Today I want to go into some improvements we've been making to our Close Support Bridges (CSB) for v1.0. This is in fact our second revision of them, with the first one you can find here: Improved Close Support Bridges - Project Reality Forums
While the changes made in the first revision did help a bit, we feel that it hasn't done enough to a, stop players from falling off them so easily and b, encourage people to use them more. For v1.0 we have attempted to address both of these issues.
It should be noted that we have kept all previous tweaks from the last highlight and we have just added a few on top of them.
Desert Camo CSBs
The first change we have made is actually only a cosmetic change. Based on new references of CSBs being used in Afghanistan, we have made a quick desert camo texture for these to help them blend in more to desert maps
The green camo CSBs will still be seen on temperate/tropical(/green) climate maps.
Spoiler for Reference Images:
Logistics Trucks Now Carry Two CSBs
The next big change is that we have decided to increase the amount of Bridges a Logistics Truck carriers from one (1) to two (2). This is purely a gameplay decision as only the smallest strips of river could be bridged by one single CSB, resulting in one, or even multiple trucks having to make many trips to and from their main base in order to build a lengthy bridge meaning that they hardly ever got built. Hopefully by increasing the amount of bridges a single truck can deploy in one trip players will deploy them more. Alternatively if you only need to bridge a small gap that only requires one section, you can deploy one CSB and one Heavy Supply Crate from a single load.
Deploy CSBs off the Front of a Logistics Truck
Yes that's right, you can now deploy CSBs off both the front and back of a logistics truck. This is mainly down to gameplay reasons again but also due to a TITAN AVLB (Armoured vehicle-launched bridge) would be the one laying down the bridges in most situations in r/l and it can deploy CSBs off the front. So while the logistics truck isn't a AVLB, it isn't a TBT (Tank Bridge Transport, ie, a truck that carriers/deploys bridges) either. This essentially means no more tricky reversing over multiple sections of CSB to deploy the next one.
Fixed Vehicle Sliding on CSBs
Yes we've finally eliminated that annoying vehicle sliding when on a CSB that sent so many vehicles over the edge! This in the end was a simple material change that was so small we didn't spot it but its now finally fixed meaning you now wont slide any more than vehicles slide on normal terrain and objects!
Added a "V" Collision Down The Middle
One of the big problems with the old collision mesh was that if you did fall down the middle of the CSB by mistake, instead of just getting stuck there since your vehicle is to big to fall all the way down though, not being able to move and being seriously damaging from it as you would expect, the BF2 engine actually decided since you can't fit down it, it would throw the vehicle out of the centre and totally off the bridge, resulting in these odd flips vehicles would do into the water, as you can see in "A Bridge To Far" @ 8:30.
To stop this from happening we have added a "V" down the central gap of the physics collision mesh (col1) which vehicles drive on, and applied a material that damages vehicles when they touch it. This means instead of the vehicle that go down the middle getting flipped out by the BF2 engine, they will instead just be damaged from touching the surface, but still able to drive out. How much damage your vehicle will get by touching the middle will depend on how badly you fall in, simulating wedging and grinding your axel on the bridge. As such you will want to try and stay off the middle unless you want to risk going into combat badly damaged, or possibly even immobilizing your vehicle on the bridge as a result.
We hope these changes will not only make these bridges easier to drive over, a bit more forgiving when you get it wrong but we also hope they will encourage you to use them more
Cheers for reading!
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