The three leads that I have appointed have kept me quite impressed. Nandeep Mali, Chair of the Testing Team, has been diligent about his role in quality assurance; Mike Newall, Lead of the 3D Artists, watches over a large portion of the work that is needing to go on within the team; John Ingato, Lead Level Designer, has been plugging away with his team of fellow artists. The team is growing pretty quickly, but we still need some help.
There are a number of roles that exist in our team that still need attention. If you have any experience you could possibly share in the roles of Animator, Programmer, Artist, Level Designer, or anything else for that matter, please shoot an email off to info@whitemod.com. We will get back to you as quickly as the internet permits.
Our previous release was quiet and passive, trying to get a solid foundation on which to build this game. As such we left quite a bit up to the world to figure out. You could consider this to be a user study, to test the intuitiveness of our game, and apparently we fell short.
Many questions were sent to me about the nature of the game types, and so I will share an excerpt from our design document and see where this takes us. Stefan, a fellow programmer, has released a video that is attached to this mod, showing the way the gameplay works within Govannon.
TERRITORIAL
A number of zones will be noted on the map, each with its own award value and achievement. The zones are initially free, but when a player moves into it a timer is started. The player captures the zone when they have stayed within the confines of the zone and kept the opposition from entering it.
When a zone has both sides in it the timer is halted and restarted when the zone is again only inhabited by one player's side. In the occurrence of trying to capture a zone that has already been captured the opposition may have to wait a longer period of time to take control. With each zone that is captured your team is given further advantage over the opposition, who will quickly lose their militant backing and have to go to another location for a part.
Each team starts out with x number of respawns or resource points and forfeits them as they progress through the game. The team with 0 respawns is forced to regroup and assault another location. You can look at this as a bit of the economics of our game, where the team only has x amount of resources to expend on this battle. This amount may vary depending on the map.
The mappers are given a number of configurable options for each of these zones, including the number of players to capture and the length of time they need to be within it in order to do so.
PUSH
An extension of the concept behind territorial, Push is a linear battle where the teams capture the zones in a mapper defined order and eventually collide somewhere between them. Another point of interest that sets this apart from the disorganization of the territorial game is the Tram, which is a logistical machine that carries troops and materials to the forward lines.
There is still lots to be said, but brevity is something I cherish. I will now hand the floor over to Mike Newall.
Well, where do I start? The past couple of months have been hard work, but extremely fun. This is my first experience working on a mod and I am thoroughly enjoying it. We have only been working on this project for a short period, but we have come a long way. As Bob said, the response to the mod has been great. I am glad we decided to release the Alpha as early as we did, in spite of the show stopper Nandeep unearthed. It was touch and go for a while, but instead of pushing the release back we let the world see our first draft, and shockingly enough no one has seemed to notice it.
Over the last month most of my time has been devoted to weapon models. All of the models are in game at this point. I have been working with Stefan Schwarzien, our resident weapon programmer, to implement them all. It would be great to hear back from you all about your thoughts about the designs textures and so forth. Leave comments on them or send us an email.
Our team is bent on monthly releases, primarily to allow you all to give us feedback along the way. Our quick iterations allow us to fold in ideas and clean up issues in a fashion that other mods aren't offering. Our team is greatly talented and diverse, literally spanning the globe, so if you have questions you should hear back from us promptly, and even if you don't... send us a love letter, and include some cute panties. You will be sure to get a response either way.
This release is focused on the weapons, implementing many and providing a few tweaks to the ones we already released. This release also features a large number of changes to our maps, including AI Pathing, Textures and Many New Models. We have worked quite hard and look forward to hearing from you.
Looks great. I love the details you have added to the character, like the mud splatter with normal map... the whole model is well done but not overdone like so many these days. Simple and it works...
This is a default UT3 character, I wish we could take the credit for it :)
We are planning on adding a custom character, but at the moment it is not at the top of our list of priorities. Our main focus at the moment is to make the gameplay as fun as possible.
We are currently looking for more help in our art department, so if anyone is interested please email us at info@whitemod.com
"Chair of the Testing Team"
Wow. Almost sounds like a studio >.>
We are trying to keep things as professional as we can, and have based nearly everything we do on acting software development practices. The similarities are not by chance.
=)
Looks interesting. I'll give it a go.
Looks awesome :D.
DLing as we speak!
