![]() Nexuiz, with the force of LordHavoc driving engine development began to move forward at a rapid pace. The field was crowded, but all of these games had followings, including Alien Arena. Beautiful.īy 2005, many other titles have arrived, Warsow, Open Arena, Sauerbraten, and Tremulous. It didn’t have much of a unified theme, but it was a lot like UT in that regard. It’s heavy use of EvilLair’s textures didn’t hurt either, and many of the characters were well done, and just cool. I loved Basement, Slime Factory, and some of the other early maps. ![]() The Aneurysm map, always stood out to to me(and it was a great layout). ![]() While there was indeed some artistic inconsistency, and some of it(the weapons in particular) were downright ugly, it had some really great artistic aspects as well. To this day I have that soundtrack on my computers to listen to while I work once in a while. I remember playing those early releases, loving the level designs, and truly falling in love with the soundtrack. Looking back, Nexuiz was actually a really darn good game – once they got the performance issues sorted, which they did. Nexuiz(the original), featuring some pretty unique art in it’s early years. I probably let that affect my perspective for years to come. I still recall downloading the first release, finding it unplayable, and being upset that it was receiving so much attention, and being billed as the “first”. When Nexuiz was released, it was instantly popular, with over 100 concurrent players much of the time, despite it being fairly buggy, and really poor performing. While Alien Arena’s parent game, CodeRED had received pretty significant attention, including being featured in various gaming magazine print, Alien Arena flew under the radar initially. With Forest “Lordhavoc” Hale involved, people paid attention. ![]() Much of this had to do with the fully open source nature of the project, as well as it using the most advanced Quake based engine of the time, Darkplaces. It was overshadowed by another, rival title – Nexuiz. It’s a little known factoid that Alien Arena was the first of the Quake based aFPS games to arrive. Not necessarily the peak of Q3 and UT, but more the years in the mid 2000’s when the open sourced shooters arrived. Sometimes I really long for the classic arena shooter days. It won’t be long before these maps are populated with items like ammo, heath, and armor. I will add a few things more to GZ this week, some car and flying saucer wreckage, a few more detail meshes here and there. Meanwhile, a bit of minor work continues on Ground Zero, so here is a screenshot(though this one doesn’t show anything new, just thought it was a cool shot!). I’m also still working on content, and will soon have some updates there. I love the base framework that’s in place, and this will be something that will be a lot more easy to deal with than ancient Quake based engines. So far, so good! I am really excited to start testing and developing the more complicated aspects of online multiplayer. Largely this is all completed now, with a little more brute force testing to confirm it is 100% stable. This all lead to the multiplayer side of things, and special care had to be taken there, not to mention the map editing aspect. So, in my “infinite” wisdom, haha, ok, let’s be honest – sometimes you just gotta go the “hack” route, I have the game go into an intermission when switching the maps manually. This really only happened when manually switching a map in the midst of a game, when it sits in it’s 10 second intermission between maps, and everything clears out during that time, it’s fine. Has to be some kind of weird timing issue with Bullet. It’s odd, given it uses the identical methods. Everything is fine when they are deleted “naturally” during the game, as they time out, but if there are some active ones and it runs through the list and clears them when switching maps – boom – crash. The one that is still bizarre is the case of the ragdolls. While tracking all of that down, a couple of other intertwined bugs were solved, at least in some fashion. It’s also now only flushing anything if the map changes, and instead resetting various data that needs resetting in those cases. It took a bit of time, and tracking down some weird things with the IQM models, but it’s working. I simply got sick of waiting for the game to load up all of the meshes instead of what it just needed…so…it was time to start doing some flushing and re-loading. I new that was coming fast, especially while making the newest level “Ground Zero”. At the stage now of “I made too much stuff, it’s using up way too much memory, and it’s time to get a little dynamic”.
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