TIGSource Forums

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UPDATES

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Both ways (Client/Server) entity control and creation.
This bring my Game engine up to 20%.
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/BaboNetworked.jpg)

Controls + Collisions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZustwz2f0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZustwz2f0)

Babo basic material (Ya.. they are just spheres..):
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/BaboFull.PNG)

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INTRODUCTION

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I started working on a new Babo. I have had many little side projects for years, but I never really went back to Babo.
Here is a brief history of Babo before talking more about this one:

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Babo Violent (BV1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhiCa6LrOQs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhiCa6LrOQs)
This one was only a prototype with very unstable networking code. Shared it with couple of friends but that's it.

Team: only me

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Babo Violent 2 (BV2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-0Gro1GXTg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-0Gro1GXTg)
The community was very active. We had clan matches and tournaments. The game was very competitive because of the game types and each sides could select from the same pool of weapons. The music was catchy and fit the gameplay. We had special permission from Lamb of God to create a medley of their music.

Modding was not possible directly, but the community found ways. Texture packs quickly became a thing. Then someone had the idea to read the log every second, then clear it. Catching events like: Player X killed Player Y. Being then able to inject commands into their server: Move Player X to team Z. So simple modding like king of the hill were possible.

Then we finally made the game open source, giving modding a little bit more freedom. Like floor decals and custom wall textures like in this example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvu93lb50SE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvu93lb50SE)

Team: My friend and I + help from the community

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Madballs in... Babo:Invasion (BV3)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/25700/ (http://store.steampowered.com/app/25700/)
This one was done in a real indie studio, with artists, programmers, audio engineers, etc. The quality of this product is high. But went a bit unnoticed. We can try to blame it on a lot of things. My personal reason is: We tried to please too many people. Some say it's the branding with Madballs. Some other balancing, unmoddable, the launch of battle field on xbox arcade the same week, or just worse name ever for a game :)

But in the end, it's a high quality game, that plays very well, with a good solo campaign.

Team: http://playbrains.com/ (http://playbrains.com/)

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Babo Violent 4 [code name] (BV4)
This one, I want to go back to the roots (BV2). Purely indie, made only by me as side project. And this is the game I will show off in this devlog over the next few weeks.

Primary Goals:

• Fully moddable
• Multiplayer Only
• Competitive gameplay
• Gory
• Better graphics (DX11)

Fully moddable:
This was the primary complain on BV2. It was hard to mod. And madballs didn't have modding capabilities at all. So I am building this one with LUA scripting.

I have built a small Babo Engine that allow scripting on almost everything: Weapon, Babo, Mod, UIs, etc. Even the map itself is written in LUA and can have logic to it.

Multiplayer Only:
As I am alone on this, I won't waste time with Single Player. Coop was very fun in Madballs. Probably the best aspect of the game! But I don't want to spend all my time on AI, and big maps (needs culling, efficient loading, etc)..

Competitive gameplay:
Weapons and abilities are accessible for both teams. This ensure maximum balancing. I also intend of having more clans feature. Like special tags, custom babo skins, etc.

Gory:
BV2 was violent, with blood splatters all over the place. I want to go back to this. Not that I am a violent person, but I think blowing up your opponent into pieces is cool. Madballs had a more "childish" look. We went away from red blood completely.

Better graphics:
I built my engine in DirectX11, and I intend to implement fully Deferred Renderer. I just find it easier to deal with lighting that way. BV2 had tons of dynamic lights (each bullets), but they were "fake". Basically overlay sprites. BV4 will be fully dynamic. Map scripting could even turn on/off lights in the level.

The general shape of the level will be more like BV2 + extra features and better texturing. Ground texture splattering in the engine allows for more than just smooth painting. It now allows features like hard edges and UVs rotation. Some mods were doing it in BV2:
(https://sites.google.com/site/piratesbv2maps/pictures/DevideNew.jpg)

This also means: Integrated map editor. Obviously. One of the strongest point of BV2!

Team: Just me, for now


That's it for now. I was able to load the first level this morning into the engine, I will post a screenshot later on this week.
My devlog might be a bit slow, as I have a real job to attend to, and I am a new father.

I consider the project already at 10%, even tho I have no gameplay yet. Because part of this project is also to build the engine and I have done a big part of it already.

Cheers!
- Daivuk

Was a huge fan of BV2 (skipped many college classes to play it) and I was even working on a clone of it up until about a month ago. Think I'll shelve that project now and wait for BV4 instead! This is great news.

Still working on this. But nothing to show. It's mostly engine code and creating the mod API for it. Will show more when I actually have pretty graphics going on.

Not huge progress because of lack of time. But here is a little something. The rendering of the babos.
They are only spheres so there is only so much I can do. But I am planning on adding custom skins. User would be able to stamp decals on their babos. Also I have big plans for the damage system and blood decals on the babos themselves.

But first, the basic Babo material:
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/BaboFull.PNG)

I've added a soft Fresnel to simulate the light passing through the Babo. Also that Fresnel will turn "off" after being killed so the opponent knows your body is not live.
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/baboFresnel.PNG)

For the specular, I chose a soft gloss-like. Babos are like thick skin covered balls filled with blood and guts.
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/baboMatGloss.PNG)

Adding a little ambient at the bottom:
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/baboAmbient.PNG)

As for the colors, those are the 4 team colors I carefully picked. The blue and red team are slightly different than BV2. In BV2 they were straight primary colors.

