There are 12 year olds who can download it with no trouble? You can't see past the menu system(which is the last thing implemented in any game) or read a manual? (protip: we've called it README) You sit here spouting ignorance and bile because outside of making a less healthy chorizo sausage than normal you seem incapable of creating anything of value on this earth, so you want to tear our work down to make yourself feel better?
Basically, the way you are acting only highlights the fact that you are full of failure, and not of much usage as a human being.
I'm sorry you don't like it. You're entitled to your opinion. But if you can't present it in a reasonable manner, don't be surprised if people don't waste their time on you. I've wasted enough, and still can't see that you have any reasonable concerns.
There's quite a bit of the tribes spirit alive and well in Blood Frontier. Try double jumping and impulsing. Basically, the direction you impulse in in the air is determined by the direction you are holding and the direction you are looking.
No, there aren't any big wide open maps. The average amount of players right now is varying between 6 and 8. Once the game picks up momentum, it'll be worth it to make big maps. Until then, it's not.
As far as arcane slash commands and whatnot, it's a beta - there's not much of a point to adding a real menu system until everything that's going to be in the menus can be planned for. An awful lot of things can be changed about the gameplay just playing with the vars menu.
resolution switching works - if you're on linux. If you're on win, you have to pick your resolution and restart. It's a limitation of the libs we're using.
And yes - you are tearing it down. You've been nothing but mean and vindictive, and haven't offered any specific criticism until prodded. You were criticizing it before you even played it. If you don't like getting called out for acting like a jackass, then don't act like a jackass.
I'm glad you're sure you're right. But the fact is we are using it. We get feedback as players are playing and can provide instant tech support if they need it.
If the people who made tribes are too retarded to see what IRC could have been purposed to, that's not our problem.
Getting the multiplayer and the AI up and running was actually the bulk of the work. Since we now have AI that works online and (hopefully) have balanced the gameplay fairly well, the next phase is actually not single player - it's more like online co-op.
Since we have a fairly complex AI up and running now with relatively little effect on the bandwidth, then a couple hundred monsters in a level with two or three players on the same team shouldn't take so long.
I won't promise cut scenes or FMV, but the next version should have a couple of mission maps - get from point A to point B to do X and then do Y sorts of things. They'll be packed with monsters, relatively simple, light on story, really just there to bring the co-op gameplay out of the larval stage.
I mean, I guess you could play by yourself with some bot-AI buddies and we could call it single player, but online co-op/PVM has been our goal all along. Multiplayer is much easier to do than single player, and since the components are re-used, it makes sense to finish the multiplayer first.
But we're an iterative process. We publish, get feedback, fix, add new stuff, debug, rinse and repeat. So we're putting the game up one part at a time, and the part that happens to have just been completed is Multi-player. We'll take opinions on this release from the community, alter things a bit to come in line with certain things that are common complaints. Then we move on to the next cycle.
huh? I'm not sure I get the jag city comment. It seems like you are actually judging the game from the youtube video. Depends on your vid settings. Either that or you're running it on a really, really, really weak machine.
If it plays like quake, it's because you're playing it that way. If there were people moving like ninjas and you couldn't seem to hit anything, then you're doing it wrong.
Really? The level editor is dead simple and well documented. It takes practically any image format and is easily configured in text files. Mapmodels can be dumped out in MD5 with a bone and textured in what you please.
If you can make a better map, show me. Teach me something. Give me constructive criticism. But since all you've done is bitch, I'm betting that you couldn't make a Lego house without screwing it up.
And also, make all your textures and mapmodels/prefabs FROM SCRATCH WITH NORMAL AND SPEC MAPPING. No cheating.
It also gives us a great way to listen in on what players think. Feedback is important to us, we take it REALLY seriously, and most people - like yourself, don't really bother giving useful feedback, so spying from IRC is the best we get.
