Black Sierra - Full Install - V0.21
Aug 29, 2009 Full Version 0 commentsThe full installation of Black Sierra Alpha v0.21. Readme included this time! Yay.
Set in modern times, Black Sierra is set upon a fictional mountain where its habitants have disappeared. Communication, trade, and signs of life from the communities stop after a group of miners break into a deep and complex cavern system where a group of carnivorous beasts resided in. Now set free, and with no reason to fear man. These beasts spread out, and prey upon the communities of the mountain. Weeks pass as missing persons reports increase before communications stop all together. Now after a Search and Rescue team goes missing suddenly, it is your squad's job to find them and extract them. However; after finding yourself in the mists of the S&R's remains, your objective clearly becomes to just make it down the mountain alive.
Black Sierra is a basic first person shooter at heart, but is being completely designed with cooperative gameplay in mind without going over the top. Teamwork is encourage greatly, yet it will never be forced upon anyone to require a team mate in order to win. Maps, pickups, monsters, weapons, and events are designed to be played with friends (or strangers if you have no friends), yet at the same time never requiring an AI team mate if you feel like playing alone.
Survival is carefully planted into the mix as your team runs low on ammunition for their high-grade weapons, and are forced to acquire civilian weapons, ranging from shotguns to hunting rifles. Slowly the chance of survival decreases as weapon reload time increase, less ammo is held per clip, and it's accuracy degrades. Pitting players with a choice of holding onto their beloved high-tech weapons, or snatching a low-grade one in order to have plenty of ammo.
Features:
5 Player Co-op: Play with up to 4 other players as you trench through the entire singleplayer style campaign. Team work is encourage through various features, such as being able to hand out ammo to team mates.
"Smart System": The "Smart" system is designed to give total replayability, it calculates and generates weapons, monsters, ammunition, and more depending on how many players are currently playing, and what their load outs are. Yet will also randomly generate them at the same time, keeping players on their toes at all times even the second time through as those precious weapon spawns some one always rushes for may produce nothing at all.
Scavenge and Survive: Starting with military-grade weapons, players are forced to take arms with civilian weapons as their ammo is decreased, search through the world in order to find weapons and ammo.
A New Breed of Monster: A fast and accurate shot is needed in order to survive, the beasts of Black Sierra aren't your usual dim-witted brutes that require 3 clips to put down. These monsters are quick, agile, and aggressive. The blend into their surrounding, and pounce upon their victims when they're least expecting it. Quick to take down, hard to hit is the idea. A new challenge awaits.
For full on information regarding gameplay, maps, weapons, features, and etc please visit our ABOUT page on our website.
39 comments by Henley on Oct 20th, 2009 digg this super bookmark
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The full installation of Black Sierra Alpha v0.21. Readme included this time! Yay.
First release of Black Sierra, alpha v0.18 5-Player Co-op madness.
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Excellent mod, my only problem is the flashlight.
For some reason, shadows casted by the flashlight are actually casted on top of the surface being shined, instead of behind the surface, this completely breaks the flashlight as some areas (particulary those with lots of models) remain completely dark.
Specs:
Athlon 64 x2 5200+
2gb ram
Windows Vista Ultimate x64
ATi Radeon HD 4830 512mb
every setting in the game is maxed out, everything is on, except V-Sync and Frame Smoothing.
This is a problem that ATi cards have with UT3. Dynamic shadows are used alot more in our mod than the game, so its much more noticable. Unfortunately the only way to fix it is to turn off Dynamic Shadows in the video settings.
EDIT: Thanks for mentioning this. I added it to the troubleshooting.
Gonna try that later, as I just had to reinstall windows (damn viruses)
I suppose that issue can't be fixed, not until Epic does something about it.
Hey, guys.
Looks and plays pretty cool. As someone starting out in UT3 modding, I'm curious about some things. Forgive if these seem like noob questions.
I'm presuming this is a Total Conversion. Its tough finding info on doing that. People say it involves replacing everything, which sounds really daunting. Does that mean you don't use the existing script base, but create all new code to replace all of that completely? Or is it more just a matter of replacing maps, assets, AI, etc to make a new game but still building off of the script base?
Thanks again.
You build off of UT3's code and all of their assets can be used as well. If your making a pistol, you simply build off of UT3's enforcer. If your mod is alot like Team Deathmatch, you build off UT3's TDM, etc. It does not require replacing EVERYTHING. It depends on what your making. Most Total Conversions are very different from UT3, therefore requiring alot of replacing.
If you have any other questions, feel free to message me. ;)
Cool, thanks. That makes sense. I've worked with T3D and TorqueScript, so that way of doing things seems familiar. I was just a little unsure because I think on one forum I read, someone said they planned to use only the base engine, but completely replace the code base and have the scripts be 100% original. That seems pretty insane to try, but some people like a challenge, I guess.
I tried it today.
Just a few things; weapons could look better.
The monsters....krall sadly, but still nice. Kill you to easily and all they do i run into you.
Scenario needs more time before they attack.
Custom monsters are still being worked into the game, there is a lot of work and room for things to break when you start messing with AI coding and what not. So we decided in order to release the mod for the MSU deadline without it being riddled with bugs that we would keep the default UT3 monsters until after we released so we had a lot of time to really flesh out the player's side of things. Make sure features such as ammo swapping, and using the E button to pick things up and what not to work well.
No server or players :(
We appologize for this. For the time being there is no advantage for us to host a server due to the style of the mod, with the mod being a 5 player max cooperative game and the game being in it's early stages we have to leave it to the players to host small listen games with their friends in order to play multiplayer.
After some more major releases, where the mod has a lot to enjoy a dedicated server from us is to be expected.