It's been what, a year? since me, Agent Dink and Oddmind have started out on this (I also have a friend not a member of the forums that is making wallpapers and logos, of which you will see in this thread), with me as the coder (Agent Dink provided me with some useful snippets now and then, Dink as the modeler, and Oddmind as the character creator. And here is what we have to show you!
DEMO
This is an indoor demo map with weapons to test. You will find a Dark AI bot patrolling back and forth, but I am afraid you can't shoot it yet.
Just test out the weapons, sounds, and effects.
Controls:
movement: wasd
sprint: shift
shoot: left mouse button
zoom: right mouse button
weapons: 1,2,3,4
Link:
http://www.savefile.com/files/391116
Enjoy.
Time Front is an online first person shooter, but also contains some real time strategy and role playing. The fps comes, obviously, from the ability to use weapons in first person mode. The rts relates to the ability for the commander to build the base as he sees fit, in commander mode. The rpg refers to the ability to play a role in your civilization as a certain rank, from soldier, to squad leader, to commander, to lord of the base. So, in this sense, Time Front is an OFPSRTSRPG, one of the first of its kind.
So, you want to know how it plays out? It works like this:
Each team (probably 1vs1, although we are considering 4 player maps) will have its lord of the base, a commander, and possible squad leaders. The ranks will be set based on voting, and then the game will start. Each soldier will spawn in their base, at a barracks, and then based on orders by the squad leader, will do the task specified (e.g. scout or attack a fortification). But the underlying goal in the whole game is to kill the lord of the enemies base. This can be difficult, especially if he is concealed in a fortified base, or if he researches the technology to make him a war hero, giving him the ability to go out on the battlefield and greatly alter the results of the battle. The whole game evolves over four eras, Medieval, WW2 era (1940s), Modern (2000-2006), to science fiction.
The game plays out in a nice, 3D, fully vegetated world, thanks to the power of Tree Magic and Plant Life, two programs which I in no way regret investing in. Here are a couple screenshots that display this (please forgive the text). Note that I usually get 75 fps or greater looking at a thick scene of vegetation, even on my old graphics card (I updated mine, the one in my sig is the old one, and has a very low memory bandwidth, is 128 bit):
What can the commander build? Towers, walls, an armoury, a gate, you name it, all thanks to the hard and dedicated work of Agent Dink:
Those red squares are not part of the model, they are for testing purposes!
Weapons anyone?
We currently have:
Medieval Era:
Mace
Longbow
Modern Era:
Colt
Ak47
Mp5
Shotgun
Frag
Science Fiction Era:
100-bullet machine gun
The demo will include only the modern era, but this is an example of the mace, shown on a very early version of the game:
The characters are not completely finished as of yet, but I will provide screens of them later. They will be using the royalty free released animations from Half Life.
So how do you think the commanders will maintain discipline? They will be provided the power to kick players, or to put them in jail, where they will wait for a designated amount of time (maybe 60 seconds, maybe 90), while they look out the window and whatch how much fun the others are having.
The demo release, with online play, and a thickly vegetated demo map with a river to fight across (in between two high cliffs), will be available on Christmas Day! We will try our best to get the game ready by Christmas Day, and I hope we don't dissapoint you!
More information and screenshots can be found at my new website (I will be moving to a better server very soon), which I coded entirely in notepad:
http://timefront.atspace.com
To let the general public know of how things are progressing, I will say that a network test has been performed, which shows that the network bullet data and player animating are workign splendidly. Each bullet hole will fire and be displayed on exactly the same position on both computers. A chat system is in place, and during testing I was pleased to find that it was very easy to conceal myself in the lush vegetation...
(some building textures from mayang.com)[href]null[/href][href]null[/href][href]null[/href]
Uncle Sam
Nvidia Geforce 7950GT 512MB PCIEx, 2.66 GHZ Pentium 4 proccessor, 1GB RAM
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