The New Mod Tease Thread

Soul_Rider · April 2014

Ok, it's not really a tease thread, because we don't have anything to tease you with..

Myself and Scatter are working on a new mod project. At the moment it is just a huge document of random thoughts and ideas, but we can see a game in there. What makes it so challenging is the environment we are going for. Out goes the corridor shooter, and in comes something spark is absolutely not designed for...

Futuristic Outdoor Warfare

We thought, if Spark is not designed for outdoor games, we will try and make one, to see just how flexible Spark and our ingenuity can be.

We are at a very early stage of prototyping and working out what we want to, but just to show you where we are at, I have made a quick video demo illustrating what we have done so far in our playing around.

If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer, but everything is very much unplanned and up in the air at the moment.

SamusDroid · April 2014

Spark is fine for outdoor you just need to change to frustum culling that overhead uses when you are well...overhead the map.

Soul_Rider · April 2014

You mean as in when in an airborne vehicle for example?

Laosh'Ra · April 2014

(to prevent any assumptions: i'm not interested in joining)

thats an interesting approach you got there. did i understand you correctly, that you are creating a whole new game (partially) using existing ns2 content?

i remember that there was already a map with a decently large outdoor area but i cannot recall the name of it. maybe someone will post its name and/or you can find it on steam workshop, it might help to give some inspiration (and you can directly contact the maker).

while i'm no expert, i remember reading in some changelog or w/e that the spark engine benefits from not being able to see beyond 1 or 2(?) rooms away which reduces computational effort by not caring for rooms that are further away (correct me if i'm wrong, it's ages since i read that). since performance in spark/ns2 is already an issue for certain people, you might want to look into that. i guess the traditional approach for this is to introduce "fog" to limit the players sight in a natural way.

Soul_Rider · April 2014

Maps require occlusion geometry to cut down the amount of information rendered. There is also a view distance limit of approx 1536 units. The map in the video is 1536x1536. Players are currently scaled to 35% of default NS2 size.

The door way that I entered as a player is 32units high and 12 wide. The grenade fired directly at the door couldn't get through, because the collision model for the grenade is around 16 units wide.

To give you an idea of the scales we are currently using:

		Real-life    NS2	                NewMod
Marine	6ft 3in	75units		26
Door	        8ft	        96units		32
1fl & roof	18ft	        216units		72
2fl & roof	28ft	        336units		120
3fl & roof	38ft	        456units		160

For reference an Onos is 120units high, the same height as a building with 2 floors and a roof in our mod.

There are tricks we are going to utilize to try and keep performance as high as possible and increase view distances etc, but it will without doubt be a technical challenge, that is half the fun.

coolitic · May 2014

Mininum requirements: 4930k and overclocked 780 Ti lol.

I just hope this wouldn't have aliens vs marines, since dem aliens would get sniped easily.

xDragon · May 2014

You can change the max view distance, and relevancy range of ents as needed, IIRC. You can even setup relevancy ranges based on mapper placed objects, I believe this is something matso created long ago.

I don't think there is anything about Spark that specifically hurts outdoor/open maps, so long as other aspects are designed correctly.

McGlaspie · May 2014

The biggest problems I see being encountered is the utter lack of a proper LOD (Level of Detail) system(s) for models, animations, effects, and network traffic.

I think more than anything the maps will make or break the general idea. Very, very careful care will need to be taken to "spoof" 90° turns, for performance reasons. The current Occlusion Culling system in Spark is not efficient at all for wide open spaces. In effect, it's dependent upon 90° turns being in a maps layout. "But commnaders and Spectators work just fine." Right, sure. Those are a very small number of players, so their impact on the network traffic is minimal compared to the bulk of the sources of network traffic.

Don't get me wrong, I woud very much like to see this idea realized. The fundamental technical issues that come along with it must be taken into account if it's going to work. I did some initial tests with significantly increasing the relevancy and draw distances in MvM. I encountered a minimum 5-10% performance hit as a result (on localhost), and it scaled upwards as the number of entities were increased. The worst it got was adding about 45ms latency to my client and reduced the server tick to ~18. That was with about 80 or so entities. 80 seems like a lot, but it really isn't.

SamusDroid · May 2014

You can set the camera far plane, doesn't help you much though

Loki · May 2014

considering they are shrinking everything down that is one way you can a get around that issue.

Soul_Rider · May 2014

That map is the bounds of the in-game max draw distance. While we know they can be increased, we are also aware of the potential performance problems. We know this is a big project and will be a challenge, and that is kind of the point.

We could use Spark to make another in-door corridor shooter, but then we'd be competing directly with NS2, MvM and Combat for players. We want to challenge ourselves, our programming skills and ingenuity, and the spark engine, haha.

McGlaspie · May 2014

Loki wrote: »

considering they are shrinking everything down that is one way you can a get around that issue.

That only helps purely from the max-render(draw) distance side of things. It won't do anything for network and LOD issues, which are the biggest problems. Afaik, Spark's maximum draw distance is the value of a 32bit integer, 2,147,483,647.

@Soul_Rider As I said "Don't get me wrong, I woud very much like to see this idea realized." ...and I wish you both the best of luck! Just be pragmatic about it, and work with what you can. Trying to go against how a system is designed will ultimately just produce bug, after bug, after bug...and nobody enjoys that ( players or devs ). If you guys can find a Stable way to get around how Spark works now (if it's relevent to a player, ALL the data is sent), then I think you could really shape this into something. In all honesty, I really think for this to be practical a full-on LOD system has to be created from scratch for everything (Network, Sounds, Cinematics, Models, Animations). And that would mean getting into the guts of how OnProcessMove works, and I find it to be a headache at best. Damned thing is sort of a practice in temporal dynamics (rolling back network snapshots for a single client and funky stuff like that). Understand, I'm not attmepting to be a pessimist or anything. I just want you guys to be aware of the problems your going to face so you can start thinking about how to solve them.

