Ether

Warp Speed second alpha release and a new video!

Howdy!

Warp Speed gets its second pre-alpha release! We also have a video with the ingame footage and badass killer voice of mine for you!

Apologies for such a huge gap in the updates! We had to shut up for a while and concentrate on work. Focused as never before we’ve generated such a huge gap between the last release and this one that it literally got beyond our comprehension! BTW. This update was originally scheduled for the end of August:P

We’ve got an update on everything, textures, gfx, engine, EVERYTHING! I won’t be spamming to much and will leave you with the real stuff to play with:

Video

100% of the ingame footage, no video fireworks yet, includes a few useful comments of mine.

A few ingame screens

Download

There wasn’t much to do for you in the previous release, this time there’s a couple of weapons to play with, don’t miss the trickjumping part in the video!

• Windows:
  • http://www.indiedb.com/games/warp-speed/downloads/warp-speed-alpha-0921216
  • http://onether.com/alpha2/win32/
  • http://labs.pordesign.com/warp-0.9.2.1216.rar
• Linux:
  • http://www.indiedb.com/games/warp-speed/downloads/warp-speed-alpha-0921216-linux
  • http://onether.com/alpha2/linux-x86/
  • http://labs.pordesign.com/warp-0.9.2.1216.tar.gz

This is a general update, physics is still not perfect, nothing really is, WE WANT YOUR INPUT! CMON! Leave some critique comments!

Progress update

Howdy!

Long time no see! Well, we’ve been working hard day and night for the last couple of weeks. Not too much on Warp Speed though as the vast amount of our time was consumed by web development but here I am anyway giving you another insight into what’s going on behind Warp Speed scenes!

Today I have a couple of screenshots to show, they may seem like not much but there’s quite a big chunk of progress behind their innocent faces.

First of all – I messed around with Warp Speed logo and mocked a new loading screen. Remember the old one? Well, probably not. Anyway, in the process I discovered a couple useful ways of creating new materials. Lucky bonus!;)

Ingame screenies:

Yes! Some textures at last. And these are pretty official. Note they are only base textures that will be used later on in the process for creating more complex ones! What do you think?

The small toothy things in the background are saw blades. They don’t do any harm to the dude, we invented them only for entertaining purpouses and to check out how convenient shooting at moving targets is. The verdict? Pretty convenient, that’s for sure!

Next image shows how hitscan weapons will most likely work in Warp Speed. Hitscan weapons are weapons that hit the target immediately after you shot them. Don’t know how it’s going to work out in practice but we’re definitely going to give it a try.

We’re working on a promotional video, a little bit trailer-like but since we unfortunately don’t have enough content to show to call it a proper trailer, let’s just assume it’s a promotional/entertaining video. The main purpouse of it is for me to get more convenient with video editing stuff so that we can share something really really mindblowing with you in the future! How noble!

I’ll finish here without giving out anything else, now it’s your turn to leave some comments!;) Cheers and thanks for keeping track of our progress!

Textures update

Today I wanted to share some of the latest texturing achievements with you to tease your eyes a little bit and make you more warp thirsty again. Starring: Rust effects.

The most challenging thing about making convincingly looking rust effects is that in real life rust has a lot of details that may seem hard to recreate. When you try to achieve satysfying results, you want to pay attention to the detail in the first place. I tried too many times to go about this in one shot and failed unconditionally every time I did so. Despite all these failures I was determined more than ever and after a few sleepless nights and far too many cups of coffee proper results started to show up.

Have a look:

The top of the image is ocuppied by a plain metal texture I made in the meantime. Below there are 8 different tiles with various rust effects. They feature rust stains in all shapes and sizes: Small ones and big ones, oval and longitudal, deep and shallow, bright and faded. I didn’t even think of getting that far at the point I first tried to solve this rusty mystery!

Tiles look nice (don’t they?) but rusty compilation is even better. I suggest you click and check out the full-sized image for even better experience:

Rust was my Achilles heel since I can remember so you can imagine the difference now that I feel like I know everything about this particular material:p Seriously though during this process I came up with so many new ideas and approaches for creating materials that I’m actually scared to test them all out. NO, I actually can’t wait to try them! This may be interesting.

Now I’m going to play a little more with rust effects and get all the tools for creating them sorted. After that I’m moving to the next stop which are paint effects on different materials. Hope it’ll be just as big a surprise as with these! See you there!

Of course you’re welcome to leave your thoughts and ideas in the comments below. We love reading them!;)

First Alpha Release of Warp Speed

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?
  • Are there too many keys to manage? (roughly 5).
  • Would you like something to be different?
• Instructions regarding the movement can be found in the download section

Download (Windows)

http://onether.com/alpha/win32/

Download (Linux)

http://onether.com/alpha/linux-x86/

Enjoy and leave us your feedback after you have played it!

Weekly update #5

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.

Lack-of-progress update

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!

Weekly update #4

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
• implemented splitscreen game (up for 4 players)
• separated autoupdate service from main engine
• unified scripting engine
• removed most of memory leaks
• sped up math performance
• fixed player movement glitches

Progress update

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!

Thanks again and stay tuned for more updates!

Movement demonstration video

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!

Update on texturing

A few weeks ago I posted some info about texturing along with a few screenshots. Today I wanted to show you new textures I’ve been working on yesterday and today and also make a short note about the changes in my texturing concept that took place over the last three weeks.

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!