Release ?

[aiaf]

I want to do a release for the community with what we have now.

All ok with this ?

Problem is i dont have much time lately, and i want to focus back on another game i worked for long time and put it on steam.

Tell me what you think.We have some really good stuff here with good potential.

Learned lot of things and want to thank everyone who contributed so far , especially Mdgunn,Slas and Thirsty.

 

I will make a release with current 3 levels, if all ok,

and ill be around and help if people decide to come back.

 

[Thirsty Panther]

Sounds good to me.

[mdgunn]

Looks like I may be getting a bit more freed up to try to help pull together a release.

I'm fine if you want to move on. Totally understandable. 

I got to do some things I'd never done which is great.

I might go on to take things a bit further.

I checked out the levels and I think it has the feel of something that could be something.

Personally I would not release these as is but take them just a bit further.

I can probably help with that.

I will see if I can get some ideas together of how I might approach getting something out from where this is now.  Maybe some work can be split up. Hopefully add something later today.

 

 

   

[aiaf]

Rgr then, ill be around , and help when i have the time.

[mdgunn]

Suggested running order for trying to use what we have to put something together which has some linked environments which overall form a coherent story segment. I had a look round the last version of the code and so joined this together based on what seemed to be the intended levels though there may be other assets which could be used and maybe I chose the wrong things.  This may help us tie things together though....

I can probably break this down better into clearer text and break out tasks.  It may be necessary to see who might be able to do what before I spend too much time breaking this down if others don't have too much time to tie these things together.  I don't think I would release what we have without attempting to compose the bits into something which makes sense as a whole....

Here goes.....

In summary I think we can assemble the assets we have into the following prequel experience/demo giving a taste of the game with the following running order:

1. Improved menu with Save/Continue function.  Think even in a demo we should not make users replay levels they complete and this is a simple task to track level.
2. Intro Cinematic - re-use space cube shot and reworked meteor hitting island and ending up in cryo room via camera track.  Though this seems to be non-essential mechanically for the game there is opportunity here with our cryo room and some simple camera moves to establish a simple but engaging start to the game. 
3. Dream Level - Minor environmental improvements and player feedback improvements. Reduce FPS slowdown.
4. Cryo room - Improve a few of the meshes slightly to be script driven objects  (e.g. opening locker or chest so we can hide items there). Finalize the meshes with physics and simple textures with colour accents.  Add simple fetch quests to link game items and together and reveal vague story via dialogs.
5. VR Monolith Teleporter level - Add some environmental interest and break up square linear room into small set of 3 sub-rooms which each are more complete in their structure (less holes) to symbolise us getting the ship systems back online. Think of a cross between Atlas Cube and Q.U.B.E 2 (see google images). Use environment probes, simple reflective textures and some glow effect to get a simple effective look.
6. Exit cyro room to  ship surface/island - Leave room via roof escape tube and show robot enemies emerging from ship vents and about to attack, fade to white...END

If we have more time then we would explore island fight some enemies, get ship/island into the air and do other stuff!

I feel fairly confident that I could get all these bits joined together into coherent experience so what I've mentioned reflects what I think I could personally do on my own if I had to. None are huge complex things to my mind but together there is still quite a bit of time to complete all.  Personally I work a day job have kids and my weekends are not necessarily my own so even with the cut down list above I could see it still take 2-3 weeks to get to the stage that I would be happy to release. 

Here is some expansion of these items. though you may find this hard to follow. 

- In order to inject some colour in the simplest way suggest we pick a basic enemy friendly and neutral colour
- Decide enemy signature color. Red? Enemies will tend to have this colour on them matching cube. 
- Decide on good signature color. Green?  Ship and hero (hand/weapons) will have hint of this.
- Friendly environments/items will tend to have green highlights, enemy red.
- Neutral elements may have blue highlights.  Display planels, environment lights, colour highlights on objects.
This gives us simple way to introduce meaningful colour into levels to avoid pure monochrome.

Preload/Loading screen
- Enhanced Menu Background - Visually upgraded title/menu screen. Shot of metor/cube either static or spinning. 
- New Game/Continue - CONTINUE Menu Should have new game or continue option enabled if user has made it to a certain level (so current level neeeds to be saved to config/storage entry and read back on load)

ESTABLISHING CINEMATIC/IMAGES
 Initially could be still images/renders of these things but I think we can probably get in engine version as we have parts already. Meteor shot we already have with additional planet backdrop/ Cut to meteor coming down near ship vent protrusion and entering through port (simple move platform script or similar). Camera follow on spline path or linear path going down duct to show cube locked positioned in receptable in the bridge/table area of our sci-fi cryo room.   Locking claws close around cube (simple leadwerks rotate script).  Alarms go off and flashing lights.
Camera cuts across room to cryo-tubes.  tube 004 extends from wall (particle effects). Camera moves towards cryo tube where head would be and fades to black while alarms continue to play and artificial voice (or screen text) announces something such as 'Emergency Protocol: Cryo Tube zero zero four, accelerated revival initiated'.

