believe they called it the "Heavy Tank."


For the Combat Tanks in Dune 2000, their bodies are separate from the turrets atop them. In this spriteset, the turret is part of the tank. So the first thing I had to do was separate the barrels from the body, perhaps the most involved process besides redoing the coloration.


Once the basic shape was done, it was a simple process to add some shadows beneath the main body of the turret.


I then had to crop the images.


All 32 frames had to be aligned properly, lest they wind up looking like this in-game:


The flash is a recolored Devastator flash.


All of those frames had to be aligned too, which finally produced something decent-looking:


Finally, I used the Trike's body as a basis for the new color on the sides of the turret in each frame, next to where the new faction color was added.



32 frames later, and a new sidebar icon by @AZ-Stalker, we have a new Autogun Turret. Yay.


Giving this new turret a proper sound involved some workarounds too. Dune 2000 can only play so many sounds at once. Introducing a new rapid fire turret is bound to either have bad sound, itself, or break the game's sound in other ways. What I decided on doing was, I gave it a new, very fast sound. Because the sound doesn't last very long at all, it's less likely to mess with other sounds in the game. This is obviously not perfect, but neither was the original game. I did what I could.

The sound is one of the Hammerhead firing sounds from C&C3:KW.

Here's a download link:
AGTs.zip

If you wanna install the mod, merge the data folder in the zip with the one in your D2k directory. The data folder under the backup folder in the zip can be merged with the data folder in your D2k directory to restore the changes this mod makes to the default state of the game.

Have fun.

Edited June 26, 2020 by Fey
typo lol

[Cm_blast]

I can tell there are hours of work on this, and having a anti-infantry turret it brings variety into the game.

It is indeed a really good piece of work.

[Fey]

  On 6/24/2020 at 12:23 PM, Cm_blast said:

I can tell there are hours of work on this, and having a anti-infantry turret it brings variety into the game.

It is indeed a really good piece of work.

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Many thanks and much appreciated, Cm. Enjoy. Hope this goes to some good use in upcoming campaigns!

[Cm_blast]

Yes, I'll use that, and that shotgunner probably too. Individually in certain missions on a certain campaign (so not always) but still, this is something I will make use in the future.

[Fey]

  On 6/24/2020 at 12:47 PM, Cm_blast said:

Yes, I'll use that, and that shotgunner probably too. Individually in certain missions on a certain campaign (so not always) but still, this is something I will make use in the future.

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Sweet. FYI, I just updated the Shotgunner standalone with the new sidebar icon, so that's 100% done too.

[Feda]

Great job man, indeed there are tons of work involved in this so thanks for making this available for everyone.

I will also be using this, quite possibly include it in a few missions of my upcoming July new campaign.

[Fey]

  On 6/24/2020 at 2:59 PM, Feda said:

Great job man, indeed there are tons of work involved in this so thanks for making this available for everyone.

I will also be using this, quite possibly include it in a few missions of my upcoming July new campaign.

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Thanks! I did my best.

I'm SUPER excited for the next installment of your legendary campaign, Feda! So glad these beauties are making their debut there, of all places.

[Fey]

For anyone who may be interested...
AGT&SG.zip

A little while ago I came out with a standalone mod for Light Infantry. Related thread here:
https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/28716-shotgunners-light-infantry-graphicssoundweapon-mod/

Now that the Autogun Turret is complete, and with Feda's new launcher coming out soon (the one that will allow us to load mods on a per-mission basis), the Autogun Turret and standard Light Infantry together might be a little too much pew pew and not enough kaboom. So, that download link up there contains both the Autogun Turret and Shotgunner.

Someone else looking to add one or the other to the standalone mods would have had to go rifling through TibEd, importing and adjusting all the sprites, and sorting the sound effects. Figured I'd take care of it myself for those looking to make new maps with both and for those who just want to play with both.

Enjoy.

[AZ-Stalker]

The new gun turret is a great addition to the growing community arsenal. Fantastic work as usual!

[Fey]

  On 6/30/2020 at 5:27 PM, AZ-Stalker said:

The new gun turret is a great addition to the growing community arsenal. Fantastic work as usual!

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Thanks so much, AZ. I hope you enjoy using or playing with it on whichever maps you do!

[firefly101]

Yes thank you very much! I am using your turrets in my Infantry mod. I already made my turrets into heavy machineguns, but I like your turret look, its perfect! My mod is an all infantry mod without any vehicles except the harvester, so it fits great with my version.

