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[Melly]

I think that if you're going to release it to the public you might as well do it from your website, making sure your name's in the game and stuff.

[Mailman]

This looks nice, the way you use the weapons as tools also is very interesting. I'm excited to see the final product.

[JP]

Rather than an even vaguely coherent writeup, you kids get an IRC log for a dev update today.


<JPL> bezzy, i'm sorry i haven't checked out your K2 stuff yet.
<Bezzy> is no worries
<Bezzy> i am adding sounds now
<JPL> whew
<JPL> i just managed to get the bom warp view interpolation working... something i believe you suggested yeeaars ago.
<JPL> it really makes the teleport feel not-confusing.
<JPL> so, yay.
<JPL> tried a lot of different approaches, all but the last were frustrating blind alleys.
<Campster> How's it work?
<JPL> well, when you hit a bom shell (the translucent sphere around the little projectile) with your trase attack, you warp to the hit location.
<JPL> and the problem with warping a lot is that, even though you're traveling along your aim vector, the pop can be confusing sometimes.
<JPL> so i do something tricky with cg.refdef.vieworg
<JPL> so it looks like you're moving to the new location really quickly, when in fact you've already warped there.
<JPL> i need to render the player's avatar so it's clearer... an out of body experience so to speak.
<JPL> still a lot of bugs to fix where the player can warp into solid geometry though
<JPL> in Q3, all the teleport points are level designer placed, so they're guaranteed to be in negative space.  not so here.  i can test to see if we encroach easily enough, but the tougher part is moving the warp location, if that's the case, to a new "safe" spot.
<JPL> but that's for another time.  i'm totally burnt for the rest of today.

[Corpus]

Oh, you're JPL? Makes sense, I suppose.

Anyway, I've been watching this thread intermittently and I'm really looking forward to seeing how this game turns out. It looks incredibly stylish.

[JP]

Update: still chipping away at the "no warp into solid geometry" bug.  Asked around on this Q3 engine programming forum.  Progress towards solution documented therein.

[Hideous]

I assume we will be able to create our own maps some time with GTKradiant (or similar)?

[JP]

I assume we will be able to create our own maps some time with GTKradiant (or similar)?

Yep!  That's what I'm using to make the maps, and I've created a custom entity definition file, which is in SVN right now.  Once the game hits 1.0 I'll package it up so people can easily install it and make content.

[Hideous]

Awesomesauce. I'll be there.

[JP]

Busy stressful milestone week at work, so of course I relax by coming home to slave over a hot debugger.

I've claimed victory over the warp bug, solution detailed here for those who are fascinated by sentences that use the word "trace" a lot.

And with this, I think all of Purity's core verbs are implemented.  I've put together a build and tested it on Linux and Windows via netplay.  I may pop into IRC this weekend and link interested folks to it and we can have a little playtest.

Still many miles to go before it's really playable and fun of course.  I think the next few additions and improvements will be in the realm of feedback - making it clear what the heck is going on.

[JP]

On Saturday I sent a build to Bezzy and we spent some time playtesting it.  Some very useful input and insights gained, most of which boil down to feedback issues.  Which is to say, there's a decent amount of stuff in the game right now that's "in and working", but it's not immediately obvious, to someone who doesn't already understand the game, how it works.

So most of my time since then has been spent shoring up this aspect of the game: HUD, in-world visual feedback for events, putting fx on things that had just happened invisibly before.  I knew I'd need all this stuff, I'd just been putting it off until a certain critical mass of things were working.  Well, now they are, and before I can in good conscience give you folks a build to play around with, I need to make it possible for you to discover how the game works just by fiddling around with it - this isn't GalCiv or anything, it's a very simple game and there's no excuse not to hold to this standard.

In general this stuff is the less acknowledged half of good game design - if a mechanic is elegant or perfectly tuned or shockingly innovative but no-one can understand it, does it really even exist?

On the tech side, seeing if anything can be done about lightmaps.

[JP]

Was on a business trip the past week, but laptop allowed me to get a fair bit of work done in spare moments.  Minor item of which is (most exciting thing ever!) an overhaul of my task list to be more of a full roadmap for the game's development, up to the full 1.0 release.  Those of you who care enough (all 0 of you) can follow my progress towards that on the SVN changelog.

So clearly I was premature in promising a build you guys could play with... consider this my sheepish apology.  Hopefully now that I've set some explicit conditions for the pre-alpha milestone, it will be clear how far along I am towards that goal.

I want to show off some of the HUD work I've been doing, but because it's animated feedback for fairly quick game events, it makes almost no sense with still screenshots.  So maybe I should set up a youtube or vimeo account and post some videos (ioQ3 has the ability to capture AVIs from the console, so it's pretty easy).  What video site are the cool kids using for their promo vids these days?

[Bezzy]

YouTube is featuring up, recently - there are some excellent stats tracking graphs in the user back end. You can also add little text bubbles to help explain the video or give text commentary or whatever.

However, YouTube's video quality still pales in comparison to vimeo's. I guess I'd say, do both, but at a pinch, go Vimeo. It still allows embedding etc.

[Eclipse]

loving the art and the gameplay idea 

[agj]

This game looks lovely. I'm not a big fan of FPSs, but this looks to be everything that FPSs aren't: interesting aesthetically, fun to move in. I approve!

[PowRTocH]

I'm looking forward to this, so much. You don't even know.

[dcalogue]

I like the style, and loved the inspirational video 90 degrees. Hope to see more soon

I just found the Naissance mod on RPS (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1974), going to install Far Cry so I can get a good look at it.

David

[JP]

Hi folks, thanks so much for the interest and encouragement.  I've been busy finishing up a few things for pre-alpha and putting together a demo video that shows off some basics.  Hope to have that up soon.

[JP]

First evar world exclusive video

.  Text makes it reasonably self-explanatory.  Eager to hear what people think.

[Melly]

Looking decidedly sexy.

What are the minimum system requirements?

[JP]

Looking decidedly sexy.

What are the minimum system requirements?

Very modest.  Probably not too much higher than these.  Those still on a 486 may want to upgrade though.