If you can't build anything, try tearing something down. It still won't help your self esteem. On the other hand, that Bacon wrapped chorizo looked great.
Double jumping, evasion, and the complete obliteration of crap collection. Since you've got unlimited ammunition, and there is no armor/quad/health power up, you have to really focus on the gunplay and evasion by double jumping/impulsing. The game then becomes more of a question of skill than of memorizing the layout and timing of crap on a map.
I'm not a Quake fan. I actually hate that sort of gameplay, because someone who runs a good path has a huge advantage over every other player, even if they can't dodge and couldn't hit the side of an aircraft carrier.
Get away from combat long enough and you even regenerate your own health - negating the need for first aid packs and health boosts and all that garbage. By making the player self-sufficient(unlimited ammo and regenerating health) the focus is shifted significantly.
Strategically, the weapons that exist in a map do not respawn until the person who picked it up drops it, and it stays dropped for awhile. That means that players can "raid" into enemy territory to take weapons laying around, and thus deny them to the enemy.
Anyways - obviously you're not interested. Some people will pass up every good thing that comes their way because they are so damned impressed with how jaded they are. If that's how you choose to trickle your mortal life away, be my guest. Sounds like a lousy, depressing philosophy to me.
Part of this is intentional. You have unlimited ammunition, but the tradeoff is that you need to be very good at evasion while you reload or simply find a place to hide for a second.
Some guns, like the rifle and the shotgun, are loaded one round at a time, even if they can hold up to 5/8 rounds. This is because, used well, they're one hit one kill weapons. The rifle only needs to score a bullet to the skull, and getting hit nearly point blank with the shotgun splatters everything.
Other things, like the flamethrower, are there purely for strategic value. Players can completely block a choke point with one. It's very difficult to use as an "on offense" weapon. It'll be a lot more useful once we start throwing zombies at everything though.
As far as the speed goes, that is actually a detail that is controlled per map. The argument is that in lower gravity, you'll get less traction before leaving the ground. Of course, you can still impulse jump. Pressing jump in the air will do different things depending on which direction you're holding AND looking. If you're good, you can actually skate along the ground very quickly.
As far as the HUD thing, we are trying to be different. That's a polish sort of thing, and if something isn't working, we'll replace it. For example - it used to be that there was no health bar. As you took more damage, the crosshair became more red. Most people couldn't link the two occurences.
Part of this, I think, is habitual. After playing a zillion "me too" shooters, it's difficult to pick a shooter up and actually try something different because you are acclimatized to the way that every shooter since 3D Catacombs works.
The game speed is configurable, by the way. Right now the command is just not existent in the menu.
Blood Frontier was originally intended to be much more tactical, so I do believe that the reload/firing times may be in need of changing, since the game is no longer going in that direction.
Thanks for your input. As was said somewhere else, we can deal with negative input just fine - so long as it's constructive. We've just got no patience for trolls though - they're like the genital warts of the internet.
Don't forget red and blue:)
Seriously though, I will try to be more colorful. I don't mean for everything to turn out brown, but much of the time it's the trade off for moody lighting.
We are essentially a three man op, with some well meaning people who offer us great help and contributions every once in awhile. We didn't focus heavily on the web site. We're too busy with the whole developing a game thing. So if you're a WEB DESIGNER with some CHOPS and some FREE TIME drop us a line.
We do take user feedback really seriously - so feel free to make suggestions you've always wanted to see in an FPS.
This version is much more bug free than the last release, and we now have MAC BINARIES available for download as well as the usual tasty Win/Lin flavors.
Ugh. Sue them. Most companies will not fuck around with you once they've received a summons. It's not worth the large amount of money that a defence lawyer costs for such a case.
Say nothing. If anyone asks why you aren't talking about it, tell them that your lawyer advised against it. Scare the shit out of them.
Begin taking a recorder to work. Copy the email records. See a lawyer who's willing to prosecute for a percentage. This kind of abusive crap must end.
