We’re getting there, open Outcast fans! We’ve just started testing our first internal builds of our upcoming CryEngine 3 Tech Demo to make sure that everything is released into a brilliant and polished package. Some CryEngine 3 screenshots can be found below.
Adelpha looks better than ever this time around!
The internal test builds still need some work before we will be able to publish our work – expect a few more weeks before the newest release will hit “Gold” status and we can present it to you guys! This time around you’ll face some resistance during your adventure. This means that you can measure your strength against some AI foes and finally put that UZA-SH2 into some real use! Oh yeah, one more thing… look forward to see us rebranded with a completely new image as a celebration to our CryEngine 3 port.
Since we announced to go Indie last summer we kept quiet for a while. As you may know the free CryEngine 3 SDK was released back in August 2011 what opened a lot of opportunities for Indie developers and modding enthusiasts who want to get more advanced results than the Crysis 2 SDK could offer.
However with great power come great unforeseen problems, or something like that. We don’t want to go into details here but we encountered a few things we can’t easily solve on our own, or at least didn’t expect we had to. But don’t worry, we’re still moving steadily towards a demo release…
Furthermore there have been some serious changes in the general project structure and other things we think you’ll like to hear/see/expierence, so you see 2012 is going to be an interesting year for anyone following our endeavour to create a worthy Outcast sequel.
Everyone who played Outcast will remember this truly legendary weapon shown above – The LN Duo 500. In this blog posting I would like to explain the process behind the re-design of that weapon for openOutcast from the very first idea in 2D to the finished model in 3D…
The first thing we do at the 2D sector is to look at the original weapon in all possible angles and think of a possible new design. How could it look like ? What was bad in the original design? What could we do better ? To answer these questions we need sketches, a lot of ideas and – the most important thing – lots of feedback.
With the first draft of the weapon design I tried to “improve” the original shape with dynamic lines…unfortunately it didn’t really look like a weapon because of the bulky and squarry base shape. One of the questions at this time was, if the new weapons should more look like the old ones or not. And if Appeal used very primitive shapes because of the technical limitations back in the days when OC1 was designed? Would they have taken more “human-army-look-a-like” weapons with a more or less sci-fi look if they could? In the end we decided to create something new BUT to keep parts of the original and recognizable design in the new concept. And this is what was coming out then:
I wanted to keep the element of “take your hand IN the weapon to grab it”. So I just thought: “Let’s improve that weapon only with more barrels and lets see how it’d look like.” You can see the sketch below but I finally recognized that this design wasn’t the right direction neither. The rotation element would maybe look cool but it is not very useful (Basically you could shot yourself with it ). It could be dangerous and why should someone use such a system if we already have the revolver system in most of other nade launchers ?
So after some more discussions and feedback we finally started to approach to the final idea. I decided to also keep the characteristic barrel angle of about 45°. In this case I only needed to redesign the rest of the gun, instead of the barrels and for that I searched the net for similar ideas. Team member Berserkr posted some reference pictures and videos and so I came to the pencil sketches below. Pencil sketches are always my first step on the way to the final pictures. They can be done everywhere and it is always something else to draw on paper instead of using some tablets and a monitor.
If I’m needed to create a digital version of this pencil sketch, I just take a photo and overpaint/colour it in “Sketchbook” or “Photoshop”. After a few more feedback rounds I was able to show up the final sketch of the LN DUO II then:
What’s missing now is some material information for the 3D artists and a short 2 frame sketch of the reload animation. Because these sketches aren’t done yet we will present them in the next episode where you can see how our 3D artist are working on the actual 3D mesh and the reload animation of the LN DUO II. I hope you enjoyed reading the post and be patient: The next episode is coming really soon
After some inactivity in the programming dept. things are back on track again. As announced one of the features we’re currently working on is the item system and everything related to it – such as the OC-typical item tracker. AtomicJo looked into this matter and, while some tweaking is still needed, the results look pretty presentable:
But what is the item tracker without the typical HUD voice (e.g. original OC footage at 0:32)? If you think you can do the job, don’t hesitate to apply and your voice will guide the player in our next demo!
Note that the “focus borders” are placeholders from CW. As it happens we’re looking for Flash designers right now. If you have experience with designing Flash websites or other user interfaces, take a look at the open jobs.
