koach2

First of, good day to all of you. Tis been a long while since I posted anything here, so I wanted to kinda give you all an idea of what I've  been up to, and what's gonna come in the future.

To be honest, things have been quite... awkward in the last months, specially since I got into college three months ago. But, of course, things started to get weird way before that. In my last entry -september 2012-, I mentioned a charity trip... well, it didn't go as planned. Let's just say I had to do something disgusting. Dear lord...

That aside, I've been getting more and more into modding lately, specially in Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars. I've left the BG2 dev team and started working freelance for various mods, such as La Belle Alliance and the War of 1812. That, and I've got myself my own little modding corner in the Flying Squirrel Entertainment forums, called "Mr. Kochi's Skin Warehouse" (www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.ph…). I've uploaded quite a few British reskins in there, featuring some of the famous, or 'darkest' regiments in the British Peninsular Army, such as the 28th Gloucestershire, the 41st Regiment of Foot and the 82nd "Prince of Wales' Own Volunteers".

FUN STUFF IN THERE.

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In other news, I'm now taking bagpipe lessons. Not Scottish, but Asturian bagpipes, one of the many kinds of Spanish-Celt bagpipes out there. Blasted thing only has 12 notes, and although it looks easy, it's a pain to play. But I adore it! Pity it's too damned noisy to practice at home (had to get a custom made flute to practice), and too bloody expensive to buy my own (800 euros, plus shipping it from Spain).

And, even if I wanted to buy the bagpipe, even if I had the money to do so, I have other priorities for money spending. I -finally- managed to find and sign up in a Napoleonic reenactment group, and since March 16th, I've been marching around in a fancy Spanish uniform, holding a Brown Bess and getting lots of cramps in my arms. Blasted musket is heavy.

Well, that wraps up all I've been doing so far. Right now I'm trying to port NW's models and textures into Garry's Mod, so expect more screenshot stuff quite soon.

Next week I'll be leaving with my class mates for a charity trip to Tuclame, Provincia de Córdoba.
Basically, Tuclame is an isolated town in the north of the province, where most people suffer from hypothyroid due to the lack of iodine ingested in their daily diet. Water there has very little iodine, thus turning iodized salt in the only way to ingest the mineral.

The idea behind this year's trip is installing a somewhat good network of working computers in the town school. Last year I went with another group of lads to help with a new water pump, which became one of the few real water sources in town (Ever since a dam was built up north, the drought it caused meant a huge damage to the environment in this region. There's little to no grass, dead trees and dust everywhere), so now we want to give some importance to the kids' education, making sure they receive the best education available to them... though looking at the school desertion percentage, few will actually finish primary school.

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BG2 wise, it was decided that a new dev team would be established. Even though I wasn't originally going to be on that new roster, I asked to join in, and got accepted as historical researcher and texture guy (again). We got new mappers, new modellers and designers, so we are set for a great graphical update in BattleGrounds 2: 2.2.
All we need now is get to work xP...

Well, shite. Warband Revolution mod died miserably due to a lack of communication and cooperation between the main mod developers, thus me not having any models to work with, and the whole mod falling apart.

And here I thought I would be able to upload better Revolutionary War videogame stuff. Oh well... BG2 and Gmod will have to do.... when I'm done with a huge pile of work, that is.



Apologies, lads, but no uploads for a while. I'll have to get this done first. Wish me luck.

-Koach

Due to BG2 development being stuck due to the lack of coders, and the fact that I have nothing better to do, I decided to start modding for other games, specially Mount and Blade Warband.

About three weeks ago some guy came out with the idea of making a Revolutionary War mod for Mount and Blade Warband: Napoleonic Wars. However, at the time I was a bit busy working on the 47th Lancashire skins. Now, they asked for my help. How can I say no to such a great proposal?

So, as of now, I'll be working on a Revolutionary War mod for Napoleonic Wars. This, however, will be quite a challenge, since I am truly not used to doing everything from scratch... but I can manage xP.

So what does this mean? Well, first of all, I'll upload stuff in here much more often. I was put in charge of uniforms, so expect interesting designs coming in.

Second: I will have less time for other things, so GMOD screencaps will have to wait...

Lastly: Heh...

After a week of trial and error, plus a patch that basically broke Mount and Blade Warband: Napoleonic Wars, I finally managed to get the 47th Regiment's skins done. The whole pack includes the King's and Regimental Colours, remade Ranker, Ensign, Officer and Drums, new shako and a small tweak in the code.

:thumb309037764:   :thumb309038583:

I must admit, these skins were quite a challenge to make. BG2 and Napoleonic Wars are quite different regarding their models' UV templates and texture arrangement. I had to edit about 6 files to make the whole texture pack, some even including new bump maps.
Truly, I am quite impressed  with the final results. This skin pack looks way better than expected, and I even managed to add a few extra details to make it even better (Belgic Shako and code tweaking).

Overall, one of my best retexturing projects.

Huzzah!