I won't pretend that it hasn't almost killed me ... but after a gazzillion issues ... it's up. A fast and long gametype to play, doubled by having day and night missions. Entirely randomized enemy and tactics, should be good for a few replays.
Dubious Demo 2 ... this time ... it's random ...
Function creep appeared, and instead of a fast and long game ... you've got 2 fast and 2 long games. Technically it's the same level, but now there are also night missions.
Talking of function creep, I also came up with a basic hit detection for close range which I wasn't originally planning.
Anyhow, it goes like this:
You've 2 gametypes, night and day, night is short ranged weapons only
This is a demo of a randomized gameplay concept, it's a first person shooter, and the idea was to make it somewhere inbetween the all action silliness of "Call of Lawyers" and the unfair realism of Arma/Operation Flashpoint". Weapon ranges go out to 400m and bullets are dangerous than in most Shooters.
There are 4 availabe gametypes: Clear Area Clear Area Night Fast Assault Night Assault
Clear Area is split into 5 areas, each one must be cleaered of enemy before you can proceed to another. Start area is random, after that each area is chosen by the player by entering it - check your map. Inside each area there is a random playtype - "Clearance" (enemy randomly placed throughout area), "Strongpoint", enemy are all around one building (or sometimes 2), and "Counterattack", as "Clearance" but the enemy will aggressively defend and counterattack. Even without counterattack, all short ranged enemies will defend around their area. Player starts with random weapons, one longrange, one shortrange.
Night missions are the same, but with reduced vision and shortranged weapons only. Player starts with random weapons, one shotgun, one smg.
...
... infact ...
There's a readme ... so read it ... there's also a license on install with tips ... read them too ... also there's info in the game on how to play it ... it should all be fairly straight forwards ... hopefully. And if you spam me with issues which I've listed in the readme ... I will kill you ... to death! (flares nostrils)
Many thanks to orb for the bandwidth. There's a full list of credits in the readme, and also in the Credits page of the game which details pretty much everything I've used in constructing this.
And the direct link. Dubious Demo 2 (125mb) Windows only ... I'm not fashionable enough for a Mac ...
I was about to go to a little country pub to celebrate ... but there's black ice all over the drive and after a bit of wheel spinning I'll be staying in with a beer and chilli.
With construction of a vaguely working alpha demo in progress, I was hammering away at the splash screen license obligations ... a glance to irc and wtf everybody's just got sacked that worked on the engine tech I use ...
So, it's been user interface work recently, and additional gametype ... err ... types.
I'd been quite chuffed with my implementation of a randomized gametype, and had expanded on the initial idea. There were 5 open areas of a 2km level, the player was randomly equipped and initially randomly spawned at one area and each area had to be cleared in any order the player fancied. Random numbers of Enemy Ai were randomly spread through each area, and randomly armed with either short or long range weapons depending on what sort of view they had. Hiding inside a house = short range, view from a window or rooftop = long range.
I figured I could throw in a few more random ideas to increase gameplay, and so came up with strongpoints and counterattacks on top of clearance ... which happen ... randomly. Thus each area could be a standard clearance operation where the player had to hunt down each Enemy spread throughout the area, but now it could also be an assault against a randomly chosen building crowded with hostile Ai, or the enemy Ai would come looking for trouble when they heard allies shooting ... but only halfway from their defensive position to player spawn area to prevent spawnkills. Regardless of random tactic type, all short-range weaponed Ai always counterattacked over a very short distance to prevent themselves being picked off at range, that way long-ranged Ai would stay put to provide supporting fire whilst short-ranged would be mobile around the goal node.
First attempt at Ai pathfinding in level
And I'd managed to fit in my "anti last man standing" idea, where the allied Ai swarm over the location of the last remaining enemy, thus preventing those frustrating "can't find the last bad guy to finish the level" type issues which can occur with such things.
I gave the player 3 respawns per area, and had dead Ai drop either ammunition, grenades or a small health pack. Each area took me around 20 minutes to play through, and taking down all 5 areas of the map could take 2 hours. So I made a "fast gametype".
