=============================================== Violation Entertainment - development journal =============================================== --------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 21st, 2008. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why bother reading this pretentious ranting, really. All this junk talk is here so I can read over it once every year and try to remember old ideas and aspirations, and learn from my mistakes. Such as ever giving too much heart and soul into game technology I have no immediate experience with, like Torque. We'd have to go back to 2002 for this. What a time. It was the so-called end of my Quake III Arena days, where I spent time just making any old crap and releasing it to the public from my PlanetQuake site, and Pappy-R and Jube would make me feel all important and special. I'll never forget those times. I left all that to start this site and focus on a futuristic racing game using the Torque engine, with all its promises and shines, and the hope of publishing the game. Little did I know I was leaving pretty much the one and only true game technology that I've ever really loved and that's ever really loved me back, "idTech", the Quake engines. About a week ago, friend and coder Bill "InCiNeRaToR" Kosche contacted me on ICQ out of the blue (I didn't see him online much for about a whole year) and basically said "we can do this in Q3A, and we can do this NOW!", and I just snapped right out of it and wholeheartedly agreed. Infact he'd said this before but just about of plain stubbornness and the time and money I'd invested in the Torque engine clouded my judgment. Like I said in the news, I don't want to say anything bad about Torque or Garage Games, that stuff can definitely make games, and good ones, but not the high-speed excitement that Chaos Circuits deserves, no matter how much time or money was invested into it, we both know for a damn fact that Q3A CAN do it, and we also know exactly how to do it, because we both have direct experience with the engine. This has to override all other factors in game development beyond time and money. The simple fact of "getting it done". What's the point of time and money as a principle if the whole idea is simply impossible, and it's never too late to change. Some say that Q3A is a step backward, even from Torque and especially from Torque Shader Engine, or whatever they're calling it now. I don't think so, not if you consider the advancements made by certain people. Infact there's a couple of people I know who can help make this project beyond even my expectations, but I won't be too specific, for the time being, let's just say "normalmaps" and "stereovision". Ulterior Warzone is taking longer still, still more environments and polish, but it has to be worth it, I feel so much love for this game that I don't even really care if it will get published or not, seriously. Maybe a curse for saying that, but I just have too much personal attachment to it now, I'm very proud of it and want it to reach its full potential. Shadowing Hate characters are on display and to be honest I'm sick of all that bullshit, nothing would make me happier than to get back to work on them and bring them to some actual final characters. Not talking about bases anymore, but to actually refine a proper character. I can't wait, all these years and I can hardly believe things are so close to paying off. With all that, I'm sure the team will be ready to expand to a healthy size again, for the first time in 2 years, we should have enough hands on deck to retain a respectable pace. New to the team is "hotwheeler", a talented mapper who is surprisingly keen and focussed on Shadowing Hate and all it has to offer. I hate to speak up prematurely about new members since there's always a chance this time next week I won't hear a peep from him, but he seems really genuine so I can't wait to see what he comes up with. There's so much more on my mind right now and I could rant on and on, but, all this is what has actually been happening and I should keep this journal like that, only type out what has actually been happening instead of going on and on about predicting the future. Back to work now. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - August 29th, 2008. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ulterior Warzone is still going, bigger than ever. It's become a very fun and feature- rich game and we're very proud of it. The Shadowing Hate character bases have had some exposure but not much interest. I think things have changed with independent and mod development now, people seem to be pretty exhausted after having seen so many "ports", where models have been taken from other games and sources, and thrown into a project, and so much hype and "marketing", I get the impression that because my characters have taken so long, been built from the ground up and have come so far, perhaps no one really believes it. It's frustrating to compete with modified Half-Life 2 character models, and tweaks on stolen files of other people's work. I committed myself to producing media that is 100% original, without any legal limitations and free to do whatever we want with, independent or commercial, but in that process have been drowned among the thefty tweaks. I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, people are able to "borrow" media, so they do, but it just seems like now more than ever no one really gives a damn about honour and integrity of these aspects, stolen or not, "it's all good". Hardly. I've never been impressed by seeing Alyx Vance bouncing around in any other engine. I've seen her in Half-Life 2, it's been done already. Sure they are great models, but there's more to be impressed about by seeing someone at least attempt something like that from scratch and all original. It's always this "ported" media that is accompanied by "WE'RE THE BEST!!" kinda comments that common folk fall for. I don't get it, I don't get how people have lost this sense of detecting bullshit when they see it. I've never been able to do that, you'll never find any ViolaE projects with taglines like "now you are our bitch" and "worship us or die", infact the truth is it's because of my hesitation to blatantly promote any of these projects that is the reason things are not going as smoothly as they should. This shit works. I had some hard times a few years ago, when I said things about Shadowing Hate like "will contain higher texel depth", "will push the engine further/harder", etc., and certain people accused me of being all "PR" about it. Still pissed off about that. While others claim to be "the best", all I had done was outline some technical aspirations, things that ANYONE could do at ANY time. Doesn't make it "better" or "best", simply explains some technical advances the project will have as a focus. And THAT'S apparently "PR". So anyway, that was then. Now we've reached those aspirations and even ventured beyond those original plans. That's a success in itself, but meanwhile these same projects with the same "stolen and tweaked" characters still market themselves as "the best" and people buy straight into it like a bunch of mindless sheep. You can't be humble or no one will give a damn about you. It sucks. And it's the same all over, Doom3 and Torque are almost exactly the same, it's a war over exposure and hype, it's not even about development at all. I met a guy from Garage Games who had this massive fanbase and getting e-mails daily and was the "art lead" of the project. Didn't have a clue about what a "texel" or "polygon" was, and the screenshots showed it. Yet, because of his persistent spamming and in-your-face trendy advertising approach to it all, people were convinced it was something great. The project looked like some Nintendo64 game gone wrong, yet people were itching for more. Meanwhile, it was all imagination. I'm not bitter or jealous about that, I know it probably seems like it but that's not it at all, I'm generally just confused about people in general. I'd like to assume with all the problems in the world that people would be getting smarter and more open-minded, gaining more independent perspective, embracing challenge and denying all this pure hype-only spam, not just concerning games but multimedia and life in general. Not the case though, by my clock the common Joe is becoming a useless and manipulatible piece of dough ready to be moulded into a stormtrooper. Exaggeration? I wish it was. Some people say to me "well why don't you do that too?" HAH! You know what Shadowing Hate is about? This very concept! It's about a vast majority being told "You're not poor, you're not sick and dying, you're not oppressed, because you've got US! THE BEST! The buncha folks that keep you in the gutter, but we have shiny logos and lots of golden exclamation marks at the end of our promises, BUY US, we keep you just barely alive!" Yeah, so you can see how much of a contradiction that would be, marketing something that in itself is anti-marketing, trying to persuade your "vote" for something that is about the evils of such persuasion. I just wish people were more mindful and clear about what they help sustain in our modern culture. If people keep falling for these taglines and exclamation marks, then we really are doomed, Shadowing Hate will become a reality. I wish I could explain all this in one neat little sentence but I can't, I can't even write about it, it has to be a game, it has to force CHOICE upon you, for you to really understand what it means. I think that's why people still struggle with it, all this time we've been reading books and listening to music and watching TV, none of these things stop and ask you "now what do you think?", no, they TELL you what to think and you will believe it and like it. Good sheep. Keep making your tiny little pencil marks on a card once every 4 years and go home believing that you actually have a say in how your society functions. Well, not you, but people in general. This is why computer games are so important, people need to be trained to have input. For so long people have been trained to be the audience, silent and non-existent, this is why computer games are so much more important than people realise, and this is also why certain types of people wish to see them banned or remain "stuff for kids". These people are scared that you, the audience, may actually have courage to stand up and say when something isn't right. It's very much a political thing, yes. Hm damn, I've lost myself here. I will save all this stuff for Shadowing Hate "the game" and hope like crazy people start to wake up soon and I don't live to see the real Shadowing Hate. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - July 19th, 2008. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ulterior Warzone is taking longer to develop due to enhancements in the way graphics can be used, especially the environment tiles which were already numerous and the most time-consuming to put together. The project now has up to 10 different environments, each with dozens of unique tiles and formable tiles, which means not only does every set need particular attention unto themselves but extra care to make sure the forms connect to each other nicely. All this takes up extra time, even though the graphics are tiny compared to the other projects, every pixel counts. Just lately extra support was added to allow dozens more custom tiles for each environment, these are used for big unique features, more "artwork" than environment, which is taking extra time to put together which also means the original deadline has been and gone. That'll teach me for trying to predict outcomes and set deadlines, because of course the project is much better off with these new features regardless of how much longer it will take to put together, and I strongly believe more love needs to be put into games these days and not rushed out the door with haste. The good news is that this is actually old news, and said customs are nearing completion too, which means the game itself is practically done and all it needs is some final polish, and the actual "maps" done, which like the other projects is always the very last thing to happen. You can't map until you have the media to map with. I stand by that philosophy, a serious project never starts at the end otherwise it will end at the start, if you know what I mean. This is why you can't see any Shadowing Hate maps yet, well, virtually none, because what would there be to see? A bunch of tests, of which there are literally 100s, but they're not very interesting to look at, while behind the scenes there's about 2GB worth of development media to work with, and it's still going. As for those other projects, little bits here and there but nothing real amazing. I regret my last post about Torque as there's been some progress with DTS exporting which was always the biggest issue, that and the physics problems but I realise the engine just doesn't do physics well anyway, good enough has to be good enough, but what engine Chaos Circuits will end up using is still out in the open. Recruiting a new team has had very little interest but what to expect as that "help wanted" stuff is only on this site. I just can't stomach whoring out unless it's accompanied by exclusively new content that warrants publicity at the same time, and everything is in pieces. The website is not a part of any webrings or ad- exchange setup or anything like that. That will come in due time though, I'm sure. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - May 13th, 2008. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last time I was on about Chaos Circuits, despite all the other cool stuff going on, and this time I'm on about it again. I love the idea of this game and so many of the extremely awesome and unique features and characteristics the game has going for it. Yes it's a racer, but it's not like any other racer you've played, it takes a little time to master how to control the crafts but once you get it, you'll find it has such a distinctive feel to the gameplay. It's also a shooter, many have no idea how natural it feels to a gamer who might enjoy first-person shooters, it has that feel to it also, and these two elements are combined in Chaos Circuits, thanks to the genius programming of Bill Kosche, a fellow Quake III Arena modder I hooked up with back during that time. And it shows, I think we both adapted so much from our immediate experiences with Q3A that Chaos Circuits became like a Q3A of futuristic hovercraft racing, the game really does have that hook, that feel and that learning curve that levels itself out into what is simply just superb gameplay. Combine that with the cool crafts, nasty weapons, critters everywhere, absolute variety and customisation, you have yourself a game that not only appeals to racing game fans, but also shoot'em up fans, almost equally. Well, what I'm trying to get at is, Chaos Circuits is deep in my heart as THE GAME I'd really love to create and polish. Torque has turned out to honestly be just not the engine for the game, despite the really awesome job Bill did with it, that's about the extent of it. Like I said in last entry, I will keep trying with Torque, I'll always have the Chaos Circuits TGE build sitting around, but to be more realistic I think it's time to begin searching for a new engine for it. It's ridiculous to limit such potential to an obsolete and problem-ridden technology like Torque. Yes, Torque can create good games, I won't argue with that, but as creator of Chaos Circuits I've come to the conclusion now that the project really does deserve better, especially in this day and age. In 2003 I was excited about what was happening and was happy enough using 1999 technology, but now what is pretty much a decade old just will not do. Torque has had its fair go. Out of the new technology I've been looking into, at the moment the "C4" engine is looking very damn nice. The examples are not great, and sure enough the engine would, like any other, have its limitations, but I believe with the right people in place and this time sufficient number of people in place (I wish like crazy I can get Bill in on this if he can find the time!) then Chaos Circuits is back on the radar in a massive fucking way. On second thought regarding my last entry, I actually wouldn't like to see it go to NintendoDS. An RTS game is the sort of thing I wouldn't want to do on PC, yet considering it on a NDS is a big chunk of the appeal that drove me to begin creating Ulterior Warzone, something I never would have dreamed doing if not for the combination of RTS on NDS. But Chaos Circuits, as a game, is something I really want on PC primarily, and I guess the reason is that it can receive the craftsmanship it deserves and would be an absolute thrill to create, even using Torque it was a lot of fun, and also because PC especially has nothing like this at all, it barely has anything in the way of futuristic racers the way consoles do. There are reasons for that too, I guess, PC gamers are not traditionally into tweaking such a game to have pretty much flawless performance as what a racing game really requires and also I guess a surprising amount of gamers want to sit back in a loungechair with a controller to play a racing game, not use keyboard and mouse. This is where Chaos Circuits steps out on its own, it IS a keyboard and mouse game, it IS in many ways more like a FPS than just a racing game, except in Chaos Circuits you are sliding fast around a track instead of bouncing around some little high-tech facility. In the Torque version, the vehicles create a momentum that is hard to shake off, so if you are targeted by another vehicle you have no choice but to perform your own manoeuvres, it's not like in a FPS where you can just bounce and strafe all different directions to avoid fire, but the point is you can't move THAT fast in a FPS anyway, where as in Chaos Circuits you travel so fast, it sounds like any kind of FPS play wouldn't work, but it does, just as quick as another craft can speed by, you too can slide along with it, get it in your crosshair and attack. That same skill kicks in, something you wouldn't expect out of a racing game, but Chaos Circuits _already_ has it, and it's something I'm very proud of and very proud of Bill for achieving. Because they are hovercrafts and not bound to a surface, they are able to look and aim in any direction while still travelling in the direction the acceleration and movement is given to. This is really hard to put into words, but once you give your craft a direction you are free to spin it around on any angle, even a lot of pitch control is given, for aiming your weapons and attack or retaliating against an attack. You can effectively "drive" backwards while attacking and then spin around again to regain control, very quickly. This takes some player skill to do, it's not as easy as it sounds, but it's very possible to perform such a trick, spin back around and continue racing like a champion. It would seem modern game developers are trying to create games that are all fancy graphics but dumbed-down and simplistic gameplay that "everyone can enjoy", developers are pushed to NOT challenge the game world too much, and who can blame them I guess, with the rise of the consoles we've seen brilliant games like Deus Ex and Thief pushed into the gutter and forgotten in way of Bimbo Beach Volleyball, where dad can win by button bashing his way to victory like a braindead ape and grab a cheap perv all the while. Yeah, better than those crappy Deus Ex games where they use big 3+ syllable words and you gots to use that there whatyamathingamajig call it? Interlet? These people are not gamers, they are the sort of people who are better off playing automatic poker machines. It makes me sick what is happening, that developers are driven to make "games" for people who don't want "games", who are not "gamers", they just want some sense of control while they push some buttons and watch some scantily clad virtual girls to do all the work for them, these "dad" gamers can go to hell. I'd never EVER want to make a "game" like that, I'd rather scrub garbage bins for a living, there's probably more creativity involved in that job anyway. If I did, it wouldn't be called "Violation Entertainment", I'd change the name of the team to "Somebody Blow Our Fucken Brains Out And Put Us Out Of Our Misery Already Entertainment", because in my mind "Violation" means "fuck you", we will do what WE want, old-school style and without even a scrap of regard for what is "popular" or "marketable". That probably doesn't come across, but that's what it means and that's what I stand for. I will have my game characters puking and bleeding from the eyes, and to hell with what Dr.Phil thinks is correct to do in games or not, if you look at the storyline you'd have to agree, they probably would bleed from the eyes with screwy cybernetics back there. Anyway, this is what seems to be happening in game development, people trying to make games to please people like Jack Thompson and Dr.Phil. Newsflash n00btards! Jack Thompson and Dr.Phil wouldn't sit and give computer games an open-minded chance if you paid them to. They don't care about games at all, and that is _precisely_ WHY they focus their blame on them. So as game developers, why the fuck focus your energy on trying to please these people? Please them, and piss off REAL GAMERS and fuck everything over, fuck over the entire system of "games for gamers". Anyway, deep breaths, that's not what I want to go on about here. I'm just saying, Chaos Circuits is a game for gamers, something new to the PC and damn it, I'm going to give it my best shot and how. If the game is just too overcomplicated for the average "dad-gamer" and it fails because most people just don't get the controls, then the team is better off that way anyway. I will get onto a new engine at some point and port everything over, and hopefully find a few good people who can understand my vision and get a firm grip on all the aspects that would make it a great game. Yes it's violent, you can run over and shoot people in the game, did I mention that? Well, they are called "critters", basically roadkill-to-be, and in some themes these "critters" will be people. I don't care what people think in this fake politically-correct society where real-life violence is trying to be solved by banning works of fiction. Maybe other developers want to give in to this JOKE in a desperate pursuit of wider market and thus bigger paychecks and deeper investment interests, but I'd sooner see Violation Entertainment hit rock bottom in the market, than be false to its own nature and original concepts. Chaos Circuits WILL be a "game for gamers". --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - April 2nd, 2008. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Been a while. I want to start by talking about Chaos Circuits, the "forgotten" ViolaE project that some assume is dead and abandoned. Not true. It's just that, like many other Torque projects, we've struggled finding the correct tools to export to its DTS model format, responsible for controllable and animated objects. The fact is that the game is playable, we have vehicles racing around tracks shooting each other, but our assets are not exported to the engine correctly. This is a costly issue to solve, it involves investing in new software specifically to correct these export problems, which just doesn't fit into our list of priorities just yet, but is my intention. But there is another possibility, that it may be "ported" to NintendoDS as an answer to the missing "F-Zero DS" title. Now, this idea has its merit as nothing more than a "suggestion" but it surely is possible. The specs for Chaos Circuits PC is far higher than NintendoDS can handle, of course, but should the opportunity eventuate, I'll definitely treat it seriously. I never would have imagined that console development would actually turn out _easier_ than PC development but it's starting to seem that way. Garage Games never did guarantee 100% support for DTS exporters, but it's just ridiculous that artists need to chase around different individual, very expensive software just to work around tiny technical issues. Tiny, but important. So its the reality that, while the engine itself is budget price, all the fucking around a developer needs to do to squeeze the most potential out of it will end up far more expensive than the engine, by multiple figures. I'm not anti-GG or anti-TGE, but it has earned the title of, in my experience, most frustrating technology to work with, particularly frustrating that the project is SOOO close to serious progress and release but with tiny expensive problems in the way. It's something I'm trying to give partial attention to in the meantime anyway. As mentioned, Shadowing Hate has character models and I'm currently waiting for my tablet before I spend any more time on fine-detail displacements. These can already be seen in the private forum threads, but still not ready for public display. I've gotten some great feedback about them, though, and very confident it will blow people away when we finally get some characters finalised, which will first be seen in Ulterior Warzone. Shadowing Hate also _finally_ has had a severe injection of new texture assets, purchased from various sources. This is some high- quality shit, I'm tellin' ya and I simply cannot wait to do some more mapping to show them all off, I swear SH will never look the same again, so for those who think the project is already looking great, the next lot of shots will smack you in the face. But, any progress with that is completely halted until Ulterior Warzone is _finished_! As for UW, it's going great, development is speeding along rapidly and there's very little that could prevent the mid-year deadline which, by the way, is the ONLY ViolaE project with a solid deadline. What does this mean, well, it means that even if I wanted to, I can't possibly postpone development in favour of possible new features or techniques or revise development decisions, like has happened with the other projects. It means that however the project is sitting by the time the deadline rolls around, it will mark the final version of the project and will not be worked on any further. I can give a couple of examples. For one, if I had put ridiculous deadlines on Shadowing Hate, for example, especially with character models, the project would be stuck with the outdated ugly puppets for characters. Instead, I've reworked and reworked them to get to the point where I'm happy with the outcome, with a foundation that will give great results not only for now, but for years to come. In the long-term it has been the smartest choice I could have made, to consider the long-term, always. The other example is Arkannoyed which, while it never had a "solid deadline" I did commit no more than a couple of weeks to it. While it still proves to have been a worthy effort, of course I'm not happy and proud of the art side of things by my current standards, but good enough for the time. With Ulterior Warzone, we need to lay down a solid deadline to work toward. That almost guarantees that the moment it "goes gold" I will be upset that I didn't do a better job here and there, but there's no choice, I don't have the luxury of beneficial postponements. So, let me ramble about the details of the progress here... My estimates indicate it is "25%" completed, but this percentage encompasses all assets, including all the extra cinematics and "screens" that are not exactly required, but will be done, the project will be very cinematic. In terms of what is playable, well 100% is a matter of days away now, and still a good 2 months away from the deadline. Phew! Great to be ridiculously ahead of schedule! Also great news because it means within a couple of weeks we should be at the point where intense playtesting can begin, with all in-game assets created, and that will leave me to focus on the leftover cinematics, at which point the progress will read more like 75% completion status. Difficult to scope, but it always is. On top of all this, the most wonderful thing is that there is no definitive plan of what cinematics will be required which means I may end up needing to do a few to express the minimal essence of the storyline, or it may mean I spend the remaining time working my ass right off, delving deep into the innermost meanings behind the plot of Ulterior Warzone with a bunch of cinematics you'll be able to play back-to-back like some short film. Big claims, but consider the character models from Shadowing Hate, consider the assets from all our other projects already available, consider the recent acquisition of texture assets at our disposal for commercial use, consider all the achievements and abilities the team as a whole has demonstrated. I really hope, unlike Arkannoyed, that Ulterior Warzone will stand as proof of the quality and depth of a true Violation Entertainment project. