[VERSION 1.01] Prime Directive (aka Space Station Omega 2)

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #49

Another post, another sneaky pre-alpha.

I actually did some work on the power generator section. And the barracks in general. And a few other things.

For the curious, this is the TODO list as I wrote it the other week, with percentage completions that I've been updating as I go. Once all this is in place, I can release (at the very least) an actual alpha build

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Import new MD3s, place fluff (35%)
Venty computer logs (100%)
Teleport beacon quest (80%)
Blue team teleport logic (100%)
Elaine random radio chatter
Cutscene canceller (100%)
Pulse generator architecture (60%)
Pulse generator computer room
Electrical generator architecture and puzzle (60%)
Cronenberg’s office scripting (50%)
Barracks vent hallucination scripting
Labs baron capacity experiment scripting (50%)
Shots fired stat tracking (100%)
Baron capacity stat tracking (100%)
Psychological evaluation
Landing pad script (75%)
Demon hotel top floor decoration
Tag all card doors with hacking cutscenes (10%)
End game script (30%)
Asteroid base script polish and implementation (80%)
Auditorium completion (60%)
Redo lighting to be more dynamic light driven (90%)
Red card - alternate radio cutscenes depending on what you tell Elaine first
Warehouse level? Might need to cut that one.
Spazzo skybox of horrible doom (maps 2 and 4)
Fatimah/Aaron emails (90%)
Fix cutscenes to work with stupid text speeds

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #50

So. While implementing another feature, ACC started throwing stupid errors at me. Like it couldn't work out how to include things. This got me swearing at ACC for being rubbish, and continuing to push everything out in to a library that could actually stand alone and didn't have anything relying on it (a few modules use my input functionality which is just screaming to be a library for example, and libraries can't handle #import statements).

This wasn't fixing anything.

Then something weird started happening - zcommon.acs started to throw errors. What the hell. I started completely commenting out sections to see what had caused it. Then I just didn't include my ge5global.acs file in a map script and zcommon started compiling correctly. Then I temporary deleted absolutely everything in ge5global.acs and compiled. zcommon.acs started complaining again.

What?

Thinking something very screwy was going on, I went to delete the file itself so that I could save it fresh. The timestamp it was last saved at was horribly wrong, especially considering I'd been saving it at a rate of once every minute or two. Righto then. So something's probably gone wrong with my hard disk and the TOC is all screwy. Who knows what ACC is reading when it tries to open the file. Well then. Good thing I've been keeping religious backups. Still, there's been a bit of work on a inter-map lift that I didn't want to lose, so I decided to zip up what I had done and delete my entire Prime Directive working folder and reboot so I could refresh the entire thing from scratch - and schedule a chkdsk so it could deal with those problematic sectors.

Shift-Delete because I never use recycle bin. Click yes. Now deleting 5000 files over a gig in size. What? That's not right. How fucked is the Prime Directive folder? Cancel and investigate.

Nope. Turns out I just wasn't paying attention after a long day, and somehow the left pane in Explorer was the active one rather than the right pane. It was deleting my entire Doom directory. I stopped the process before it got to source files I was using for Prime Directive, and the PD folder itself (as it had already taken the ZIP I'd just made). All my IWADs, however, were gone.

All my discs are back in Australia. There's not very far I need to travel to be exactly on the opposite side of the world to the garage they're stored in.

Good thing I'd bought all the Doom engine games on Steam just in case of emergency.

This is one of those things that people overlook in their kneejerk reaction to Steam because ermehgerd DRM - it's a deploy-anywhere digital backup. I downloaded Doom 2, grabbed the IWAD, stuck it back in my Doom folder, and bam. Back in business. This is a freedom that physical discs do not afford me.

This computer bluescreened when I was writing out this post. Restarted Firefox, and it seems they finally implemented that feature that keeps whatever you'd input in to text boxes on tab close/browser shutdowns/computer fuckups. So I haven't had to type it all out again.

So. The damage overall is that I lost the contents of a completely unrelated file to what I was working on, and that global file was a few revisions behind. A quick (because I'm in Finland) download from my Google drive later and that file (DECORATE definitions from Paranoid, with additions by myself) is back to where it was, and a few lines here and there and the global acs file is back to where it was.

It was then that I found out problem existed entirely between keyboard and chair in the first place. It's been a long day at work, and I didn't notice I'd typed in a function name wrong. On several lines. Thus causing ACC to not find the function it was looking for.



(Warning: Malcolm Tucker. But the gist of the video is accurate.)

[Nash]

Sounds like you need to get away from the computer. For a few days. XD

[GooberMan]

As fate would have it, I'm off to Stockholm this weekend to see Das Ich (who I thought I'd never see because they very rarely tour outside of Europe, and Stefan was in hospital a couple of years ago from seven brain hemorrhages and was probably going to die). I'll be isolated from Windows for a couple of days.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #51

Did some more grunt work tonight... and got to a stage that I'd call "alpha". It's feature complete, as in there's no more major systems I need to write. You can go through from start to finish and have a reasonably compelte experience. There's things missing, thus meaning it's not content complete (ie beta) so there's definitely still work to go.

But looking at the TODO list... I think I'll package up an alpha build tomorrow night and pimp that around here and Doomworld.

[GooberMan]

ALPHA RELEASE AVAILABLE

COME AND GET IT! GZDoom 1.8.02 is the minimum required.

The mod can be played through to completion. However, there are still things missing such as cutscenes, some computers, some geometry, etc. Basically, from here it's all polish. But what I really need right now is bug hunting. There's one that's got me stumped with screen wipes - they shouldn't happen, but on some map transitions they do. I don't know why.

So, what's the feature list looking like since last time?

