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[JP]

A few things over the past few days.  I've implemented a few more features of the Bom attack, but most of my time has gone into troubleshooting a problem involving trail systems that don't get destroyed properly when their associated client entities go away.  Fortunately, there's at least one example of this working properly in the Tremulous codebase I can look at.

Some weeks you spend grappling with interesting design questions, some weeks you spend tracking down annoying little bugs just to make things work.

[Melly]

Some weeks you spend grappling with interesting design questions, some weeks you spend tracking down annoying little bugs just to make things work.

Welcome to game development.

[Inane]

Some weeks you spend grappling with interesting questions, some weeks you spend tracking down annoying little things just to make things work.

Welcome to life.

[GP Lackey]

JP, this is a very cool sounding project.  I love the idea of building a game on these different modes of movement, which if I'm not mistaken were initially emergent features in Quake and the like?

Just a tangent on the aesthetic choices.  If you haven't seen it there's a mod for FarCry called Naissance that's kind of an abstract adventure.  There's some parts resembling puzzles but mostly they're just navigation related.  Anyway it looks like it was directly influenced by that period of modern art:

Check out the video at that link, for sure.

I had recreated one of the architektons you showed in the fist post in Hammer once but I seem to have misplaced my screenshot of it 

[Hideous]

Oh dude, that's fucking sweet.

[JP]

GP, that is bloody gorgeous.  Thanks so much for linking it, I had no idea of its existence before.  Leave it to the Frenchies to create something so austere and beautiful.

What gave me a bit of relief is that Purity is significantly different in terms of mechanics.  Where Naissance seems to be mostly about strolling through the spaces and absorbing the atmosphere, Purity has the crazy movement, dueling and color elements.  So, mash that up with this Warsow trickjumping video for a rough idea.

[Akhel]

Holy SHIT, Naissance looks really fucking amazing. So much potential! I may have to download buy, in a completely legal way, FarCry just to play it.

[GP Lackey]

Yeah I don't think you have any reason to worried about being mixed up with Naissance, if anything it's just another source to draw inspiration from.  Besides, more people could try variations on this style and I would be quite happy about it.

Where Naissance seems to be mostly about strolling through the spaces and absorbing the atmosphere, Purity has the crazy movement, dueling and color elements.

Another angle on this is that Naissance is about setpieces created by the author where purity sounds like it will be heavily focused on the player created experience.  The two are very different.

Have you thought much about how you're going to do level design or is it too early still?

[Melly]

Damn, I can't access the Naissance website for some reason. Can someone provide with a mirror?

[JP]

Have you thought much about how you're going to do level design or is it too early still?

On the technical side, Q3 engine has a great editor called Radiant that I have a lot of experience with, so I can rough out lots of strange architecture fairly quickly with it.

Design wise, the geometry of a given map will be driven to some extent by the game mode it's designed to support.  Solo.Run or Duel.Run maps will be like big 3D racetracks, or maybe some of the more outlandish Mario Galaxy levels.  Duel.Attack maps does will be like Rocket Arena maps - smallish, high-connectivity combat terrain.  Within that, there's a huge expanse of possible ideas.

Aesthetics are the part where I have the most prototyping (previsualization, to use the more domain-appropriate term) to do.  I could spend 6 months making a single space that looks as nice as any given frame of

, but that would completely sabotage my goal of being able to continually support Purity after it hits 1.0 with new maps and mutations (mods).  So I have to develop a style, and a way of executing that style in the engine, that doesn't require a huge amount of painstaking detail work.  I think that's possible, but it will take some exploration.

[GP Lackey]

I didn't think to look up 90 degrees after the first post.  Great stuff. I suspect the guy who made Naissance (Mavros) saw this since some of the sound an imagery in the beginning of it is fairly similar.

So I have to develop a style, and a way of executing that style in the engine, that doesn't require a huge amount of painstaking detail work.  I think that's possible, but it will take some exploration.

I don't suppose your offloading a lot of that stuff to rendering effects and the like?

Oh, sorry to distract again but I found it

All the little blocks are jump and crouch jump height so you can hop around on it.

[JP]

I don't suppose your offloading a lot of that stuff to rendering effects and the like?

To the extent that I can, yes.  I don't know much about low-level rendering code, so I probably won't be able to add significant new features, but art assets and clever use of Q3's shading language might be able to get most of the way there.  And one of the benefits of using ioquake3 is that other people have added new features to it like cel shading and framebuffer efffects, so I can integrate those patches where needed.

Oh, sorry to distract again but I found it

All the little blocks are jump and crouch jump height so you can hop around on it.

Lovely!  Some of my early test maps have a similar look.

[MekanikDestructiwKommando]

This looks really cool.

