Name: Rick Johnson
Email: rjohnson@ravensoft.com
Description: Ld. Programmer / Network Admin
Project: Quake 4
Nickname: Superfly
1/24/2002
I’ve been waiting to do this announcement in order to get a few decent screen shots, but I seem to have the artistic talent of taking nothing but boring shots, so I’ll do this without them for now.
We’ve been busy working on the SoF2 MP and so I’ll announce a few features, which haven’t been announced until now. The first big one is that the Random Mission Generator will be included with MP. This includes both the dynamic terrain generation technology and the BSP instantiation (buildings, walls, other pre-fab stuff). MOD makers will be able to easily create their own generation parameters in the external files, add in unique instances, etc. There’re a few other surprises in this area that I’ll hold off announcing.
The next technology that we’ve added to MP is a flexible game-type creation system. You create a simple script which defines the entire parameters of the game type. Maps, with a few minor changes, can easily support new game types. For example, we have CTF implement via this system, as well as two other game types, all of which will ship with the game. One interesting feature that has been added is the ability to purchase weapons during each mission phase. The designer places “buy” areas inside the map, and while the player (on the right team) is inside this area, you’ll be able to go to a menu to purchase weapons, ammo, armor, etc. The script can then reward money to the player based upon the various outcomes that are defined.
Both of these two core technologies can be combined, as we do have randomly generated CTF going. In all, this should add some unique flavor to SoF2 MP that hasn’t been seen before, as well as make life a little easier for MOD makers.
Non-Raven news. A year ago, I worked on a GameBoy Color game in my spare time, just as a side project and to have a little fun. I never finished it, and so I decided that I'll be placing the source code out for the public. I'm not sure when I'll get around to doing this, as my spare time is in short supply. I'll update my .plan file at some point in the future once I've put out all the files.