Jabroni Brawl Ep. 3 - Revival Media Update #10! news

WELL HELLO! AGAIN!! FOR THE 10TH TIME SINCE REVIVING!!! It’s that time again. Time to show off stuff and talk about RELEASE DATES ! But today is special, not just because it’s our 10th revival update, but also...

And to help commemorate the occasion, we’re going to finally dive into our RELEASE PLANS ! First off though, I’ve seen more than a few questions being tossed at our devs over the last 6 months, so I figured I’d do a big fat FAQ to try and explain things. Feel free to skip over all this insane rambling if you just want to get to the good stuff, cause after this, we’ll FINALLY announce a date !

FAQ:

Q: WAS THIS REALLY IN DEVELOPMENT FOR TEN YEARS??
A: Nope ! It’s more like 6 years all together when you cut out all the downtime lol, but a LOT of that was the aimless early years cause I suck at project management, but we’ll touch on that more below.

Q: WHY HAVEN’T YOU RELEASED EARLIER??
A: Sorry ! But yeah there’s quite a few reasons for why this has taken so long. Obviously in the early days of this project it was entirely because I was clueless about what I was doing lol, but for these last few years (under the guidance of actually credible game planners!) we’ve been steadily working towards a very concrete goal - Rebuilding the game on the CSGO Engine in a stable and at least SOMEWHAT presentable state. The enormity of this effort can not be understated. There are just so many moving parts in this game, and massive issues that would disrupt and wreak havoc on any wide release are being discovered with every playtest. Hell, our last patch had a server crash within the Navmesh system tied to a handful of maps, and just two patches ago one of our dev’s build became unplayable because Source’s voice chat ban list had gone berserk and filled itself with 17 MILLION bogus entries, lagging his game horrifically and requiring various code changes to fix and avoid this happening again. And it wasn’t that long ago that all players would crash if they were in line of sight of a railgun beam going through a wall at the moment of a level change, lord. There’s simply been a lot of big and confusing issues we needed to isolate + iron out before bringing in everyone.

The JB3 early launch experience

And then of course there’s still the in-development UI rebuild, which involves using CS:GO’s panorama system instead of the old Source VGUI system, and it still has a bit to go. We’ve got all the building blocks for it in place at last (big thanks to Dan and Charles for all the graphic design work), but there’s still some functionality needed (key binding doesn’t work right now), plus more we can do to help people navigate our very confusing game somewhat adequately (the thought of a full server unknowingly voting to go to a map only made for 2-4 players, and then spending a full minute telefragging each other before ragequitting, just horrifies me). And, perhaps the biggest issue here, is that while we do indeed have MANY people listed as programmers, the reality is that 95% of the post-revival work is from ONE programmer, Zero. The others basically just come and go over the years. He works phenomenally hard (he's done ~480 commits just in the last 3 months!), but there’s just been a LOT to do in rebuilding the game on a new Source branch !

Code isn’t even all that’s holding us up though - as we’ll be detailing later in this FAQ, CONTENT has also been flagged as a concern. We were confidently told one thing at the start of the project from another Source licensee regarding what could be shipped in a Source game releasing via Steam, but now we’ve been told a very different story by other licensee’s. We’ve had to make a great many painful decisions regarding maps, player models, and general map assets we can ship with. And this process is still being finished, as right now a little over 30 of our maps are currently missing assets in some form or another.
Now, take all this into account, and imagine how miserable a public release would be with all that lol. I’ve been around the Source community enough to know we’d have ~legions~ of kids bombarding our devs with demands to fix stuff "RIGHT NOW!", or even just burying them in countless crash dumps (all undoubtedly posted with no accompanying details), or just never trying the game again after crashing once. That'd be VERY STRESSFUL for our developers, and I’m just not interested in subjecting them to that. We’re certainly not aiming to have the first public build be 100% finalized and polished and perfect by any means, but these glaring blocker issues neeeeed to be sorted. At the end of it all you’ll still get a free game to play, one that (remember!) was made by volunteers working at their own pace in their own free time as they see fit. Hell, I myself juggle this project between 3 other jobs AND various coursework (and I may have just gotten hired into a new full time job, oh god pray for me). SO, if you’re still somehow interested, then please try to bear with us a bit longer.

Q: WHY AREN’T YOU DOING STEAM EARLY ACCESS??
A: Fun fact - that functionality doesn’t exist for mods on Steam lol. But there are other options we could pursue at least, but we’ll talk more on release stuff later.

