216 replies to this topic

[Blood-Pigggy]

Whee, I have a basic construct working now.

You start out in the middle of a city roughly the size of Liberty City from Grand Theft Auto III, you're wearing some quilted armor and a crappy knife as a weapon. From that point on you can explore and attack things, there's a bit of the surrounding desert planned out as well, so far I've made that you can go a relatively far distance from the city (to a little oasis out in the middle surrounded by badly textured ghouls with some pretty nice models) there are three usable vehicles, although the physics are a bit bouncy (I haven't optimized the vehicles yet) and I overestimated their toughness, as they tend to explode even after a few crashes. There are a few people walking around the city, with some AI having them entering and leaving buildings (which you can't go into at the moment) they also interact with things in the environment to make them seem more believably, there are a few stray dogs for example, that people might feed or pet, and they do other things like kick cans around or talk to each other (there's no speech yet, just the animations).

You pop up in a destroyed building with a small stash of weaponry. So far, it includes every weapon that has been entirely completed along with armor and other accessories (although their textures aren't entirely done, and neither is the sound) so far there's a very basic low level pistol, a pretty rusty rifle, and a mediocre M16 (which has a high unreliability stat) so I'm actually trying to implement the weaponry and armor from low level to high level.

You can do one quest so far, which has you going out to the oasis to kill the ghouls and find a key to a vehicle for an old geezer, it was just a test quest, but it works well, and proves that the interface and dialogue works well. There are no people driving vehicles yet, but I plan to put that in next, I've developed seperate AI for the few monsters there are now (which include Ghouls, Irradiated Zombies, and a few enlarged rats and bugs) which all have appropriate animations, but once again, not all aspects of them are finished. I plan to make the finishing touches on these elements then move on to the rest. So right now, most of the basic interface and gameplay system is working.

Armor only changes the color of your character now (which you can only view in the character info screen, but I plan to make the game playable in third person as well) but I hope to add new textures and etc. that will make each piece of armor unique, although I'll need outside help for that because otherwise it'll take far too long to finish it up.
Right now there's Strength, which helps carrying weight, and melee damage, Agility, which increases speed and your ability to quickly swing small melee weapons, there's Perception, which increases your capability with guns, and then there's Endurance, which of course attributes to your health and resistances. These are the basic stats finished for the RPG aspect now, but I plan to add more and even include a few perks or etc. like Fallout.

I'm hoping this turns out to be pretty cool, I'm also planning to put in some radio stations you can listen to in the car, so anyone suggestions on good channels for music that everyone might enjoy would be welcome.

[Potatoe]

Sounds awsome so far. Can't wait to play it.

[Frodo]

Sounds like a brilliant game Pigggy.  Can't wait to see a demo for it.    

[Sean]

Sounds really good, keep it up

[Blood-Pigggy]

Thanks for the support guys. I work on the game little by little each day, so I don't get that much done, but it's something.

Perhaps once I get a quarter area done and finish up the textures I'll release a little tech demo (I want to make sure that the rag doll physics engine works properly before I do that though, because the way they are now it's totally ridiculous, if it doesn't ever work, I'll cut it out completely).

[greywolf]

WOW! This sounds amazing! I can't believe I've overlooked this until now! I'll be drooling waiting for your alpha release!

[Blood-Pigggy]

Funny ragdoll testing stories.

- At one stage when I altered the script's sensitivity, every time a civilian got hit by a car their arms would stretch into the sky and start flailing around and knocking all the items nearby everywhere, it would usually also flip over your car causing it to explode and you to die, which would normally send your body flying 5000 feet into the air.

- I typoed when I set the power level for one of the sniper rifles, and it would instantly kill any enemy and have them speeding off into the distance where their body would kill anything that it hit.

- Some civilian in a car hit me and my body was stuck in his windshield and he sped off because of the "flight or fight" response that was coded into the AI, and he did so with my body still twitching in his windshield, he kept going until his car flipped over into a ditch and it exploded.

- A civilian on a bike starting floating into the air slowly when I hit him with a iron bar.

- Some characters would permanently become fixed in the "begging puppy" position when killed because their model bone structure wasn't correctly worked out, the dead bodies would have their hands extended in front of their body, their elbows bent, and their hands facing downward.

- In an early script that allowed drivers to be ejected from their seats when they collided into something with their car, some civilians that flew out of their windshield would fly out at tremendous speeds, to the point where driving into another person would make both of them fly off at five hundred miles into space.



There are also some pretty weird bugs that occurred during testing.

- When disabling graphical syncing (which removes most of the graphical effects, usually to test something like how many models the game can possibly hold) once every civilian would slowly float into the air and inexplicably die and fall to the earth where they would begin flailing on the ground. This would result in entire cities of civilians floating into the air then literally raining down upon you. It turned out that whenever I did this the physics engine would malfunction, and since I made the sky box "water" so that any NPC or such that managed to climb something he wasn't supposed to climb would die, they would all float into the sky and drown to death.

- While I was testing civilians hijacking each other's vehicles, I accidentally linked the "Hijacker" trigger to the "Explosion" trigger instead of the "Eject Driver" trigger. Basically what this did is it would cause any car to spontaneously explode whenever another civilian attempted to steal it, killing the occupant and the criminal.

- I accidentally removed a "monster barrier" (meant to prevent monsters from entering cities and causing havoc) when building a map, and an entire city was infested with zombies, all the civilians instead began screaming and running away, the result was nearly every car in the city speeding at 100 miles per hour running over nearly everything in an attempt to escape the zombies.

- Accidentally armed every civilian with a M16 instead of the "hostility ring" I wanted to that would allow them to have different attitudes towards you. What happened afterwards was total chaos as every single person in the city began shooting everything indiscriminately.  

- A solitary zombie appeared in the middle of a city for no reason and proceeded to attack every car on the road, one eventually exploded and set off a chain reaction of explosions that destroyed at least 10 cars and sent civilians screaming in every direction, the zombie shambles off like nothing happened.

[Doubler]

Heheh
Still sounds great, Blood-Pigggy

[Sean]

Screenage to the PMMachine please..

[Blood-Pigggy]

Never

Or perhaps you haven't seen the numerous times I've posted on these boards that my computer can't take screenshots properly? (Look at any topic where I'm reviewing a game)

I'll give teaser shots when I get my new computer in April.

[Sean]

Oh, your computer sucks.

My crack.

[Potatoe]

Blood-Pigggy, on Feb 11 2007, 04:40 AM, said:

- Accidentally armed every civilian with a M16 instead of the "hostility ring" I wanted to that would allow them to have different attitudes towards you. What happened afterwards was total chaos as every single person in the city began shooting everything indiscriminately.

You should make a secret level like that.

[Blood-Pigggy]

, right now a simple command in the console can make stuff like that happen instantly, maybe I'll leave some of the commands in so people can have some fun along the side of the real game.

[Potatoe]

That would be awsome.

[Sean]

Is this still moving along Piggy?

Feb 22 2007, 11:38 PM

I'll give teaser shots when I get my new computer in April.

-
Tease me please.