[JP]

I've claimed victory over that annoying bug.  Depressing thing was, it was happening due to a "fix" I made to the trails code a few weeks back... this is why I still don't go around claiming to be a real programmer.  Everything works fine with the fix for the fix in place (saga documented in the bug report linked here).

To celebrate, here's a shot of some bom projectiles bouncing around happily with proper trails and extra cheese:



Next up: one of those "interesting design problems", the bom warp ability!

[Bezzy]

Could you do massive damage along the line you teleport along, perhaps? Like, it becomes a rail-gun shot with your own body? Would that be abuse able, or skillful (like the Shock Rifle Combo in UT?), or even too hard to be useful (lining up the bom, the enemy, and yourself, and then getting the shot - rare!).

[Dim_Yimma_H]

The green "Bom" explosion looks beautiful. Because it's green, as a surprising contrast to the special gray environment art.

I think you should add a similar colorful contrast on the white trails. So instead of white they could be, let's say sky blue or something and look even nicer. (They were glowing blue in an early screenshot, so maybe you have something like that planned. Or will you use the pencil trails? They look great. )

[JP]

Would that be abuse able, or skillful (like the Shock Rifle Combo in UT?), or even too hard to be useful (lining up the bom, the enemy, and yourself, and then getting the shot - rare!).

Could be any of those.  I like the general idea of player-as-damage-modus though.  The warp ability is kind of a hybrid of UT's shock combo and translocator - a combo combo, if you will - only much easier to hit on the move, in keeping with Purity's idea that all the L337 trickjumping stuff should be doable by normal humans, so that the stuff really skilled players can do is even more amazing.

[JP]

Just now got the bom warp ability working.  Very pleased at how relatively simple it was to do... broadphase with trap_EntitiesInBox(), then do RaySphereIntersections() only on the player's own currently active projectiles.  The warp is pretty much a VQ3 teleport minus the fx, plus you keep your velocity.  The visual feedback for a successful warp will be a whole separate challenge, but for the time being it's helped by the fact that you're always traveling along your aim vector (no confusing switches in direction).

To explain a bit of what I've been yammering about:
(from the Readme in SVN)

Every attack in Purity is also a movement tool:
- Puls projectiles produce splash momentum, which can be used to propel yourself away from surfaces and climb walls.
- Bom projectiles produce an implosive force, or become teleport points when hit with the Trase.
- The beam of the Trase attack grapples towards or repels from specially marked surfaces.
- Engaging the Spheer attack when you collide with a surface will bounce you away from it like billiard ball.

The Puls, Sphear and Trase attacks were working first, and only recently I've added the Bom attack and its associated movement effect.  It's quite fun to use, again if you're the kind of player who loved the translocator in UT you'll appreciate this.

Bom attack has always been the one core verb (out of the 4) in the design I feel is most in danger of being cut.  Puls attack is straightforward and very versatile, Trase is the other big obvious archetype (instant hit), Sphear is melee-esque and the movement effect is very useful and unique.  Bom is the indirect fire attack, eg grenade launcher or Tribes fusion mortar.  It's a little more complex and a little harder to use in a duel.  So I'm glad it's in now so I can start exploring how it changes movement and fighting.  Still possible I might axe it, but it will certainly get its day in court.

The combination of trase shot beam, player trail and bom projectile trail produced by a warp leaves a nice unique visual glyph in the sky:





As for visuals, it's worth reiterating that these are all placeholder / first pass.  I'm in "get everything working" mode, so any time I spend on art content is just to provide clear feedback that roughly suggests the aesthetic, and learning what all is possible with the engine's (really quite nifty for its time) shader system.  Hopefully the final result will have all the clarity and boldness of this temp stuff, but with some more analogue textural bits you can marvel at in screenshots.  None of that yet though.

[Melly]

So, any idea of when you should get this working? I'm interested in seeing the results. Should I wait a year or two?

[JP]

So, any idea of when you should get this working? I'm interested in seeing the results. Should I wait a year or two?

Well, lots of stuff is working right now.  As for when the first playable build will be out... I'm terrible at estimating how long tasks take.  I can give my criteria for "pre-alpha" though, and go by however long that takes:

- all attacks working in netplay - this part is pretty much done!
- in-world text feedback (help messages, scoring)
- crosshair and world feedback for various surface mods (so you have some idea of what a grapple/repel surface does, when your shot has hit a noimpact surface, etc)
- start/goal entities tied to a level timer, so you can race against someone
- some non-test levels that are good sandboxes for the core mechanics

I suppose I could do a pre-pre-alpha build sooner and just release to interested folks on IRC or something.  Maybe I will, once I've tested and stabilized the latest additions, just so people can play around with the attacks.  Hmm.