Laosh'Ra · May 2014

i remember that there was already a map with a decently large outdoor area but i cannot recall the name of it. maybe someone will post its name and/or you can find it on steam workshop, it might help to give some inspiration (and you can directly contact the maker).

turns out that was in fact kodiak

Soul_Rider · May 2014

@McGlaspie‌ I really appreciate your advice, and you are very definitely my go to man as you know when I need proper programming advice. The one thing I have in my favour, is that I'm more the kind of, can't we just hack this and this and sort of make do with that, kind of programmer, so I can generally find a way... meeting your criteria of Stable in the meaning of your message is a mere pipedream when it comes to anything that I am programming

However, if we can create something that doesn't actually crash every 5 mins, even if the underlying code is a carcrash, it will be enough for us.

coolitic · May 2014

xDragon wrote: »

You can change the max view distance, and relevancy range of ents as needed, IIRC. You can even setup relevancy ranges based on mapper placed objects, I believe this is something matso created long ago.

I don't think there is anything about Spark that specifically hurts outdoor/open maps, so long as other aspects are designed correctly.

What I'm saying is, look at the performance requirements for these smaller maps. Outdoor would mean more things to render or a very thick fog to cover up view distance.

McGlaspie · May 2014

Soul_Rider wrote: »

@McGlaspie‌ I really appreciate your advice, and you are very definitely my go to man as you know when I need proper programming advice. The one thing I have in my favour, is that I'm more the kind of, can't we just hack this and this and sort of make do with that, kind of programmer, so I can generally find a way... meeting your criteria of Stable in the meaning of your message is a mere pipedream when it comes to anything that I am programming

However, if we can create something that doesn't actually crash every 5 mins, even if the underlying code is a carcrash, it will be enough for us.

@Soul_Rider‌ Heh, fair enough and to each their own. Let me know if I can help. Oh, and just for clarity, I've got too much modding stuffs on my plate to be an active participant. MvM is growing more small mods as it develops. First ColorSkins, and now it's looking like 4-5 more will ultimately come out of it
:-S

Soul_Rider · May 2014

Because of a small change of direction, we have gone back to using tech points for spawning. This gives me a great opportunity to show how the scale of our players works in a NS2 map. Of course, as this is an outdoor game, I had to demo it in @Loki kodiak map. It is just me running around, but hopefully seeing this will demonstrate why I think this is going to be much easier than people initially fear

It is pretty much 11mins of me running up and down the massive river in the middle of kodiak though...

McGlaspie · May 2014

Rats! It's Rats from the good ol-days of CS Beta! Someone, quick, make a kids bedroom map and call it "Imagine" :P

DC_Darkling · May 2014

you SURE you wanna make maps to scale? That miniscule bugs view looked awesome on kodiak.

Soul_Rider · May 2014

How do weapons work when everything is scaled down?

How do I test that?

I know, let's go BOT Hunting -

Soul_Rider · May 2014

Strange Buildings have been seen in Kodiak... Spooky Situations indeed....

Loki · May 2014

lol

Benson · May 2014

I smell Gorgezilla coming to town!

Soul_Rider · May 2014

We've been a little quiet on the news front lately, so here is a quick video update explaining one of the new features we have added to the game.. Apologies for my sore throat..

Soul_Rider · June 2014

MvM Dodge X NS2 Wall-Jump is way OP when you don't scale it with the rest of your game....

Ironsoul · July 2014

I can offer 30 minutes a day to this project. Although I'm a complete programming noob so I'd probably bog you down more than speed things up. either way, offer is still there.

Soul_Rider · July 2014

Thanks for the offer, although there is no mod at present I will get in touch when we are back.

I am currently homeless & jobless, staying at friends, so don't have my PC, and haven't been able to work on the mod for 6 weeks now. Scatter moved and was offline for a while before I went offline, and I haven't yet caught up with him, so I am not sure if he has done anything to the mod in the meantime.

We will discuss the mod when I am back online and see where we are going. I am torn between carrying on with the mod when I return, and starting a new project on a new engine.

Overall, I love the mod idea, and we were making really good progress with the game code, but we were hindered massively by lack of mappers and modellers to help bring the project to life. When I return, we have to decide on which path to take.

Over the last few weeks I have designed a new game based on some of the mod ideas, but set in a completely different world. As a result of this, I now have a world and backstory with 2 multiplayer games and 1 singleplayer game outlined. I also have a backstory and concept for the mod, as well as a potential single player follow up to it as well. I guess it is a case of, do I want to be a modder or a game designer/developer?

Also, if we carry on with the mod, will there be any NS2 players left to play it in when we are releasing playable beta's in 18months time?

Saltlick · July 2014

Your miniature marine videos got me thinking about space marines hunting dinosaur-sized Kharaa.

Ironsoul · July 2014

That's a big bummer man (about being homeless and jobless), I hope you're making the most of it. It seems as though a mod for ns2 for you specifically would not be a great option given your current financial situation.

My offer is still open to help you work on a project regardless of engine. I've got the personal commercial license for construct 2. I have a tiny bit of experience in unity(i.e. I'm not afraid of unity) and I'm currently spending most of my time in unreal engine 4(which is awesome and you can get for $20, cancel your sub and still legally use it until you're ready to sell, you just give up the updates and access to the marketplace if you cancel your sub).

30 minutes a day is not much, but it sure as hell beats zero minutes. That's just active effort too, I'll participate in discussions that don't count towards that 30 minutes. Keep in touch.

The New Mod Tease Thread

Comments