Level Selection and Fast Game Mode
Fast gametype was a random strongpoint attack in a single area, with a slightly more beefed up number of random enemies to guarentee plenty of action. This made me think of a few variations for additional gametypes ... but ... y'know ... one thing at a time.
As ever, I found a gazzilion issues with everything I did, great swathes of script wrote at 5am that were never going to function properly in the cold light of day, and various other bugs that got stomped on and features that got relentlessly tweaked.
All this new stuff needed a user interface. Not just for mission selection, but also the type of instructions and info that you'd expect, such as what the controls are and what the differences between the various weapons are.
First Attempt at user interface that vaguely makes sense
I also thought that it might be a good idea to explain what the hell the whole thing is ... plus I then had to look through all of my stuff to see what I'd used. Now, I have attempted to do as much as I can almost all of the audio is my own - but I couldn't get a good fire/burning loop, but everything else is self done. All of the models are hamfistedly made, rigged, textured, animated by myself. I used various self shot photos for base texture templates and tiled them myself ... and then got the rest of the templates from on-line. Fonts and music weren't even worth my attempting and so were straight off licensed from the start. I haven't even looked at Fmod Ex yet, having just thrown in the audio dll. And that's all this stuff takes so much time.
Credit Page attempt 2
And then there were some annoying issues. My pathfinding is based on a waypoint resource, though it hasn't scaled well to such a large and open environment. I've got a level with a lot of changes in height and direction and the sheer number of waypoint style objects for the Ai to navigate around the whole thing has eaten 25 percent of my performance - which is annoying ...
But currently ... that's how my alpha demo will be going out. Afterwards I'll have to take a look at nodegrids and maybe other solutions as a replacement.
Also I need to do a bit of 2D artwork to "tart" it up a bit, and 2 of my buildings are still placeholders. And there's some functions hacking I think I might try as a performance test ...
But all in all, we're well on our way ... and ... allegedly ... I should be able to crank out a rough but playable demo full of issues by the end of November. Which is 12 days away ... awww hell ...
Environment Completed ... Sort of - oh wait ... haven't I already used that blog title? And actually it's the same level! But things have slightly changed ... if "slightly" really meant "quite a jolly lot". 2km of open game world, with 838 random AI spawnpoints - count 'em.
Click the pics to view them full size if you're squinting.
Right-ho, so what have we got? One 2km map with full drawdistance. 88 buildings, 34 of which are fully open, furnished and lightmapped for a bit of extra vavavoom - because blank shadowed interiors are boring on the eye. 178 random props such as telephone boxes and pillar (post) boxes - it just wouldn't be England without big red things in the street - regardless of the fact that the red telephone box has been killed off and replaced by things that look like transparent urinals ... which they often become at 2am on a Friday night.
Bus stops, benches, litter bins with amusing messages, petrol (gas) stations with amusing messages, other stuff with amusing messages, old style lamp-posts (which you can still find in places - in fact I know a pub that doesn't have electricity, but is still using Victorian gas lighting! It's as dark as hell and you get stoned off the fumes but it's "quaint" and they do a good pale ale) ... and then there's trees and shrubs, which all gently rustle in the wind thanks to the wind vertex shading. In fact there's 1600+ of them ... thank Sickhead for imposters.
LOD like hell!
And then there's the actual gameplay kinda stuff. I did promise ... possibly just myself ... brain far too frazzled by all of this, for correct retrieval of memories ... to have something resembling the randomized gameplay which I'd conceived.
So to such an affect, I had a good long hard think about how best to do it. Spawning a shedload of AI at the startup seemed out - both in terms of playability and performance. So I decided to split the whole level into areas - 5 of them.
So, there's 5 areas, and the player starts off in one of them - randomly. That area then becomes active, and spawns a random number of enemy Ai which seek to defend that area. They're randomly armed depending on their goal position - so if they've got a long view they'll have a long range weapon (rifles, lmgs), and if they're hiding in a small room away from the windows they'll have a short range weapon (shotguns, smgs). And there's a random chance of them having grenades. Each area has between 150 and 200 random spawn/goal nodes. So there's a fair bit of available randomization.
