It's been a long time coming, but here's the fourth in our alien reveals...the Lerk!
Concept
We thought it would be cool to imbue the new Lerk with a wildness or craziness, which we thought would fit with his sudden movements and fast changes in direction (we rejected this concept). We also though his drooping, hanging form would give him a unique silhouette and allow him to be expressive when landing and taking off.
Final render
Here's a shot showing the high-detail model before it's been textured:
...and here's the final textured version:
You can see in this render of the finished Lerk model how closely he matches the concept. We still need to make his wings translucent (one of the last features left in our engine).
Gameplay
As the primary ranged and support fighter on the alien team, he's able to shoot spikes or clouds of spores. He is the most nimble alien with the ability to fly, glide and roost.
The biggest change for the Lerk in NS2 is the switch back to spikes instead of bite (as in NS v1.0). We wanted to keep him as differentiated as possible and this seemed the easiest way to do it. It also doesn't seem very Lerk-like to have him fly up to a structure and then sit on the ground and bite it. He should be hiding in the rafters and in vents and attacking from range.
Spikes So his main attack is a rapid-fire spike attack. These don't have the super-long range as they did in NS v1.0 which means the Lerk must be in medium range to do damage to its target. The spikes fall with gravity and have some spread to them. They are good against marines and structures alike, although Skulks are more effective at bringing structures down quickly.
The alt-fire for spikes is new, although many community members will recognize it as an ongoing feature request. Alt-fire zooms his view and changes his spike attack into more of a sniper attack. This will let him hide in dark places and pick off marines. We also plan on adding a cool bit of flavor with this - if the sniper spike kills a marine standing near a wall, the spike will impale him up against it.
Spores The spore attack works like NS1 - it shoots a spore projectile that becomes a lingering spore cloud where it hits. Any marines in this spore cloud take damage over time. This is a great area control weapon and should allow Lerks to try to force marines out of an area, or prevent them from entering an area. We will probably still have heavy armor marines (info coming) be immune to this spore damage. We currently don't have an alt-fire attack for spores but are open to suggestions!
Roost We plan on allowing the Lerk to hold his crouch key when near a ceiling to flip upside down and roost there. When roosting, his view is upside-down and he's able to spike and spore from above. This is something I really wanted in NS1 and I can't wait to see it in NS2!
There are a couple upgrades planned for the Lerk as well, including Adrenaline, which increases his energy recuperation and Piercing which adds extra damage (and a satisfying "crack" sound) to the spike alt-fire.
Here's a video showing the completed Lerk in action:
I hope you enjoyed this look at the Lerk! Let us know what you think.
It's Friday and we have another weekly update for you. If absence truly makes the heart grow fonder, then this week's patch to the Spark tool set should be met with thunderous applause (we skipped a release last week). If that's not enough to muster a hearty clap, we also have three sound montages showcasing the work of Simon Kamakazi, the sound designer for NS2. Enjoy!
Build 137
This week we're releasing Build 137 of the Spark tool set, which is available to everyone who has pre-ordered Natural Selection 2. The Spark tool set is the package which includes the level editor, viewer, and model and texture creation tools.
Here's the complete list of changes in this patch:
- Fixed selection crashes after Undo operations in creation tools
- Fixed lighting artifacts caused by view space normals with negative z values
- Fixed crash when loading a DDS format texture that was improperly formatted
- Added support for null render targets on cards that support it (GeForce 6+ and Radeon HD 4xxx+)
- Added vending machine and bottle models
- Added coffee machine and cup models
- Added conveyor belt and mining track models
- Added refinery machine model
If you've already installed the Spark SDK, it will automatically detect the update and give you the option to install when the editor is launched. If you haven't installed the Spark SDK before, use the link below to download the installer.
Note that in order to run the tools in the SDK you will need your game key.
Download ns2_setup.exe (360.3M)
Sound Montages
This week we'd like to introduce you to Simon Kamakazi, the man responsible for all of the sound effects in Natural Selection 2. Simon is an electronic music producer and sound designer in Sydney, Australia that we've been working with for the past 6 months. All you really need to know about him is that he makes great sound effects and his last name is not actually Kamakazi.