Honestly, there are tons and tons of pirates on the PC. A lot of pirates collect and rarely finish games. People who buy games buy 'em, people who don't aren't suddenly going to decide to change their ways. That's not going to change.
I also think that companies who don't make demos of their wares shouldn't even bother with the DRM - people are going to pirate it just to see if they like it or not, especially when it's essentially a console port. And once you already have it, and the feds don't kick in your door, it's soooo much easier to just keep it and not buy a copy.
Now that DRM has become invasive, buggy, and can be a resource hog - nothing like getting the NO-CD crack for a game you legally own just so it runs okay(Oblivion! I'm talkin' to you!), I don't see any continued point to it's existence.
All the zombies will be thoroughly non-human, meaning that all they have to really learn to do is de-humanize their targets. Although that could be a really good side story - set a condition where killing too many will drive a conscientious character mad, even if they are zombies, but require them to kill a few to get past key points.
We're not looking for tried and true - double jumping, in-air directional impulses, moving bullets that make sniping hard and aimbots less than useful, a redirection from collecting crap on a map(ammo, armor, health etc.... THERE IS NONE!)
We want to make something cool and different. If you've got ideas, let's hear 'em!
Well, I guess that largely depends on if you're a kid. There are, believe it or not, parents who want to moderate what content their kids are exposed to on the internet and take steps to do so. The paintball mode is a nice option if you want some FPS fun and have parents that won't let you play the bloody stuff.
When I think of the children, I'm not worried about what they get exposed to - not my problem. That is their parents' responsibility. But I do worry that someone who might like the game won't get to play it if there's no option like that in there.
Some people like the action, but are turned off by the gore. Now there's something there for them too.
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There are 12 year olds who can download it with no trouble? You can't see past the menu system(which is the last thing implemented in any game) or read a manual? (protip: we've called it README) You sit here spouting ignorance and bile because outside of making a less healthy chorizo sausage than normal you seem incapable of creating anything of value on this earth, so you want to tear our work down to make yourself feel better?
Basically, the way you are acting only highlights the fact that you are full of failure, and not of much usage as a human being.
I'm sorry you don't like it. You're entitled to your opinion. But if you can't present it in a reasonable manner, don't be surprised if people don't waste their time on you. I've wasted enough, and still can't see that you have any reasonable concerns.
There's quite a bit of the tribes spirit alive and well in Blood Frontier. Try double jumping and impulsing. Basically, the direction you impulse in in the air is determined by the direction you are holding and the direction you are looking.
No, there aren't any big wide open maps. The average amount of players right now is varying between 6 and 8. Once the game picks up momentum, it'll be worth it to make big maps. Until then, it's not.
As far as arcane slash commands and whatnot, it's a beta - there's not much of a point to adding a real menu system until everything that's going to be in the menus can be planned for. An awful lot of things can be changed about the gameplay just playing with the vars menu.
resolution switching works - if you're on linux. If you're on win, you have to pick your resolution and restart. It's a limitation of the libs we're using.
And yes - you are tearing it down. You've been nothing but mean and vindictive, and haven't offered any specific criticism until prodded. You were criticizing it before you even played it. If you don't like getting called out for acting like a jackass, then don't act like a jackass.
I'm glad you're sure you're right. But the fact is we are using it. We get feedback as players are playing and can provide instant tech support if they need it.
If the people who made tribes are too retarded to see what IRC could have been purposed to, that's not our problem.
Getting the multiplayer and the AI up and running was actually the bulk of the work. Since we now have AI that works online and (hopefully) have balanced the gameplay fairly well, the next phase is actually not single player - it's more like online co-op.
Since we have a fairly complex AI up and running now with relatively little effect on the bandwidth, then a couple hundred monsters in a level with two or three players on the same team shouldn't take so long.