Very good release! My critic: Part 1
COVER: I really like the ability to take cover but it could use a bit of improvement, mainly in the ways that sometimes it covers my view of where I am shooting when I come out, and that I get stuck sometimes. Sometimes when I'm hit I come off cover and sometimes not.
GUNS + GAMEPLAY: There is no crosshair, I'm sure this was intended but for the rifle (5 shot) weapons it seems awkward to try to get kills with them. You should make your own customized controls menu so I can tell what each key is actually being set too, and maybe an aiming function so you can precision with some rifles. Another thing is to indicate what each firemode is. Some of the weapons seem to have none but still "click" when I press the firemode key as if they switched to something (Which I couldn't tell). Also need to add a leftover-ammo box to HUD or somewhere so one can see how much they have left. The guns need more variety in sound effects so I can tell the gun by the sound, for they currently sound too similar to eachother (Some are using the same sounds I'm sure). I know you will sometime add your own playermodels when they are done, which will help the theme a good amount. The HIT gun sometimes doesn't explode when it directly hits someone, making it take 3+ shots to kill. Some guns are untextured (Which I believe you already know). The basic shooting mechanics are quite solid though, specially once you memorize where your bullets are gonna go :D.
BOTS: Don't do much even on hard difficulties. They barely shoot and barely hit. They also follow the paths near exactly making their movements incredibly predictable.
Part 2 ;D
MAPS: The gamemodes still don't seem straight forward enough. I can't tell if I gained a territory sometimes (Display doesn't always show) or it won't let me take one. Also it doesn't indicate if I'm actually taking it while I'm standing in location. Often I can't get to the enemy spawn before the game says "Flawless victory" and restarts suddenly without me having to do anything (Happens second in sometimes too). Gavannon (Untextured?) has horrid FPS in the red spawn, but I never tried blue. Cronus slightly cuts my FPS when viewing across the map and sometimes the sky randomly flickers black in some locations, but other then that it really is a beautiful map. It also says "Lighting needs to be rebuilt" still on it (Cronus). Nothing was wrong with Mythris besides that there was nowhere to cover because the corners usually had those large pillar-like wall pieces that blocked me most of the time from effective use of cover. I didn't seem to udnerstand how to take the territories either. (Could not tell if I did though it did restart a few times and tell me I'd won).
MENU: Main menu and loading looks great! As does the starting game picture via shortcut! Just a small mouse error occurs when moving the mouse over the text and it has the "Label text here" displayed when it first loads up. Just need to make it so only your gamemodes show up in instant action :D.
We aren't going to be removing the UT Game modes. We may build on top of them, providing our camera and cover and so forth, but they are not going to be removed.
thanks for finding all that, however, most of those are already adressed internally. although you couldnt know that :)
the crosshair issue arised after updating our mod to the ut2.0 patch, but i wasnt avail this weekend to attend to fix it, and we didnt want to push the release any further.
as mentioned before, i will work over a lot of weapon issues this month with nandeep, including those you pointed out. make sure to check out our next release in early april, and see if it is to your liking :)
thanks for your thoughts
Your mod isn't perfect until you get a "AlCool Approves" review from me :D. I'll be there when you release :D
Does it need to still have vehicle CTF and such overtop of your territorial and push gamemodes? Seems kinda weird to me.
If you are referring to the score, no it doesnt need to be there. That was the easiest way to get the game released and have the score shared without too much work.
if you have much more for us i would like to suggest that you share it on our user voice page and not just these comments.
Whitemod.uservoice.com
Argh that uservoice thing really bugs me XD. Just the layout seems so unnecessary to have to scroll through and read in a large but annoying font :\. Why not just a suggestions forum thread?
This is our suggestion forum. Being annoyed by the font is not something we are trying to correct, the game is our focus and the uservoice page is absolutely dirt simple. You dont even have to register to be able to post or contribute your thoughts.
it searches for similar questions, cutting back on reposts. It provides OpenID and so forth login systems, so theres no loss of identity or need to create a new one. It provides all necessary functionality in a dirt simple package.
I don't require dirt simple I require appeal :'(
appeal?
Does it not appeal to you that we have a superb game to release? This is the tool we trust to help us make that happen! APPEAL!
Looks really fun, but you need moore custom content dude :D you should get a character/enviorment artist on the team ;) Might wanna have a look at your level design aswell.
Thanks for the input. We are quite aware of not having custom constent for everything. We are working on it, and recruiting. Look forward to the next release, it should be more filled.
Moddb.com for more info. A 4v4 will be hosted July 28th 10:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.