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 30th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So that's pretty much the end of the year. It's been a challenging and fruitful year in many ways, especially just lately. Ulterior Warzone is well under development now with many in-game replacements looking just splendid despite having to work with the limited colour ranges of 8-bit, but my fears were unjustified and the game is looking pretty damn good so far, I must admit, I feel really confident about that project upon now finally getting used to how to tweak the graphics and export them to the hardware. Shadowing Hate finally gets true finalised character model bases now, which now have over 100 different displacements ready to make high-detail version and bake some lovely normalmaps for them, ready for a little public-release of an in-game "convalescent stasis chamber" scene, so the world can see first-hand what exactly we plan to do, not just with characters but with many different aspects all combined into that one little scene. Work has also started on the new Purse Grabber HD video, which is a blast to casually work on environments from Shadowing Hate assets without any limitations whatsoever and plenty of cool effects. It will be the ultimate test in animation and effects for me, but as far as media creation goes, all that's missing is the characters themselves, which being cartoonish will also be an absolute blast to work on, so you can expect something to do with all that real soon too. So all across the board things are looking really good and many obstacles have been overcome, infact many major obstacles now rest conquered and the obstacles that remain are not immediately a threat to decent development. While there's very little to show recently, I can assure you we have really reached a magnificent overall milestone and 2008 is looking bright. The team has also scored a number of new associates and my plan for creating some kind of little developers club might be something to consider again, as well as rebuild the team again at some point in the next year. Yeah it's all a lot of work and I've got way too much on my plate, but I'm very excited and really digging in like a pig! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - November 28th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So I bet you didn't expect functional character models so quickly, did you. For a long time I've been assuming concepts like rigging hundreds of vertices to a proper skeleton to export to MD5 was damn difficult, and it is, but I let it scare me way too much. I spent a couple of days looking through some tutorials and just decided to play around with some features one morning, and it was like a blossoming flower of realisation, all these tools and buttons and terms that I previously had no idea the meaning of or what they do, suddenly everything made sense to me. Within just a few hours I had my old Quake 3 Arena model "Clobber" rigged to a skeleton and ready to be animated. I've had experience with animation before, but years ago with vertex animations only, never a properly rigged skeleton that requires weights and influence on properly structured meshes. I've been learning a lot over the last year about animation, but always books and tutorials on animation principles and how to move a character, and never about the gritty hands-on work of actually properly creating a skeleton and actually binding vertices to that. I've bought a few books on animation and each one of them mindlessly skip over these parts that I guess leave a lot of people with a lot of knowledge but no practical means to implement it. Or maybe it's just me, maybe I've just found nothing but the wrong tutorials and books out there. At any rate, for me, I've learned a tonne about animation principles and theories, but have only just now come to understand skeletal rigging and how to rig bones/joints to massive amounts of vertices and get smooth and clean results with deformations, which is equally about how the mesh is modeled, which is also what I've studied into lately. Violation Entertainment was previously dependent on finding someone with rigging and animation experience in order to get at least Shadowing Hate in any reasonable form for release. Now it has one and I no longer need to worry about the possibility of never finding such a person. It's very horrible to realise you are relying on an uncertainty to avoid failure, because anyone will tell you that good animators (who are also good at rigging and understand how UVs/textures/meshes/etc play into the animation task) are extremely difficult to find. You've known these projects as still screenshots because nothing has been moving around that is very interesting to see anyway, so I guess those days are over and it won't be too long before some interesting videos surface of actual gameplay. As for Ulterior Warzone, like I said in the news post, not much is going to be shown or even talked about with this project, but for a very good reason. There is definite commercial promise about this project. A good RTS game on the NintendoDS would be a top-seller, if the visual appeal is there. As good as it sounds, that's mostly what I'm uncertain about. I have pretty strong convictions about how this game should be and how the graphics should be created, and like everything else I do it will be far from everyone's preference, no doubt. I really have no idea what people want these days so I can only remain true to my original vision for the project and hope for the best. And as much as I hate seeming to salivate the most over commercial prospects, things have changed and I no longer have the luxury of time. The reality is that games cost money to make and standards keep shifting, people want to be compensated financially for their time and talents, and a team such as this cannot possibly survive in any realistic sense in this day and age. What's left of the team will continue on for as long as it can, we are still far from expired, but this is the reason there is such immediate focus on Ulterior Warzone. NintendoDS development truly begun here because of the fun and revival of older and simpler times in development, and the team would be chasing any commercial interest from any of our projects at this point, not because of some greedy money-hungry motivation, but because it may just prevent us and our projects from being binned and forgotten, forever. You will find if success does come our way we will still be devoted to our original concepts and methods and still take our time developing our projects with love, and we won't suddenly be found working on a whole bunch of tits and ass for some cheap braindead button-basher! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 26th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally back from overseas, and to my horror a dead HDD again, this time in my desktop, but luckily I was able to quickly get it fixed and as of now back in business. My first priority is to get the forum back up so that's what I'm focussing on. The website received a few updates, the older projects now a part of the main website but the removal of team member information. The development pages are now up which will allow more detailed and frequent insight into the development process, and will get updated independently from everything else on the site, and soon to follow will be the resource pages where some of our distinct techniques will get shared with everyone. Cobalt Maniacal gets a very early release in the form of an updated concept demo that was previously only for testers. Now you can skip the intro and play without needing any stupid codes. The project I thought wouldn't amount to anything has had some recent interest so it's definitely still on the to-do list, but for now something possibly even greater has happened. Violation has been invited to work on an RTS game for the NintendoDS. Still in very early development and without a title, I've decided it will be based on one of our future titles, "Ulterior". This project hasn't been mentioned for a long time now but it's definitely going to be one of the boldest game projects this team will ever encounter, so it seems fitting to create nothing else but an RTS game as somewhat of a prequel, as actually Shadowing Hate is somewhat a prequel to Ulterior also and being done because the idea for Ulterior is just not possible to live up to with even today's computer game technology. So I'd really like to keep trying to wrap my mind around this old plan by working on spin-offs and prequels like this. Ulterior is about a race to uncover and control alien technology that has been buried in the Earth for millions of years, and military powers will fight to be the first ones to implement the technology for themselves, but with hidden consequences. This tiny Ulterior RTS will concern itself with the early days of the war for this technology and the sides in conflict, their motives and intentions. I'm very excited by the prospect of getting this project finished extremely fast, the graphics demands are really very tiny and the programming side of things is almost pretty much complete and playable. I confidently estimate it being done well before the end of the year, minus perhaps lavish cinematics that it would otherwise contain as a full and proper game project. As I said, Cobalt Maniacal is very much still planned to be a full NintendoDS game, but for now this RTS project is ready to be done, so expect that to officially show up on the website with screenshots very soon. As usual I'm going to tell you about character models for Shadowing Hate being almost ready, well this time I can assure you that it's one version away from being used, and the development pages will focus on this very important transition from low-poly base model to becoming high-detailed and ready to create normalmaps with, which will tie in with a resource page about the techniques we'll be using. Once we work our way through that, it will be almost time for the multiplayer release. For now, most of the work done on Shadowing Hate has been to do with the storyline. I'm very happy to say that everything has a lot more depth to it now and a very clear direction to head in, along with a balance of numerous opportunities to expand, while still possible to work with any limitations we may have. To put it simply, the storyline can make the experience worth it and is unable to fail the project in any major way, and has actually turned out to be a lot deeper and more meaningful than I ever imagined it could be. You see, originally Shadowing Hate was going to be a very Serious Sam- type shoot-em-up where nothing would need to challenge the player's emotions or intellect too much, apart from whatever we are able to shove into the storyline itself whatever way we could. This gave the project a bigger responsibility to answer more questions about itself and forced me to fill in a lot of detail while still allowing for simple gameplay. There's still those 2 ways things could go, from Serious Sam simple to Deus Ex complicated, right now it seems to be shifting more toward Deus Ex which words can't describe how happy I am about those possibilities, with some solid foundation for plot twists and decisions. I can confidently say that at least half of what was planned for Shadowing Hate is possible to do and has been designed that way, so already it won't be mindless shoot-em-up but allow for some depth and meaning. Finally a mention of old Chaos Circuits of course. A lot of improvements there and more to mention. Finally we've been able to achieve some effects and features long wished for, like detailed terrain and being able to create better collision formations and avoid some of the limitations, so that means, like Shadowing Hate, enough has been achieved now to more closely live up to the original expectations for the game plan, and Chaos Circuits is possible to do. Of course I knew this all along, but it's the end of long-reigning scepticism about the doability of the project in its entirety. Furthermore as if icing on the cake, Chaos Circuits is now candidate for a Nintendo Wii port thanks to an SDK available to us. This is news so we still haven't wrapped our brains around exactly how this will affect Chaos Circuits development. Both Shadowing Hate and Chaos Circuits are games designed for PC, for PC players, and each project already uses more controls than consoles are capable of. I really don't want to dumb- down the PC versions for the sake of a wider console audience, but at the same time it would seem stupid to NOT port Chaos Circuits based on that. So it will take a lot of consideration but certainly I can assure everyone that the control system on the PC version will not be dumb-downed because it's just way too cool the way it is now. It might end up taking 2 Wiimotes per player to pull it off, and that just might be a very cool way to keep some very cool features. We'll see about that possibility. So to round up, everything and more is in progress, playable releases are due soon and hell, already available, and those very important milestones all on the brink of being conquered. I think to myself it is this way for a reason, for a very good reason. