Hello ModDB !
This is the third development report of Revenge of Love (a year after the last one). Before you slap my ass for having kept Revenge of Love under a year of silence. I will explain everything.
The "Why Revenge of Love has been silenced for a year ?"
Since September 2013, time working on Revenge of Love was like "10 minutes per day", the reason is the fact that I had to handle both school and personal life stuff and couldn't allocate time for Revenge of Love, in order to give you an example, I created the "introduction" map in 3 months which is just a little room, an external view of a playground and the beginning of Jack and Nina's high school.
Around March 2014, I had to stop working on Revenge of Love, school was taking much more space in my time.
I started working back on Revenge of Love during the holidays (June 2014).
So know that you know why Revenge of Love has been silenced for a year, it's time to move on the stuff made during 1 month and a half.
No more modification (in hell ?), it's a standalone total conversion now.
Revenge of Love is no longer a Half-Life 1 modification, it still uses the Gold Source engine, but we are now using the Xash3D engine.
Xash3D is a Gold Source engine build from scratch, it has a lot of great features and it's great to work with, you can learn more about Xash3D here.
The fact that we use Xash3D means that Half-Life 1 will no longer be a requirement to play Revenge of Love when it will be released.
Starting from scratch, for everything
It doesn't only concern coding, but also story, levels, in short terms : everything.
Programming side : originally, the code was a huge mess and was just blocks of copying/pasting/tweaking. This time, everything that we added was either re-programmed or cleaned and then integrated. We cleaned Half-Life stuff from the code, there are still some leftovers that will be either removed or are still present for compatibility. We also added some other homemade stuff that may be described in this news.
Story side : The mod's story has to be redone for 2 reasons :
1) Too short : if Revenge of Love was already finished and released with this story's length, you would have probably finished it within an hour, maybe 2 hours if you took the time to explore or just 20 minutes if you rushed like hell, the first reaction I imagine you could have look like : "OMFG YOU TOOK YEARS TO CREATE A 20 MINUTES GAME ?!?!".
2) Non-logical stuff : The story wasn't logic from the beginning, the perfect example I can give you is that Jack is supposed to have the profile of a depressed student (at the time the tragedy occurred), if you follow the current story, it's like if he knew already how to use a weapon even before getting one. If you don't understand my example, here's a simple version : a random women is about to give birth to it's baby, once the baby leaves it's mother body, he doesn't cry but speak about E=MC² theories.
What has been done in 1,5 months ?
Programming : (some stuff may be missing)
- Tweaked some Xash3D features to fit Revenge of Love's needs (MP3 system and main menu for examples).
- A lot of Half-Life 1 stuff has been removed, some others has been left and probably renamed.
- Some weapons were re-implemented, others will follow, others will not.
- New player movement system (walking, running, sprinting with stamina, thanks Ku2zoff from HLFX.ru).
- PARANOIA's view punching has been implemented and is being used on weapons and player's movement (thanks BUzer).
- PARANOIA's subtitles have been implemented (thanks again BUzer).
- New weapon behavior system inspired from Cry of Fear (for example : if you jump or sprint you can't use your weapon).
- Some weapons effect implemented (thanks DefilerUnit from HLFX.ru)
- Death scenes system improved.
- Basic statistics system implemented, it tracks basic stats like "number of kills, number of shots", still need to be improved.
- Player voice system improved (drowning, jumping, falling...)
- A more dynamic HUD.
- NPCs footsteps sounds now adapt to ground's material (if they walk/run on metal, metal footsteps is heard, thanks to ts2do from Wavelength).
- Work in progress implementation of a "Bullet Cam" system (like Sniper Elite/Max Payne).
- Work in progress implementation of ARRANGEMENT's enhanced AI (thanks SysOp, Nem, HAWK044).
Level Design :
- Currently remaking the whole introduction map.
- The sewers (which act as training) are also getting a look overhaul.
Story :
- Starting remaking it.
Final words
It took me time to write this news but I'm quite happy that I wrote it. Don't worry, future screenshots and videos will come once we are ready to show stuff. Don't forget that you can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and track us on ModDB, stay tuned fore more information !
One last thing : Sorry if I made spelling errors in this news, at the time I'm writing this it's currently 1:48 AM GMT+1 and I'm very tired after working hard on polishing the player movement system.
Like always, feel free to comment, suggest and slap my ass if you hate me because I silenced Revenge of Love for a year (I won't fight back), see you next time !
Shepard
Great! Xash seems to be in deed a good alternative.
It is, I can't wait to implement some eye candy stuff on it. But more important assets (like story and maps) comes first.