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

Item Tracker

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!

If something of this is appealing to you check out the detailed job descriptions.

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So far for now and Happy Easter to everyone!

There are some good news for those of you, who wanted to have the artworks from the artbook in a Hi-Res version. We now finished uploading all of the artworks to our gallery here on the site.

In addition to that, we created a profile on Issuu (an online page reader software) and published our artbook there.

Hey there!

It’s quite a long time ago, since we last posted some news here. But don’t worry…we are still there and are currently working on the first in-game region “Okasankaar”. As we are still in the concept phase at the moment, we decided to give you an artistic insight in the form of an “Artbook” on how Okasankaar looks in the minds of our concept artists.

The Artbook features drawings from all our concept artists and shows as well landscapes, flora & fauna and even some talan sketches directly out of Okasankaar. The artists were able to write a short comment to their pictures and in addition, the Artbook is being produced in high-quality to give you the possibility to print it out and enjoy it on real paper also

Use the link below to download the Artbook!

DOWNLOAD ARTBOOK

See you guys in the next news release!

The artists of ooc

A feature that no game calling itself sequel to Outcast should be missing is the ability to travel between different regions freely (the game world Adelpha was connected through portals – the so called Daokas).

Is it possible to transform a merely linear First-Person-Shooter like Crysis Wars into an adventure game that supports this kind of free travelling?

See for yourself:

NOTE: The morph targets for the Cutter model weren’t finished, so his lines aren’t lipsynched. What do you think about his voice? Should it be changed – maybe YOU can do it better?

When introducing free travelling we also had to think about following issues:

• Will the inventory/questlog of the player be kept when travelling to another level?
• Will modifications performed to the current level be remembered when travelling elsewhere?

Our solution for both of them was the development of a persistence system (check the corresponding feature on ModDB for more). We were pretty much relieved when it worked out the way we imagined, since it wasn’t clear whether the Crysis Wars SDK would permit such sort of modification altogether.

This and the dialogue system (presented in an earlier news post) were features not clear to be doable with the SDK – so we decided to implement them first to make sure we chose the right engine for our project.

Again we were confirmed in our choice … while it is still a long way to go until we’ve finished the programming work (not to mention asset creation) we are at least certain now that the remaining things we want to alter are definetly possible.

You also may have noticed that some custom UI elements for the questlog were added. Under the hood we further created a Lua-driven quest system that fits our needs better than the stock mission system of Crysis Wars.

And finally we added some screenshots of the new marketplace, city walls and the tweaked Cutter model with the incredible Backpack 3000:

The next step in terms of programming will be the implementation of an improved 3rd person camera with support for proper aiming (in combat mode) and collision detection (everyone who tried Oasis surely noticed that navigating in buildings was pretty annoying).

More on that soon…

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And finally some advertisment for vacant jobs:

We are always searching for motivated and talented people who want to help us release open Outcast some day and improve their portfolio along with getting experience working in a team with a professional claim at the same time. Currently we have a considerable shortage of 3D artists (modelers and the like) and besides we could need some tool programmers (C# knowledge required) and community managers (who can translate news postings and “spread the word”).

Take a look at the official job announcement at ModDB to learn how to apply and what the detailed requirements are.