[WIP] AlienCS - tactical muliplayer fps - with aliens!

In your first video at 0:50 i love this fun moment. Great game good continuation. Peace

 

@Rombie @Whiteleaf
That does sound pretty darn awesome actually. Looked up those rino aliens and they look bad ass

Thing is, I have been thinking about having different classes very early into the concepting stage, but at this point I can almost certainly say that ACS will not feature classes for marines or aliens.

I might write an entire post just on this subject at some point but for now I'll just say:
I think there are enough class based fps out there already and I'd like to finish this game some day

BUT I am considering adding mod support via MEF so it probably could be modded in later? All that is faaaaar into the future though....

@hemzab
Yah, that was hillarious
That moment summs up the game pretty well actually

 

@inko Wow, after watching a Natural Selection 2 gameplay it looks very similar! Definitely should check it out; might give you some ideas.

 

(Don't know if you'll get the alert that I edited my message, so I'm putting a new one in) How did you go about making NV for the aliens?

 

@Whiteleaf
My alien vision effect is actually pretty hacky. I just change ambiance color for the green effect and cramp up the fog to create some depth. A cleaner solution would probably be having an image effect that reads out the depthTexture and lerps each pixel based on the depth value. That should be pretty streight forward but I just never got around to it.

I'm not at home right now, so I can't check the code but it's currently something like:

Code (CSharp):

1. void SetNightVision () {
2. RenderSettings.fog = ...;
3. RenderSettings.fogAmmount = ...;
4. RenderSettings.ambiantLight = ...;
5. ...etc
6. }

 

Huh. Interesting. I just went about it by using color correction and setting it almost full green. How does the ambient light not affect other users cameras though? Never used networking and messed around with ambient lighting, but I don't think it would only effect you, right?

 

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean tbh. Just tinting the screen into a green color isn't really night vision since it doesn't make it easier to see. Just more green. And why worry about other cameras? There is only one camera on each client so it's exactly the behaviour you want. Syncing it is an entirely different subject and needs to be done seperately of corse.

 

It helped the user a tiny bit. Tinting it completely green didn't help, but it being full white and having some greenness to it helped(grayscale made everything look identical, only so many different grays). Why I'm worry about the camera is, isn't changing the fog and the ambient light in the render settings? Not on the camera? i guess since it doesn't mess with the others I really shouldn't matter, but I was curious.

 

@Whiteleaf
Yea, changing the render settings will effect every camera in the scene. But you souldn't have more then 1 primary camera in the scene anyway. I agree that it's not the cleanest solution though and working with an image effect would probably be nicer. Just tinting the screen is not the way to go though because it only uses with the information already contained in the image. A pitch black screen will just change color but not show any more detail. Working with the deapth texture would be the way to go but requires some scripting.

Here is some information on that: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-DepthTextures.html

It's fairly streight forward to get a basic depth only image effect working, but making it look nice is more difficult.

[EDIT]
Oh, and if you want we can continue this discussion via PM. Keeping the thread clean and all

 

Nah it's fine, you told me what I wanted to know. Gonna take a look at Depth-Textures.

 

I did it! The first art pass on the main map is finally finished. That doesn't mean that the map itself is anywhere near done, but at least it has a consistant level of detail throughout the map. I also tweaked a whole bunch of small things here and there so that I can now finally call this game an Alpha.

​

This is absolutely huge for me because I barely ever got a game to alpha stage before, and especially not anything of this scale.

Unfortunately I don't have much footage to show yet because so far there was only one very short 1v1 playtest in which I got absolutly destroyed. Here are 2 of the more exciting moments in gif form:





This is just a quick heads up that the game is coming along well, but I'm already out of time again.
I'll try to post some more footage and infos on the upcomming semi-public playtests in the next couple of days.
See you then!

 

This game looks really promising. However, from the looks of things the aliens are a bit OP? Will this be changed?

 

Dang! This game is so cool, it just keeps getting better and better! I saw the GIF and had to force myself to not scream in excitement and scroll down the page to look at it. I had to read the post before I could get a good look at it.

Lol literally though I almost screamed this post made me so excited

@thumbstickstudio Well if you think about it, no one even knows if aliens do exist--heck even what technology they possess. But I guess you're right, because in the game it wouldn't be very fair. But I think that's why @inko should make classes for each team, or at least the alien.

