Epsylon - The Guardians Of Xendron


Most informations here are taken from the webpage and shortened. Look at the webpage for all informations. 

Project Epsylon


This game is part of Project Epsylon which includes Dragonscript (a GPL scripting/programming language), Drag(en)gine (a GPL game engine) and the final game itself. Main focus on this project is to create a free crossplatform gameengine and game originating from linux systems. 

Story - (short, see webpage for Background and Story)


It is late this afternoon where Sam and Tedeon are taking a nap on the near hillside. Georgo joins up to tell them about the informations he squeezed out of his informant from the shany towns. They learned some days ago that the old laboratory in the valley side has found some new people inhabiting it. A couple of month ago they took out a drug dealer ring which used that laboratory as their production and shipping facility. Since then the building had been neglected. But now there seems to be life in their, non autorized one. Sam and Georgo assume that those guys might have returned. Deciding to pull off once more a night operation they decide that both of them are enought to deal with
it and that Tedeon and Sean should take a nap. Approaching the car though Sean shows up on the window pulling of their sad little face. Sam knows quickly that she wants to participate in this one. As Tedeon does not use his veto as her father she is up for the party too.

After the nightfall the three take on the laboratory. They notice quickly that the building has been befitted with a couple of guards. It is thus time for some stealth operation to get in there unseen. They
know from their last intrusion that this building holds subterrain laboratories and appropriate equipment. Down they search through the labs and find out that those people in charge here somehow managed to get their hands on the old research documents of Sam that he created back in those days where he researched his portal generation device. Sam knew that with the uncomplete documents nobody would be able to recontruct his portal. Unfortunatly those people seem to have knowledge about xendronite crystals which goes beyond what physics can explain at the time. After some more searching around they find out who might be responsible for this and an address of a dimension: alpha-10, the world Odjin comes from. Knowing that in this world do exist people that would love to own such a device they decide to head over to alpha-10 with the entire team to investigate further. They have to make sure that this technology is not misused by the wrong people.

The next day they set off for alpha-10 not knowing that they just ended up in one of the most tricky cases they ever had. 

Gameplay


All your actions have large influence on the events in the world. It is better to solve your missions without lethal force if possible. You can take enemies on with your bare hands or use tranquilizing
devices to knock them unconcious. Take advantage of the Energy based fight system to overcome your foos. If you knock somebody's energy low he will act completly different than if he has full energy. Get
Physical Boost by triggering your Adrenaline-Meter to get out of desperate situations. But beware, what happens to your enemies can also happen to you.

  • Use Lock-Picks or Electro-Hacker devices to open doors or disable various kinds of electronical devices. Hack computers or security terminals to gain entrance to shut of areas or to get yourself an advantage.

  • Misuse objects for the most crazy contraceptions. Use everything as sort of weapon if you want to knock off your enemies or try to build up a nice trap to catch them. Play MacGyver and dazzle
    your oponents with creativity.

  • Take advantage of different camera perspectives and the Dragon-View mode to get a much better and more lit up view of your surroundings.

  • Use Bionical Implants of Characters equipped with them to get throught tight and deadly spots. Use their Neural Interface to gain entrace to computer systems and security panels or stick to their Vision-Enhancer Implant to have a better insight into the current battle ground.

  • Solve missions in team work with up to all team members working in parallel to achieve the goal. Give them orders and proceed with all at the same time or position them at key points to be able to proceed on a certain path more easily.

  • Check the abilities of your team members and develop them independently to help the team the most. Each Character has his unique skills and abilities.
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6 comments by Dragonlord on Jan 6th, 2009 digg this super bookmark


A long time passed since the last update on this profile as all the updates went into the Drag[en]gine profile where they are situated more logically. Now it's time to show what also happens on this project for a change.