I would love to see you make a new heavy infantry that is off the Trooper model but using the weapons that the Sardaurker use. I tried to make my own and did ok but the indexed pallet messed everything up and I could figure how to fix it in Photoshop.

[Fey]

  On 7/25/2020 at 1:33 PM, firefly101 said:

Yes thank you very much! I am using your turrets in my Infantry mod. I already made my turrets into heavy machineguns, but I like your turret look, its perfect! My mod is an all infantry mod without any vehicles except the harvester, so it fits great with my version.

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Thank you for your compliments! I hope you greatly enjoy the spriteset. I'd ask if you want a tank variant, since I finished the spritework for that recently too:

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But you said your mod involves infantry only. So, maybe for a different mod ya do up later or something. Also, the Autogun Tank doesn't have a sidebar icon yet, so that's incomplete, but the main sprites, hypothetical balance and soundwork are complete.

I'll just post some more junk about it down here:

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Intel entry:
Autogun Tank - Armor
     Dual autoguns fixed atop a massive frame. A titanic vehicle by necessity due to the number of rounds it must lug around, the Autogun Tank is cumbersome, but its hulking body can absorb a tremendous amount of damage. Despite being ineffective against other armored units, they can defeat lone Combat Tanks thanks to their durability advantage. They are terrifying against infantry and certain LAVs, but they can be overwhelmed by Quads or Combat Tanks, or sniped from afar by Missile Tanks. Because they represent a logistical challenge for battlefield commanders and are also fairly expensive to build and maintain, they tend to be available only when infantry and LAVs are in great enough numbers to justify their use.

Dialogue:
Unit reporting:
They are outgunned.
A titan among tanks.
Send us to the front.

Order confirmed:
We will cull the weak.
Autogun Tank on the move.
Frontline unit rolling out.
Autogun Tank compilation.wav
https://i.imgur.com/Efnnk57.mp4

 

  On 7/25/2020 at 1:33 PM, firefly101 said:

I would love to see you make a new heavy infantry that is off the Trooper model but using the weapons that the Sardaurker use. I tried to make my own and did ok but the indexed pallet messed everything up and I could figure how to fix it in Photoshop.

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I replied about this in the other thread, the Shotgunners thread, but I did have another idea. What if you were to use the new Sardaukar minigunner sprites recently drawn up for the Sardaukar, and then use the old Sardaukar as the Troopers' sprites?

If you want it to be a new spriteset built off the Troopers, that will take some work. Spritework is tedious, but rewarding. Don't be dissuaded by the palette conversion - we'll have options to deal with that soon enough, but until then, those who have been working with it for a while can give ya all the details for working around it.

I hope to see ya on that Discord server. We can talk more at length there.

[firefly101]

I can't use discord, I have an old OS and I get weird results on that site that make it impossible for me to use it.

What new Sardaukar sprites I never heard of them? Are they like the 1984 movie or something different? Do you have a download for them?

I originally tried to mod the Sardaukar units to have faces that are similar to the Troopers, but the Pallet issue messed all my work up. I spent 2 hours on it for nothing!

I was thinking Troopers being edited might be the easiest, as the Bazooka already looks like a MiniGun, so only the color from blue to black and changing the firing sprite animations would be needed.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 26, 2020 by firefly101

[Fey]

  On 7/26/2020 at 6:41 AM, firefly101 said:

I can't use discord, I have an old OS and I get weird results on that site that make it impossible for me to use it.

What new Sardaukar sprites I never heard of them? Are they like the 1984 movie or something different? Do you have a download for them?

I originally tried to mod the Sardaukar units to have faces that are similar to the Troopers, but the Pallet issue messed all my work up. I spent 2 hours on it for nothing!

I was thinking Troopers being edited might be the easiest, as the Bazooka already looks like a MiniGun, so only the color from blue to black and changing the firing sprite animations would be needed.

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Ah, I see.

Err, there's also a desktop client, if that helps! I use that rather than the internet browser.

Here's a screenshot of some of the new Sardaukar frames:

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Ain't those pretty?

He does not really have a complete death animation yet, nor does he have prone animations. I don't believe our pixel artist friend intends to make prone animations for the infantry, but he may do a death animation at some point. I'll be working on in-game alignment when I get the chance since, without alignment, the sprites will jump all over the place.

