In the two weeks since the release of the engine test it's been super busy around here; this week we wanted to give you an update on what exactly we've been doing.
Just like when we released the first version of the editor, our first step has been to address any crash bugs that showed up.
Most of the crash reports from the built-in reporter were related to situations where the graphics device was lost. This happens when you alt-tab away from the game in fullscreen mode, or when the screen saver comes up. This week Kurt added proper handling of these cases in the engine. This was a complex change so we plan to release that next week after some more testing.
In addition to the crash reports, with this release we've also been using Get Satisfaction to get feedback on the problems you are having with the engine test (the praise is nice too!) One of the more common issues is performance, so Max has been working on improving that, especially on lower end graphics cards or when running at high resolutions. We're also working on adding in support for multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA).
We've been keeping a close eye on the community's modding projects and we have a few things planned for the next patch to make life a little bit better for them. The biggest thing for modders will be the documentation on the Lua scripting API exposed by the engine. The first release of the documentation won't be complete, but hopefully it will help explain some of the less obvious features.
One of the cool community projects we spotted in the new NS2 mapping forum is SgtBarlow's in-progress map. It's looking really fantastic and we can't wait to munch some marines on it!
In addition to improving the performance of the game, we're also working on improving the performance in the Spark Editor. Currently the Editor doesn't take advantage of occlusion culling or other optimizations in the game. We're working on converting the Editor to the game's system and having everything unified.
That's what we're working on and have planned for the engine in the near future. Meanwhile, Charlie and the rest of the team are working towards the Natural Selection 2 alpha. We'll have more information on that for you in the coming weeks.
We're catching our breath after the Engine Test release last Friday. We're very happy that it seemed to be well-received and that all of you are enjoying an early look at the technology and art style in the game. So far we've had over 7,000 people run the engine test which is the majority of our pre-orderers!
Community member rsd stole our thunder with today's update so I guess we'll have to try something else! Max and Kurt are hard at work addressing issues that you've reported. They're also bringing the editor up to speed (it is currently using our old slower rendering pipeline and it will get much faster shortly).
We are excited to see you guys already modding the game, adding things like sprinting, crouching, deathmatch, etc (we've developed a lot of this as well, although we didn't feel it was ready for release yet). We love this first NS2 "frag" video too:
We've been hearing about how much you like the NS2 music at the main menu. The musician is David John, whom we've been collaborating with for a few years now. To make sure the music doesn't interfere with the game, we're using intermittent musical "stingers" in-game. However, we really wanted to create a full standalone soundtrack as well, so we're working on that and planning to release that for sale when it's done. In the meantime, here's the main menu audio track in .mp3 for you to listen to or download:
Finally, I'm refactoring our NS2 game script to make sure we can release bits of if to you guys without releasing the whole game (before it's ready). This will also allow us to release updates more easily without breaking your mods (something we are particular sensitive to!). We're also making a small game mode that is both useful for us in building our mod infrastructure and should prove entertaining to many of you (especially if you've been around since the original NSTR!).
Today is a big milestone for Unknown Worlds: we've just released the NS2 "Engine Test" to everyone that has pre-ordered the game!
This is the first version of the game and game engine where you can run around on a couple small maps and fire the rifle at animated dummy targets. It isn't supposed to represent gameplay for NS2 (or really, any gameplay at all!) but serves to help us test our technology to make sure we get it running smoothly on a wide variety of computers.
We hope you enjoy this first look at the technology behind NS2 and are looking forward to your feedback!
As we announced a couple weeks ago, we are releasing our "Engine Test" tomorrow. We wanted to take a moment to let you know what exactly is going to be in that.
We've built a couple small maps which give you an idea for the art style, look and atmosphere that will be present in the game. You'll spawn as a marine with your rifle and be able to explore and fire at pop-up targets. You'll be able to connect in multiplayer as well, although it doesn't include any game code yet. It also includes the main menu and the first of our music, which will start to give you an idea of the overall look and feel of the game.
Our main goal of the Engine Test is just that - to test the engine. There is a bewildering array of PC hardware and configurations out there and with no in-house testing or QA team, we want to get feedback from you guys to make sure the game runs smoothly for you. There are bound to be problems, but as with our many Editor and Spark SDK releases, we were able to fix problems much faster with feedback and users then if we kept everything to ourselves.
We expect the majority of feedback to be in the graphics performance and graphics compatibility areas but feedback of any kind will be quite helpful for us. Much more of the game is working than what we are releasing initially, but we also need to take it one step at a time.
We hope you enjoy your first glimpse tomorrow!
We thought we'd take a moment at the beginning of this new month to give you all a sneak peek at the biggest and greatest feature in NS2.
We now take a moment to show you this masterpiece in action. We know you'll never be the same, so remember this very moment as the moment that changed everything. Or, at least transformed first-person shooters forever.