[SCION:tps] preAlpha GamePlay Test and Contest Entry

ok
=nervous=

ok, well today i reveal what our team has been working on, for those of you who know me, i assume you all thought we were still working on our first person shooter, well no, we couldnt get the quality we wanted, so we decide to pause it and wait on shadeC..

Today however, i would like to reveal:

SCION: the preAlpha Contest Entry

yes, it falls under the same name, while working on our fps, we always noticed that THIS video on youtube was getting constant views, we came to the conclusion that a TPS was more interesting to watch than an FPS, so we decided to ressurrect it and bring it online, welcome the new scion:




now this is a preAlpha test and was only released for the contest, simply because in order to finish our dream games, we need to a few things, since A8 is the current engine version, it happens to be one of them.

so this thread is to start testing the contest Entry, then i'll send a stable version in for the contest, note that this is only a client, most features were disabled.



You'll be able to create your armor in the LOADOUT screen:

this menu is incomplete, you'll need a res of 1024x768 or higher to use it properly, in the left above the color wheel is another box, this allows you to choose the CHEST pieces which each have their own functionality in the right is each armor piece, the cam will zoom to is as you click them, when selected, you can then change the part and its colour, next to the colour wheel is three buttons, the first reuses the last color, the second allows you to desaturate a colour and the third applies your last color to all pieces,also, please revise the key Configuration, then you can either do a training run and run around the map, pressing 9 will kill yourself, thus you can preview ragdolls



[size:12pt]NEXT you can join my Server and engage in some action, MOST guns and armor have been unlocked for you, since this is a test, i know you wont have time to be leveling up[/color]

ALSO, we havent tested with more than 2 players recently, we've tested with more in the past but not since recently so this is also to see what bugs i encounter there, i assume it should run fine

NOTE that choosing weapons and armor DO decrease your credits, well thats about it, we HOPE the test runs fine and/or i can fix bugs that popup in time, we hope you guys have fun playing me and finally i hope that we can WIN this contest so we can continue working on this game and bring you the real essence of what we want it to be



the game starts in window 640x480, just create a new profile, select it and it will go to fullscreen, or, it should, then go to preferences and change videoscreen and resolution to your liking, i'm trying to remove these problems now

this update includes a few fixes:
- fixed some annoyances with some menus
- added some info messages to make the player aware of what hes doing
- weapons are all unlocked for the sake of the demo
- minor fixes to animation bugs
- reduces HDR a little
- you cant log in unless you select a profile
- some server fixes
- increased pistol damage

i apologize if there is a long load time at sttartup, i have no idea why, the uncompiled version doesnt take that long, am just asking you to bare with it because it WILL load


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mE-g84QIc8

downloading, will be there after the oscars.

Hello darkinferno .... I was the one playing with u....
What's happening is the game is running in small window... I mean very small window.... and also All the settings are set to low and very low.... when I change it the menu get stuck and never hides... If I press the menu 3 times the screen is displayed 3 times one over the other....
I don't knw why... but I want to play Scion
Oh my Laptop's specs are:
Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53 GHz
Nvidia GTX 260M
Windows 7
4GB Ram



EDIT:: when I select window mode the screen gets bigger than when I select full screen

click on the settings to cycle through them, did you try that ?

thanks for making me aware of those, i'll look into it... i'm working as we speak, but my teamember tested before and he had no problem navigating menus, ahm, remember to press escape to leave menus

When I started your demo and the profile selection screen popped up, the window size was extremely small, so I pressed F5 multiple times and F11 once to check the resolution (in fullscreen). When I got my desired resolution, I hit F11 again and the game started to glitch. Then my computer froze for some seconds, made some beep noises and shut down while giving some error messages (explorer.exe stopped working and the like, I don't know how much that was related to your game, maybe not at all?).
I'm using Windows XP, SP3.

ahm... it starts in 640x480, just create a profile, select the profile and it will then go to fullscreen, then change your resolution in settings... those f# functions will always cause problems, i apologize for starting in such a low resolution, but i was having some problems, i guess i need to update it and set it to fullscreen by default

Have I been kicked?
I could not exit the game properly because the weapon selection blocked the "Leave game" button. (The bloom effect is way too strong.)

Otherwise I see a lot of potential!

EDIT:

Screenshot1
Screenshot2

ok about the bloom, it was being used for a snow level, which was ok, we made the change to this level in the last minute, need to readjust it and no, i crashed, seems the menus are the most annoying things, i really didnt have enough time to work on them before we decided we'd enter the contest, my focus was gameplay...

