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

[GooberMan]

i'm a bit of noob as I seem to die alot

Any particular areas, or just in general? I've adapted my playstyle to the marines, so all I can balance for anymore is people that are used to battling marines.

Do you plan on having voice acting?

Yes. I probably even mentioned it in the first post. This project will benefit significantly from voice acting, and all my scripts are set up to take that in account once the lines are recorded. I don't particularly want to pay to get voices though, even if it's a $5 site. I'd much rather bring in community members and work with them to get the best performances. I was considering just doing all the voice work myself at the very early stages and using voice modulation to get the females sounding right, but that really won't work for Cronenberg. And the female red squad marines would sound too similar, even if I put on dodgy fake accents.

[wildweasel]

GooberMan, I would recommend pitching your project at Voice Acting Club; there are a lot of really talented people there, and most of the time the only payment they ask is credit and/or the ability to put their recordings in their portfolio. I previously requested their services for ww-diaz-v3 to replace most of the copyrighted enemy voice clips, and I got some very awesome work from a handful of people there, including a full replacement of Diaz's player sounds (even down to recording a "Falcon PUNCH!" set with three variations, which I didn't think anybody would do!).

[GooberMan]

That seems really cool actually. I'm going to have to write up character sheets for the voices I need now.

Thank ye, sir.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #30

Well, it's more of an anti-development entry. As I've done no work on it since the last post. Hey, it's FInnish summer. You'd lose the initiative when the days are like they currently are after a long snowy winter too. I just spent the weekend in France for Hellfest too. I won't be needing to do any clothes shopping for a while. First multi-day festival I've been to up here. Australia's single-day festivals have nothing on the Hellfest lineup this year.

There's also been the odd real-life personal issue pop up. Not going to go in to detail on any of those.

I have been exercising my writing skills in the meantime. And thinking about the plot and linking a few things up for PD that need linking up.

I expect development will pick up again some time next month. August will be pretty much out of the question as I'm heading back to Australia for a few weeks.

[grouchbag]

Very nice and fun!

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #31

Holy crap. Someone out there making professional video games gets it.

What am I talking about?



This is a male marine from the game Natural Selection 2. Pretty standard sci-fi stylisation there. Obviously borrows a bit from Halo (which, in turn, borrowed a bit from Doom).



And now they have a female marine.

Same kind of stylisation as the male. Same kind of body coverage. The only concession they've made to the female form is obviously thicker chest armour. But not over-the-top thicker. It's as form fitting as the male equivalent, and rather than emphasise the breasts they simply pushed the previous chest ridges out to allow for more room.

This is exactly what I've been after for Prime Directive, basically. Virtue's female marine/Crash skin is the closest I have there.

[Gez]

The male one is "in situation" while the female one is posing for a character sheet, but I'm amused they're still going with the "men stand up straight, women lean on one leg" thing.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #38

Well. That was a rather intrusive case of "real life".

Alright, so what am I looking at here. I haven't done any work on PD since the end of April. It's now the beginning of October, and I want this released by mid-November at the latest. This development thing? I'm doing it wrong.

I'm going to play through what I have to see where I got up to, and get latest versions of GZDoom and GZDB at some point tonight. Try to work out what's changed that I can use. I'll do some actual work on it this weekend. I think I might have to scale back some things (such as a fully voiced script) if I want to hit mid November. The main thing I'll need to do is get it finished to an actual alpha stage by the end of the month. I'm not sure how much more work is left to hit that point.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #39

I wonder if they'll notice that I skipped about seven entries...

I've been pushing away at finishing this over the last week or so. I made a todo list of all the things I need to do... and it looked intimidating. Hmmm. But I pushed through tonight on a rather major feature that I've been meaning to implement for months.

In the opening cutscene, it makes mention of another team infiltrating the base from another entrance. In the open pre-alpha, you can find these marines out the back of the labs map. They sit there and do nothing. The plan was to always have them do something. Specifically, through some experimental technology you can find in the game you can get them to teleport to your location and join in the fight. That logic, excluding some bug fixing, is now done. It works across the entire hub, and keeps track of the status of the marines.

That, however, is the easy part for me. Scripting/programming is my thing, and I've been doing it professionally for almost 11 years. The rest will be more time consuming.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #40

Debugged my blue squad, and implemented dead zone regions where they won't work. That took longer than I wanted, but it's rock solid now.

Things that noob mappers do because they're noobs:

• Use ACS_Execute instead of ACS_ExecuteAlways for death scripts.
• Forget that GZDBuilder likes to reset action special parameters if the special changes.
• Call Thing_Destroy on a dormant thing that hasn't already been Thing_Activate'd.
• Fail to set global variables to stop the scripts running all the freaking time.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #41

God some MD3s for light fixtures. Added some lights. It's not the final values (I'll be turning them down for the final release) but they already significantly add to the mood.













Targeting GZDoom only has certainly been the right choice.

[Nash]

Lookin' pretty there!

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #42

And now for a screenshot that looks like complete ass.



3D floors and slopes will be the end of me. But I've finally gotten the basic architecture in for the pulse generator. In story terms, this is a piece of tech that the miliatary is using to control the local (imported) demon population at Eureka base. It's not exactly a small piece of technology, but it is an experimental thing that the military finds very promising in stopping any further demon invasion.

(The bit that isn't mentioned here - and I'm unsure if I should mention it in the mapset - is that the same tech can be pushed to control any form of life. Including humans. Not what it's being developed for, but the potential is there).

If you chose to control the demons after your your trip to Hellifornia, you get given the blue card and a directive to go to this pulse generator and shut it down. The demons will know The Cartwright saved them and will serve you. If anyone's played the pre-alpha, the pay off is that the sewer demons teleport in to the final fight and help you take down Cronenberg. Having a Cyberdemon on your side sure would be handy, wouldn't it? Well, thanks to the architecture design it's not easy to leave ol' Cybie there alive. You'll need to think, perform some acrobatics, and - what I'm referring to as the Hollywood moment - because the access bridges to the pulse generator overrides are locked you'll need to monkey across the things in mid-air. All while Cybie is taking shots at you.

It's a good physiical puzzle, and becauuse The Gateway Experiments are all about choice you can just kill Cybie and live without him later on. But that's silly.

[GooberMan]

Development Diary #43

The moral of today's diary is: Even the shittiest geometry can look fab with the right lighting.













Today's work involved a lot of script writing. I put some work in to the intro, updated the geometry, spent a while working on MD3 lights that can switch on and off, used them in the scripts, added to the landing sequence (because there's now a departure sequence), played through what I have (looks like I'll get an hour and a half out of the entire mod from start to finish if you hunt down everything), hooked up some more Elaine radio communications, and worked on the trap in the labs with Cronenberg (which now is completely scripted). So long for that Sunday.

The script additions though have definitely been worth it though. There's some character stuff with Elaine that gets highlighted as a result. Not only are you weighing up whether you should become more demon throughout Prime Directive, but you're also weighing up how to deal with a PTSD-suffering Elaine.

I think it's fairly safe to say that this story is going places that Doom mods never go. Hell, it's hard to find a mainstream game that goes there while giving the player actual choices.

[Nash]

Development Diary #43

The moral of today's diary is: Even the shittiest geometry can look fab with the right lighting.

The models are hurting a lot without proper vertex lighting in this... =[