Anyway, never delete your old work! You never know if a fix is just a little bit of spritework away. Basically, you have three main factors: Transparency, shadows, and faction color. Pink, black, and various shades of gray. Palette conversion will transform certain pixels into slightly different colors sometimes. Only way around that is importing the new sprite and seeing which pixels need changing. Spritework is very tedious indeed. However, there is some good news! That hex editor fellow I mentioned in the other thread may be working on a superior resources editor that would allow for more precise palette conversion. No idea when he'll be done with that, but it's apparently a work in progress.

Edit: I dropped the frames in-game at some point, but haven't aligned them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWx97LmN1gQ

This is a test of the total sound overhaul. I won't go into the details about the sound modding, but basically, getting both new 'unit reporting' AND 'orders confirmed' dialogue requires some hex editing because TibEd is kind of broken. Anyway, in that short vid you can sometimes see the new Sardaukar sprites on-screen. Since they haven't been aligned or touched up or anything, they appear quite strangely, but that's not an issue with the sprites themselves.

Edited July 26, 2020 by Fey

[firefly101]

Interesting on the new sprites. The old ones look more like the 1984 movie though. I tried to edit the Trooper sprites and just make the bazooka black, but when I check transparency it would have been transparent! I have no idea how the pallet thing works for those sprites. Other changes caused other black sections that were NOT transparent to become transparent afterwards.

You seem to know how to mod the sprites to keep the colors right and transparency based on your Turret mod which is great. A new trooper sprite would be nice if you ever get the time. 458-593 is the sprites for that unit.

I think an edit for the Troopers may be easier, as a several of the animations could be used as is if colored differently. Its mainly the firing animation that really need some cut and paste as they are firing like a bazooka and not like the Sardaukar units.

Edited July 26, 2020 by firefly101

[Fey]

  On 7/26/2020 at 12:28 PM, firefly101 said:

Interesting on the new sprites. The old ones look more like the 1984 movie though. I tried to edit the Trooper sprites and just make the bazooka black, but when I check transparency it would have been transparent! I have no idea how the pallet thing works for those sprites. Other changes caused other black sections that were NOT transparent to become transparent afterwards.

You seem to know how to mod the sprites to keep the colors right and transparency based on your Turret mod which is great. A new trooper sprite would be nice if you ever get the time. 458-593 is the sprites for that unit.

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Oh yeah, sometimes exporting a sprite and then re-importing will have weird results, but the good news is that this re-conversion only happens once. If you make changes you like and then find it's messed up, that only has to be edited one more time. When doing the Shotgunner sprites, I had a similar issue and had to refer to the original sprites again to make sure I got the right pixels properly darkened.

It's terribly tedious.

  On 7/26/2020 at 12:28 PM, firefly101 said:

I think an edit for the Troopers may be easier, as a several of the animations could be used as is if colored differently. Its mainly the firing animation that really need some cut and paste as they are firing like a bazooka and not like the Sardaukar units.

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On the contrary, infantry have over a couple hundred frames due to their various animations. The Shotgunner was relatively simple thanks to only editing the firing animations, but fully editing an infantry unit is... well, it's not on my table at this juncture. I've got looots of other stuff I'm currently working on. All I can do right now is say that the easiest way to correct the shadow pixels is to copy some working dark pixels and move them in place of incorrect shadow pixels.

[firefly101]

But the pixel are the same color exactly the same? I don't understand why they would become transparent if they are exactly the same color number?

Also how did you embed the pallet for the sprite, I must be doing something wrong in photoshop?

On the units, looking at the trooper, the only real sprites that have to be changed are the fire animations. The others can have a simple recolor to black instead of the awful blue color. If I could figure the pallet issue out I would do them myself.

Edited July 27, 2020 by firefly101

[Fey]

  On 7/27/2020 at 7:30 AM, firefly101 said:

But the pixel are the same color exactly the same? I don't understand why they would become transparent if they are exactly the same color number?

Also how did you embed the pallet for the sprite, I must be doing something wrong in photoshop?

On the units, looking at the trooper, the only real sprites that have to be changed are the fire animations. The others can have a simple recolor to black instead of the awful blue color. If I could figure the pallet issue out I would do them myself.

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I didn't change the palette at all! I worked around it.

Once you have all the sprites exported, open one up in your image editing program and make the recolors you want. Then, re-import in the same slot and see if anything is broken. More than likely, some colors or shadows will be off.

This only is the case for exporting and re-importing. Once you know which pixels are fucked up, that can be reliably fixed.

