After a couple of months of almost releasing the alpha version of Warp Speed we finally made it!
Important things to note:
It’s extremely aplha. We’ve tested it on a very few machines. If it doesn’t work on your computer, do not panic. Let us know your basic hardware and software specifications and we’ll try to work this out in the meantime.
We want your feedback regarding the movement. Mainly:
Is it comfortable enough?
Is the game speed fine or too fast? Would you prefer it to be slower?
Is it too hard to learn the rotations? Are the rotations intuitive enough?
It’s been hard couple of weeks. I spent most of my time fixing bugs, searching memory leaks and other sick and twisted things. But it’s over now. We are moving forward!
What does it mean for you? Alpha release is coming out soon, very, very soon, leek mentioned this thursday if everything goes as planned, so will see.
I’ll be no shittin you, I have not done much recently, basically due to standard stuff that keeps me from Warp Speed that is namely exams and webdesign work (or lack of it for that matter which is just as bad when you need money)
Enough moaning. List of things that I managed to get done includes scratched metal textures I mentioned in the recent entry and worn out paint and badass rust (which I’m working on ‘currently’). So far I think the last two are the hardest to make but I’m progressing slowly and getting to the point where I almost like them enough to show you.
Just as I do like the metal scratches textures you can see below:
As you can notice the texture on the bottom features deeper scratches.
And they’re pretty seamless!
Don’t they look real?
Now, the coolest thing about them is that I found out pretty much a receipe to make them with as little effort as possible. That may sound lazy but it’s not. Personally I’d call it creative efficient. My goal from the very beginning was that the textures will not use any reference photos and will be 100% self-sufficient, easily editable and customizable.
From here I’ll be working out the way for the rust and worn out paint effects (Yea I’ve said that already) that will look just as cool and will be just as easy to make as the two textures above. Then I’ll think about some kind of a tutorial featuring these materials.
I don’t expect much progress for the next couple of weeks though.
For now let know your opinions for they’re always much appreciated, twice as much at such time actually!
Sorry about the lack of weekly updates lately but i’m working really hard on the Warp Speed engine doing some improvements and optimization. At the moment, we’re not sure when the alpha will come out but be patient because it’s worth waiting for.
Anyway, take a look at the list of recent changes below:
completely rewritten renderer using vertex arrays and display lists
We’ve been working pretty hard on everything this week, I don’t have any solid evidence I’d like you to see at this very moment but that is going to happen inevitably some time soon anyway. Have a further reading to find out what’s currently going on behind the Warp Speed scenes.
I’m spending huge amounts of time recently (too much if the truth be telt) working out my way to the best and most efficient ways of creating new ass-kicking textures. I must say that I’m more than satisfied with the results, specifically after today as I learned a couple new great techniques of making specific metal effects on textures that I was striving for for quite really long long time now.
Wesz is on and off working on the base engine. Not having an alpha out yet looks like a bad omen but I hope it’s not and once we’re ready to make the release, we’ll be adding further features in no time.
Thanks to all of you watching the progress and leaving comments on Warp Speed profile at moddb.com – that obviously matters to us a lot, personally I find myself doing a lot more Warp Speed related stuff recently due to the fact we managed to attract some of you so quicky!
Recently I announced that we’re going to make the first alpha release of Warp Speed by the end of this week. Well, in a perfect world we would have but wesz had to sacrifice most of this week for some stuff that was unrelated to Warp Speed. Still, he managed to rewrite the parts of the base engine that he planned on improving and currently he’s readopting a couple more pieces that rely on these particular parts. It’s a big deal for us as we don’t want to delay the release anymore but we want to make running the first alpha as pleasant an experience for you as possible at the same time, please be patient! Anyway, we don’t come totally empty-handed today!