I won't promise cut scenes or FMV, but the next version should have a couple of mission maps - get from point A to point B to do X and then do Y sorts of things. They'll be packed with monsters, relatively simple, light on story, really just there to bring the co-op gameplay out of the larval stage.
I mean, I guess you could play by yourself with some bot-AI buddies and we could call it single player, but online co-op/PVM has been our goal all along. Multiplayer is much easier to do than single player, and since the components are re-used, it makes sense to finish the multiplayer first.
But we're an iterative process. We publish, get feedback, fix, add new stuff, debug, rinse and repeat. So we're putting the game up one part at a time, and the part that happens to have just been completed is Multi-player. We'll take opinions on this release from the community, alter things a bit to come in line with certain things that are common complaints. Then we move on to the next cycle.
huh? I'm not sure I get the jag city comment. It seems like you are actually judging the game from the youtube video. Depends on your vid settings. Either that or you're running it on a really, really, really weak machine.
If it plays like quake, it's because you're playing it that way. If there were people moving like ninjas and you couldn't seem to hit anything, then you're doing it wrong.
Really? The level editor is dead simple and well documented. It takes practically any image format and is easily configured in text files. Mapmodels can be dumped out in MD5 with a bone and textured in what you please.
If you can make a better map, show me. Teach me something. Give me constructive criticism. But since all you've done is bitch, I'm betting that you couldn't make a Lego house without screwing it up.
And also, make all your textures and mapmodels/prefabs FROM SCRATCH WITH NORMAL AND SPEC MAPPING. No cheating.
It also gives us a great way to listen in on what players think. Feedback is important to us, we take it REALLY seriously, and most people - like yourself, don't really bother giving useful feedback, so spying from IRC is the best we get.
If you can't build anything, try tearing something down. It still won't help your self esteem. On the other hand, that Bacon wrapped chorizo looked great.
I think we've actually set the bot skill too high on the server. We've tweaked it down quite a bit - see if you still get the same impression.
Double jumping, evasion, and the complete obliteration of crap collection. Since you've got unlimited ammunition, and there is no armor/quad/health power up, you have to really focus on the gunplay and evasion by double jumping/impulsing. The game then becomes more of a question of skill than of memorizing the layout and timing of crap on a map.
I'm not a Quake fan. I actually hate that sort of gameplay, because someone who runs a good path has a huge advantage over every other player, even if they can't dodge and couldn't hit the side of an aircraft carrier.
Get away from combat long enough and you even regenerate your own health - negating the need for first aid packs and health boosts and all that garbage. By making the player self-sufficient(unlimited ammo and regenerating health) the focus is shifted significantly.
Strategically, the weapons that exist in a map do not respawn until the person who picked it up drops it, and it stays dropped for awhile. That means that players can "raid" into enemy territory to take weapons laying around, and thus deny them to the enemy.
Anyways - obviously you're not interested. Some people will pass up every good thing that comes their way because they are so damned impressed with how jaded they are. If that's how you choose to trickle your mortal life away, be my guest. Sounds like a lousy, depressing philosophy to me.
Part of this is intentional. You have unlimited ammunition, but the tradeoff is that you need to be very good at evasion while you reload or simply find a place to hide for a second.
Some guns, like the rifle and the shotgun, are loaded one round at a time, even if they can hold up to 5/8 rounds. This is because, used well, they're one hit one kill weapons. The rifle only needs to score a bullet to the skull, and getting hit nearly point blank with the shotgun splatters everything.
Other things, like the flamethrower, are there purely for strategic value. Players can completely block a choke point with one. It's very difficult to use as an "on offense" weapon. It'll be a lot more useful once we start throwing zombies at everything though.
As far as the speed goes, that is actually a detail that is controlled per map. The argument is that in lower gravity, you'll get less traction before leaving the ground. Of course, you can still impulse jump. Pressing jump in the air will do different things depending on which direction you're holding AND looking. If you're good, you can actually skate along the ground very quickly.