Go back to the image editor. There are certain to be some dark pixels that do work, at least there were some in the Light Infantry frames. If you want to copy one such pixel from the Light Infantry, try importing a Light Infantry sprite and see if there are any dark, colorless pixels in one of those over the Trooper palette.

Anyway, once you have a dark pixel, copy it over all the pixels that were mistakenly turned to shadows. As for fixing colors, you may just need to fuck around with a few shades of gray until you find a shade that always works. The same shades will always work for every Trooper frame, so you can copy them between frames while ya work on 'em.

The first frame is always the toughest, but hopefully this helps ya get started mate.

[firefly101]

Thank you, I will give it a try and let you know.

 

[Fey]

  On 7/27/2020 at 8:32 AM, firefly101 said:

Thank you, I will give it a try and let you know.

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Good luck, mate. I'll be around to help if I can. Please do feel free to post a screenshot of the resources editor or photoshop as progress is made. I don't care about spammy posting on one of my threads, but if I haven't replied and you've made more progress, you may want to edit your prior post rather than double-post. Or, you could open your own thread for a Trooper graphics mod. I know @Cm_blast for one would be very interested in a Trooper graphics mod.

I use Gimp, by the way. Dunno if that means anything, but, I'm not an artist and Gimp was simple to use, so I enjoy it. Version 2.8.0, to be specific.

[firefly101]

Hi, I was able to modify the animations for firing both Prone and Standing. I decided to just edit the existing weapon with color since that means I only had to modify 60 animations instead 250. But I wanted to ask you a question, X and Y offsets, I believe the X is for up and down and the Y is for side to side correct? and should an image be moved left at a lower number or right is a higher number?

Reason I ask is one of the animations had to be moved to make room for the flash and I should offset it, its hardly noticeable, but it is there. Also the job was easier than you think, some of the animations the BULK was just copy and paste from a previous animation since it was just the flash changing.

Also I found a small error on your Turret mod, the Picture that shows the turret should color a different color for each house, but only part of that border on the left side does. Only noticed it in the editor.

[Fey]

  On 7/28/2020 at 8:49 PM, firefly101 said:

Hi, I was able to modify the animations for firing both Prone and Standing. I decided to just edit the existing weapon with color since that means I only had to modify 60 animations instead 250. But I wanted to ask you a question, X and Y offsets, I believe the X is for up and down and the Y is for side to side correct? and should an image be moved left at a lower number or right is a higher number?

Reason I ask is one of the animations had to be moved to make room for the flash and I should offset it, its hardly noticeable, but it is there. Also the job was easier than you think, some of the animations the BULK was just copy and paste from a previous animation since it was just the flash changing.

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Yes, if you expand the size of an image for something like the flash you'll need to offset accordingly. This can take a little trial and error too, but it's much less annoying than the actual spritework, I think.

I'm glad you found it less difficult than I did. I'm not very fond of spritework, the results are my goal but the actual practice, I can't say I take tremendous pleasure in. Sometimes, yeah, but most of the time, I just want that new thing. You know?

  On 7/28/2020 at 8:49 PM, firefly101 said:

Also I found a small error on your Turret mod, the Picture that shows the turret should color a different color for each house, but only part of that border on the left side does. Only noticed it in the editor.

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You mean the sidebar icon? That doesn't actually change color in-game at all! It was an artistic decision to leave it neutrally-colored up top, but it would probably support some coloration.

[Feda]

@firefly101 You might be interested to join our modding discord server, its easier to get this info since you can talk to us in real time Link is in my signature

[Fey]

  On 7/29/2020 at 10:39 PM, Feda said:

@firefly101 You might be interested to join our modding discord server, its easier to get this info since you can talk to us in real time Link is in my signature

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I informed our new friend of the Discord server already. Apparently, he's unable to run Discord. Ah, well! We check in here pretty often, yeah?

[firefly101]

Hello Fey.

I will try to see if I can fix the discord issue later. But right now I made some great progress, I am almost done with the new animations! I have about 70 or so to go. Many were easy as they used the same model but some small difference like firing etc. What I am doing is giving a big Machinegun to the Troopers that looks similar to the Sardaukar troops. It does have different animations but if beefed up compared to the Infantry. I would like you to check it out when I am done if you want? I suppose these new animations can be used for another unit to make a new unit available. I always felt Harkonnens should have and heavier infantry.

 

P.S. I removed some of my posts from this thread that cluttered your thread. I left any that would help others in modding though.

Edited August 2, 2020 by firefly101