Q: I HEARD CONTENT WAS CUT. WHAT DID YOU DO !
A: Major content from L4D, TF2, Portal, and (to a lesser extent) CS:GO won’t be in our game on release date. When we revived this project, I reached out to another Source licensee to find out what we could get away with distributing in our game when releasing over Steam. We were confidently told we could go nuts! And so we DID. Late last year, however, during our collaborations with other Source licensees, we were told a VERY different story. It’s all super confusing, with parts depending exactly upon the terms in your specific license agreement, and even just what the general mood is towards content in certain Valve games right now. But the short, short version is we can’t launch with content from those games. After our release, I’ll try and get a more concrete answer from Valve directly regarding any possible exceptions, but as I’m sure you know this would be a longshot. We MIGHT be able to explore a workshop option (see below), but this would be something post-release that would also be a sizable undertaking. Sorry !

Q: WILL THERE BE A WORKSHOP??
A: It's possible. We did have a programmer take a peek at this during a re-visit (among other vital tasks), so there is progress to it. But it's still a complex task that the rest of us have no experience with, and right now all our focus is just on the release build. We'll SEE about picking this up again in the future, but we can’t promise anything at this point.

Q: COULD THE CUT MAPS BE PUT ON A WORKSHOP INSTEAD??
A: The mappers are free to do whatever they want with their work, so yeah. In theory, we could then add the cut maps to our dedicated game servers, and since the maps themselves would be hosted on the Steam workshop, it’d mean people could use Steam’s massively powerful download servers to quickly download these otherwise VERY large maps (The two2fort’s one alone is nearly a GIGABYTE thanks to TF2 assets). But again, this is all very much up in the air, and something we won’t have time to investigate until some day post-release. Plz give us your strength..

Q: ANY VERDICT FROM VALVE REGARDING RELEASE APPROVAL? HAS A REVIEW BUILD BEEN SUBMITTED??
A: It was submitted 5 days ago and as of THIS MORNING (!) we got our first round of feedback from Valve ! No red flags were thrown, no stonewalling, just a few technical issues were pointed out that we need to iron out before we can be cleared to release over Steam. Once we do so, we’ll be resubmitting and then we should be in the green! No drama, no stonewalling, no nothing, just all GOOD NEWS ! So, there shouldn't be any big roadblocks for our releasing on Steam.

Q: THIS GAME WILL NEVER BE FINISHED !.... ?
A: Actually a very fair criticism lol. Were it anyone else working on this it would’ve died ten times over thanks to me being clueless about reasonable goals and how to wrap a project back in the early days of this project (and even for a bit after the revival lol). We are, however, extremely fortunate to have found an immensely dedicated group of Source modders who are all hell bent on seeing this through to the finish line. And especially lucky to have found Zero, who’s incredible dedication AND knowledge of how to actually run a project of this size has saved it from death 100 times over. And, just to repeat it here, he's had ~480 commits over the last 3 months. THANKS ZERO

Q: YOUR GAME WILL BE FORGOTTEN IN A [year/month/week]???
A: That’s ok ! We’re not setting out to make the next fortnight here - this is an extremely niche game targeting a very small target audience of some Source nerds (though really it’s just built around stuff that I specifically find fun lol). We have a server full of dedicated testers who we’ve been playing with for the last DECADE now, and that’s enough for us. If more people want to join us, that’s great! But if not, I understand, and we’ll still keep having fun. Just remember - this IS a niche game. It is a massive sensory overload to play and also VERY stupid in tone. There’s SO many guns, maps, and gamemodes, that you’ll really need to take time to soak it all in to get a grasp on it all, which many people won’t be willing to do. So yeah, you totally may not like it, and that’s ok! There’s plenty of other rad + free (and more focused!) projects out there to play. If you’re a Source junkie, maybe check out Obsidian Conflict, or Pirates, Vikings, and Knights 2!

Q: WHENS RELEASE DATE REVEAL
A: RIGHT NOW

Release plans:

YES, we’re actually at this point, NO, it’s not a joke. It’s been a very long time, and we’ve certainly seen more than our fair share of comments regarding how long we’ve taken! BUT REGARDLESS, we’ve taken a hard look at what’s remaining to get the game functional and (mildly) coherent, as well as examined what our own work schedules are going to look like in the months to come, and what would be a COMFORTABLE pace for us to work at. SO, based on all that, we’ve picked a date we all feel confident that come hell or high water, we’ll release something on, and are pleased to finally announce it in an obnoxious video format here:

For those that may have wanted it sooner, just remember, we’re all volunteers doing this in our (increasingly diminished) spare time. Feel free to join our Discord and yell at postal (only postal!!!) to go faster. It’ll definitely help !