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Oasis 1.2
While working on the components of the actual game (story, assets, levels) and other stuff (document procedures, …) kept us busy in the last months, we decided to give you something playable again soon: Oasis 1.2, our next demo!
As the name suggests we don’t consider it as pure technical demo anymore (e.g. demonstrating the possiblity of nonlinear dialogues and persistent levels). This one will feature all the core components of the game.
If you tried Oasis 1.1 you probably know what was missing: some action! (read: combat system and enemy AI)
Additionally the whole questline and dialogues were rewritten and our leveldesigners Demogorgon and Linkin Muse rebuilt the oasis level from scratch and tweaked the island level.
This milestone will also incorporate the feedback we received from the technical demo, while under the hood many systems have been revised to enable easy porting. Expect it… ehm… well, at least before the release of the…
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… Cryengine 3 SDK
When we decided to use Crysis (Wars) and CryEngine 2 as technical base for the project, we got a state-of-the-art engine with great tools for the price of not being able to create a standalone game.
As the UDK was released, many Unreal Engine based mods went indie and while no real struggle emerged about changing the engine inside our team, spirits were down a bit since the Crysis Wars SDK is in some ways buggy and not really well documented (much time was spent on figuring out how to do something that could be explained in not more than three lines). Additionally there was the feeling that even after finishing the project some players MAY hesitate to try the thing if they have to buy another game in advance or download a ~6GB demo (even in the times of high-speed internet).
When Crytek recently published a release date for the Cryengine 3 SDK and confirmed it will come for free for noncommercial projects, things have changed for the better: we’ll be able to release open Outcast as a standalone game!
Although everyone in the team is excited about the new perspectives (going indie, better documentation, regular updates and bug fixes directly from Crytek), we’re trying even harder to reach a new level of quality in our last CryEngine 2 (and Crysis Wars) based demo in order to have a good starting point when the battle of the SDKs gets into the next level this summer (UDK – Unity – CE3 SDK).
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Jobs
Want to jump into CE2 based game development (and learn using the tools) to be ready when CE3 SDK gets out? Always wanted to work in a team, that’s determined to reach AAA quality in all fields, to enhance your portfolio? You can apply for:
Female Voice Talent – be the voice of our HUD! See original OC footage at 0:32 for an example in the original Outcast game
3D Artist – everything from simple decoration to architeture, animals and characters
Flash artist – always wanted to use your skills to design an user interface of a game?
Action Script programmer – Give some functionality to our HUD and menus.
Gamedesigner – You’re always complaining about dull quests, imbalanced weapons or THAT huge design flaw? Here is your chance to make it better! You should be ready to learn some tools and do some scripting – but that’s worth it, right?
Writer – Like writing stories or plays? How about giving more depth to our storyline or creating some ingame dialogues?
Translator – make sure Oasis 1.2 gets localized to $YOUR_LANGUAGE as well!
*knock knock* Hey there! Can somebody please clean up here a bit? It’s full of dust! *cough*
Long time no see, huh? The good news are that we are still there and working. The bad news are…sorry, there are no bad news today Some of you may already have noticed that we are currently not that active in PR and that we are missing a lot of updates as well on ModDB as also on the blog and on the boards. What we recently started to counter this a bit is that we are now twittering a lot on our internal twitter account which can be found here:
This is our first step to get back to a normal operation in PR. Really sorry about our latest inactivity in showing pictures and stuff. We will try hard to do better!
I would like to give you a short update on what the current status is. So… Okasankaar is at about 60% now. The terrain is existing and we are – slowly but steady – proceeding with decorating the map with flora (tree’s, bushes etc.) and other decoration assets. But I think most of you guys are just interested in the status of Cyana, the capital city of Okasankaar. Good news there! The sketch of the city is done. That means that the city is already there but not with the final assets. We created a lot of dummy assets for that purpose and it worked quite well. Expect some pictures there soon.
We also just created a small “fisher village” these days which is located on another island near Cyana and this village will be featured in a bigger news update soon. But hey, we can’t just leave you here with those ten lines of text, can we?
There you go…proudly presenting “The new fisher village”
). It could be dangerous and why should someone use such a system if we already have the revolver system in most of other nade launchers ?