Here are three sound montages that Simon put together using his Natural Selection 2 sound effects. These montages help us get a feel for the overall mood of the game and how different sounds sit together in a mix. Let us know what you think about them!
Ambient montage (crank it up!)
Simon says: "This one essentially simulates a fly-through of a few corridors of a typical NS2 map, this is a compilation of some of the many background sounds that can be placed around maps using the editor. I wanted to keep some of the feel from NS1 with the background sounds in NS2, the ethereal sounding synths you can hear near the start of this piece are a reference to the background music you could hear at the start of an NS1 game."
"An important theme in NS2 is nature, although the environments are dark space stations, and refinery's on alien planets, we wanted to have hints of natural sounds coming through the industrial buzzing and humming. So for example toward the end of this montage you can hear what sounds like breathing, the sound was actually made from recordings of industrial machines and the heavily processed to sound like breathing. Some of the newer sounds not in this montage are things like, cicadas buzzing made to sound like a transformer or neon light buzz, and rain forest recordings turned into creepy industrial sounding atmospheres."
Marine + Ambient montage
"This one combines the ambient track with some of the marine teams sounds. In this one you can hear most of the marine weapons firing, as well as a few reload and deploy sounds and the new distress beacon. The NS2 rifle folds up when its not being used, so its deploy animation shows it unfolding, for this sound I combined various metal clicking sounds, with sounds of my printer, and a CD players opening to get the little mechanical layers. For NS2 we wanted to avoid using commercial sound libraries whenever possible (they are so over used), so most of the sounds you will hear in the game are things in my garage or have been synthesized, for example the flame-thrower fire sound is completely synthetic apart from the little metal clank at the end which is the sound of a metal tool box."
Alien montage
"The Kharaa in NS2 have a very slimy gooey texture to them, the base sounds used to make these are recordings of squishing oranges, wet rags, fresh and dry leaves (anything I find that goes 'plop'). For the alien voices I used recordings of my voice which have been mixed with the NS1 alien sounds and the sounds of animals. All of these elements are processed and treated so that they fuse into what sounds like a single alien."
"At the start of this montage you can the hear the hive with its ultra low breathing sound and creaking as it hangs there, this sound was captured from in-game, and is a combination of 5 independent layers of sound. FMOD lets us use many individual sounds to make up a single sound event, so in this case the hive idle is using loops of different lengths and oneshot sounds that trigger randomly within given parameters, we did this so that the hive could be listened to for a long time without becoming repetitive, even though it has the constant in and out breathing you will not hear distinct loop points and repetitions as you would with a single looped sound."
Simon isn't composing the music for Natural Selection 2 (we keep him busy enough making sound effects!), but if you'd like you check out some of his work, you can do so here here and here.
This week we've decided not to release a patch for the Spark toolset. While this may be a disappointment, rest assured that it means we spent 100% of our time this week making the game better (and playing ping pong).
Sensing this day would come soon, we've changed the format for our Friday updates to include different types of updates. This week we have a look at the alien Harvester and the second part of the Spark Q&A.
The Harvester
The in-game footage we released last week included a brief look at one of the alien structures. Even though it looks a bit different than its Natural Selection counter-part (and has a different name), most people correctly identified this as the resource collecting Harvester.
The Harvester serves the same role as the alien resource tower in Natural Selection; the alien team builds these structures on top of nozzles in the level to gather resources. When designing the look of the Haverster, we wanted to retain the bulbous-ness of the original while incorporating the new visual style of the alien species. The bony growths, glowing sac and finger like tentacles are recurring themes in the alien designs. While we want the Harvester to feel like a living part of the alien ecosystem, it was important to make sure that the structure didn't look too much like a playable character.
How do you like the new design?
Spark Q&A
Two weeks ago I started a series of questions and answers about the Spark engine. Here are a few more answers to questions I received.
Graham asks: Will we see water and will we see glass? If water will it be a simple implementation akin to what we saw in the HL1 engine? Same for glass?
You won't see glass if it's exceptionally clean.