Once we get closer to the date, we’ll make some more announcements regarding how exactly this release will work.

BUT HEY! There’s still other stuff we’ve had going on these last 6 months! Let’s check it all out ! ! !

Weapon models:

- Impact grenade, by Chanoc -

It’s a grenade that explodes on impact. Pretty self-explanatory, but I still love the idea of it just being a tiny seamine.

- Rear gas grenade, by Chanoc -

In our ever-continuing quest to be the most immature project to ever stalk the deepest, darkest depths of the internet, we made the unfortunate decision to add a fart grenade. Sorry.

- Ration, by Chanoc -

We finally got our own semi-original ration model ! It’s a cheeseburger-in-a-can, part of any balanced American breakfast.

- Sonar, by Chanoc -

One of the many gadgets utilized in SvT gamemode, this reveals the locations of nearby players as UI icons on your screen.

- Jammer, by Chanoc -

And another SvT gadget - any players within the radius of this gadget will have their global voice chat disabled. Pretty handy for isolating groups of players.

- Compound Bow, by Austin and UprightBlue -

You may remember this being shown off years back, but now it’s finally finished. We’ve a lot of stupid ideas for this.

- Chainsaw, by UprightBlue -

The L4D chainsaw is finally GONE. However, this model will likely end up replaced down the road. We’ve got a pretty stupid idea for a super sized chainsaw that we’ll be exploring post-release…

- Anti-Air Cannon, by UprightBlue, and designed by Arceonn (@arceonn)

The Anti-Air cannon, one of the FIRST weapons added to JB nearly a DECADE ago, now has its own model after being the last placeholder from those ancient times!
Normally, carrying around a full sized anti-air cannon would be rather difficult due to its size but thanks to the Aperture Science Mass Displacement Kinematics Tool, you can now carry a full sized cannon with zero issue*

*The Aperture Science MDK Tool does not mitigate any degree of recoil from the cannon itself.

Maps:

- Gunman Chronicles: Frontier, by Nask + Nicko

YEP, it’s time for ANOTHER Gunman Chronicles map, and this one has a LOT to unpack. The level design is (mostly) a recreation of the ‘Frontier’ deathmatch map that shipped with Gunman Chronicles. The map was essentially a mash-up of various points of interest from the “West” chapter of the game. We’ve added some tunnels, and a LOT more cover for players to utilize. There’s also climbable trees, drivable raptors, and numerous end-round events (an attack from the gyrocopter, an attack from a pack of raptors, and one that involves chasing after an eagle to stay alive). There’s even a playable piano that can spawn you armor if you finish a song! It’s a great addition to our Gunman Chronicles set, and one I’m sure people will enjoy.

- Hairball, by Nask/Gearbox

It’s HAIRBALL! A very small capture the flag map featured in Opposing Force’s CTF gamemode. Not much else to say here except that it’s good for small-scale CTF rounds.

- Hairballer, by Nask

But obviously we had to do our own spin on it as well. And so, we have HAIRBALLER. An extra base, a tunnel system, and explosive penguins that wander the map have all been added. It’s a good chaotic map for larger CTF matches.

Progress has also been made on our existing maps, too!

- Arcane updates, by Nask

Arcane’s chapel and docked ship have gotten a visual upgrade, with a great deal more details and places to fight in.

- Biohazard updates, by Nask and Zero

Biohazard received a massive art pass from Nask, who really drove home the HL1 theme even further.

- Courtside updates, by Junior

Junior gave Courtside a visual overhaul as well, giving it a darker look to it as opposed to the more white first draft.

- Survivor updates, by Nask and Zero

Survivor, our port of a famous CS1.6 map, has finally been finished thanks to another art pass from Nask. All the dev textures are gone, fog has been added, and extra details wherever needed. It’s a real blast from the past.

- Complex updates, by Missi

Missi updated Complex as well, giving some more detailing to the office areas, and a ton of optimization to make the map run great and be much smaller in filesize.

- Pipedream updates, by Missi

Pipedream, an already awesome map, also received lots of tweaks + some new rooms to fight in.

Player models:

Since our focus is entirely on overhauling our player animation system, any new player models are on hold until we can get them re-rigged on the new setup. So, no explosion of new player models this time.

