quick v0.6 status update from eggman

[R@ge]

It has Been a while since eggman gave an update.
It's cuz they're busy heh. he's also been super busy with some real life stuff.

eggman decribe a typical problem with the development cycles;
about half way through they discover something really cool, then increase the release scope to bring y'all that cool new stuff.
This time around it has been 1km view distances and 17 sq km maps. eggman were going to hold off until v0.7, but just couldn't resist

Adding 1km view distances has created a need to revisit a lot of aspects of the weapon systems. Most were set up for the current and vBF2 maps where engagement ranges are typically 400m. We've had to do a lot of tweaking and testing to get the weapon to perform correctly at 1000m engagement ranges (for example some projectiles were expiring from the world at 860m, which was never noticed previously because you coudn't shoot anybody that far away).

NOTE: not all maps are going to have these sort of view distances.. we've enabled this capability but have spent quite a bit of time tweaking and learning how to get it right. Some maps simply won't support this long of a view range.

On Kashan Desert the CPs are a LONG distance apart and the map takes a long time to drive / fly around. There is a lot of transport provided for Infantry. In addition the entire military complex pictured below is a CP group of 2 flags and the area is only accessible to Infantry. The military complex is about 1.6 sq km .. or the size of a small BF2 map heh. The CP flags are about 400m apart. With lots of cover for Infantry to advance and lots of places to set rally points and bunkers.

Astute folks will notice that the flag icon in the foreground is drawing, but the one about 500m away is not. I *think* we've managed to reduce the flag icon draw distance, which should greatly clean up the HUD. Still have to test that with Punkbuster which can often complain about name tag changes.

*note that this map is still heavily WIP .. lightmaps are not even rendered.



We've also been working on some new destroyable buildings for a while now. There's an entirely new set that matt.b calls "explodistan".

All the buildings in this village are destroyable. One cool thing about them is that tanks can smash through the walls and the buildings



Here's a couple of buildings and a bridge before:


And after:



As always we're going to intriduce some new game play concepts with v0.6. Aside from continuing on our planned set of changes to the commander role and spawning system, we're introducing our own hacked up concepts of "wave spawning". But uh.. not what you think hehe.

On one particular map we are spawning the heavy assets on a 20 minute reinforcement "wave" timer (APCs, AAVs, Tanks, Aircraft). The way it works is that you get a set of vehicles at the outset that do NOT respawn. These vehicles and some "temporary" spawn points are set up to get some skirmishes and battles going right away.

Then there is a set of vehicles that are not spawned until 20 minutes into the round. They respawn every 20 minutes. They are inside a "dome of death" so only the friendly team can get at them. The way these spawners are set up teams are rewarded for keeping their vehicles alive because they will spawn a maximum of 2 vehicles for each spawner. So if the first vehicle is still alive, you will get a second one (but not a third one if the first 2 from that vehicle spawner are alive).

There are multiple game play dynamics we want to affect with this, but the most important ones are:
- make vehicles a rare and valued asset
- encourage vehicles to roll together
- reward teams that keep the vehicles alive

We released another alpha build last week and are about to release the final v0.6 alpha. After that we'll hopefully have a beta pretty shortly, and then an open beta test.

Things are a lil rough around the edges atm, but we are making good progress.

Source @ realitymod.com

[K_Shizzle]

Thanks for the updates r@ge. Front paged.

[grim reaper]

Just keeps getting better with every update. That 1km view distance sounds awesome.