But base team colors can be manipulated in a per mod basis.

First gameplay video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZustwz2f0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyZustwz2f0)

The movement of the Babo, Camera and the collision system has been taken directly from BV2. The collisions in BV2 are far from perfect, but they worked very well in a multiplayer game and they were proven. So I simply took them from github:
https://github.com/Daivuk/BaboViolent2 (https://github.com/Daivuk/BaboViolent2)

Holy shit man, I was really active back in 2007, skipped many morning classes of UNI, because of playing late into the night where the majority of active players were online. Being one of the first european players back then was hard, thank god for my godly fast uni connection back then :)

i loved the game, we actually played it last year at the local lanparty, everyone was really surprised about it, never heard about it before and it turned out we played it more than other mainstream games that are normally played at lans :)

i'll be monitoring this. too bad bv invasion flopped, i was really excited about the project but then kinda moved on and missed it.

also - i never saw bv1, those particles look cool.

Nice to hear davidp!

Yea, BV2 was the "in between games" game for lan parties. I heard even big regional parties (Hundred of players) ended up wasting all night playing BV2 lol.

I would like to recreate the same level of addiction. With better modding support, better graphics, better gore!

As for Mibi, it didn't flopped. It just wasn't the big "wow" some of us expected. But I have to say, Mibi is such a quality game. The networking engine is so good, we reused it in other projects that support hundred of live connections on one server! And the survival mod was nice in Coop, it's like L4D.

(http://daivuk.com/bv4/BV4ServerEntityReplication.PNG)

This screenshot might not look like much. **Chatting over networking, wow /s**. But it's a HUGE milestone for this project.
Because the way it is done.

In BV4, the network is quite different than BV2. The server sends the full game state at 20fps. With deltas and not sending if value didn't change, but i'll spare the details on this.

It sends entities information, and global variables stored in LUA for each. Chat messages are nothing more than Entities! When you write a chat, it creates a new entity. It has a fade alpha to it, and an offset on the screen. All that data is replicated on the client, because of how entity replication work.

What's cool about this, is joining the game you can see a brief history of chat messages. Also what's even cooler about this, is if I implement a KillCam later on, you will see those replicated messages into the replay! (This might be a bad thing, but its cool)

Anyway, done for the weekend. I consider it at 15% now. I will update my flair at 20% once the client can also request entity creation remotely (Chatting also..).

I played Madballs in Babo:Invasion a lot with a friend, first the coop mode,
then multiplayer matches.
We used to play a lot of games together and I have to say that Babo Invasion
was definitely among the best experiences we had.

Looking forward to see your new project evolve.

Nice to hear jcstranger!
BV4 is not on the scope of Madballs tho. It's a very small project. No AI and such (Unless someone makes a mod ;))

Whaaat, a new babo? That's awesome to hear, David.

Also,

"Angry Birds in... Babo: Revolutions"

Ehh ehh? *shoudler nudging*

Definitely needs more subtitle.

Babo Violent 4: Reviolent

PS. Congrats on the fatherhood!

Another big milestone this morning. Each client can now spawn and move around and control their owned entity while the other players can see it move around.
(http://daivuk.com/bv4/BaboNetworked.jpg)

Chat messages also go both ways using Client created Entities.

I've also started to layout a bit the modding API documentation. (Incomplete)
http://daivuk.com/bevg/modding/api/ (http://daivuk.com/bevg/modding/api/)
http://daivuk.com/bevg/modding/api/reference/entity.html (http://daivuk.com/bevg/modding/api/reference/entity.html)

This helps me design a better API. Because while writing it, I see flaws and correct them in the engine.
Also it's in plain HTML without CSS for now. So ignore the formatting.

I think this is amazing, can't wait for a new Babo  :). In case some of you readers want to try out old BV2 go to http://www.baboviolent.net for download of servers, clients and mods.
Anyways Daivuk: Go! Go! Go! I say

So good to see that the project is moving along!
Just here to show some support, we're with you, Daivuk! ;)

Registered after seeing a reply on the old BV 2 Facebook fan page. Just wanted to give a nod Daivuk. There is still a very special place in today's market for a TRUE indie game like babo. In fact of argue that for a slightly older type of gamer,  who remembers the gaming scene before massive publishers had a hand in every avenue of gaming.  Back when a stand alone game client was exciting within itself. I really hope this is able to continue along.  I still have the babo Xbox faceplate on my x360 console, check in on the Facebook group etc...

I know if I found this and got excited the old competitive scene/group shouldn't be to difficult to reach, as well as appealing to another brand new crowd as well!

Keep it up david! It sound like you are on the money with trying to keep the babo SPIRIT alive with this!

I'll definitely be keeping up on this.

Sorry but I don't think I can continue working on that for now.
The baby is taking all of my time... When I started it I was in parental leave so I ended up with more time.

When I have time it's like 1h here and there. This game would be too big and require more attention. Mostly because it has to be better than BV2 otherwise it's not worth the time.

So I'll focus on smaller projects and game jams for now as I can just do stuff quickly.

Sorry if I created a hype on this.