• A almost-complete HD remix of Space Station Omega. Need to go through and do a few more things to it.
• Cutscene cancelling. I really only did it so that I didn't have to freeze the player in select circumstances while another cutscene finishes.
• Goal system which gives you a percentage at the end of PD.
• Weapon stats tracking.
• A discoverable squad of marines that you can teleport to your location.
• More MD3s.
• A new lighting pass. Combined with the 3D polyobject trick, it can stress GZDoom in some areas.
• The characters you talk to over the radio are now represented by a real-time hud graphic.

If you download and try this, as well as bug reports I'd appreciate if you uploaded the autosave that is made as you enter the final map (GE5MAP08, easily identifiable by the fact that it's where your stats are told to you).

I'm not sure I'll hit my original release date limit of November 10th, but it should be in a complete state within the month.

[grouchbag]

Bugs or not,I was to fascinated to notice.Since this is so good in alpha,can't hardly wait for the final.Good luck on it!

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #52

So that was a long week. Started off last weekend when I went to Stockholm and saw Das Ich. Yay! Never thought I'd get to see them, due to a non-existant Australian fanbase and the fact that Stefan had seven brain hemhorrages a year before I moved to Finland. But they're back. The right side of Stefan's head is basically a scar, and he needed a lyrics book in front of him to read from on occasion. Not a bad effort considering his friends and family were told to say goodbye to him.

Then there was a bunch of other stuff I'm not at liberty to talk about that caused my free time to mostly evaporate.

Still, I did manage to touch up a couple of areas. Write some more of the dialogue script. Implement some of it.

I suppose most people are holding off on the full release to play through this - which is understandable. It's a story-based mod where I haven't fully implemented the story. I guess I should elaborate a bit on why I want autosave's of the final map though.

I've had some ideas on how interactive story telling should be structured going back about a decade now. There's a game I've been designing since late 2004 that's going to wrap it all up in to one big genre-defying package. I've never been able to get the implementation of that off the ground as convincing people my crazy ideas can be done is difficult. So with Prime Directive, I decided to do a trial run of some bare basic concepts.

Anyone digging through the code will notice that I keep track of several statistics. These are called Warmth, Reasoning, Apprehension, and Perfection. Selecting dialogue choices, and even performing actions in the world, alters these statistics. This is a very select subset of statistics I have in mind to track for a full-fledged product. Dialogue, conversation choices, and even how you interact with the world are affected by these statistics. Actually implementing a basic version of them has done good things for the theory I've been building up over the years, and I've expanded on it in ways I'd never thought of before simply due to coming across issues in the implementation.

With an autosave, I can load the game and get access to these statistics. I was curious as to how most people get to that point in the game so I can do some balancing accordingly.

But no matter. I want to get this released within the next three weeks. The important thing is to get it polished and out the door. Going through save games at the moment will just get in the way of that.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #53

I DID IT AGAIN

I SHIFT DELETED THE DOOM FOLDER

Excuse me while I go feel like a complete tard once more. There was a bunch of work I didn't have backed up this time, which is going to take me a while to get back to where it was. Mainly in the final map. I had a complete credits section and the final cutscenes all set up and working. I'll have to write that all over again now.

EDIT: I was able to partial recover the final map. All the ACS is gone. The translations file is gone. The miscellaneous global script additions I'd made are gone, but they weren't too many there so that's okay. The other maps I'd altered are all good. All thanks to a little program called Recuva.

Not a complete disaster, then. But it means there's an hour or two I have to put in to get back to where I was.

[RV-007]

That's a good inside joke. Put that reference in your project. You can be one of the joke characters who go, "Damnit, I deleted the files. Can someone get the backup hard drive? It's in some place taken over by stealth monsters. Get me a drink while you're @ it! I really need to work on my habits."

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #54

Sneaky pre-beta for those watching the topic. I can say pre-beta now! Woo!

Alright. Back to about where I was. I spent most of the day not re-doing work I'd deleted though. Been going through and continuing my work of adding more marines after you hit certain points in the story; implementing extra bits of story; and the big one, making a massive linked portal skybox to really give you a sense of location.



I'm going to have to finish up on this in the next week.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #55

So I haven't finished it yet. I've been putting off writing the final bits of dialogue, but I have been slowly working on the maps when I've had the time. I'm almost at the end of the additional map bits pass. Then I'll have no choice but to do the dialogue. Then I can upload a beta build.

I'm off to the UK to be a massive nerd this weekend, so I'd really prefer to get everything done by Wednesday. We'll see how that goes.

My laptop, however, is protesting. It seems to have developed a shutdown problem over the last week whenever I'm running 3D applications. This includes Doom Builder and GZDoom. This has caused me to lose an hour of work on occasion, so now I've taken to religiously hitting the save key. Blergh.

Also, I might start up a new project thread here tonight.

[Enjay]

I'm off to the UK to be a massive nerd this weekend...

OK, I'm going to hazard a guess... Doctor Who 50th anniversary convention?

If so, I am "well jelly" as the kewl kids say because I tried to get tickets for me and my daughter and failed.

[GooberMan]

Yeah, I got tickets in their presale thing. Which they well fucked up, the password to get in was wrong. But I guessed the right one and got tickets before the masses did.

I also paid to get a photo with Matt Smith (solely so that I could make him wear my plush kitty on his head) and an autograph from Tom Baker (solely so that I can tell him he did things to my childhood).

I also have a place to watch The Day Of The Doctor, I managed to get a ticket to watch it at the event too. Woo. Had to check my inbox every five minutes on Friday to get that one, and even then I nearly missed out.

EDIT: Sneaky edit to throw up another pre-beta. This will be the last pre-beta. The next upload I make public will be the beta release, and then I'll want bug reports as I won't do anything other than bug fixes.

[Enjay]

Damn! Now I'm really jealous.