DREAM LEVEL - Pretty good.   Platforms that dropped were a little confusing at first but the simple level traversal mechanic was engaging enough to encourage numerous retries. 
SUGESSTED IMPROVEMENTS -
 Clearer Indication WHEN (NOT WHICH)  platforms drop - Sound indication and would be better if first platform to do this was somehow more in eyeline. maybe you jump down to it so it is clearer when it drops. Perhaps timed camera shake script.
 Visual Goal .  Think it's always good to have a clear visible goal, even if the path there is not a direct line.  Maybe super-sized version of the monolith that you need to move towards. This always adds more visual detail to the level.
 Additional visual details - Think there maybe should be some additional background detail.  Perhaps something that links back to real world like cubes spining and descending in the distance.  This would also add a touch of colour to the scene.  

CRYO CHAMBER
Simple fetch quest within 
Have some simple collection of a few items around the room. 
E.g.  tablet on table initially shows low battery icon (could just be sprite in position over screen).  Then when powered up needs a pincode to be found, pin code hidden in locker in locker.  in game mechanic terms just set 3 boolean flags to and normal ipad operation only triggers when 3 globals (or something similar) are true.
ipad gives some backstory info and spoken password to access VR headset.

When we know password VR Headset on table will activate once we have got the password this will take us to Monolith teleporter puzzle. 

MONOLITH TELEPORTER PUZZLE
Storywise the purpose of this section could be to represent  the user getting the ship sub-systems back online or perhaps just the escape system which will result in the upper escape tube in the cro room to descend and allow access to the surface (which actually the upper surface of the ship grown over with nature - which would be our floating island when the ship is fully restored and airborne - though our story may not go that far).
Currently The puzzle is initially a bit overwhelming but in is actually quite intriguing and suprisingly complex in it's internal structure.  I think the with some better presentation and perhaps done in 4 steps where code 1 is just to operate the right teleporter (like now), step 2 is a 2 step code to ensure user gets it and step 3 is 5 step code.  I think each time the code is complete the user is teleported to a more intact structured level and at the end of the 4 codes the user ends up back at the ship and exiting the VR headset. I strongly think the room needs some simple added visual structure not flat square single level arena.   
I am thinking an 'floating' irregularly structured arena composed of blocks, some of which are missing and some of which are mis-aligned (suggesting a malfunctioning environment) There should be some variation in height to form a simple maze-like structure, but one without walls (and you can fall off).

EXIT SHIP 
After VR section escape tube will descend in cro room.  Player will enter.  The tube will have a lift platform in it to take them the short distance (5-10 m? to the surface).  
After exiting the ship we see nice low poly landscape with some odd vent like structures near by.  From the vents and floating alien enemies (that we have done already) emerge and possibly some floating tanks. We see our hand raise up with an embedded hand blaster weapon, we hear the weapon charge, the enemies continue to close. The screen fades to white and we hear blaster sounds and explosions and sound of  electrical/mechanical sounds of descruction.

 

[mdgunn]

The text above is probably hard to follow so don't worry if you don't fully get it.  If you have different ideas or things you'd prefer to add remove I'm not precious about anything said above.

Also, in the above there is not really a notion of a flying island. If possible I might  try to make it clear that there is a buried ship in the landscape with a distant circling camera shot as the meteor descends or something.  It would be later on that the ship emerges and effectively becomes a flying island.  

If we went further later then we probably would be outside and moving around on the island/ship surface fighting AI but those things although partially developed still need work and due to numerous things interacting player, enemies, environment, health systems, weapons, navigation etc there is a lot that needs to be done to a good standard to be interesting and not feel a bit broken. 

 

[mdgunn]

Added an image to image section showing what broken up block level might be like will play a bit more.  As I didn't do the mechanics I'm avoiding tweaking those but the level layout I think could do with some variety while still allowing the main mechanism to not be broken up and hopefully to add some interest on the way to completing the puzzle.

I will try to do what I can to move forward some of the concepts I mentioned above, not necessarily to get them complete but to show what I mean first too.

 

 

 

[aiaf]

Thats a lot to cover.

