Comments - mochumbo

...Slowly chipping away at it, but things are slow at the moment.

Yeah I know!! Its been a long time, well I have a bit of a hang over but I have finally finished my exams and today starts the period in which I hope to get public release completed.

Sorry for making you guys wait so long for an update.

Its that wonderful time of the year when the team is bogged down with exams. So give us a couple of weeks and production will be ramped up again and the site will be updated with heaps of news & goodies, so stay tuned.

Currently we are aiming for just around parliment. I really want to make the map bigger and take in more of the sites around melbourne. But i'm busy working on other things (animations), hopefully later down the track.

Looks very sweet indeed! Top show.

Looks pretty damn sweet! Pitty its for half-life :P (ducks flame)

Yeah, well that article was back in the day (a few months ago)... Before we had a website, and was the first gilmpse the public had.

Thanks Lixus I will check it out.

I thought doom3 stuff was all made in lightwave, apparently carmack and his crew have made doomIII tools that tie in with existing packages very good... Which is a god send because working with quake3 can get very ugly. I.e. i heard that maps were made in lightwave and then exported straight into the game...

I always find it very weird that people start "modding" an engine before it comes out. I mean one or two months i can understand, you can do all the planning and concept work. But to request help of coders and stuff, what are they going to do when they don't have access to the engine?

Aside from that, it sounds like a cool mod and i'm sure you will hit the ground running when the game comes out (apparently everything needed to mod the game comes packaged with the game)

Anyways goodluck.

Hunter, Bystander was in the GMAX comp, issue #71, page 98. Plus a VERY early screenshot (was after the first day of work on the mod)

As for the actual concept origions I had just finished watching in the line of fire late at night ~2am, went grabbed an orange juice out of the fridge. Then staring into an empty cup it all dawned on me, it was soo clear. Such an obvious progression for games, why hadn't it been thought of before?

Well thats where I was wrong, there are several games/mod ideas that never really got completed which included non-player-characters, such NPC's have been around for yonks in role playing games. Its such an obvious progression in multiplayer gaming that obviously we weren't the only ones thinking of adding NPC's. But don't worry we have most of the "hard" parts out of the way and we are so not going to let all that hard work goto waste by quiting.

But Bystander WILL be something totally original, and the gameplay WILL be very different to what people are currently used too. We just hope that a handfull of people have as much fun playing the thing as we have had making it.

Yeah mr.Guest it was PC Powerplay that the comp was in, we really dunno what ever happened to it. But it was a good idea that would help build on the aussie modding community.

Yeah Hunter, its really starting to take shape now. Slowly starting to resemble our vision, its come along way. Yet still has sooooo far to go.

Yes monkey it IS all about gameplay, which is one of the reasons why this mod isn't already done. A large tweak of our development session was set aside purelly for tweaking to ensure we had the right blend of gameplay that actually makes it FUN.

But the type of gameplay we envision doesn't come through in screenshots. Sure we can have a bunch of civs in a screenshot and say hey look, you can't tell who is bad and who isn't... But that really doesn't convey the gameplay. A movie of a round of bystander would go a long way to showing that off, but unfortunatly we aren't at that stage yet. We still have a lot of work in the characters and animations department.

ats>inFEX, nah mate i really don't know. I could say a date but then you will yell at me if we don't make it.... So you will just have to sit tight.

Yeah, i found that nominate mod thingo and clicked and nothing happened. No sparks no bells no whistles... But I am talking about a mod of the year thing. Where the 12 mod of the months are the only mods in the draw for mod of the year...

Mr spidey up there looks damn funky, nice work on the modelling and the texturing. How many polys is he and does he deform alright?

Yeah tw13ve you were into bystander before anyone else was ( well cept hunter :P )! Yes one of our aims is to make a killer mod that looks and feels Australian without alienating the large foreign (mostly American) community. There aren't going to be kangaroos jumping down Bourke street or a bunch of aboriginals having a corroboree on the steps of the opera house. But the mod will be set in Australian locations, with the focus on a dark and gritty underworld.

As for your question mr.guest our civs are also not bots, as for being able to push the same population as "the hunt" I really don't know as i haven't given the hunt a go yet.

Yeah, I was against once a week and more in favor of once every couple of weeks. But somewhere along the lines of me writting a comment I changed my mind.

An award once a week will be nice, but you need to get that mod of the month implemented as the "big award". Then 3 or so minor awards for every "big award" seems fitting.

...After 12 months of operation it would be nice if users and guests could vote for one of the 12 mod of the months for a mod of the year award, that would be very cool.

Thanks for the comments, they help us strive to get the thing done.

As for engine choice, QuakeIII was picked because the mod was originally intended as an entry in a local games magazine compition (that is no longer being run)... And that was to make a mod for quakeIII, it was only untill after the comp was dropped that we started thinking hey serious sam would be a very good engine for this particular mod. BUTTTT we were are already to far along developing the mod for quakeIII, so we have stuck with it and its starting to take shape.

As for promo shots, soon. soon. I want to get this melbourne map finished then i will have some new shots of that... Gameplay shots will follow suit but won't contain our full set of characters (i have been busy with mapping and moddelling weapons for characters)

knocked up a quick one for you hunter ;)

Basically 1 civ per spawn point, but there will be HEAPS of spawn points (currently ~80 in our testing map, melbourne) I can put many more in, but performance issues will come into play before you hit 80+ civs... I mean we haven't tried it yet, and everyone seems to be able handle it alright as it is now. Soon we will need to find a semi-serious server that we can do a closed test to really work out which settings is going to be optimal for performance, yet still look and play good. But as always there are still a few things we need to get done before we get to that.

Should Definitly be open to all, let guests sample the community by being able to add to it, soon enough they will get sucked in and become members.

Of course, posts by guests should be marked as such. As for newbies argument which is a good one, perhaps one way around this would be to allow MEMBERS to flag bad guest posts, after a certain number of flags the guest post gets removed from the site untill an admin can determine if the guest post in question should be perminatly removed.

How, many civs you can have in the game is left to server admins to decide (through a simple command g_numcivs x) and will ultimately be determined by what the server connection is capable of handling.

Although, there is also another civ limit and that is determined by the number of spawn points in the level (but don't worry offical bystander maps are going to be chock full of them)

Well, screenshots shall be very soon! We just wrapped up a massive 5 day development session, and have gotten a couple more key features implemented.

As for civilian populations, our major concern has always been network traffic, most computers these days will have no worries pushing the number of characters we are aiming for in the QuakeIII engine.

But results from early stress testing we have done are promising. We can push about 40 civs (with 5 actual players) no worries (over a upload capped cable connection) with Dial-up players still managing a very respectable 180ms ping. But for the total "Bystander experience" a LAN is most definitely going to be your best bet, with much more bandwidth you can really push the civ limits to mimic a crowded street. Although gameplay won't hampered over internet, we found even with very low civ numbers (~12, with 5 players) it is almost impossible to pick out who is innocent and who has a shotgun tucked under in their bag.

Thanks for the award!