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - July 11th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I recently went off on my first overseas trip, to China, staying in Hong Kong for a few weeks before heading to the mainland. Totalling roughly 2 months. I had planned to do a lot of work in Hong Kong, mainly on filling details in Chaos Circuits and weapon models for Shadowing Hate. That hasn't really worked out though, mainly because I damaged my laptop hard-drive, coupled with a nasty cold that I've only just gotten over. So, I regret to announce, for the 3-4 weeks I have been out of Australia, nothing has been done on any of the game projects. I intend to spend most of today collecting photography for use in texturing work, that will be a massive help to the team resources. I also hope to get my hard-drive fixed in a couple of days, and I think I'm in the right city to get that done. If not, I will just buy a new one. Problem there is, it will take a few more days to set it up again and before I know it I will be off to mainland China where I won't have the free time to get any work done anyway. It seems the most progress will be made within the last half of 2007, but with all the bad luck I've had and everything that has gone wrong, it doesn't look like anything is going to be publicly playable within this year. Mainly due to not being able to find any decent help this year, due to the forums being taken down and not enough security for the online resources, and now a complete draining of any funding I had for the team, which would have gone into building up more resources and hiring someone to fix the forum problems and such. It's only a matter of time before I'm in that position again, though. I'm deeply sad about it, I'd always dreamed about getting together a small but hardworking and talented team of other independent developers, but that is a lot harder than it once seemed, a LOT harder. I have had a good team now and again, but never really all at the same time and working in harmony. I feel certain it will still happen, but, as "leader" of an independent development team, it's nothing you can completely rely upon, otherwise you will definitely fail. I think it proves I'm the guy to direct entire projects, being that I can still carry them all by myself and still make progress all by myself. Maybe every team needs to go through this phase, to sort itself out. Despite all of this I still feel confident these projects can become something bigger and stronger, with the character base models pretty much done and moments away from being full characters working properly in-game, a small project of its own that has now been years in the making, and I'm sure all that hard work will pay off. We now have enough great-quality resources to make the kind of environments that I once only dreamed of, and all the special effects have already fallen into place, especially with the recent discovery of my normalmapped foliage technique. There's still so much to be proud and happy of, and many more milestones on the brink of being reached. I have so much fresh inspiration lately from being here in China, and it's not all necessarily Chinese designs either. I feel like a different person here, the people here are lovely and there's so much to see, and such a balance of urban structure and nature here in Hong Kong, I have such a clearer view of overall urban architecture now which will really help when it comes to mapping for Shadowing Hate. I really miss being able to work on these projects but at the same time I'm in the middle of a once-in-a-lifetime experience that I've never had before, this is my first overseas trip, and anytime I take time away (or get it taken away) from my beloved game projects, it's always for the better in the long-run, I'm always so fresh and energized after the break and come back to the projects to kick some serious ass. I'm a lot healthier after being here, even just these few weeks, I feel physically and mentally a lot healthier and can think more clearly about my goals and what needs to be done. There's a lot more I could dribble about, but most likely I won't post again until I'm back in Australia with at least _something_ to show on the website. My first priority still remains getting the forum back up and safe from spambots. Finally, I wanted to end by talking about id Software's new engine "Tech5". Heaven be praised, it looks like all of our work is completely compatible with this new engine. From what I've learned, it's still all normalmaps and still closely related to the Doom3 engine in many ways. They have really taken steps in the right direction in relation to what I'd like to do with the technology. Even though it's still early days, the way things look at the moment, a shift from Doom3/Quake IV to Tech5 seems pretty likely right about now. It's hard to keep up with what's going on in the middle of my holiday and all but I'll try to collect as much info as possible to read through when I can. As I've said before in the middle of these long dry spells, it's far from the end of Violation Entertainment and its projects. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - May 6th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Suddenly the team loses it's webdesigner due to some misfortunes on his behalf. So first let's wish him the best of luck, and _then_ consider the additional delay of the new website and forum, which is a horrible shame but there are worse things in life. I'd like to chat about the website first. The current one is nearly 5 years old now. It was structured just before I closed down the old PlanetQuake site after finishing all of my Quake 3 Arena stuff and Arkannoyed together. Man, has it really been THAT long? 5 years? Half a decade. Well, these things take time, especially when essentially you're only one person going at it, which it has been that way. The other artists on the team and that have been on the team are talented and hardworking people, and some have spent many many hours working on components for these projects, but it's true that 99.9% of what can been seen on the ViolaE sites was created by me alone. During this 5-year period I've also done a lot of study into high-detail CGI and animation, not to mention getting involved in not one but TWO _extremely_ different computer game technologies, with very little help from anyone, all the while facing countless vicious obstacles, in both the projects and my real personal life. Last time I posted around and had the team reach out for new recruits, the forum became sick with filthy spam, too much to bear, and was shut down because of that, making it seem pointless for new recruits and making it very difficult on everything. The good news is that I now have very clear focus on how to put these projects together to a sufficient point, even all by myself, and I've gathered so much technical knowledge and experience to achieve more on my own. Such as just recently discovering how to put proper custom vehicles and weapons (among other things) into the already playable Chaos Circuits, which means the playable beta demo is really not far away, as already stated. Shadowing Hate also is in a similar position, many of the environments that I intended to include in the deathmatch demo have plenty of suitable assets ready to use and the proper character and weapon models are just around the corner now. I feel extremely confident both of those will get a release sometime this year. Many technical aspects for both of these projects have been established and conquered, which is why there haven't been many media updates or new screenshots lately, but plenty of new media has been created and gathered too, which means a whole lot of great new stuff is ready to be used and will be very soon. Today I show some of these new assets in the forest environment for Shadowing Hate, we show that we are able to have these types of environments, as promised, in very large continuous areas in-game. Many will tell you it's impossible and the screenshots prove nothing, but here at Violation Entertainment we have developed a new technique for creating volumes using normalmaps, meaning we're able to create low-poly objects like trees, plants and bushes without using a lot of triangles and without having bland light or ugly noticeable seams everywhere. I'm not going to explain exactly how we've done this, that information is for inside developers on the team only, it's actually pretty crazy, but it works wonderfully. We have created foliage that can be dynamically lit like everything else, is light and fog- friendly and as mentioned is almost completely free of seams along intersecting edges. I can tell you that this isn't a modelling technique, we're using very low-poly trees so we're able to have 100s of them in one area. The trick is all in the normalmaps and materials, a combination of tricks that I actually discovered by accident. I really haven't seen this done in the Doom3 engine, and trust me, I keep a very close eye on all developments, especially when dealing with outdoor areas and organic components. Finally I'll mention that the new Chaos Circuits craft was also created for a NintendoDS game project called AmplituDS by Sander Stolk, I'm very proud to have worked with him on that project and its model viewer, which he was nice enough to code up on my request for real-time viewing of custom models and textures on the handheld device. I may or may not also be getting involved in a RTS for the NintendoDS, and as for Cobalt Maniacal well that might be getting binned again. I will probably try once more to get some NDS programmers involved in that project once the team forum is back up, so we'll see what happens with that later. So, as I've said, the state of everything has allowed it to become time again for putting together the bigger pictures, more models and maps can begin to be created toward the final products, not just models and maps but actual functional implementations of them for playable experiences and not just some screenshots on the website. We also plan to release a lot more videos as things start to come together as well as the start of the new Purse Grabber animation, which I've briefly discussed before. It will be true to the original and be great practice for animation as well as the gore/frag techniques that I've been theorising. Mostly everything else is already available, all the project needs is a few cartoonish character models created and a whole lot of animating, scripting and voice acting. Then it's render time and Violation Entertainment will have it's very first HD-DVD- quality short animated film that we'll hopefully have the opportunity of entering into some competitions and such, which would obviously be fantastic exposure for the team. I'll end by safely stating that the new character model base will be done within days. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - April 1st, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Many things have been happening lately, actually it's been pretty hectic. Website redesign is pretty much DONE as far as graphics go and somehow it looks almost exactly the same as it originally is now, but much much better, it's difficult to explain, but hopefully visitors will find it a little easier on the eyes, visually more contemporary relative to the graphical evolutions of the projects themselves, easier to navigate and without any bugs, and a whole lot more efficient, so it will be great. Else in the oven, as mentioned, is the character models, probably the most exciting thing happening in the whole team in any of the projects. The quality is just superb now and the bases will make some fine characters, I'm sure, but I won't discuss that much until it's finally done. Also the same is for weapon models, it's almost time to get some in-game and functioning as actual weapons, again very exciting and that stuff will happen before the characters are implemented (meaning in-game, animating and working as actual computer game characters should) but still not far away at all. What is the most exciting thing worth mentioning and the point of this entry and, hell, worth a news report on the main site, is finally the exporting of proper vehicles (and weapons, etc.) into Chaos Circuits. Cue the fucking fireworks, this is an absolute milestone, have no doubt, for a number of reasons I will ramble about here. It means that there is nothing stopping a playable release of Chaos Circuits sometime in the very near future, being that the game has been actually playable for some time now, it currently can already be played and enjoyed, but only with very basic (borderline non-existent) tracks and some temporary stand-in media. Now all of that can be replaced and is, as you read this, being replaced with the proper game content. That's not to say there won't be more obstacles and problems ahead preventing that from happening, I'm sure there will be, but I'm confident we can make something out of it and get the demo version ready well before mid-year. In many ways the Chaos Circuits engine and technology is so much more complicated than Doom3 (Shadowing Hate), despite how conceptually simple it is compared to Doom3, but the model format itself is complicated, especially when it comes to things like controllable vehicles and working weapons. The DTS model format used by Torque holds a lot of code that would normally be done in scripts and programming, with most other engines and such is the case with Doom3, but Torque allows for models to behave different based simply on some definitions within the model itself. This is good and bad, it allows for more control defined in the design itself but making even simple tasks very complicated. There isn't much documentation available, and for what there is it is incredibly vague and complicated to understand. Not the fault of the author, having written a guide tutorial about it myself I now appreciate how difficult it is to get the information clear, concise and in an easily comprehendible layout. Most importantly, there really are no source files available, especially for the software the team is using to do it, and even for the proper software the version is now extremely outdated and much information is lost in that process. The stand-in media the game is currently using are binary outputs only, no source files, and despite constantly requesting the source files I was never able to obtain them, so the only direct information I've been able to obtain is by hex-editing the binaries looking for some clues, and there haven't been many to find. I've been able to gather some simple information about what the model requires, but ZERO information about how to achieve it in practice. So all this time it's basically been a dead-end up until now, I have read through all documentation multiple times and with many hours of experimenting and headaches and hair-loss, I've finally discovered the correct techniques to exporting to this format, at least to the extent of being able to have working vehicles and weapons. It was a massive obstacle, probably (from an artist's point of view) THE biggest obstacle facing the project. Doom3 models may seem complicated when comparing them to Torque, but at least with Doom3 there is such plentiful documentation and a wealth of examples to study, infact all Doom3 games come packed with examples to look at, the whole game itself being one big open-ended example to study, where as with Torque it is pretty much the opposite and the few source examples available use different software packages. We could have very well decided to go with those packages and prepare all exports to happen from them, but I chose to avoid doing that for a few reasons, most importantly it would keep future exporting of custom content very simple and easy for modders to achieve, and other developers that will be working on the project, and eventually it will become a valuable resource for other developers. Ultimately whatever helps other developers will help the team as a whole, unlike some others that choose to share only the end- result binaries and not share their knowledge, they may feel all powerful and important at the time, but what is one artist alone compared to an entire team and its entire projects? It is the entire projects that suffer in the end, and I will not make that same mistake and force artists to struggle with the same problems I've struggled with. It actually allows the team to license out the technology to artists very cheaply, so everybody wins, the artists, the team and the projects all benefit from doing it this way. Why anyone would want to do it the other way and have source and knowledge all locked away, when honestly, the models themselves are barely anything worth protecting, we're hardly talking master works of art here, I just don't know, sometimes human mentality confuses me. I guess I can understand, some part of me wants to lock away what I've