I can do this pretty fast 1. Improved menu with Save/Continue function. we have already a method to persist data to disk that is used.

2, Cryo room already have some dialogs, we can add more , but we need a way to highlight the objects that can interact with e key,

 

Like the plan for the cinematic parts.

DREAM LEVEL - We should add more levels like that from time to time, mechanic is fun.

 

MONOLITH TELEPORTER PUZZLE  - intention was to have this level as a way to issue command to island and different rooms and intro story a bit.

I know its a bit overwhelming, best i could do to explain is the current form.And it gets more wild i dont know if you figured out how to use the Select Operation feature

 

At the moment when you finish the level it teleports you to the library room and tell you some bad dramatic event is happening and get you out of Vr mode

back into cryo room , camera is shaking lights are flickering and a red volumetric light travels from window to the dock exit.When it stop you get teleported to level 4.

 

Level 4 was intended to be some kind of caves levels to shoot up enemies before going to surface.Slas did some animated hands for the character we could use.

We can change. im ok with the EXIT SHIP description , just explaining how are the level wired at the moment.

 

We also have 2 kind of spells , one pushes rocks around , and other some kind of energy ball , and a way to switch spells by using Tab key (the circles at bottom center of screen). We should add a way to pick up this things and improve on this .

 

 

[aiaf]

I did a commit for task 1.

Save/load level and position, rotation of the player. Saving is done when exit game.

Some kind of autosave would be good , so we dont have to bother to do ui with save files.

[mdgunn]

Some of the levels have checkpoints in already.  Wouldn't they just save a little more data out and on level load it puts you to checkpoint.  If that's what you mean?

 

[aiaf]

No i was thinking like a 10 second autosave.Doesnt matter for moment i leave it like it is , it works for any new level we add.

How can we do a model highlight ?  Like a glow effect when you get close to a model that can be interacted with e key.

Im thinking sprites , but my attempts at doing effects with sprites didnt go too well,

[mdgunn]

Autosave based on time can be dangerous. Could be easy to get into situation where auto-save saves just before death and you get caught in unescapable death cycle.

Not sure the amount of time it might take to get a nice model highlight would be time well spent if you are interested in release very soon.  For me I think this would fall more in the category of 'nice to have' but not something that would stop release.  For our limited environments I think the current hand is acceptable and would personally probably choose to spend the saved time elsewhere.  

Having said that a simple highlight is probably possible by tweaking a channel on the material of an object and make it more white or red etc..  Doing some sort of actual outline probably requires a shader and it might be that this requires all assets to be resaved to the new non-standard shader.  Would need investigation as I don't have a go to solution for that and this investigation would probably require time to do, then possible resaving of assets.  This is why I think it might not be worth time spent when functionally we have a basic but working solution.

I will have a think about it though. Maybe something quick will come to mind.

 

[mdgunn]

On 3/24/2019 at 12:35 AM, aiaf said:

We also have 2 kind of spells , one pushes rocks around , and other some kind of energy ball , and a way to switch spells by using Tab key (the circles at bottom center of screen). We should add a way to pick up this things and improve on this .

I don't think I have seen this in action. Not sure what to load to see that if it is linked in.

 

[aiaf]

Have a look in Maps, canyons.map and test.map

Now they are not wired in anymore , Slas was experimenting with some animated punching hands.

I dont know how to wired those back in, maybe make a checkout to a previous version that worked.

Scripts/Objects/AI/MonsterAI_Modified.lua
Scripts/Objects/Player/SIMPLE_FPSPlayer.lua
Scripts/Objects/Weapons/ElectroBall.lua
Scripts/Objects/Weapons/Projectile.lua

[aiaf]

Btw , 4.6 is released ,i checked it out  somehow messes up level1.

I think it was an update to newton , now all platforms are slowly but surely flying up.

[mdgunn]

OK.  I guess we need to stick with 4.5 and avoid letting 4.6 modify any files.   If I move to 4.6 I will check Forth against it but so far have been avoiding it.  Thanks for the update on some present issues to look out for.

 

[mdgunn]

Playing with the idea of having some tumbling objects from the cryo chamber as a super simple to add some visual detail to the level (the idea being it they are memories of aspects of the ship in the dream).  Also I thought that level 1 had some slow down but this is only in debug mode and I think in normal play it may be OK (though I've only tested so far on a fairly fast card).

 

 

Testing the cube in the teleport level with grayscale off.

 

 

 

 

 

[aiaf]

Looking good with that touch of color.There was a pyramid model that could be added as background object.

Yeah we don't have performance problems so far, im running from older laptop, all ok.

