3 day weekend. 3 major hurdles blasted over.
So far I’ve managed to keep my promise to myself to keep this blog updated weekly on the progress of this game. While I don’t have a bunch of followers or anything like that, and the truth is I want to keep this game somewhat under wraps for now, this is a way that I keep myself interested and motivated. At the end of this post, I will update on the status of Alien Arena.
First though…
Indeed, you are seeing a network connectivity interruption symbol. This is because I decided to shift gears and work on the multiplayer side of things this weekend! I had been putting it off because quite frankly, it scared me, just a little. Luckily the foundation I laid out for this was largely intact from Frenzy, and the concept was sound. The main issues dealt with how weapons are used, animation, and such, but it’s mostly very similar. After a few hours of adjustments, I was able to set up and join a server and iron things out. I discovered a few things that will need addressing, but for the most part it’s fully functioning, and works quite well when I host on a server that actually has the horsepower to run Bullet Physics at 60 fps. It was good that my VM actually did not have said horsepower, as that exposed a few things that I had to work on with physics and animation. Now my only thing to tackle will be settling on a reasonable server frame rate. So far though, I really am digging how it works, and the way this game is designed, it’s just as smooth playing online as off, something that Quake-based games struggle with, including Alien Arena. Of note is the locked in 60 fps (well, 58 and it oscillates a bit between 62 and 58 on the output). Very soon I’ll be updating the default fps to 120, and allowing for variable framerates. Not sure if I’ll fully uncap it, as that generally invites physics weirdness, but it will compensate everything for when it drops at least.
I also spent a bit of time finishing up the ragdoll/gib system. This is just really cool! Depending on damage, legs and arms, and even the entire body will disintegrate into a shower of gibs, or a few with a partial ragdoll. This was done in games for many years, but we never did that in Alien Arena. This really makes the fragging experience so much richer, IMO. I also worked on physics and ragdoll management, solved quite a few bugs along the way. I also made the decision that I will in fact update Frenzy to address these, and some other bugs that I’ve fixed, rather than trying to port Frenzy to this version of the engine. Frenzy is pretty solid, though somewhat inefficient. There are three or four things I want to update/fix there, and will one of these days. Overall though, this new version of the engine is really starting to streamline well. Long, long way to go, but I’m happy with the progress.
Given the number of renderer changes and additions, as well as re-organization, the last big hurdle that laid before me was VR. Now I didn’t mess around much with any of that, but I really was worried some of the post processing effect changes would muck things up. It didn’t. Everything actually worked very well. I did have a few little things to tweak and fix, but for the most part it’s all working good, and what an amazing experience to play a game like this with VR goggles! Surprisingly motion sickness was not an issue, and the ability to turn your head independent of the mouse, or I should say in addition to, is really a nice perk of using VR. The whole thing was just too cool…
I still have a lot to do with getting more things dynamically loaded, especially with maps, and still some bugs to iron out throughout, but this game is really starting to get some functionality that only a few months ago seemed so far off and daunting.
On 2/14(Valentines day), Alien Arena was officially made Free To Play on Steam. This was something that had been contemplated for the last year, but we really wanted to take some time before committing to that. We had clung to keeping it a (very) low cost game to help provide prize money for tournaments, but sales had dwindled to nothing, and player counts continued to shrink as well. The bottom line is that in the Arena FPS genre, if you aren’t F2P, you’re dead in the water. I don’t have a ton of hope that the game will revitalize, and there are no plans to update it. All focus is on Saucermen, with a little going to Frenzy at some point(which also will be F2P at some point once I’ve started back on that). There may very well be a time where I make some skin packs or other things for Alien Arena, but that’s pretty far down the list, and road. There is however probably a (very) good chance of seeing some alternate, retro Alien Arena items available for purchase in Saucermen, such as weapon view models, or some skins that use the Alien Arena style.