learnt about this stuff and not share with anyone else, I mean it is me that's done all the hard work, I've been the one awake for days on end, I've been the one having to stare at the constant vague error messages as the whole engine just crashes without telling me what's wrong. Why should I just give away my knowledge for free, let them worship me, let them beg!.. but no, I didn't go through all that just to lock away the fruits of my labour and try to justify being an asshole. I will not become what I've so hated in the past. That proud, selfish "just-because" attitude some people have, that's not me. One of the most wonderful things about Chaos Circuits is its future ability to be modded and have custom content added to it, as a developer it's a wonderful thing that something you create will later be able to then entertain you, as the creator. Typically once I finish with a project, I can't stand playing it. The moment I release something for everyone else to enjoy, I've personally had enough of it. I'm sure many other artists and developers feel the same way, you spend so much time playtesting that it becomes almost impossible to enjoy it simply as a player would. So, Chaos Circuits is exciting, it feels like it's the Quake 3 Arena of racing games, both in some of its gameplay and visual aspects but also the ease in which it can be modded, the ability for "plugin" vehicles, weapons and tracks (and custom content for tracks) as well as just about every other area of media, it's brilliant and exciting to me, and nothing would make me happier than to see an interested and involved community for it. Should it be successful, then the choice to leave it open- ended and accessible to be modded will definitely pay off. Again, many get paranoid and want to hide their secrets and lock away their content, well, you folks are free to do that and may call us stupid for doing otherwise, but I'm sure, in the end, this generosity will pay off and players will appreciate us more for taking risks and delivering not only a game but a game development experience to our players, for without this same generosity from others, this team and its projects would probably not even exist. As an artist, it really is the greatest but often unseen reality of why you do it, that you may inspire others and fill them with energy to believe that they, like you, CAN do it, and that they may do something that later will inspire you in return, in a perpetual counter-effect of designers inspiring designers inspiring designers. It's a great thing where everyone benefits and truth and purity automatically prevails, and why anyone would want it any other way, well, insecurity? I just don't know. All I know is, so long as I'm at the helm, Violation Entertainment will never have this attitude and will continue the legacy of developers helping other developers, professional or amateur, even at our own expense, because without that from others, we wouldn't be where we are now. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - March 14th, 2007. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There was actually another journal entry before this one that was "lost", it went into a lot of detail about many different subjects, mainly the NintendoDS project Cobalt Maniacal and the future plans concerning that, which are still active. I'll talk about that just after the website issues. Everything needed to be relocated to a new host, which had its problems and took a lot longer than it should have, not to mention the trouble redirecting the domain to the new host which extended delay. Hopefully with the new hosting service will bring far more security to the team forum to keep out those wretched spambots. It will also bring faster uploads/downloads and more bandwidth ability to the website, not that it probably needs it at the moment but I predict with public release of certain new media content that traffic may increase substantially, which will happen after the new website is up and running. It won't change drastically, it will still look much the same, be categorised much the same and hold the same content it already does, mainly the new menu system will make it much easier to navigate and it should hopefully be bug-free and compatible with just about every different browser. It will also have all new graphics but along the same style as it already has. It may well have some extra features that combine the forum into the main website somehow but that is yet to be fully decided. Enough about that for now, how about Cobalt Maniacal? Well to be honest it was received less than expected and didn't really end up becoming much for itself, but it did manage to get ViolaE a place in NintendoDS homebrew development and we're now involved in a few different projects to some degree, which may later bloom into a project that is a full ViolaE project, perhaps Cobalt Maniacal, but perhaps not, no one knows. I think to some degree the failure/closure of the team website pretty much less than 24-hours after public release of the Cobalt Maniacal project had a lot to do with the apparent lack of interest with the project, just a case of extremely bad timing. I may just try my luck at it again once the forum is back up, this time I will try to release an actual homebrew demonstration version, somehow, so people can actually see it on their handhelds in real-time and really get a good idea of the value of the project, because seeing it on PC at such low-res, I guess it's difficult for people to realise what it's actually going to be like as a full project on NintendoDS. It could use some better graphics too, so perhaps not all hope is lost for that project yet, we will see. The previous journal entry went into the history of the idea of Cobalt Maniacal, about how it was actually a serious Violation Entertainment project before Arkannoyed was created but I'll spare you the trivia. Apart from that, things honestly have been pretty slow, personally I had some PC problems for a little while which directly restricted me from working on anything seriously, mainly the human character base models again, which even as I type this are really evolved and polished enough to be properly used, but still I will spend extra time and get some extra external feedback about them from people before I raise the flag and claim them as "final", which is a big word in computer game development terms. It's one of those things that takes so long and gets worked on so hard but yet nothing is shown to be seen, the average person won't appreciate hours and hours of detailed mesh restructuring and vertex tweaking, and very few people understand just how difficult it is to achieve, I mean hell even many professional teams struggle with the very same thing, these are well-organised and professionally- trained large teams of artists, and they go through the same trials and troubles. That's why when people say things to me like "Awww you STILL working on that?" I can only reply with "Shut the fuck up, you braindead dog-turd!" because _only_ a braindead dog-turd would both fail to understand and have such attitude about it. It's fucking hard stuff and people with attitude about it have either never tried it or tried it and failed miserably, and I've been borderlining that failure and surviving, and continuing, and (slowly) succeeding, and now I realise that it's all necessary to the process, and like I said even big professional teams that follow all the industry- standard blueprints still struggle with. What is more interesting is my recent theories about how to cut up and slice open these character models, especially for cutscenes, I have realised and theorised there is really no limit to how any model can be sliced up and mutilated from a whole object, and so many little tricks can be used in conjunction with those events to make some extremely sick gore, I'm talking about slow and smooth pain and death for our triangles, even the high-poly versions of the character models. It will all depend on the quality of animation, but given that would be successful then I think Shadowing Hate will be a new step forward in terms of realistic violence in computer games, and I'm very excited about that. I can't wait to cut some people open and let their guts spill out and watch them collapse onto the ground and die in pools of their own blood. If I can manage to make some people feel ill from seeing that, I will be very proud. But what is gore without some weapons? Well that's another thing I've been busy working on lately, infact one pistol is getting very close to high-poly time and then texturing. Unlike many other components of the project, and indeed unlike within many other projects, the weapons in Shadowing Hate will come in roughly 4 different forms, and very exciting is the fact the v_wep (1st-person view) version will be incredibly high-res, because personally I find in many different computer games the v_weps are always a little underdetailed compared with everything else you see on-screen. It's very important, you will always see that model and its texture in front of you and infact, perhaps subconsciously, it's what the player relates themselves to in the game world, it is actually the player itself, most of the time, so in Shadowing Hate I really want to push those numbers very far and make the v_weps something very detailed and beautiful to look at. It too even accompanied by detail-mapping and of course cubemap reflections. Their animations would be the same, detailed, varied, long, unpredictable. Perhaps not many players understand the importance of these details, but I do, as a player, and fully intend to put it to practice very soon. I won't talk much about what is to be in the future anymore, but this is what has been happening in practice and theory. And finally, the last thing I wanted to mention is Chaos Circuits going demo-status! Yes it's true, there is enough media for that project to put together a playable demo version. As I've said before, it actually already is very playable and enjoyable, and it does have plenty of media ready-to-go, all it needs is some composition. It also does need more structures which are known as "interiors" created, but creating an interior is so quick and easy it's ridiculous. The reason no abundant amount has been created just yet is because of the lack of textures, which (as I've said many times before but yet to follow-through on) are about to get some massive 3rd-party increases. After that has been achieved, Chaos Circuits will be able to be downloaded and played on your PC, how lovely. And finally worth mentioning is the dwindling of the team again, it is so difficult to maintain a healthy-sized team but luckily it gets easier and easier, the more that has already been achieved, the more interested potential new members become. Actually the forum and website problems play a big part in that and I've had plenty of interest from new members wanting to be a part of it, but can't really tell them much besides wait and I'll get back to them. Any day now things will at least be back to normal and we'll get some new media up on the site and start recruiting again. Enough yabber for now, I have some character and weapon models to create. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 29th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- No wonderful guns just yet, but a mention of the shader material overhaul, I've gone right through every single damn material and now almost every one of them uses detail- mapping (some now using multiple detail passes) and cubemap reflections for many more metallic surfaces making use of the newer cubemap textures we have and also the new techniques I've discovered for using them to achieve different effects. I've been trying to combine multiple cubemaps and somehow have them with opposing/counteracting movements on the surface, but sadly I don't think it's possible at all, those passes are very picky and specific and not much room for experimenting with the reflections. This was actually possible in Quake 3 Arena, although not cubemaps, it was possible to have multiple environment-map "reflections" that could scroll and move independently from each other, it made for a very cool effect and helped surfaces to look "alive" even when static, and I really want things to look alive with subtle effects but sadly this doesn't seem like it will happening with metal reflections. I will keep trying some combinations though. The cool thing about this overhaul is that the outcome is instantaneously updated throughout ALL maps, so just update the base materials (like 50Kb PK4) and it automatically applies to the entire project, no need to recompile the maps even. Shader scripting is very cool and exciting work in game development, when it actually works, that is. One downside about the overhaul is now the actual MTR scripts are in shambles, creating optimised versions/packs will be quite a job so those optimisations might not happen for quite a while. They will need complete reorganising based on the extra detail/reflection passes and the complexity of them, and also isolating very complex materials that use up to and over 10 passes. Also exciting is the experiments with hi-res multiple-stage lightshaders, oooh yes, these puppies make for excellent but expensive large ambient lights for outdoor areas. We'll be having beautiful cloud-rich dynamic portal-skies and the ambient light on EVERYTHING will be just as rich. I'm talking about the lighting effect of moving clouds in a sky that emits ambient outdoors light. All of these effects in Doom3 and Quake IV were very low-res and not used all that often, but Shadowing Hate will be more evolved in this regard, they will be hi-res, dynamic and abundant. The main aim, for me, is to make much of the game's environments look and feel alive with subtle use of these effects. It's something you'll just have to wait and see for yourself but I'm sure we'll get a nice response from the way we'll be doing things, after a while of developing and playing around with dynamic lighting effects, playing other games that don't use much (if any) dynamic light just feels so outdated, even if the rest of the game is pretty next-gen-ish the lack of dynamic lighting lets the entire experience down, that's why it's something we'll be focussing on very strongly, simply because it is something you don't see much of in other games, even Doom3 and Quake IV, at least to the extremes that we're using it right now. And finally and probably most exciting of mentions, the full and I mean FULL compatibility of BOTH Parallax2 and GTX Bloom with Shadowing Hate! What does this mean? Parallax makes normalmaps more, how you say, deep and dynamic, it basically tends to squeeze more 3D out of 2D beyond the vanilla normalmap of the engine and the GTX Bloom is the bloom effect using the GTX mod, which basically adds a blurry glow to all light and bright "areas" in the game, hm I'm sure you all know and love the bloom effect in almost every game now anyway. The only problem with the GTX bloom is that it seems to glow over the edges of the screen. What I mean is, if you have full- bright white on the very left edge of the screen and pitch-black on the right, the bloom will be visible on the right from the brightness on the left, through the edge of the screen and overlapping back to the other side. It sucks pretty bad but in the end buggy bloom is better than no bloom at all, I think. Users can easily choose whether to use it or not. It's not officially part of the Shadowing Hate project anyway, just like Parallax mapping and the bot mods, they are just other mods compatible with SH. Combine all this and I think it makes for a pretty high-fidelity gaming experience in the works that will satisfy all you power gamers out there, at maximum ultra hi-def release version it will make any rig squeal and should last a few years visually, I'll confidently say it's ahead of its time, so the time it has taken to put it all together is definitely worth it, and hopefully players will agree. Based on all that technical dribble, I'd say it's a pretty good way to sign off 2006 and march boldly into 2007. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 24th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (despressing and offensive Christmas post excluded) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - November 15th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I decided to let loose a few new shots of some bits and pieces out of the private forum as well as add the new bigger shots from our quiet little website. Hard work is still being done on the character models to make them that much higher quality and almost perfectly compatible with the skeletons and animations of Quake IV, and it would be a waste of time _not_ spending this much time on such a fundamental and important thing. We now have plenty of stuff to start making some proper maps, along with cool weapons starting to pop up and those bloody character models (or yet to be bloody) so we plan to have a small deathmatch test (should also be compatible with bot mods) in possibly a few months from now, but the main problem is that our team is very small and it's very difficult to find help. Hopefully when the new characters are done and everything gets composed together properly, the team will expand. Also planning to move the mod to another game later, since what we have is almost all media so far, but we will see how easy it is. Mainly depends on how the new game would use normalmaps, file formats and some scripts like materials and particles. Despite our very best efforts, we don't expect many people to be playing Quake IV mods by the time we finish. Hopefully the immediate state of our project will be compatible with say "ET Quake Wars" or "RtCW2" and we will make the switch, since I'm confident these games will have rich communities, great support and longer mod-life. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 26th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The SH character models are finally again in development focus now, starting with a side-project we're doing for the Doom3 mod project Into Cerberon, a middle-aged bald gray-haired businessman-type guy called Dravis, who will also feature as one of the Q-Sec seniors named Orlen Sivard, who you will need to assassinate in later chapters. On this final version (25th version) of the character bases it will guarantee full compatibility with Quake IV skeletal animation systems. It just takes a bit of hard work to get the changes into the model and many many hours tweaking and shaping the mesh, then finalising the UV mapping and making sure it all smooths/ subdivides the way we want it. It's no easy thing, many industry professionals sometimes struggle with it and your average "mod team" never dare to even attempt it. These new versions will make the old ones look like the deformed ugly pieces of crap that they really are. We'll efficiently get a few key characters done and then focus on many weapons and everything should fall into place nicely at that point. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 21st, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A lot has been cooking behind the scenes, in the forum, a lot of bits and pieces, and games are made of bits of pieces. I've realised that we're well to the point now where we can efficiently create things to use and render them out to extreme quality, we're already using 16MP resolution images to produce in-game textures, that's 4096x4096 pixels. This is the way I've been working on texturing character models, painted out on a 3D canvas with already high-resolution images, meaning components of any texture can up to 4096x4096, with further detail map blends included. This sounds like a bad idea but I'm not saying it doesn't require a shitload of work and effort to do correctly, but I'm saying I'm pretty comfortable creating pretty much everything using this technique. We still haven't invested in our texture library but we have a lot to work with already, and that matter really will be given attention ASAP. So this is all very important for us as an entire team well into the future, because at what point can you really render too much stuff real-time in-game? Think about 10 years down the track, what will a 16MP image mean? There's still a long way to go with catching up on rendering texels to the point where it looks real, and people's expectations on high-resolution output (1600x1200 is sounding too common already) makes it all the more difficult to provide the 3D surfaces with ultra-fine gritty detail well beyond the size of its parent triangle. That is always the ultimate goal, real-time or pre-rendered, you want to give the audience a sense that every little tiny pixel is working. And I don't listen to people who say that 2D images will go obsolete one day, that's simply ridiculous, any serious 3D modeler will tell you that being able to use high-quality 2D images has _everything_ to do with 3D creation process, even if they don't realise it, many methods used to work with 3D geometry work on a 2D level. Games that attempt visuals to mimic photoreality will never be portrayed entirely as geometry. The point is that there will never be such thing as too much and we're on the right track as far as resolution output goes, it does not determine the quality. Quality is no longer reliant on resolution. You want an ultra cool 32x32 texture? Ask anyone from the Doom II days (that's almost 15 years ago folks!), they'll make you one with Paint! Why should 1024x1024 textures be any different by today's standards, even though 1024x1024 doesn't really cover the same amount of detail in-game now as 32x32 did in Doom II? It used to be that the difference between 32x32 and 1024x1024 was the difference between 10 minutes and 10 days, but we're at the point just now where resolution really doesn't matter too much, compared with older techniques. With higher resolutions it's become less important for every little pixel to be loved and unique, but rather for every pixel to work to create the detail, the fine edges and the gritty realism, on top of the entire artwork of the texture, which no longer resides in pixels but in millions of triangles. Basically what I'm saying is, this really is the way it's done and this is the way we're doing everything now, efficiently. It's not really a struggle for us. The struggle is making so many different bits and pieces. In Doom II, or Quake II even, it's common to see repetitions in almost every aspect. The challenge these days is to make everything unique, especially in games such as Shadowing Hate and even Chaos Circuits, they both call for a lot of constantly unique features, and at very high-resolutions. It is a struggle, but on the creation side of things it's not a problem, we are still as efficient as ever and with just a little bit of funding we could be set for years to come. The problem is people power, to create these little bits and pieces. Even if I can get a functional 2048x2048 texture working in-game in no time, I'm still only one person. Anyway, I'm also focusing on the geometry side of things, although there are big leaps for me when it comes to higher resolution 3D models, meaning it's between a good 2,000 triangle model to a good 20,000 triangle model, which is a massive difference in numbers when it comes to models. A texture can be resized and prepared for in-game in a blink, but a model needs to be very optimised and minimal, and it's never easy, it's never a mouse-click deal. Thing is, pretty soon 20k for a character model won't be out of the question and after our experience with Doom3 tech we will definitely want to embrace technology strong with blending LOD forms over any lighting/shadowing/materials benefits. Working without character LOD is what forces us to keep models under 2000 triangles. We're doing the next best thing and using 20k models for closeup cinematics. This is a lot of useless ranting. Basically, we are keeping up. The problems we have is the problems we've always had. I see other projects and other teams falling to pieces because they fail to keep up with the modern demands on specs, moreso than not being able to gather a decent-sized team. At any one time, Violation has not been more than 10 people (5 active now) yet we still survive, while other teams gather up to 20 strong team and give the same, if not less, and then fail. The problem is that we keep a very low profile and we've approached development from different directions compared with most others. Typically I notice other teams beginning with a lot of mapping and code, this is your traditional "mod" and usually works if the team has a goal of "mod" in mind, but this is not how proper game development works, this is not how "total conversion" development works, it never starts with maps and game-code. It starts with developing strong foundations to efficiently create an entire game worth of unique content. This is why even posting and e-mailing everywhere and getting 20 people on your team can still see your project fall to pieces. This is why we call Shadowing Hate a "true total conversion", it's entirely original visually, and this is why we've taken a different approach to development, this is why it's difficult to put together giant maps and game-code that is traditionally the evolution of a mod team, but that time is very soon upon us, with the total conversion foundation already there. What does it all mean? It means everything here is working! Despite again the dwindled down team, that is not a result of the project, it's a result of the humble nature of the team and its projects as a whole, and on top of that we still get results and we are still alive and kicking and can be, as I said before, perhaps 10 years from now. We could have redone the damn website by now, yes, of course we could have, but games are not about their websites, that time has been used for more important purposes. Game developers usually have a strong foundation, a core of design and methods, and a dynamic outer rim of artists and coders. Mod teams and their projects start from this outer rim and try to work their way inward, but this rarely works when they are aiming for TC status. Don't be fooled though, many think we have been dead for a long time too, but all I can say is that we've started and approached our projects from the inner core and evolving outward, we've approached our projects as game developers. At the same time wholesome results and thus mass interest and recruiting serious new members is a very very very slow process and one we're still struggling with. Actually, sometimes it's almost like big TC teams kill themselves with large numbers, bring to themselves a quicker demise. Better to take your time and do it right than to rush straight into mapping and game-code trying to make a big serious game project. I hate to offend anyone, I'm very supporting and positive to work with, but I've had some mappers on the team that I wouldn't want their maps entirely representing my project out on the internet and short-term are not worth having on the team at all. I could easily have an extra 10 teenage mappers on the team, not that it's about age at all, but experience matters, you don't want your project hastily represented if you hope to be taken seriously later on. We've been very aware of this for a while now and I feel confident to say that it's this attitude and approach that separates us from being a mod team and makes us an actual serious independent game development team, and based on the recent evolutions in our methods and ideas and the constant production rate which is possibly now better than it's even been before, we'll be around for a long time to come. What's the point in firing a cannonball if you only use a little bit of gun powder? You want to make a boom and have maximum impact, and we've been collecting up plenty of powder and polishing that cannonball nice and shiny. It's just that in the meantime we look like we've got nothing and will do nothing, but I wouldn't be ranting on for 2 pages if that were the case. What a rant. Basically what I wanted to get at originally through this entire entry is that things no longer really have an expiry date for us, we're no longer progressively decaying at all, there is no longer any loss, we're in the frame of mind to tackle game development into the future. Not to say it won't be very hard work, but not completely unimaginable. It's not typical for a mod-team or wannabe fake-TC game developers to work this way. Serious game development teams need to think this way, otherwise they will die. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - August 1st, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Things haven't been progressing much lately for a number of reasons. Firstly I've taken a few weeks away from these machines and spent some time in the outside world and the team has again dwindled down to just a handful of people, but that's okay because the few that have stuck by me are very talented and great people. My little holiday will be over in just a couple of weeks and then I'll be back hard at work. Some exciting stuff is on the way, finally the new character models, some weapons and a whole lot of new media such as bigger texture library for both projects, the next few months will be great, I'm sure. Just today, both projects have been fully uploaded to the webspace, including the development files, so only just today do members have access to the updated content. Things should all come together nicely to show the world exactly what we have in mind for these projects, and we'll be pushing the numbers just a little further, too. And last worth mentioning, the entire team will take a very different approach to how we try to publicise our projects, we already have a volunteer willing to handle all "PR" issues and shove our projects into everyone's face, because the lack of such an approach is the reason the team has never fattened up enough and we've not had the interest we would otherwise have. Too little too late, maybe, but we are not done with yet. We still have some fight left in us. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - April 22nd, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well yes there's that big bully of a bot there but much more is going on lately behind the scenes. Many things are being worked on simultaneously and new technological achievements will enable us to bring more detailed media to the projects. I've also made the decision to purchase some textures from artists external to the team, this is something I've been hesitant to do but it's seeming like the difference between life and death for these projects, they both sorely need a more abundant library of textures on top of the continuing existing ones. Once again there are many delays so we can improve what we are doing and play catch-up but working with such efficient and talented people, combined with my increased spare time and wisdom, should yield some excellent and critical results for us over the next couple of months. As for me personally, I will be focusing back on the characters and weapons for Shadowing Hate, along with the gameplan and storyline for it which desperately needs more filling out, and finishing another craft or two for Chaos Circuits, along with everything else that project needs. Other members are also balancing their focus equally on both projects at the moment in important areas and hopefully we'll get even more members very soon and eventually finally become a properly sized and functional game development team. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - March 30th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just a quick yabber here about lack of progress updates on the site. It's been an emotional month for me with a lot of horrible (and good) stuff happening in my personal life and not much energy left over for the projects, although some technical stuff has been sorted out lately and increasing interest from possible new members along with fantastic progress behind the scenes from current members. Anyway, now things are settling down for me and my PC is almost back to the way I want it, so that means I'll be dishing out my fair share of hard work to get these projects closer to completion. Expect some great updates real soon! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - February 22nd, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The last couple of weeks have been incredible for the team, we've been getting some nice attention and through the process have found some interest from people and a couple of very talented new members joining up. Hopefully we'll be able to fill a couple more positions, then things will really heat up and get more efficient. At the same time, though, we're going to start looking over some areas of our development and try to improve again on those before moving right ahead, which is really going to slow progress down for a while but rest assured work will be getting done and it will make for a much better outcome in the long run. The other positions that need filling should be pretty easy because they are general skills that don't tie in directly with technologies or communities, for example we really need someone to redo the website to be compatibly functional and not the ugly monster hack it is right now. What I'm personally working on? I've been focusing my attention mostly toward Chaos Circuits and mostly tiny bits and pieces that I can't possibly make anything out of just yet but some time soon will come together and add finer details. My process logic is to put these projects together in all areas at a consistent and equal rate, so hopefully, for example, when you see 1 futuristic hovercraft you can imagine another 20 or so of that same quality in the final version, but what's the point of making all 20 right at the beginning when we may have more problems building racing environments for them? So things always seem to speed up and slow down with development and what progress we can show you but we are working hard using an intelligent and safe approach. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - January 29th, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just a couple of new screenshots, an MP3, a site update now with miscellaneous downloads and a spotlight/news page in the main section, along with a bunch of stuff to be found in the forum of recent progress with everything, it's been a busy couple of weeks. The first shots of the female base model can be seen, which so far I'm very happy with, particularly the fact that I didn't need to up the triangle counts on certain womanly areas as other developers would do, it turned out pretty well. The team now has some great reference material to work with so the human base characters, both male and female, will become nothing to question the proportions about. The foundations have been laid for a lot of new special effects and abilities for both projects, to the point where I can safely say that we can now push both engines to the limits and show everything we want to show, finally, it's just still the process of putting it all together and composing the games themselves. Pretty soon Shadowing Hate will get the normalmap detail layers happening, which to be honest I haven't really tried yet so who knows if that's possible or not, but if it is then the texture quality will just go through the roof, but perhaps the same time as your system melts through the floor, but that's a feature that is both incredibly small in size and wonderfully easy to change by simply replacing scripts before you run it. By now I've also done a lot of work in the texture department with buckets of new textures suitable for both projects, and Chaos Circuits is expecting some actual rendered textures in-game pretty soon which will help all surfaces, models, interiors, terrain, to look more bumped and 3D because at the moment most of them are the mere diffuse maps that are being used in the Doom3 engine, so crafting them to look 3D and have proper highlights and shadowing is something that just hasn't happened yet, but it will soon, and it will be great. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - January 2nd, 2006. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm back and all is a-go once more, after a two-week break for the holiday season, I'll be picking up right where I left off, basically composing all the media into screenies for recruiting and polishing up the development documentation, and see how we go. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 17th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Well unfortunately time just really flew and for personal reasons I didn't quite get around to fully putting together those screenshots. Here's the deal, a whole lot has been done with coding and media, for both projects, but it's mostly in bits and pieces so there isn't much completeness to show off yet and it's just not right to show bits and pieces in a mess, it's far better to show entire screens of what the projects will look like as you see them on your screen in real-time. Sure, I have plenty of shiny renders to show off, but that would be dishonest and lazy on our behalf. Another excuse is that it's right on Christmas's doorstep here, it's fully the wrong time to try to get attention and try to recruit, and I personally will be busy for the next couple of weeks so there just won't be anyone around. The first couple of weeks of 2006 will yield much fruit for ViolaE, though (that's us!), I'm sure it will be an exciting and important year for the team in its history, so on that note, if you bother to read this dribble, Merry Christmas and see you next year. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 6th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now on-site are 2 new in-game screenshots from Chaos Circuits, one of the garage interior, which will end up being used as some real-time vehicle select screen, and one of a city-themed map which is more representitive of level of detail in the playable game itself. It's really only minus a few more details and some particles and that's about it. I also removed a couple of Shadowing Hate shots. More to come very soon. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - November 14th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some good and bad news of late. The bad, in a "glass-is-half-full" kinda way, is that the team has ultimately dwindled down to just a few souls again, which is always an inevitable event in these circumstances, but certainly not the end of us, that's for sure. If anything it's just the beginning. Now the good news, and good it is! Our own Chaos Circuits engine now has a full arsenal of special effects working in-game, pretty much everything it possibly could do in theory is now wonderfully effective in practice. There remains some problems preventing us from fully executing this project the way we'd like to, particularly some model types preventing us from achieving some curved interactive surfaces, but each day is of progress. Shadowing Hate, the Doom3- engine first-person shooter project, has taken a back-seat at the moment. The couple of character models and everything else produced will be enough for a few screenshots and will probably remain at that point until Chaos Circuits is more evolved. It's not certain whether Shadowing Hate will ever be completed especially while the team struggles to retain itself, it's probably too big a project for us first-timers to possibly handle, unfortunately. We'll see what kind of interest we get at the beginning of next year to determine what will happen. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - October 18th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The very first official and final character model has pretty much just been completed, however it's for a different mod and different team - http://icbb.doom3reference.com/ But this is almost identical to one of the first characters I wanted for SH anyway, hence the reason I decided to do this. This character will have orange coloured suit instead of blue and minus the helmet, originally, and feature in one of the first true SH screenshots that will be on site very soon. As for CC, our engine continues to get many great improvements and so many more special effects are possible now, I could upload many shots any time with what we have but I will wait for the right moment, when there is enough variety of media to put on display. It's almost impossible for independent game developers to keep a schedule so I won't bother estimating when all of this will happen, but I have my own personal goal of public recruiting pre-2006. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 11th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The displacements for the SH character models are done, a shot of such can be found in the forum. With this and the finalisations of the UV layout for this model, it's truly a very important day for the project. Next I will finalise the UV layouts for the male body model (the displacements will be per-character) and then work on the female versions, and once I'm happy with how everything is looking you can expect to see new character models being created very quickly. Development is usually so slow at the beginning as fundamental aspects are focused on but I feel confident the slow days are coming to an end, but on the same note, unfortunately, the team is almost falling apart with minimal interest or ability for them to contribute. This is my fault for never publicly recruiting or organising the site and team structure, but that will happen soon. As for Chaos Circuits, well, as I mentioned I lost a bunch of stuff I had been working on but, as it was, it was all nearly ready for those new shots to come out, which will be vital for the new recruiting. Finally worth mentioning, my good friend Mauz is keen as ever to help me create the new website, one that will actually function correctly and be more compatible with other browsers. I think everything will come together just nicely and at just the right time. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - August 26th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Who, me? I had some computer problems, accidentally formatted my sacred secondary hard drive and lost a bunch of stuff, pretty much a month's worth of progress, foolishly I didn't back-up, blah. Who cares. Everything is still go, projects are going ahead as planned, it's just been a big waste of time. On top of this, the team has been too loose for much progress, on the art side of things. I'm personally ready to get right back into these projects and that's the most important thing. Most of what I had done in the last month needed improvements anyway, I'm sure I can recover quickly and get the next wave of shots for both projects out soon. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - July 11th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The new hovercraft model is textured and on show, but only that little pic at the top of the website, unless you're registered in the forum to see the proper render in the CC WIP section. There won't be more high-detail renders until the in-game shots are up on the site, at the same time I'd like to get at least one of the new SH character models ready to be shown, too. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - July 2nd, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What? Oh yeah... Nothing much to report except I've had my little break and I'm back on task once again, already with a new SH enemy model, called a Xenex Sliderdrone, almost ready to show, but nothing much will be on display until there's a nice little bunch of shots, a website fix/tidy and, at which time, I will give shout-outs here and there to let everyone know. The stuff-to-see is all in the forum at the moment in the WIP threads. So much to do, but I'm confident within a couple of weeks - new shots! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - May 22nd, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hm, monthly increments, lazy. I'll personally be off-duty for about a month as of now and I'm about to upload all Shadowing Hate media for other developers to check out and play with. The Chaos Circuits release I wanted to upload hasn't made it far enough but I'll get right onto that in a month's time. The major news is that the UV mapping on the SH base model is finally complete, a few more tweaks and we'll have character models a plenty, with tight and tidy textures, much unlike the ones you see in the current shots. So with proper UV mapping also comes proper normalmaps, I can promise a total evolution in quality. The first hovercraft for Chaos Circuits is also in the same state, lovely UV mapping but no texture as of yet. I really wanted to have it finished by now but no such luck. It's better to take time to get such an important aspect of the model completed rather than slack it and end up with second-rate rubbish. A few other mentionables, we have some lovely rain effects now, thick and shiny, it has an almost fully transparent look but a strong specular map so it really glows in the light, much like the true nature of real rain. It also has a "rained-on" MTR stage that we can place on the textures, both the water hitting a flat surface and the rain running down walls. I can't recall seeing this effect in any other game so that will be just great if we achieve a first. Not that it's hard to do. It will be tricky to use it sparingly but I must say it looks great and the engine handles it just wonderfully. Enough rambles for now. I'm off for a month but when I return I'll have some remarkable updates, as well as yet another website revamp. Can't wait. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - April 20th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I had forgotten about this thing. I never use it for actual development documentation as I'm supposed to, I'm still blabbering like it's some news post. The team is at a point where it's gathering a decent amount of consistent attention from possible new members. I've personally been reworking a lot of stuff to get to a professional level and that's why there haven't been a lot of updates. Chaos Circuits is coming along nicely, though. I've actually been playing it, believe it or not, at least a very primitive and graphically devoid version of it. We've decided to switch from wheeled vehicles to hovercrafts but a lot of the gameplay features will remain the same. The engine responds much better to the hovercrafts as far as collisions go so that's really the wisest choice for us, to avoid making something ridiculously buggy. Shadowing Hate is still being worked on, the character models are being redone to be the way they should be, finely tuned and nicely skinned, and ready to be animated and exported to the engine, so we'll have cops running around in there in no time along with a nice powerful futuristic pistol to blow their brains out with. Fun. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - March 18th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A LOT of texture work has been getting done over the last few weeks for both projects, along with a few scenery models. A couple of new Shadowing Hate shots uploaded. I'm able to work now with a recent stable build of Torque. The forums have been updated and are now ready for people to post. The team may increase with a few possible new members taking an interest. That Chaos Circuits stuff is still waiting to be screenshotted and uploaded. Nevermind. At least I know it exists. There are many new features working in Shadowing Hate, the latest screenshots will show you. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - February 22nd, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of Shadowing Hate shots featuring the new female version AECE operative. Just like the male version it still requires so much work. It is just the male version reshaped and given a new head texture. Also introducing a new enemy NPC, which will be known as a Parallax Gauntlet, the name coming from Quake III Arena, some would recognise that model as my old gauntlet replacement with legs. Coming up is not one but two new Chaos Circuits vehicles. The team is beginning to become more active on the art side of things with a couple of new members. A big texture job is ahead because what we have now just isn't good enough. Things will look a lot better soon and folks will be desperately choking down their negative non-constructive feedback. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - February 12th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first Chaos Circuits video is finally compiled and uploaded. This doesn't contain any real-time in-game footage but it does have a lot of the in-game media in there, one obviously being the vehicle. The next vehicle is coming along nicely which is actually the base vehicle model for the project, meaning vehicles will be much easier for us to make and new vehicle models will be completed regularly. Shadowing Hate probably won't be updated for quite a while but the human models are getting regular attention and the female version is already being worked on. Once we have completed those models, finalise the UV mapping and have more textures to use for that project, the more it will be worked on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - February 6th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A bit of bad news here. The recent media for the Doom3/Quake4 project has been lost. It was all in one location and accidentally deleted. It's not so bad, actually. It was all very preliminary, and although could have helped to produce the final quality, it's only the final quality that matters. From this point we'll put all of our effort into producing final quality standard media for the project. It means progress will be a little slower but when shots do arise, they will be so much better than what we have. People will finally see what we have in mind for this project instead of the test shots that are up now. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - January 29th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The site gets some improvements. Instead of going with anything too technically advanced it's now at least functional. It still has major problems on some other browsers but we'll get around that somehow eventually. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - January 26th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I haven't been using this as planned. Note to self - starting using the development journal for detailed development logs. Shadowing Hate is going to get left alone for some time. The second of the Chaos Circuits vehicles is getting closer to completion. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - January 24th, 2005. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Back again after a holiday break and say hello to our second Shadowing Hate character model, the MetroPD. There's also some new renders for Chaos Circuits in the files section, these need to be compiled together to form the title intro to later in-game video releases, but there will be an initial prerendered video release in just a few days from now, along with new Shadowing Hate shots. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - December 12th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Just a quick update on the Shadowing Hate shots. Not much has changed at all but they look a whole lot better now. There's also some new additions to files/movies section. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - November 16th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- So yes, Shadowing Hate has been shifted ahead to be developed using Quake IV. The reasons being that Quake IV should really push the Doom3 engine enabling many more possibilities to benefit Shadowing Hate while creation methods will already be familiar to us and a lot of media can be ported straight over without problems. Raven Software have been known for innovating id Software technology and pushing it in new directions and the Quake games have been traditional for Violation to work with, so it seems natural. The AI should be significantly improved being that Doom3 only had to bring monsters and zombies to life, but Quake IV demands much higher standards that will hopefully make sure the human opponents of Shadowing Hate won't be braindead idiots. That and the obvious improvements that multiplayer will receive make it a very easy decision to make. We're already very familiar with the technology and development is still in the process, even though very slowly, there will be some new Shadowing Hate shots in the new site launch (soooon), but as mentioned, Chaos Circuits is the main focus and will be until it's at least in a playable beta form, sometime early-mid next year, hopefully. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - October 29th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Currently the engine (which we could safely now start to call "our engine") is getting more impressive by the day with some very cool new features with improvements for gameplay, graphics and development. The site has been updated with some very early shots of the title animation. Needless to say, more very soon. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - October 11th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A little render for the most special person in the world to me and I've already started the Chaos Circuits logo which should look just awesome. The engine is being continually worked on by the lead programmer and a lot of artwork is ready to throw into it. Shadowing Hate is totally taking backseat for now but I've decided to shift that project over to Quake IV which is a wise thing to do. Torque is what is being concentrated on now but when Shadowing Hate does get some attention it will be of the multiplayer kind to start with. The new playable build of Torque (which now contains mostly original media) is uploaded now, also. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 24th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated the two Chaos Circuits shots that show some improvements in many different areas. With a few more problems solved, media should be able to flow, as far as tracks and environments go. Still problems exporting actual drivable vehicles but that could very well be the greatest hurdle. With some extra engine features being implemented and vehicles on the way, this project will really start to take shape. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 17th, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A quick silly little update. Things are moving slowly. It's usually a case of making a whole lot of triumphs in areas that just can't be shown yet, especially the new website. Like mentioned earlier, the next update will be a huge one. It will then also be time to expand the team. Us few are finding it difficult to work alone while others seem to be taking too little interest. With the launch of the site I'm sure ViolaE will find some fresh talented help. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - September 2, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hm, here we go, a couple of shots straight from real-time Torque Game Engine. Some of the media does look very familiar but it definitely won't stay that way as the project gets further into development. The website development, however, is going very slowly at the moment. Maybe the original menu system design is too complicated. Back to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - August 16, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Time flies when having fun. Doom3 was finally released days ago and I'm adapting to the new layout of everything. The AI I've seen so far looks very promising for the type of scenario the mod will be. Some technical problems being had with Torque development seem to be finally smoothing right out. The first morsel-sized release of Shadowing Hate will be downloadable very shortly although already it weighs 20Mb. Next on the list is weapons and characters so the next lot of shots will look a whole lot more interesting and that will be about the same time as the first Chaos Circuits shots. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - June 27, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The first decent update for quite a while, the first official screenshots of very early Shadowing Hate development, the total conversion project using the Doom3 engine. The functional version of the site will be finished soon but won't officially launch until there is Chaos Circuits content to display and probably not until Doom3 is officially released, which is currently planned for mid-August, but some "CC" content will be up before that, definitely. Now that I've got these 4 "SH" shots up I will be leaving that for a while and concentrating entirely on Torque, which I have bought the Shader Engine of (which I mentioned earlier as being Torque 2) and that should look just as good as what is happening with Doom3. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - June 4, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The human base model for the Doom3 project is nearing completion now. This is a huge step forward as it is without a doubt the most valuable piece of media. A number of textures are Doom3-ready now, too, and importing tests have gone perfectly so far. As far as Torque goes, there are now a number of people working on that same project and once enough media has been done I'm sure something playable will be available almost instantly. There is also a new site design on the way, this time it will actually function the way it's supposed to. These changes are a couple of months away. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - March 22, 2004. - L.D.Ash --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally there has been some "fiddles" with DOOMEdit (Doom 3 Radiant) and 6 shots have turned up. I've finally done _something_. Also, with the announcement of Torque 2, the racing game project has some hope again. I've been assured that everything I know about TGE still applies to the next generation of the engine, which really couldn't be better news. Anyway, these crappy little Doom 3 shots are not even playable. I just wanted a few new somethings to gander at on the site. It's been a long time coming but things are finally going to start happening around here soon. Every little scrap is significant in its own way and what I've just learnt about the engine is definitely significant indeed, a game that is still a little way off being released. It's great to finally be at a point where media production is my biggest concern, and it's what I do. Hopefully the official launch of the site will be within a couple of months. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ======================================================================================= ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------