Translucent surfaces are one of those things that are a real annoyance to graphics programmers. The reason is that most of the tried and true techniques for creating an image on the screen don't work that well when you can see through something. This is especially true with a deferred renderer like our engine uses. The common solution is to have a separate rendering path for translucent objects, although some recent games use interesting alternatives.
One of the challenges of developing technology in parallel with a game, is that invariably some engine features will have to be postponed until late in development. Ideally these features will be the less important ones that don't hold up anyone's work. Since glass is not very prevalent in the Natural Selection 2 universe, it doesn't really affect the playability or the look of the game very much. Thus we haven't implemented it yet, but we will!
Water, on the other hand, is not planned for the initial release of Natural Selection 2. With a small team it's important to pick your battles, and water just wasn't important enough to justify the development time. Eventually we'll add in water for mod makers, but that will be post release.
Matthew asks: How are sky boxes handled in Natural Selection 2? Will we have to make a box around our level?
A sky box is a common technique used to draw the sky and other very far away things. The way this is done is by creating a big box with images of the sky mapped onto the inside faces. The box is rendered so that it's always centered on the viewer. This prevents you from getting closer to the sides of the box and is important for maintaining the illusion.
The Source engine supports "3D sky boxes," which are conceptually the same idea but it can include models in addition to the box. These models might be things like far away buildings. In theory these buildings could be painted into the sky box, but having them rendered and lit like the close up geometry helps to integrate them and sell the effect. It also allows them to have dynamic lights, particles, animation and other interesting things which wouldn't work in a static image.
With that in mind, we decided to build sky boxes for our engine using our Cinematic Editor tool. We haven't released the Cinematic Editor or discussed it much, but you've seen some of what it does. It was originally created to build movies rendered with our game engine (namely the teaser video), but we later realized it could be used for other things; namely particle effects and in-game cinematics. In the Cinematic Editor you can place cameras. models, lights and particle emitters that can all be key framed to create animations. Certain types of objects can also have events attached to them, like playing an animation or sound effect on a model or shaking the camera.
So sky boxes in our engine are just cinematics that are rendered with the viewer at their center. This means a sky box can include all kinds of complicated things like you saw in the teaser video. We just added this to the engine recently so we haven't explored it too much, but I expect it will be fertile ground for modders. Once a "sky cinematic" is created, you just place a special entity in the Editor and specify the file name of the cinematic.
For those of you that have been eagerly awaiting part 2 of my blog post about the effect editor, wait no longer! The Cinematic Editor grew out of some of the early work on that tool, and quickly superseded it.
I still have more questions in my queue, but if you something you'd like to know about the engine, editor or anything else related to the technology of Natural Selection 2, feel free to e-mail me at max@unknownworlds.com.
This Friday we have another update to the Spark SDK for everyone who has pre-ordered Natural Selection 2. The Spark SDK is the package which includes the level editor, viewer, and model and texture creation tools for Natural Selection 2.
Most of our engine/tools effort this week was spent making improvements to the game, so there are only a few changes to the Editor in this patch. Here's the complete list of changes:
- Added rendering of the world axes in the Viewer
- Improved asset thumbnail rendering for models
- Fixed bug where custom colors add in the color picker would not be remembered when selecting another entity
- Fixed missing textures on props
If you've already installed the Spark SDK, it will automatically detect the update and give you the option to install when the editor is launched. If you haven't installed the Spark SDK before, use the link below to download the installer.
Note that in order to run the tools in the SDK you will need your game key.
Download ns2_setup.exe (360.3M)
In addition, we've uploaded a higher quality version of the footage used in the Mod DB award presentation. This is pre-alpha footage of the game, so it's a little rough around the edges. Normally we only like to release media that's polished (you guys can be so critical!), but we wanted to say "thanks" to everyone who supported us, even if everything isn't optimized and there are some glitches.
Natural Selection 2 just won ModDB's Indie Game of the Year!
There you'll see the first game footage of the skulk, marine, gorge, command station, the sentry and a marine base chock full of marine toys.
Many thanks to all of you who voted for us!
