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[NongBenz]

Broke Protocol
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Broke Protocol is a FPS but not so much a shooter. It puts you in the role of a cop or civilian in an online open world with AI and human pedestrians/traffic and allows you to live your life however you want. That includes some illegal activities but that's life in the city of Eden.

In fact let's take a look...

Welcome to Eden - please mind your wallet.

The game is almost to alpha stage and I'll be sure to round up a few unlucky testers here. In the meantime I'll post progress updates... sometimes technical but mostly about game ideas and theory. I kind of want to test how far we can go in games with communicating issues about crime. Sometimes it seems like murder is the norm in video games but things like drugs and abuse are still taboo. Anyway, my end goal is to focus on character interactions that don't simply revolve around shooting each others faces. I want to allow scenarios for emergent gameplay rather than scripted scenarios or hard win conditions.

Please stay tuned or throw me a like and I'll be sure to continue my updates here.

[NongBenz]

Just a quick update on the latest changes! I've implemented day/night cycles and am pretty happy with the results. The Network time wasn't synced up like I expected but I got around that with an RPC call that fixes the timing to the authoritative server, accounting for latency too.






Time syncing also allowed other things to sync up as well - including the traffic lights seen in the video. You can see the AI drivers follow rules of the road - stop signs, traffic lights, and check intersections for traffic before crossing. These are full physics vehicles, same as players - no cheating AI 

The pedestrian AI has full pathfinding too but I'm still working on getting them to safely cross roads - stick around for more videos on those experiments. Let's just say ragdolls are fun. 

[Petty_King]

This looks phenomenal. When you need testers definitely let me know! I'd love to see a gameplay video too. Hat off to you getting decent AI traffic to work. I've tried that in the past and it's been a nightmare.

[xTylerx]

"Anyway, my end goal is to focus on character interactions that don't simply revolve around shooting each others faces."

That's  a line I enjoyed reading!

This game quickly reminds me of the garys mod game that is used in a lot of servers. I'm excited to see where this game goes!

[guille]

Interesting concept, I would like to hear a bit more about the actual gameplay. But these virtual worlds are definitively something enticing... 

[NongBenz]

Hey guille, xTylerx, Petty_King, - thanks for the encouragement it really means a lot to someone who's been working in the dark on this for so long. I've seen videos of other mods with the same kind of concept, maybe it'd be a good idea to introduce it to them?

Anyway I think gameplay is best shown with videos, but at the moment I'm refactoring all of the netcode which will take a couple days. I think there's room for a Broke Net Protocol joke here but alas. Next I'll show off the inventory system, and available interactions with other players/NPCs.

Really thanks again for the interest - it keeps me working. 

[NongBenz]

Back again, and thanks for the interest.

The past week has been spent rewriting all of the netcode to use a lower-level implementation. This allows for more optimizations and hand-tuning to make an open-world game like this possible. The result is much reduced bandwidth usage and better performance with unnecessary memory allocations removed altogether. Network culling allows many players in a world without needed to send data about every single entity / NPC. Giving the server full-authority also prevents many cheats from working as well. This is an area where games like Day Z and Rust fall short.

I was also able to spend some time on the physics in the game. I wrote the characters and vehicles to be fully simulated physical entities that allows players to rag-doll on death, and vehicles to slide, burnout, and lose grip depending on surface. Without further ado… here some vehicle/rag-doll.. testing, uh.. for science.





Please tell me if there's anything in particular you want to see and I'll be sure to keep you guys updated. Thanks!

[NongBenz]

  A few long weeks of slogging at the gameplay code has ultimately led to the feature complete alpha state: the state of the game currently includes these latest changes:

• handle player criminal histories and wanted levels
• holding up, arresting, restaining, and searching other players and NPCs
• players can get police job to ticket and arrest other criminals
• drug manufacturing, growing, and processing
• weapons and narcotics can be traded with players and NPCs for profit
• merchants at gunshops, bars, clubs, and general store
• vehicle ownership, locking, and stealing
• bombable bank vaults and jail doors
• AI police react to wanted levels

All that's left is a bit of polishing, and then we're good to go. Please post here if you're interested in testing and I'll send you details.

Some gameplay...

Alpha Footage

More info to follow soon 

[NongBenz]

 
IT'S HERE

The first public 0.51 release is out now at www.brokeprotocol.com

Download Here (25mb)

Thanks to everyone who helped out and offerred to test.. and hope to see the rest of you in game.

[RujiK]

This game looks pretty neat! Physics and low-poly graphics appeal to me.


Two things:
The color palette is a bit bland. I see lots of the same greens and grays with different lighting. Maybe try some different tints on some of the colors for a bit of variety. You have a whole spectrum of colors! Use more than 5!

The water looks nice but doesn't really match the other graphics.


Looks like a cool game though, I'll be watching for updates.

[NongBenz]

Heya Rujik - that's some solid advice. I know the graphics can look a bit bland. Hopefully, the gameeplay can shine through.

v0.52 is out with AI improvements, new UI, and many tweaks and fixes. Hope to see some of you online.


Broke Protococol Download Page
www.brokeprotocol.com/download