Today marked the first day I spent on furthering development on my mod for World in Conflict for some time. I was forced to put it aside for some time because of university and lack of personal time in general. Now that I have some time to myself again I figured why not dedicate some of that to Realmod once again.

The World in Conflict mod kit. Its what makes it all happen.

Since it was a while since I last worked on my mod, I decided to conduct a reevaluation of things and ideas I had in mind in regards to my mod. I pretty much retained all my original goals set before I took a break, but decided against trying to improve on the AI until the release of the World in Conflict add-on (Soviet Assault) which was billed to bring AI improvements.

The list of short-term ideas and things I wanted to look at and work on included:

• Tweaking the bullet tracer effects
• Recording and implementing new sounds for the dropships
• Balance testing the recent changes I made to the Air and Support roles
• Further tweaking of the changes I made to the Armour and Infantry roles in v0.2
• Type up new detailed unit descriptions for each unit for flavour and extra info
• Create new unit icons
• Code new abilities / tweak existing ones

I decided to tackle the first item on my list first as it was the last thing I was trying to accomplish when working on the mod before I had a break. There was three parts to achieving what I wanted in regards to tweaking the bullet tracer effects.

The first part was to eliminate the "white line" bullet effects that appeared in order to help the player visually see where their units are firing and vice versa. While this effect is helpful to some in a gameplay sense, to the playerbase of my mod (myself included) it can distract from the immersion. To do this was simple enough, I just had to find the associated texture and using the alpha channel I can stop it from being rendered in the game.

Juicemaker, WinSDF and Showbox. These 3 tools combined can let you do a great, many things.

The second part was to tweak the colours of the tracer rounds. I always felt they looked a little "washed" so by using Photoshop I adjusted their colour to be a little more vibrant for what is essentially a flying bullet set alight with burning magnesium or barium salts (if a green tracer round).

The last part is to adjust which units fire tracer rounds out of their weapons. I want to test and see what it is like if only the machine-gunners fired the tracer rounds in a series of visual and gameplay tests. The only problem here is I am still unsure where the juice entry (file that controls various attributes) is within the unittypes file. If I can't find it I will have to stick with all units firing just coloured tracer rounds occasionally (with the "white bullet line" phenonmenon eliminated).

I hope you enjoyed my first developer diary, there are more to come as I continue my journey in developing my modification for World in Conflict.