The Sizzling Summer Status news

Hello everyone! It's been a long time since I've posted an article here but it's been an extremely busy and fruitful past few months. We kind of missed our anniversary, but I didn't make an article for it so enjoy this little talk.

Ubisoft Legal News

After over half a year of deliberation with the Ubisoft legal department, I am proud to say that we have been given the legal green light to continue developing and releasing the co-operative mod and reverse engineered modding SDK! This does come with some additional guidelines that still need to be worked out before we can start doing public testing of course, but this is a HUGE win for us.

If you've followed the development of this mod you know how panicked I was around the legality. So many other mods have been taken down in the last few years just for relying on reverse engineered code, and here we are developing an entire modding kit for people to skip the reverse engineering process. Thankfully, the people over at Ubisoft have been extremely supportive of this project at every single level of discussion, and it's a really inspiring thing for the team and I to see that through the support of the Dark Messiah community we have been able to get this far. Hopefully this will lead to some even greater things in the future, but above all I am going to say thank you again to everyone, we really, REALLY would not be here without you.

Character Design Philosophies

We are operating on a basically completed game, but the objective of the co-op mod is to do our honest work so that people would be fooled into thinking it was a part of the core game by default. One of the obvious things we will need to work on are player models. The game is a singleplayer game, and walking around with a mannequin head isn't good for presentation.

There's already a bunch of models in the multiplayer component of Dark Messiah, and we also want people to be able to choose a model like the many co-op mods that came before us, so why not pluck them out! However, we will be going further than that. Because of all the different armor types that Sareth can wear, we are also going to design new armors for each of the models to fuse their character design and the Sareth's equivalent model.

I'll note that these models will be coming alongside the mod over time instead of gate keeping the release of the mod just for them to be ready. We want to take our time and do a good job without sacrificing your potential playtime! I've made a video really breaking it down to the very fundamental design choices here, so if you're interested in this I highly recommend my video:

Fully Custom Entities in Our SDK

Thanks to the sustained efforts of SacredAI we now have the capabilities of fully custom entities in our Dark Messiah SDK. When I previously announced custom entities, there was still a catch. We needed to derive our entities from one of the existing entities with Dark Messiah. Now, we have the ability to just dump an entirely custom entity, even from another SDK (so long as it is compatible with the source engine and we have all the headers) right into the game.

To curb any exaggeration, we are still at the basic level of these entities. You can see the entity is a little bright, and that's because we're working on hooking into Dark Messiah's lighting engine for full control. We are still maybe 3 class inheritances away from NPCs or weapons, so we're not going to see any metrocops or guns in Dark Messiah, but the potential is there, and if you know anything about how I've spoken about the SDK, we usually push to live up to that potential. Fully custom rendering, networking structures and methods, and non-inherited behavior is at your control! We may even have to re-visit some of our older co-op mod fixes in light of this new SDK for better stability.

Sareth's Demon Form Animations

Riddick3 has been hard at work getting the animations together for the third person version of Sareth's demonic transformation. As you might know, the animations are very stiff and don't really exist because of the forced perspective of a singleplayer game, so he's taken it upon himself to add a little flair to it.

There are a few animations that are still missing, mostly very simple ones that are needed for intermediate playback between the main sequences. Think the shifting feet animations you see above, but for things like transitions between ledge grabbing. Riddick is a little sidetracked with the character concepts I mentioned in the other section, but sometimes you have to switch between things to prevent burnout.

Development Diary and Closing

This developer diary is mostly the share the excitement in all of these breakthroughs and some of the issues that came along:

As we are getting closer and closer with the end of the legal proceedings, we are shifting focus to getting this into the hands of some testers. We'll start small with the people that have been helping out in the discord, and then expand to more and more until we eventually reach a fully open beta period. I have been polishing a lot of the game's bugs to at least make it a seamlessly playable experience and then we can worry about fixing the co-op map locations and things that may occur during gameplay.

Discord is still available, so if you want to talk with me about anything, use this link: Discord.gg ( select Dark Messiah from the #role-assignment channel )

I accept all pings, questions, suggestions, and etc.

And while I have not been as active on Twitter recently due to me really working to pump these things out, I recommend following anyway because it's still a very good way to keep up: Twitter.com