As far as the HUD thing, we are trying to be different. That's a polish sort of thing, and if something isn't working, we'll replace it. For example - it used to be that there was no health bar. As you took more damage, the crosshair became more red. Most people couldn't link the two occurences.
Part of this, I think, is habitual. After playing a zillion "me too" shooters, it's difficult to pick a shooter up and actually try something different because you are acclimatized to the way that every shooter since 3D Catacombs works.
The game speed is configurable, by the way. Right now the command is just not existent in the menu.
Blood Frontier was originally intended to be much more tactical, so I do believe that the reload/firing times may be in need of changing, since the game is no longer going in that direction.
Thanks for your input. As was said somewhere else, we can deal with negative input just fine - so long as it's constructive. We've just got no patience for trolls though - they're like the genital warts of the internet.
Don't forget red and blue :)
Seriously though, I will try to be more colorful. I don't mean for everything to turn out brown, but much of the time it's the trade off for moody lighting.
We are essentially a three man op, with some well meaning people who offer us great help and contributions every once in awhile. We didn't focus heavily on the web site. We're too busy with the whole developing a game thing. So if you're a WEB DESIGNER with some CHOPS and some FREE TIME drop us a line.
You are probably correct. But you're awfully damned rude, so don't be surprised if you get ignored or resented.
Are the weapons balanced, or are some too powerful/useless? Why? I wanna hear your opinion!
Are the computer AI bots too hard? Are they too easy? Speak out guys! You actually have a chance to affect a game's development for once!
Tips:R to reload, E to pick up weapons(unlimited ammo in most cases), Q to switch to frags, spacebar twice to do ninja stuff, shift to crouch
We do take user feedback really seriously - so feel free to make suggestions you've always wanted to see in an FPS. This version is much more bug free than the last release, and we now have MAC BINARIES available for download as well as the usual tasty Win/Lin flavors.
Ugh. Sue them. Most companies will not fuck around with you once they've received a summons. It's not worth the large amount of money that a defence lawyer costs for such a case. Say nothing. If anyone asks why you aren't talking about it, tell them that your lawyer advised against it. Scare the shit out of them. Begin taking a recorder to work. Copy the email records. See a lawyer who's willing to prosecute for a percentage. This kind of abusive crap must end.
Honestly, there are tons and tons of pirates on the PC. A lot of pirates collect and rarely finish games. People who buy games buy 'em, people who don't aren't suddenly going to decide to change their ways. That's not going to change. I also think that companies who don't make demos of their wares shouldn't even bother with the DRM - people are going to pirate it just to see if they like it or not, especially when it's essentially a console port. And once you already have it, and the feds don't kick in your door, it's soooo much easier to just keep it and not buy a copy. Now that DRM has become invasive, buggy, and can be a resource hog - nothing like getting the NO-CD crack for a game you legally own just so it runs okay(Oblivion! I'm talkin' to you!), I don't see any continued point to it's existence.
All the zombies will be thoroughly non-human, meaning that all they have to really learn to do is de-humanize their targets. Although that could be a really good side story - set a condition where killing too many will drive a conscientious character mad, even if they are zombies, but require them to kill a few to get past key points.
We're not looking for tried and true - double jumping, in-air directional impulses, moving bullets that make sniping hard and aimbots less than useful, a redirection from collecting crap on a map(ammo, armor, health etc.... THERE IS NONE!) We want to make something cool and different. If you've got ideas, let's hear 'em!
Well, I guess that largely depends on if you're a kid. There are, believe it or not, parents who want to moderate what content their kids are exposed to on the internet and take steps to do so. The paintball mode is a nice option if you want some FPS fun and have parents that won't let you play the bloody stuff. When I think of the children, I'm not worried about what they get exposed to - not my problem. That is their parents' responsibility. But I do worry that someone who might like the game won't get to play it if there's no option like that in there. Some people like the action, but are turned off by the gore. Now there's something there for them too.