Hey! From when you first showed off the game I never knew you guys were this ambicious (by the way besides you Manslayer who else is working on this, you guys are doing great) I would also like to help you guys out with beta testing, I'm too busy to actively make my own game right now so I'd like to beta this for you, I'll PM you also to make sure you get my message. Unforchanately I have school to contend with but I'd like to help you where I can. Thanks for the credit by the way, its nice to get acknowledged every once in a while, and even though it wasn't necessary I do appreciate it. Talk to you soon.

P.S. All download the game from the first post??? Is there any other updated version of the game I'm missing besides that one?

EDIT: One more thing, when and if I find a bug where should I post it? You can PM me with the details

Beta testers will have an updated version, i'll be emailing it to you guys next week, the third person cam is completely changed, and we're working on ai, but it hasn't been going that great

edit: quick update on the torrent, it now works on our website as well

This game is really cool, I thought the movement was really fluid. I liked the dodging, it was fun to blow stuff up ^^

thanks david, and now we're adding your "KH camera" to it as well , and our saber system will be similar to yours, they fit the game so well

Wow! I'm glad you guys can use the KH camera ^^ I hope it works out, any tech questions feel free to pm me.

it's been a few weeks since giving an update, so i'll give one:

More updates will be available at our forum

March 09, 2007:

Well, it's been a while for an update, and alot of new stuff is happening, first of all we updated our version of the engine and have started to convert our existing code, models, and levels to the updated engine version. Second PreVa is getting a makeover, i have started to shorten the code, adding Preloading for the entities (for less strain on framerate), and the code is being worked on to make it more effective and less framerate heavy. The models, i.e. the mechas, weapons, bullets, etc are now also being edited to be less strenuous. The ai for now has been postponed until the first 3 mechas (and possibly all the mechas) have their code done. Animations are coming to play, and the saber has been attached properly to the slim mecha, meaning that animations will be done soon, also a new added feature is that the arms will follow the camera's movements, so you are actually pointing at your target. Overall work has been great the last few weeks, and things are coming along as they should. After the game has been changed to a more framerate friendly version, we will start the rest of the work on the other elements of the game. A list of the new improvements is below:

1. New Camera: this may have been mentioned before, the camera system is different, the first person view is still the same, however, third person has been changed a bit. Rather than being behind the mech the whole time, the camera can be rotated around the mecha when you are not moving or firing, this makes it easier to spot your enemy, as soon as you start to move or fire, the mecha will quickly turn around to face where the camera is and start moving or firing in that direction.

2. New Bone Movement: So far the mecha may now move his arms up and down to face his target, so it looks "right" when the mech starts shooting someone above him. There are also plans for new movements like this one.

3. Ai: Although the ai hasn't been updated in a while, it has a little bit of a change, the ai will normally stay on someone now rather than just sitting there. The ai still has bugs, but these will be worked out after we finish updating the game.

There are many future plans for PreVa as well, including speed changes, Level changes, new modes, and more...although they are not at the top of the improvements list, most will be implemented.

Until the next update, Manslayer101...

March 15, 2007:

Framerate optimization is still under way, a new shader has been coded for PreVa so the skins not only have "baked" specular lighting, but they also have it with a shader. Just today we have done a framerate and collision test with the updated version of the engine and the optimized hover mecha with a 1024x768 skin as well as some "buildings" which have the same size skin, to test the framerate with over 200 models and over 116,000 polies on screen and the shader running with 1024x768 resolution at the same time, on an off-the-shelf pc, it's stats are as follows:

AMD Sempron Processor +3100, 1.80 Ghz 256kb L2 Cache w/ 512 DDR SDRAM and a nVIDIA GeForce 6100

so in other words, today's "basic" or "bare minimum" pc. Here are 3 screenshots showing our results:

Yes, the fps is 28, and that is 117,118 polys, exactly 225 models, all with the shader (except the black ground and wall)






Needless to say, we got what we were going for, the game was running every bit of code from the demo version, plus the shader and some updated code. To point out the fact that we don't see any part of the game where there will be over 200 models on screen at a time the framerate optimization is proceeding as we hoped, and is becoming a success, quickly. We've also been talking about adding a bloom shader for pcs that can handle it, as an option, which would kick up some of the look to the game. We may be posting a video showing the shader off, we'll keep you informed.

Also a note to our beta testers, we will be sending you the test and will look forward to your results as well. Sorry we haven't been in touch with you as much lately, it's because we have been extremely busy, but we're not hanging up the phone on you yet.

We are still open for more beta testers if any wish to help, we really could use them, lately we have been very busy on updating the game, and we could use some beta testers to keep in touch with in case we have problems and wish to get a quick answer, you may post here or pm/email me if you wish to be a beta tester.

is the one in front the hitler mecha?

no but with your thoughts on the shaders, you may want to be careful because with shader slowdowns have nothing to do with how many objects are on screen, but more to do with how many pixels on the actual screen have a shader applied to them, the shaders would have a much worse effect if you were zoomed in real close on one mech, but your doing real well with the polygon count thing great to see.

it was a test to see how with the shader and without the shader, the framerate differentiates, and we were testing how many models and polygons we could have on screen using the existing code (updated for 6.5) and we were testing buildings with huge textures that were polygon intensive (every circle on top of the "buildings" has an extreme amount of polys)

the shader itself is still a bit of a wip, and i still need help with it, i can't get it to do exactly what i want, and considering i have no shader experience it's a good first try (i'm converting a "specular lighting" shader to a shader which supports static and dynamic lights, in an attempt to make the mechas have more realistic specular lighting, rather than just baked skins). to tell the truth it is kind of hard to understand why it's not working, i'll be posting the code and a demo in the shader forum soon.

I've finished the shader that i was working on, it gives anime style lighting to our models, and the specular lighting moves across the models and supports dynamic and static lights, it takes no real cpu speed to run, and it's a way of not only having "baked" specular light, but "realistic":

Before:



After:



Also if anyone is interested in grabbing this shader, it's located here:

http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/sho...vc=1#Post739811