I made a short video that covers a few basic movement capabilities. Note that this concept of movement is not the final one, we don’t really know how far from or close to final it is since the only way to make further adjustments is after playing (against a bot at the very least) and we’ll be struggling to get there for some time yet I suppose. Without having to worry about anything but running though the current configuration is quite comfortable and in such sense may be considered like 80% done. These 80% include:
90/180 degree rotations
gaining speed on turns (which is actually off in the video) + a certain speed limit after which you can’t further accelerate through rotations.
gaining speed on slopes (which is a bit too easy now and will be limited in the future) – should allow you to accelerate as long as you want (and can) but for now it is limited, too.
Remaining 20% are things mentioned in the brackets and dashes (Thanks to some acceleration applied you can perform farther jumps (only if it’s not a consecutive jump) This feature basically allows for the maps to be a little bit more open what improves the general comfort of movement.)
Yes, the blueish dude you can see there is Victor. He does not hold an invisible gun as he did until recently. It made him look stupid like dudes in scooby-doo when running so we decided to remove the gun temporarily and make the upper torso animation instead. He will have his weapon back later on.
Oh, and btw. Bear in mind that rotating looks a bit dizzy on the video but it is really not the case when running around at optimal 60fps.
Thanks for your interest and again stay tuned for more incoming updates!
For your convenience I’ll start with the interesting part and then go to more boring things regarding my own thoughts and techy stuff.
The above mix may seem to have the contrast broken a little bit when you compare it with the first mix but making adjustments in this field is no longer a problem and it’ll be easy to sort out when we can see these patterns in game on actual levels.
The cool thing about the new patterns is that they are very easy to manage. I can easily change their color to whatever I want, I can edit the texture and the details won’t get messed up after that, I can finally add as many or as little details as I want and they won’t mess the texture. I was looking for best solution to that for quite a long time, result being that all previous patterns I made have quite a messy and hard to manage structure but that’s not an issue anymore. The funny thing is that even though I’ve spent ages on finding the most efficient way to make the patterns while doing them, I figured the solution during making Warp Speed website design and Vector Victor that was also introduced recently, rather than the actual patterns. Then I just implemented these ideas into texturing and after a few hours I came up with the results you can admire above.
Remember that we’ll be releasing an alpha version shortly so stay tuned and do not miss out on all the fun!
Every day feels like we’re closer to the goal of making the first official alpha release of Warp Speed but with us, being too pedantic as always, we were bound to have at least some delay! As you can notice, the download section has been already added so it’s ready and just waiting to have the proper downloadable content in it.
Wesz is currently rewriting a few parts of the base engine due to the couple of gimmicks that cause the game to crash unexpectedly. We’ll be releasing once they are removed, so stay tuned!
Hello there, after finally getting bored with Mr. Stork’s skinny looks (it was our previous guest dude), I felt it’s time to replace him with someone who looks more badass and will be a base for the future final version of The Dude.
Today I decided on introducing to you our newborn child, Victor. Vector Victor, to be precise. What Victor Vector is? As you’ve probably already guessed, it’s a vector representation of the player model that’ll be used in Warp Speed. Why vector? Our destination size of The Dude is around 100px. It’s not pixel art in its pure form, but it’s not a hi-res model either. After having some thougts on this topic I tought pixel arting and doing The Dude in 1:1 ratio would be too tricky and the easier way will be with vectors since you can edit them more easily and they degrade pretty cool when scaled down to the desired size.
Below you can have a look at Victor in it’s full size. The Dude is simplified a bit and he may look a bit angular (when in such scale) but the point is to make it look badass in the target 100px scale. It doesn’t matter here, whether his abs are angular or rounded as you won’t see the difference in the end product anyway.
Mr Victor Vector in its original scale. You can notice the joints between particular parts of his body. You may also notice that his palms are not finished.
Another cool thing about Victor is that his body parts fit to each other perfectly and look neat in any natural position. Below you can se a couple of poses Victor agreed to do for me on his first photo shoot session. Click the image to see how Victor looks in the targeted 100px scale.
Posing Victor. From the left: Standing; Dashing; Making a gesture; Falling backward after being hit.
So, what’s next?
In the meantime Victor will be spiced up and will have alt versions for front/back leg/hand done but he’s not a priority anymore. After we have officially launched the website I’m back to texturing BIG TIME!