EDIT: internet was going a bit slow so the GIFS were, too. Now that they're at full speed I saw that there are now ragdolls. Pretty sweet! Also, I noticed how in the 2 videos you were getting a solid 50-70 FPS. Now in these GIFS looks like you're getting a solid 40. This is still good, but you probably want to optimize some more(maybe start optimizing if you haven't).

 

Thanks guys! glad you like it

@thumbstickstudio
Yes aliens are pretty op atm. But don't worry, ballancing is probably the one thing that will change the most in the coming months now that the framework is finished.

@Whiteleaf
Optimization is a good point. While most of the code runs fairly efficient right now, the models, occlusion culling and light map are certainly not.
But keep in mind that I'm running this on a laptop in windowed mode, max settings and HD resolution while also recording with high quality. So if you are running this on any kind of gaming pc I think you should get a fairly stable 60. Nevertheless you are absolutely right. I'll have to do another optimizations pass at some point soon.

 

EDIT: Nevermind, I feel so dumb for not knowing what the Alien franchise was >-<

Anyways I made a little fanart of a corridor to test out drawing ambient occlusion; as I'd never done it before. I quite like the way it turned out, but the walls and the floors are a bit "distorted" or at the wrong angle.

Spoiler

 

@Whiteleaf
Damn, I really wanted to answer here earlier but totally forgot. Sorry
Luckily I remeber your question, so I will answer it anyway!

Yeah, the 2 alien movies are a big inspirations for me. But an even bigger one is the game Alien vs Predator 2 which is still up to this date one of the best asymetrical fps games out there in my oppinion! Unfortunately it's a little difficult to get nowadays because it's not on steam but I highly recommend it!

I'm also a huge Valve nerd and really enjoy their approach to ballancing their games. So CS:GO, TF2 and even DOTA to some extend.

And the fanart is so awesome! Thanks man, I love it! It has a ton of atmosphere!


As for news:
Still haven't propperly tested v.016 yet
Looks like I'll get .161 done before I can even test the old version. Oh well...

Here is a neat little gif of a spooky corridor. I really liked the lighting here so I though I'd share.

 

It's funny how there are almost no textures yet it looks incredible and is quite a creepy atmosphere! I REALLY like the hallway on the left, especially the light.

 

i really like where the game is going, im tempted to model a animated alien model for u to replace the blocky meshes. however when trying to PM u i cannot send u a message .PM me if u r interested. anyway, keep it up!

 

The project looks very cool, always nice to have another alien game incoming

I still fire up and play AVP sometimes. The very old one, they had nailed the mood in this one very well.

 

xeno idling

 

Those look great!

 

doing some tests in unity, with the assets im doing for inkoo

 

Did Inko hire you? Or are you doing this for free? Either way the game's gonna look sweet with these models!

 

Alright, been I while since I posted here myself. Was mostly just watching @Mister D posting his awesome art

As for how he is involved in the project: I'll let him explain that for himself is he wants. I'll just say that he is so generous to make some very high quality character and props assets for ACS and I'm super excited to get them into the game.

I am currently also re-evaluating the scale of the project which is a little bit scary but I think I'll have some better plans of where this project is heading in a week or 2.

Since my last post I finished 0.161 with a whole bunch of new gameplay and ballancing tweaks as well as a big collision overhaul on the main map. I also added a whole bunch of features to chat, the minimap and audio.

I also had a look at unity 5.1 and almost choked on my coffee when I saw 260 warnings and 20 errors after the inital compile. I think it's pretty save to say now that I won't upgrade ACS to unity5 any time soon. (The new shader and networking system looks like a mess anyway, so I don't think I'm missing much at the moment)

I hope I have more cool stuff to show soon(ish),
until then


[EDIT]
oh, and because posts without images are boring!

The alien vision is not cusomizable from the settings file. Whooo cusomization!
The alien arms get currently rendered over the image effect. Always more stuff to do...

 

If you ever do upgrade to Unity 5, I'd recommend Unity 5; not 5.1. I don't know if it's fixed or not but there was an audio bug in Unity 5.1 where you couldn't import any audio.

 

Hey the graphics quality is really good!!!!

 

characters in progress

 

finished the aliens' animations, heres 2 of them

 

Top animation seems a little stiff, bottom one is better.

 

Uh oh, did you stop making this game? I hope not. I really hope it's just taking longer than expected for a new update...