Qore Devlog 2 news

Hello guys 'n gals.

A weeks passed and between smoking two cigarettes i shook this out of my left sleeve:

The Gibstages are polished and working for the most monsters. I decided to restrict certain death animations to specific weapons. This gives a much nicer feeling of reward, lowers the gore and the happening of gore + it adds back atmosphere, which got lost a little. So in 07 there will be less but therefore more rewarding explosions of everything. Unless you have a rocket launcher. Then everything will burn and splat and splat and frag and crack. A lot.

I also added two new enemies and finished the skins and the painskins for the new Soldier variations. Three new weapons also found their way into the arsenal. I balanced them as good as i could. Damagewise they sit in between the other weapons. Though i still have trouble with those damned weapon select and weapon cycling functions. You can of course tell the mod to spawn the new weapons or to spawn them not. It is even possible to let only specified weapons spawn.

Also i worked on the multiplayer a little bit more. I tried to make bloody skins for the player deaths, but i continue to mess them up. It must be something with the shirt and leg colors, that throws some bytes around and what you see on screen is an ugly red/black pixel mess on the dead players. But it works. Technically. And i added a 3rd person deathcam. And yes, that can be shut off by cvars as well.

About the gore itself: I reworked some effects again and the outcome is satisfying. It looks more volumetric and is not as exaggerted as before. The same counts for the gibs. I reduced the number of flying flesh a bit and added cvars to the qore.cfg to let the player decide how many she/he wants to see. Apropros blood: There is more but the decals are less overlapping, which looks more "natural" and less trashy.

You might also notice, that in the new gameplay videos the game looks more pixelised than darkplaces usually does. That is because i found a thread at QuakeOne.com about different render settings in darkplaces have a link: How to let Darkplaces look more like the original Quake I added 3 different settings to the qore.cfg, so as soon as 07 is out, you can choose yourself which rendersetting you use. I did this because a lot of people like the grungy pixel-look of the original Quake and the Darkplaces default shader-setting doesn't allow it. But the engine conatins a lot of stuff and so you can now go either full blown retro (you CAN go full blown retro and live with it ;-), retro with realtime lightning or the usual Darkplaces shaders & lightning. But the retroshader will be the default. There will also be a pixelised version of the particlefont.tga, so the particles look blocky too.

What's left to say? Oh yes, i made no progress with the painskins, but that's on the list. Instead of adding them all in one update i will make them one by one. It's even more work the more monsters i add *sigh*. But i want those new monster :-)

In case i forgot to mention it: Every new addition except the gore can be switched on or off, so you can either have your vanilla-quake with gore or some enhancements.

So what's left to do until release?
A monster painskin (Ogre), a very small weapon balancing for the three new weapons (must do the math), fish gibs (somehow slipped the schedule), one nasty player death animation bug. Should be done & ready next week, so next friday i can release 07, if nothing get's in the way.

If you want to know which map the first video is from : QUMP Project Nice episode of maps! Also GGRC made a nice review of it in his weekly Quake Grave : Part 1 Part 2

Videos:

General action to give an impression of how the gameplay can look now:

The first new enemy : A low tier enforcer variant, shooting bouncing acid that explodes after a few moments. Not the biggest thread but don't underestimate him. The reason to add him: The low tier Quake enemy roster had no one who shot grenades.

The first mid-tier enemy: Nail Ogre. I put the knights helmet on his head and gave him a Quake 3 Arena-like nailgun. The helmet looks a little goofy. But cool thing, definetly adds a fresh variation to the rythm and tact of the Quake move-shoot-dodge-dance that Quake singleplayer is. You also can see how the new Fullbody frags particle effect will look.

So long,
have fun and a nice weekend.

DaisyFlower :-)