Improved locomotion system

In the last News post of the Drag[en]gine ( which you might have slipped as it drowned in a mass commit ) the improved Animator System has been discussed. Text and images can not give enough clues about the power of this system, especially a power given to animators. In contrary to conventional systems or fully procedural systems no coding knowledge is required to build highly dynamic animations. Great way to keep your artists busy without waiting for the programmers/scripters all the time. As a little illustration of the system you can find here a video of the work in progress locomotion system used in the game. There are a few animation variations missing ( mainly turning and transition animations for extreme cases ) but the rest is working needing only some refinements. Good thing is that a large number of variations on these animation ( holding and using items ) can be generated without requiring your animators to produce animations for all situations. Another advantage is the way this game handles the first person camera. All camera movement is governed by animations ( and therefore the animators you create ). In the video you can see a test session cycling through various combinations of walking, running, crouching, moving sidewards and looking around as seen by the ego-camera and the movie-camera. Especially notice how the head bobbing for running is small if you run straight ahead but gets wonky if you run sidewards ( all animation driven, including looking around ). Also there's a slight lag in the change of walk direction which will be higher when carrying large objects to give the player a better feel for the weight of what he carries. With this you can move around maps without having to use side-step keys all the time as required for most FPS games.


Inventory system reworked

One of the problematic points in developing this game has been the aimed for game mechanic goals. A lot of time in the recent month went into validating the usefulness and especially do-ability of certain ideas in the design document. Some withstand the tests others showed to be problematic and got either dropped or reworked. One of the main points has been the inventory system. The old system allowed for multiple inventories which sounded nice on paper but actual play testing showed various troubles with this system. The inventory system went trough various reshapes to find a balance between the aimed goals and good game flow. After all the main game mechanics involve rich interaction with the environment/world, crafting your own devices ( MacGyverism ) and solving tasks using your own mind. To avoid too much distraction with the inventory the system has been reduced in complexity. Players have now a list with VIPs ( very important possession ) which they can neither loose nor do they add to encumbrance or consume inventory space and a sizable inventory. Each actor ( of which you have multiple in your team ) can equip besides other stuff one baggage type item. This item indicates the size of the inventory and how much the actor is encumbered. The two added images show the current inventory dialog in-game as well as a mock-up with some large inventory ( for example a large backpack ) containing a sample cast of items and a smaller one ( for example a smaller backpack or a shoulder bag ) for comparison. The larger one can carry more but also has a larger impact on the agility of the actor. The rest should be self explanatory. The layout of the screen is not final. As we have some free space left we will most probably add some more infos about the items like the attachment slots they have. Drag and drop interaction is implemented and can be easily used.

Equipment Inventory | Mockup: Equipment Inventory

Various stuff

The cloth system is now working. A bit a strange name but this simple means that you can equip cloth and other items and they reflect on your actor. Known from RPG games and therefore is no new thing to gamers. If a cloth is equipped the underneath human actor body part is not rendered. So here only the head and hands are rendered. The rest are individual items. Uses the Drag[en]gine collider attachment system for this. No code required, just plug it in and it's working. For adding quickly new cloth you can use XML files now. No code required for this.

Furthermore the first map of the introduction chapter ( which is going to be a sort of live-tutorial as it is done often nowadays ) has been worked on. In the above video some parts of the map can be seen. It stretches though further outside the view ( where the game will start ) and includes a main valley through which the player approaches the building and a smaller side-valley which is required to solve a later puzzle ( but more I will not disclose yet ). There's no texture paint on the terrain yet since we use this as a little playground for testing out ways to generate this texture masks for faster working later on.

Besides all this the skin of Sean has been improved and except some seem fixing and a few small tweaks on the wings ( to make the color better bleed over ) it's done. The back fins are also something to fix up later but that's pure texture work. Sam also got some cloth to wear around as well as a fix up of the Armature for animation and a cast of new animations. Still needs a fix on the hands ( higher polygon count and fixing a mistake in the bones structure ) and some eyes.

Sean Skin

Outlook

Updates on this project will be always a bit slower and less until the Drag[en]gine is released. This is done since people would like to take a stab at the game engine before the game itself is out. Work continues on adding interactions with the world, improving the first map and adding more props and items.

So stay tuned for the next news post on either profile.

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Comments  (0 - 10 of 88)
daleluck1313
daleluck1313 Jun 29 2009, 3:20pm says:

The graphics don't look the best, but the animation seems pretty damn good (judging from the latest video).

Watching.

