For now I'd just like to announce that I've finished my initial pre-alpha bug fixing and added a nice new feature: I now can address balancing issues without having to compile and debug the code! That should finally get me the solution for the load of balancing issues we have.

Additionally, I've managed to add the thunderhammer and stormshield to the game! Looks stunning and should actually be useful since I managed to add the sprinting ability to the terminator captain. Decided to add it generally (that means no matter which weapon he uses) because that's the way these kind of abilities are usually treated in my code. We'll see if that is a feasible decision during test.

And here comes the new alpha release:

http://www.rivalspecies.com/files/rspecies_1260_u3_full.zip
http://www.rivalspecies.com/files/rspecies_1260_u3_to_1264.zip

I may update the second file as I move along and fix initial test stopping bugs.

I've tested the long talked about robots and found a couple of bugs that I will work on during the next days. That means the server is only sporadically up! If you want the server up for balance testing:

Join the #rspecies1 IRC channel on quakenet and tell me, I can put it up anytime.

Remember though, that you will need a testing buddy to play with (and it is not going to be me, since I'm occupied fixing the mentioned bugs).

goes without saying that I'm gonna rebalance the weapons :-). Same money should get you same dps, basic rule.

Well, id say its only the sergeant that can take this weapon and have a sprint ability, not the normal termies. then wecan finally give the assaultcannon to everyone :-). and i hope to get the launchers in!

Great to read somebody still cares :-).
I might even get a new stable version with help of the bots.
And its almost solo... kudos to Zenarion, Chromeangel, Eltharyon and possibly others that I'm sorry for not listing.

And in other news:
http://www.darkmillenniumonline.com/

That thing will make real what our wildest dreams were about :-).

I'd like can take a little look at the decline of this project at this random point in time, because it is a warm summer day in Sweden :-). I won't waste my (and your, if there still should be somebody out there reading this) time with a lot of words, but this much:

This project has been running low both on the fan and the dev side for years now. Basically it is me doing some stuff and some occasional contributions from different former team members. So in case you didn't realize that before, there are no large hops to be expected. On the other hand, we do have a new weapon (as mentioned before) and it is even decided that it'll be a Terminator weapon. That will require us to give the terminator sergeant a sprint ability (otherwise, he will never be able to charge someone with his big hammer and just be a sitting duck somewhere). On the other hand, we can give free access to the Assaultcannon (and will probably remove the powerfist from that combination for balance reasons).

This decision has against my hopes never been discussed openly, since the only comment on the news post was a reference to old times music :-). Very fitting... .

The second information concerning our decline is: Since we don't seem to have any players anymore, it has become extremely important to replace them with artificial players. So far I have finished a prototype of a linux server program that can run agents on our server (yes, we have a server, it is not online, but I could put it online any time). I'm currently making progress in porting the prototype to the windows platform (as I need that for development issues) and there is 'only' a basic socket communication left to implement.

Edit: And by some pure luckshot I managed to finish the step mentioned above :-D. So now we do have both windows and linux socket servers that work with the agent based robot system. Next step is to integrate them with the actual game server and then we basically have a new release that can support some stupid robots that run around and play pace car. My protocol shall later include control of the combat and entity interaction, but for the beginning, that will be handled by the followbot code. All the agent is gonna do, is decide for the robot where to go and which team, class, weapon to take. That should be sufficient to fill the server with loads of stupid targets to fire all kinds of weapons at and occasionally get shot in the head ;-).

Edit 2: First screenshot of an agent robot ingame :-D.



Edit 3: Yay, the agent is actually appearing correctly and even shooting at me when I'm on the opposite team!

Edit 4: He is now even aiming properly, switching weapons, using grenades and doesn't crash the server anymore when he kills me or another followbot. Additonaly, some minor bugs are fixed (score in scoreboard, recoil etc...).

Edit 5: He is even respawning correctly when dying and his stupid colleague (the followbot) is working correctly against him. Now it's really just the navigation that is missing for his first test appearance.

Edit 6: Fixed another couple of bugs concerning his movement, collision detection, menu behavior and added the feature to deliver the map name to the navigation code (important when trying to keep track of which routes were good ones).

Some modeling progress on the old and dusty agenda! It has been ages since the last. (A little more than a year to be more correct.)



The last step has been done by Zenarion and my humble self, finishing the stormshield to make this a powerful close combat combination. Now the question is out: Who is supposed to use it and how should it work? Feel free to comment :-).

rules vs gameplay ;-). I'm glad we had astonishingly few discussions about that during our lifetime. Well in this case, we do have a balancing problem. Additionally, I'm sure we have larger lacks concerning the rules. I've never been eager to run for the rules. instead however, doing the easiest thing to balance the classes. in this case the IW warsmith is sadly a but inferior to the BT captain, because the captain has a plasma pistol.