EDIT:

ok thanks for the screens, problems noted

apparently i crash whenever error("") is active while inkey is active... gamestudio bug maybe

Game's fun. It's on the right way.

- ragdolls still need work. had some weird positions there.
- when spawning, SET the position of the new player (directly), don't interpolate it (on the client). I always had you moving real fast from the position where you died to the position where you respawned.
- menu in game is still showing when I go back to the main menu
- icons for "XYZ shot ZYX" aren't all that clear. Might need it larger?
- the weapons don't feel powerful. The sniper felt very weak, because of the sound.
- there should be some recoil, it would make the guns feel stronger and make the player have to aim better.
- the particle effects look real good
- animation blending doesn't work at all. There's lots of "jumps", the weapon-changing ani doesn't look right and is played multiple times when I try to run?

The mechanics themselves look/work/feel good. Seems like you got some solid network code!
Apart from the menu-bug (which is still unfinished, you said), where was no crashes. Well done.

i think the itemtossing animation is what messes up something, most transitions blend nicely, however, but we use two animation modes, we're having problems transitioning between those, looking into it, thanks

am working on the other bugs, hope i can get them done in time, tired XD

the most apparent transition fail is when you stop sprinting, to be honest, i think thats the only noticeable one, unless you saw something else ?

Well, am downloading atm, but from what I can see from the screenshots the character models look very good. Also, I like the idea of painting the armor and stuff. Cant say anything about the gameplay atm though.

Apparently clicking around the armor screen just to see all available armor parts wastes money which makes the credits go negative. (In other words: Do the buying on the server, not on the local profile)

Weapons menu overrides the game menu in-game.

Think of users with widescreen displays! (16:10 AND 16:9)

W + A/D makes weird animations while running

Looking around the in-game menu can be tiresome when you hear a shot everytime you click a button.

Climbing stairs not so easy without jumping

I cant for the love of it choose another weapon

The profile creation screen should not allow one to select a slot if there is no profile in it (creates nameless profile which is extremely buggy and in no way playable)

The pistol seems to need about 30 hits to kill someone, which is totally underpowered. Especially if its the only weapon you can use.

You also need a GUI designer, right now the whole thing is just a lot of stuff garbled up with no uniform style. Loading screen is horrible.

Controls are choppy (you probably work with integers for rotating, which makes the whole thing very stiff, remember roll/pan/tilt can have decimals!)

Now for the positive:

The character shaders seem good.

Multiplayer works, kind of.

SuperBloom works, but should be toned down just a bit.

Good start, but I would not peg it 51%, there is a lot of fine-tuning to be done, and the devil is in the details. Just having lots of half-assed features will never be as good as 2 features that work perfectly.

ok, i hope to address all those in the next update, i'll also give infinite cash for the sake of testing and i apologize for the bugs guys but this is more of a bug hunt release rather than for actual demo

ok, so i want to update the game, but it seems changing the EXE and acknex.dll isnt enough, that seems to work when its not using a RESOURCE, anyone can give me some tips on that ? or do i have to reUpload the whole thing ?

Replacing EXE and acknex.dll should be sufficient.
I'm using A8 and I update frequently just with a new EXE file (with A8 a single acknex.dll works with all executables).

yes i always did that only now its compressed to WRS and doesnt seem to work, i'll try again though


SERVER OFFLINE

I tested game with training run, here are my impressions:

-I like player's model and shader
-I really miss more screen resolution options than 4:3, I use 16:10 and 16:9 monitors
-Game crashed for me when I used rocket launcher
-Ingame esc-menu got covered by weapons panel, so I couldn't click on leave game
-Player walking is a bit strange, he seems like jumping with that giant steps, running is perfect.
-I miss a hand and body animation (movement) when shooting and a bit of camera recoil, it looks a bit artificial.
-I also miss blending between walking and running, or walking and standing.
-In some stairs of test level movement failed and I had to jump to go up.

I know this is just an alpha play-test and I suppose you had planned most of my suggests, but just in case I've posted them

-i'll look into the screen options
-lol i dont even know how you go to use the rocketlauncher, its suppose to be locked
-ingame menu over items SHOULD be fixed, i hope
-hand and body movement and all the shooting mechanics are indeed planned
-blending from the spring animation is tricky because it uses a complete diffent technique from the rest of anims but will be fixed
-ahm.. stairs, well.. thats my level designers job xD

thanks for trying, i really hope i can get a few more players online though

Well, tried only the testing run, but there are the following things apart from what was already said:

- I couldnt "buy" any weapons at all. Could be I did something wrong, but by clicking on the panel I could not select the new weapon

- it looks strange how the upper body follows the camera. Maybe add some more constraints and more bend the upper body instead of just turning it at the spine.