But Ellie did add some more skins for the info_player_start player model

And, I had a little idea for a certain Opposing Force creature as a player model, which Ellie has set-up and ready to go once the animation overhaul is ready:



Yeah, this'll be a nice addition lol.

NPC’s:

Well, we added an alt version of Barney.

… sorry

Programming stuff:

Press-and-hold button UI

Zero created some more fancy buttons for mappers to use, complete with explanatory text to help convey what they do! (Shout-outs to AGSMA for the piano music b t w !)

Positional voice chat addition to various gamemodes

Pretty self explanatory - rather than just relying on boring old ‘alltalk’ in certain team-based gamemodes, we allowed for ‘eavesdropping’ if you’re close to someone from the other team. The main use for this has been for SvT, where the Sneak’s can overhear nearby Guards. It’s a small touch that really elevates the gamemode to a surprising degree! Here's an obnoxious video to show it off:

Burning sound loop fix

Is there anything more Source engine than the sound of fire being stuck on loop??? Well, we’ve fixed it (2nd time even since it came BACK with the CSGO port!!!), so thank GOD.

Voice chat lip-synching

Another classic feature from the old CS1.6/TFC days. We had access to some of this code, so Zero fixed it up and slotted it in here. It’s still WIP !! And will require player models to be modified for it (which is only being considered cause they’ll all need to be re-rigged anyways for the Animation Overhaul), but for right now you can see below to see it in action here. Also, big thanks to Ellie as well for helping set up some of our player models with this already.

SDK launcher

For our modder friends, we’ve also added a nice little SDK Launcher panel that’ll help you get to where you want

VRAD upgrades (Raven)

Game Zombie has been hard at work upgrading our VRAD to something much, MUCH faster. This new iteration is called "Raven" and you can check out a public version of it HERE. For those that don’t know, this basically affects map compile times, which are horrible by default. His changes though have allowed one map that took about an hour to compile, to instead compile in a little over ten minutes. So YEAH, it’s FAST now, and mappers aren’t losing their minds anymore ! THANKS GAME ZOMBIE !

Misc:

HL1 Chrome RESTORED

So anyone that’s played “Half-Life Source” and original “Half-Life” will have no doubt noticed the massive changes to the chrome textures used extensively throughout the game. Since we used HLSource assets, this change carried over to our game as well. THANKFULLY, a modder named Paynamia made a fixed set for them all to bring them back to their GoldSource glory, seen here
Steamcommunity.com
They were kind enough to share the assets with us, so now we’ve got the classic chrome effects back!

Optimizations:

Since we’re in the home stretch, a LOT of work has been done on just getting the game to overall run well

Map navmesh lookup times

A ‘Navmesh’ is something that goes over every walkable surface on a map, to help bots/NPC’s/player guides navigate the terrain. And since some of our maps are BIG, this meant some of our Navmesh’s were HUGE. Source wasn’t really built for that, so its method of reading them was really awful. Zero replaced this with a new system, and maps that would’ve taken a full MINUTE to read a Navmesh, can now do it in just a few SECONDS. QUITE the change!

Dedicated server CPU usage

A LOT of time has been spent trying to make sure dedicated server CPU usage isn’t out of control, which it very much has been for a long time. Lots of stuff has been optimized, but probably the most glaring of these again ties into Navmeshs and Bots. Hopefully, the server won’t choke hard anymore when a server is loaded with bots and players, but more testing is still being conducted to ensure this stability.

FILE COMPRESSION! ! !

NO, we haven’t forgotten about compressing our assets!! Contrary to what you may have heard in some dark corners of the net, most of our stuff is already nice and compressed, due to most of it coming from other (professional!) sources. That being said, there was still a decent chunk of our original stuff that needed a pass. Thanks to Game Zombie, a script was developed to scan over all our raw assets, and report back what all was uncompressed. We then compiled it into a google doc, sorted by size, and Game Zombie and Chanoc then examined everything that compressing would make a noticeable difference for (aka FAT files). They then decided what types of compression were needed for each and every asset (like knowing if an alpha channel was needed for transparency), developed a script to automate compressing it all in those various methods, and then BOOM, all our map and player model assets were compressed. This saved us 600MB of space!
Next will be weapon assets. This required some changes to the PBR shader, but now that that’s finished, tests are being conducted to see what’s doable there. If all goes well, we should be able to shave off several hundred more MB’s of space.