We often get questions about the technology we're building for Natural Selection 2. With this in mind, I've written up the first of a several part blog post to answer some of the more common and interesting questions. My initial call for questions generated quite a few, which I intend to address in depth, but first I'll start with two of the more general questions.
Andreas asks: What is the Spark engine? Is it the whole game engine or just the graphic part?
This is a great question to start with. Spark is the entire game engine and tool set we're using to build Natural Selection 2. This includes the graphics, sound, networking, physics, scripting, path finding and effects system (probably others too). It also includes tools like the Editor, Builder, Viewer and Cinematic Editor.
When Charlie and I started working on Natural Selection 2, we weren't planning on building an engine. Creating technology is a lot of work and it's also very challenging to build a game - both in terms of gameplay and artwork - when the engine isn't finished. When we ultimately decided that we were going to create our own engine, we wanted to make sure the technology was flexible enough that we wouldn't have to start again from scratch for the next game. We also wanted to make sure that other people could use our engine to make their own games. To this end, the technology is designed to be largely independent of the game. Spark is coded in C++ and provides the core functions of managing a virtual world. But Natural Selection 2, which is entirely programmed in Lua, adds the common elements of first-person shooters (players, weapons, score, etc.) and the Natural Selection-specific pieces like commander mode, tech trees, wall walking, etc.
The division of labor for the coding has always been very straightforward – Charlie writes the Natural Selection 2 code and I write the engine/tools code. A few months ago, Kurt Miller, a great programmer and a good friend of mine, joined Unknown Worlds to work on the engine and tools code as well.
For the past two months we've released weekly patches to the editor. Often people interpret these editor-specific updates to mean that we're not making progress on the game. In fact, even when we were crunching the hardest on the Editor - right before the initial release – Charlie was still devoted full-time to the game code. Now-a-days, Kurt and I spend most of our time enhancing the engine, with Kurt spending a small amount of his time implementing new features and bug fixes in the editor.
Beat Wolf asks: What platforms will be supported? (Linux, OS X, XBox, etc..) The web page still mentions Linux and OS X as target platforms, but there have been many doubts with the inclusion of Steamworks and because the question seems to be avoided for some time now.
Well let the issue be avoided no longer! Currently our engine and tools only work on Windows, and that will be the only platform Natural Selection 2 will be available on at release. However, most of the engine is not platform specific. The largest Windows-specific piece is the low level rendering code which is built on Direct3D. In the interest of having our engine run on Linux and OS X someday, this low level rendering code is wrapped up so that it's mostly separate from the rest of the engine. With a small amount of effort, we can swap out this piece with an OpenGL implementation that will work on Linux and OS X. All of our tools are built using the cross-platform wxWidgets framework, so once we get the engine working on another platform, bringing the tools over won't be too much work.
Now that I've convinced you that we've taken steps to allow us to bring our engine to other platforms, you might be wondering why we don't just go ahead and do it. The answer is simple; we don't have the time right now. As an alternative to doing it ourselves, we've considered "open sourcing" or publishing the low-level APIs for the pieces that are Windows specific and inviting community members to contribute their own implementation. If you like this idea let me know in the comments.
Now the issue of Steamworks. For those of you who don't know, Steamworks is the core technology of Steam, like the friends list, server browser and voice chat. We've integrated Steamworks into Natural Selection 2 because it saves us the effort of implementing these things ourselves, and gets the game into your hands faster. Unfortunately Steamworks (which essentially is the Steam client) only works on Windows. We've setup Natural Selection 2 to work without Steamworks, but you lose the services that it provides. For example, instead of being able to browse for a server you'd have to type in its address in the console to connect to it. For an OS X or Linux client, we'd have to substitute in our own implementation of those missing services. This certainly isn't out of the question for a post-release update to the game, but it's not something we'd delay the initial Windows release to incorporate.
I should add to this discussion, that none of this applies to running dedicated servers on Linux. Dedicated servers don't require graphics, input or any of those other platform specific things. And one of the great things about writing all of the game code in Lua is that it's inherently platform agnostic. Dedicated Linux server support will be in the initial release.
If you have more questions you'd like to see answered, feel free email me at max@unknownworlds.com. The more specific the better!