- the color tinting stuff in the loadout menu was a bit strange - the armor wasnt really colored, it looked more like an transparent overlay color instead of paint. I suppose you change the ambient or diffuse values of the material?

However, thats the things that sprang to my eye.

Oh, and regarding the animation stuff mentioned: Ask Painkiller for ent_blendpose, he can tell he some stuff which could be helpful for you. Especially regarding the blending from the spring animation. You see, using ent_blendpose you can indeed blend from EVERY possible bone pose, even procedural stuff like ragdolls, to every other pose, no matter if it was set by ent_animate or ent_bonerotate or whatever. Meaning you can very well blend from procedural animation (what I guess you use for the jumping and all that) to keyframe animation using the same system as blending between keyframe animations, and you can easily add a animation layer and -mixing system which will also make the adding of hand of body animation for shooting and stuff a) easier and b) better looking.


EDIT: Oh, and of course - apart from that its already very cool. I liked the basic framework, the characters look cool, though I noticed that some loadout configurations arent really fitting together - some armor parts stick into each other and stuff. But I liked the particle effects, the general style and Im looking forward to see this with some real levels.

I've tried four times to connect to your server, but it doesn't work anymore.

Bug: When you change the saturation of any armor color, the saturation panel will always be visible, even in-game.

- theres noway the paint could be just values because note not every area gets affected, my artist was SUPPOSE to redo the paintmap for it but he was busy being lazy, lol
-maybe you clicked around in the armor screen too much and reduced your cash, the next update will fix this
-animations arent complete, theres a couple more states to implement

thanks for trying, i'll update and have the server up soon, hoping to get some action with multiple people

Well, I even created a new profile, spend no time at all in the armor screen and tried. The weapons arent just locked (theres not LOCK sign), the panels even react on clicking - I just dont seem to have any changes, the weapons I got still are the heavy pistol thingy and that other single shot rifle or whatever it is.

dont worry, am updating soon, should have all those fixed by now, wait, you do know you only get them when you respawn right ? press 9 to suicide

@darkinferno i have a problem
im using win7 64-bit after i start your game the start screen was loaded but then it crashes and the message appears scion.exe is not working

EDIT:I have this problem with some games but for example Silas BEta Demo is working very well
what could the problem be?
WFG Progger

ahh.. it might have somethng to do with the post processing shaders, though i guess i could compile a no postprocessing version for you but.. it would be ugly

You might want to check your settings on "Data execution prevention". A user of Survive! had the same problem and it was gone after he disabled DEP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention#Windows

contest entrance cancelled

sorry superku, the server was down for a while, its back up now, but please use the new version of the game, sadly i didnt fix that saturation panel, click it off before leaving the loadout screen and it will be fine

The menus are still a pain, sorry. I could not click "Save Changes" until I opened "Preferences" the 5th time or so.
Why does the game say "Don't set the resolution too high!" every time I click on the resolution option?
The weapon icons/ the buy menu still covers the in-game menu, no regular exit possible.
The game crashed for me ("scion.exe stopped working") when I killed you the 3rd/ 4th time with a melee attack.

I know that you're under heavy time pressure, but if there's one thing that should work it's the menus because otherwise it really bugs me.

The colouring works pretty nice and I like the Metroid Prime 1 - style music.




EDIT: The game has crashed again, approx. after the same playing time.
Here's the problem I've told you when I was on the server:
http://www.superku.de/scion3.jpg

The panels/ texts look HD, the game itself looks like 640x480.
The last 3 buttons under preferences don't seem to work at all anymore. (Maybe the size of the panel that contains the buttons is too small, so the buttons get ignored.)

i find these problems strange, especially that lowres looking one, i cant recreate it, heres what it looks like for me:


ahm, i think i see the problem with the menus, its trying to scale with the resolution, i thought i limited it, sadly i guess not, if i could update easily it would be a fix but i cant so running a lower res should be ok...

am sorry its so unstable, i was contemplating not releasing it because i didnt think it was ready, but our 1v1 playtests were stable so my artist insisted.. we'll just have to see what happens

[EDIT]
ok i fixed the menu scaling problem, i think what happens is, when you change the video settings, it displays ok but when you save and reload that same setting, all it does, is set the screen_size.. which is strange

if only it werent so hard to update, i hear A8 has better publish options, hope so

@Schokokeks thank you very much that solved my problem
WFG Progger

The game crashes on my machine, compiling a shader

mtrArmor_Shade..