[mdgunn]

I will continue to look at the existing levels and try a few things out adding small extras to try to lift the levels a bit without modifying the way they work.  I think I may even just add the modified levels as new copies so others can confirm they want a certain version. I think sometimes you need to have a wander around it rather than just see a screenshot or video.

 

 

[mdgunn]

I've updated the physics on the cryo level objects though I intend to go back in and apply some basic textures using the shared pallette.

 

[mdgunn]

Does anyone want to do a simple set of 'find necessary' items quests in the cryo room?  

Or were there other plans?  Seems this would be a simple way of having some reason to use the cryo room  and for the user to experience the room.

If people want to go ahead with compressing a story to absolute minimum then I suggest that the purpose of the quests should be to ultimately escape the cryo-room via a roof tube/lift and that the user needs to get the ship systems under control and force this escape route to open.  

This is not what was in design docs but the reason for change is that if I understand correctly we want to put something more complete together so we must join up what room we have in as short a path as possible.

If someone wants to do some 'quests' in the cryo room then don't worry about models you might want or mechanisms you might want (e.g. lift descending from ceiling).  I can handle models and mechanisms if someone wants to concentrate on the mechanism or finding item x picking up, moving to location y etc. Then you can just tell me what objects /mechanics you want.  

Don't want to take this opportunity from someone else as I'm not sure what I missed when I was away and some work was ongoing.  If people want to focus on something else than I can probably pick this bit up and do the story, mechanisms and models myself.

 

[aiaf]

Kind of missing a plan agree with short path, but something its already implemented in a very minimal and rush way not exactly respecting the document:

Only interaction before pressing the tablet to enter level 3 vr is some text boxes on some of the items , describing things.

After level 3 finish your back to cryo room , camera shakes, lights are flickering , and a red light is slowly passing the room(something related to the monolith ?) , when the red light arrives near that space dock , cryo room gets wrecked you somehow escape , level 4 is loaded (i was thinking some kind of caves inside the island where to shoot enemies up).

That red light could be explanation why you suddenly develop some magic powers you got irradiated or something

Cryo room access is not possible anymore (rocks and sutff) Later we could do a quest to restore access to cryo room (for example move the rocks out of the door).

 

Thats what we have now probably need to change it, btw when you updated the object physics , somehow all textboxes that where wired in dont work anymore.

I have some easy to do ideas:

-pick up some food rations

-a med kit embeded in a wall , like in half life

-somehow test the spells

 

Well i can do it , but after you finish with the texturing,

Is it posible for you to make a animation to open the doors in cryo room ?

Somehow exit cryo room and then level 4 should be some cave level , skiping some stuff but keeps the basic idea from document.

 

 

 

[mdgunn]

Ah sorry about breaking attached texts.   I think I remember seeing those now. Not sure exactly what caused that but it could be when I did the collapse operation on the meshes in the editor.  This was because otherwise the root object that of the mesh on import seems to be a sort of empty object  which messes with selecting it in the object as it has no polygons itself  as if it is a pivot or null object. If I further mess with objects it is possible that things will get broke again so I will try to get the objects to a final textured stage soon (hopefully by end of weekend) so we can call them done.  They were only supposed to be a trial for the basic look which I  considered I might redo to more archaic in nature (think more glowing blocky temple-like composition and less traditional sci-fi).  I guess I will go with this first attempt.

About the exit to cave.  If we exit through the rear door I think that might be weird.  You'd expect it to be another room or at least the engines rather than straight outside wouldn't you?  

I was originally going to do a roof exit with a lift pad thing to take you up and out so that I didn't need to do a second room but now I'm thinking I could probably get a second room together fairly easily based of a 180 flip of the first with assets moved round so it should not take too long.  I'll look into that.

I think I saw some cave like levels.  Is there enough there do be useful at this stage?

I know I was working on some weapon system stuff which I think I never quite got finished though it was getting there.

Are the spell things you mentioned a weapon and are they hooked in to enemy damage at this time?

 

[aiaf]

Ok then simple second room could do it.

Dont have any usefull cave level so far.

Those 2 spells were working at some point , i try to switch to older parts of code but so far cant make them work again.I may have to try find Slas.

At the moment the punching is doing damage to tank enemies.

[mdgunn]

OK.  may be able to review it and and see how what it looks like in combination with what I got done. 

Initially though I think I will focus on following first:-

• Final textures on models cryo room models.
• Simple second room
• opening door between room (which currently means redoing rear wall mesh as it isn't an opening door

If anyone would like me to focus on anything else I'll reconsider so just let me know.