+2 votes     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jun 29 2009, 4:15pm replied:

Yeah, I'm not the best artist and currently I'm doing this artsy stuff all on my own so there's a certain limit to what I can do.

+1 vote     reply to comment
timstro59
timstro59 May 6 2009, 10:47am says:

looks good.

tracking.

+1 vote     reply to comment
SinKing
SinKing Jan 8 2009, 8:57am says: Online

Sounds good to me and - yeah - to make a toolset available and give people a chance to play around with it before joining a complex project like yours, is definately a good idea.
I understand what the dragon does now and it's most likely going to be interesting. You made great progress in the last two years and it's good to see you are following your design document and always know which step to take next.
This is surely gonna work out and if you ever need any help, remember there are people who want to give you a hand!

+1 vote     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jan 8 2009, 10:24am replied:

I'll keep that in mind. I hope to get the engine and toolset out as soon as possible but as always it depends on the amount of work at university ( last semester with full schedule courses ) or the company.

+1 vote     reply to comment
SinKing
SinKing Jan 7 2009, 3:21pm says: Online

The human walking cycle looks smashing and it's great to see the head moved by the motion, too.
I always watch this project and enjoy every update. What do you mean by: "it depends on how many people join this project, when it will be finished?"
I can't remember seeing many (if any) recruiting attemts by you. If you need some particular person, please let me know - I'm very good at finding them.
I am also German, so we could speak about it in our mother tongue ;)
Cheers! Great work man. I still don't get what the dragon is doing in this game, but I guess you have a plan!

+1 vote     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jan 7 2009, 4:03pm replied:

About the recruiting it's a bit of a problem because we work here with a from-scratch engine and my current experience with people who joined ( and dropped ) the project is that the lack the will to work with something they don't know yet. Those who want to work on that project need to be flexible since you can't simply work after a schedule-X with known tool-chains. Many can only do this and those who can are usually already tied up in projects or moved already forward into the industries itself. Since some month now I'm not doing recruiting anymore here since I try to get the engine ( and with it the tool-chain ) out as soon as possible so people can fiddle with it before attempting to join. Maybe I can get then people on board ( besides the two which are already ) that really are willed to sit this one through. Otherwise it gets a patchwork and this I want to avoid.

Now what goes for the dragon there's a reason you won't see much right now. They are central in the story which unfolds though mostly around the 3 chapter. The first chapter ( which is going to compose only of this map including the underneath lab complex ) is an tutorial chapter introducing the player to the human character game mechanics. It's therefore rather short ( and planed to become a preview demo of some sort ). From the second chapter onwards the dragon characters become available too. They give you a different way of handling missions. Human characters are mostly specialized on using tech ( building/modding devices, using weaponry, computers and such ) while dragon characters are specialized on using physical abilities ( very agile, natural camo, low light vision, stealthy ) and "xendron energy". The trick is combining the strength of different characters together and using them in tandem ( have for example a human character in a town doing detective work while a dragon character is out in the rougher terrain in the mean time looking for what you need ). This is just one example.

+1 vote     reply to comment
H4CK3R117
H4CK3R117 Jun 26 2008, 10:22pm says:

great job guys

+1 vote     reply to comment
tadmod
tadmod Jan 18 2008, 9:27pm says:

Wow, This game looks awesome... I'm a real sucker for interactivity...

Do you have an expected release date? and how far (in %) are you from finishing this??? this is definitely a mod-watch for me.

+1 vote     reply to comment
Dragonlord
Dragonlord Jan 20 2008, 9:43pm replied:

Can not give an estimation for this really. It all depends a lot on how many people are helping. The latest plan had been to release a first version of the engine somewhere this summer but this is also not set in stone. Once the first ( introduction ) chapter is done it will be released as a sort of demo. But like the rest this is just a plan without a fixed date yet.

+1 vote     reply to comment
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Epsylon
Platforms
PC, Linux
Developer
Team Epsylon
Engine
Drag[en]gine
Contact
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Official Page
Epsylon.rptd.ch
Release Date
TBD
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Style
Genre
Adventure
Theme
Sci-Fi
Players
Single Player
Project
Indie
Statistics
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330 of 1,324
Last Update
5 months ago
Watchers
210 members
News
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