I had mentioned the possibility of linking this game a little closer to Alien Arena previously. There always was the plan of reimagining levels, including of course, Dm-Saucer, the very original level created for Alien Arena, and rebuilt, redesigned, revamped several times. In the case of that level, everything was completely redone from scratch as the last iteration came many years ago, and it was an entirely different map format (though starting to use more static meshes).
Over the years, I have actually retained quite a few assets, and you can see this to a certain extent in Saucermen.
Gen 3 of Alien Arena has a lot of pretty decent assets. Many of them are static meshes used in various maps. One map that I really loved the layout of and would like to recreate in SM is Dm-Violator.
Re-using these assets would give me a huge leg up on completing it. Very likely I will need to revise some scales and proportions to make it better fit Saucermen. Aesthetically, it was already showing the changes in my style that is more aligning with SM, so little texture changes would be required.
You may also note in that last screenshot; just how dynamic the lighting is, and how the previous shot in SM looks a little more muted. That’s going to change a bit. I have not yet sat down and worked on the specular maps in that level. I will work on that very soon.
The other thing is I wanted to add two more weapons to SM. One was a no brainer, and that was a melee weapon. As I said, some of AA’s assets were pretty good, and one was the violator weapon.
After a little bit of retexturing and tweaking, I think I have it fitting in well.
It might need a little work yet, but it matches up with the other weapons nicely.
The other weapon I finally decided on adding/retaining, is the beamgun. That was the best-looking weapon in AA, and would be really easy to alter and make it fit in perfectly in SM. I’ll spend some time on that one soon as well.