I will try that tip Schokokeks suggested

EDIT: does not work, when turning DEP off for this game.
Well, might be a nice game. I will never know

I wonder a bit, that you need 480MB for this game though.

because theres ALOT more in the game that was disabled, notice the assembler and host game menus are unavailable, the assembler is a realtime online map editor [c_ignore is crucial for this hence the reason we entered the contest in the first place] and host game, allow you to setup your own matches and change game types, however i dont wish to reveal those yet and thus blocked it for the alpha, ofcourse i didnt have enough time to remove them fully...

i dont know if i can keep updating you guys since the contest started, if i can, i would like to know?

You could make an "after submission" build,
running seperate from the contest.

I would like to try it (having the shader disabled,
I thinks thats the one causing problems, not shure though)

i would have to get confirmation on this "after submission build"

server was down today because i wasnt home so, if the game is stable for anyone and they wanna join, feel free to, i realized that it wasnt too problematic for all users, i'm looking forward to a test with multiple people, also remember to make sure you downloaded the update

i cant update anymore for the contest so it will have to remain in whatever state it is now.. sadly

AU_ERROR in the first Menu, if I click "Create New" and enter my Name is is crashing.

Win 7 64 Bit
Geforce GT 335M
Core i7 640 ULM
4Gb DDR3 RAM

oh, just make a new folder and name it "profiles"

just got a problem about downloads not starting, anybody else have this error ?

also just uploaded a youtube video for those who havent seen the game yet maybe because of its size or other problems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mE-g84QIc8

If anyone else wants to join, so will I.
I wanna try this with more than just 2 players...

Edit:
-loadout screen: the "armor" button is on the left, the rest of the buttons on the right. Why is there an armor button that looks different, doesn't have writing on it... is the chest armor not part of the armor?
-also on loadout: the color setting is a very neat idea, but why is it so complicated? I do not understand at all how it works. there's three buttons, one changes the display of the color wheel, and all seem to randomly change the color.
Make it 3 sliders for R,G,B OR one color wheel that I can click on. Don't complicate things.
Also, why is it so hard to choose dark black? I can for the life of me not get it back to a 0,0,0 black after I've made it brighter. Either use something like this:
http://www.worqx.com/color/images/shade-tint-wheel.jpg
(with smoother transitions) where the black and the white can clearly and easily be chosen, or use a ring for the color and a slider for the brightness. This is a cool feature. So work on it and make it work well!
-Again, loadout screen, again, color wheel: The colors on the left side, the two that are shown, the selected ones: they're supposed to be the same I believe but don't look it, because there's a gradient on the green around it. The top one looks much darker because the green around it is so much brighter.

Damocles, you need to have the latest directX, we just confirmed that problem, for anyone else that got AU_ERROR, please create an empty folder in the game folder and name it "profiles" no quotes ofcourse, we're running a test now and need more ppl, germanunkol and another member is in, the game is being pulled from the contest so this may very well be your last chance at testing with multiple people, feel free to join....

ok server offline, thanks for those who tried it, for those who it have problems, i apologize, just look forward to the official alpga and keep in mind what you saw here was only about 50 percent in terms gameplay functionality

our preAlpha didnt go exactly as planned and all download links for it have been pulled but we did get enough data and we're still hard at work, ive decided i'll start posting screens every now and again, you guys can give feedback and see where we're headed.

first set of screens -

[explosion effect: particles, soft sprites, volumetric fog, refractions]
status: 75 percent complete

looks awesomely nice, good work.

some points:

either there is too much refraction or refraction texture should be something like radio/sound waves(circular).

width of the flares coming out of explosion(flames shaped like lines) should vary.

on last 2 shots, the flame texture inside the smoke(light yellow one) is too repetitive. you could use 2 variations of that with different rotations.

ok points noted, but to be honest, i could take 20 more screenshots and it may never look like the above screens because its quite random, so as for the repetitive fire, dont think i'll change that, also i dont want to load too many images, agree with the streak lengths however

looks better in motion but wont render a vid anytime soon