Never let it be said that I'm not a sucker for a crap joke :P
There's a random number of these Ai spawning, anywhere between 5 and 24, so each play-through an area will be different, sometimes a "bughunt" with lots of jumping around corners quietly hunting the enemy down at close range (which does get quite tense when the prolonged silence suddenly shatters with closeby gunfire), to large scale firefights at multiple ranges from many directions. There's also the trouble of spotting and identifying targets at long ranges, often a case of following the incoming tracer back to it's origin, the enemy all but hidden, crouched behind a window cill or lying under a bush at 200-300 metres, so at long ranges you end up putting a lot of fire down on "areas" rather than targets, a la Full Specturm Wariior or IRL as it's also called. :P
It does give the feel of battle which I've been looking for ... dangerous and confusing without being unfair (ArmA I'm looking at you!). It's coming along and as much as "one bloke, in his bedroom, trying to make computer games" can create the halfway house between the arcade style of Call of Lawyers and the anal (if blatantly unfair) realism of ArmA/original-OFP.
And this style of working gameplay also showed up a few issues with my Ai. Mainly that it took a while for them to go through their attention routines at close range, they'd hear you walking up the steps, but it'd take a while to increment through their thought processes to become panic-range alert, and a fast moving player could confront them before they were as ready as they should have been, and thus get a few seconds drop on them. So this, I fixed, and instead of incrementing the alert, they jump to which ever is neccessary (but not from full unalert status so they can still be surprised - though in this type of "all action - non narrative" gameplay I use a hack so they're always on-guard).
The slogan was going to be "Bringing Oil To Your Shores!" but I thought that joke might be too subtle
Once one area is clear, you can choose another by simply moving into it. And to give you some help, there's a map which shows the areas ... in fact an entire SitRep overlay, where your weapons/ammo and mission status are displayed. The map shows all tehhe roads and major buildings as well as anything else of interest (first aid stations!), but it's a static map, no updating dynamic object positions. You have to use your view of the objects around you to orientate yourself to where you are ... just like real life! And yes, I am a cartographyvert. Google Earth ... oh baby ... you're so hawt ... show me those hillocks ...
Okeedokee, that's what I've done ... now what I still need to do.
Models - still need a church, and one other "special building" that can get reused for a few things, think slightly grand, I still need a train station, a general building with an open interior and internal balcony (like a pub I know in Scarborough).
A couple of other props, a coach/minibus which I'll probably convert from a truck and a police car, which will be a USAFB Security car with a different paint job.
AI - Currently my Ai is static, there's no pathfinding in this level, and the sheer size and openness of the environment is gonna take a bit of extra thinking about ... not least how to get a gazzilion pathnodes in there in the easiest manner possible - though limited early tests went fairly well.
Then it's sorting out a friendly Ai system, and I don't think the classic system of "trigger-directs-to-nodes" is going to work on something of this scale ... or they'd be a whole lot of triggers and nodes ... and there's already plenty of them. So I'm currently thinking of having the allied Ai as a sort of "escort force", dynamically keeping themselves to pathfinding within a short distance of the player, and then rushing off to target threats which reveal themselves. I've also thought long and hard about "lastguy-itus", where the player has swept through an area but just missed the final, lone enemy. If it gets down to just one badguy left, I'm thinking of having the ally Ai just charge his position. There is nothing as annoying as searching for one last asshole hidden behind a closet ...
As for the enemy Ai, I need to stop them spawning where the player can see them when a new area is activated - easy enough to have them spawn away from their goal and then move to it. I also need to setup a counterattack situation where hostile Ai may randomly enmasse charge the player team. I also need them to be more proactive at defending their own positions, thus randomly again, having some short-range based Ai hunt the player down through their house when they hear them enter it, rather than just wait for the player to run into their room.
And that's about it so far. I do have "some" kind of gameplay in a large, 2km open area. And performance is good for it all too, looking at the magical 60+ fps at x1080 with normal settings.
And here's a little vid of said randomized gameplay, looks better in 720 HD @ youtube of course. I've been toying with a "zoom/ADS mask" which features in this vid, but I've since changed it as the original restricted vision way too much. This is unedited and lasts about 8 minutes.