Oversized navmeshes

I mentioned earlier how we had some BIG Navmeshes… But some were just way too big, and not even needed due to the wide open nature of some maps. These maps had their navmeshes either remade and super optimized, or just removed entirely (we have a minigames map that we’ll never be able to teach bots to play, so yeah, don’t need one there). So even MORE space was saved !

Thanks to all of the above efforts (and the various content culling), I can now report that our game’s total file size is UNDER 20 GB’s!! Thank GOD

VPK packing!

And now the BIG ONE ! Any project featuring a large amount of content needs to pack it’s content into VPK’s. What happens if you don’t?? You get MASSIVE LOAD TIMES as your harddrive tries to dig through all the loose assets. I can now happily report that ALL of our content is now automatically packaged into VPK’s with each patch, and our load times are now VERY fast. It takes me about 14 seconds to load into a map for the first time after launching the game (the first load will always be the longest as this is when various global assets are first loaded), and subsequent map loads take under 4 seconds. That being said, this is from me running off an SSD. If you’re using an old crusty HDD, it’ll likely take you a bit longer, but it SHOULD still be bearable ! !

Yeah, that’s right, the silly fart game actually spent time on optimization, wow ! !

Animations status:

SO, as was mentioned before, there are two big milestones left for us to conquer - UI overhaul, and animation overhaul. So where are things at with the animation overhaul? WELL, Sinfect has finished the first pass over the entire new set of player animations ! At this point, we’re waiting for some of our collaborators to help guide us through implementing them. Then, we can start the tedious task of rerigging player models on the new setup. It’s gonna be a slow process, but the benefits will be massive. Here’s a demo of some of the stuff Sinfects put together:

The hope is over this next month we’ll get the ball rolling on their implementation. Fingers crossed!

But HEY player animations aren’t the only thing Sinfects been up to. He’s also cooked up some more weapon animations!

AND HEY ! ! Chanoc's also been helping out with animating some of our weapons. Check his stuff out below:

UI Status:

SO, now on to the UI Overhaul. Let’s take a look at the current DRAFT (things will likely change!)

So, there’s a lot to break down here. First off, you’ll notice we’ve gutted all the Source default VGUI pop-ups that virtually every Source project is known for, in favor of inset Panorama panels. We really wanted our game to not just feel unique, but look it too, and we’re definitely on the right track with that. Map voting UI is still in the works, and some more gamemode features are slated to be added, too. But overall the overhaul is going VERY well.

Icons are gonna be the next big step for us. Dan, our graphic designer, has finished our starter set, and they’ll next be added for our weapon selection hud and kill feed. Here’s a preview of what he’s been up to:

April Fools Nonsense:

For those already on our Discord, you most likely already saw our silly April Fools joke. We wanted to have a little bit of fun and do something that was CLEARLY a joke that people could mess around with while waiting for our release, and hopefully get a laugh out of. We still have it uploaded here:
Team-jabroni.itch.io
Spoiler alert: It’s a silly Unity asset flip that we all brainstormed and then Chanoc put together using an FPS template. We actually had a lot of fun figuring it out lol, so definitely have a look if you’re BORED. Otherwise… sorry !

Localisations:

Korean (From ‘Sandball’) and Romanian (From ‘Kenny’) have been started finally! And with them, we officially have at least SOME progress on all the languages that Steam supports! Obviously though how many will get fully finished remains to be seen, but we’ll at least certainly have a LOT of options for everyone! But that doesn’t mean we don’t still need help! Check below in our help wanted section.

CREDITS:

HELP WANTED:

As I’ve said before, mappers are always welcome, but only if you’re QUITE experienced enough.

Programmers would be great, but because we’ll have to get you licensed through Valve, you’ll need to be someone with a traceable track record and a lot of experience with Source. But YEAH this would definitely be a big help!

For translators, we are mostly set, but there are a few that may need a hand as I’ve not heard from their current translators in a bit. If you speak Bulgarian, Greek, or Norweigian, and want to help us finish their localisations, please let us know over our discord (and yes it would entail getting beta access early).

Ultimately though, if you’re really good at any aspect of Source modding, just hit us up on our discord and we’ll see if we can make it work. Thanks!

IN CLOSING:

It has been a long and bumpy road to this point, but the finish line is now definitively in sight! We appreciate all the support and IMMENSE patience everyones shown us over the last DECADE, and look forward to finally delivering this abomination into your hands soon. Thanks for reading! As always, please feel free to stop by our discord and chat away!

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