Solitude reborn update #1 news

Welcome everyone to our first update of Solitude Reborn. Many of you are probably wondering, what is this? Well, this update is to serve as the answer to that.

But before I show anything cool, a bit of history.

Many of you probably do remember Solitude (https://www.indiedb.com/games/solitude). One of the biggest and most anticipated projects of psp quake community. Unfortunately during its long life cycle, there was one big lacking thing. No release (expect for a pc alpha, but it was never released on moddb). This great project is a reason some of us are still here, and is actually what I call, the mother of all psp quake mods, while kurok was the grandmother. Many psp quake projects has emerged from the halo solitude's community, some notable ones being the L4Q, NZP and conscript for example. And these projects inspired even more. CoW, quartal, alpha team six, BTL and more. However solitude has already been dead for years. What is this project then?

We are a 3 (4 techincaly) men team. I am Jukki, engine coder. Ghost_Fang is the "leader" or director of the project. And we are following his visuals (and correcting his mistakes). His job is mainly the game logic code and mapping. Dr Mabuse on other hand is mapper and coder too, mainly responsible for the AI code. We are what we consider the psp quake community's veterans. The longest one's to stay and develop on this dyeing platform. This project was started years ago, when Ghost_Fang received a file, containing all the solitude's assets that where never released, and was told to "finish the fight". Few months ago we had discussion about reviving the project. And just about 50 days ago, we decided to start doing it. During these 50 days we have worked hard to achieve our goal. Restore solitude to its former glory, and give it a release it deserved. Now we have reached the point where we believe we are ready to bring this project to public.

So now that we got all that out of the way, lets get to the current day. And lets start by some screenshots:

Visually our reboot looks a much like the solitude, that is due to using of the old assets, like models, textures, and hud icons. However inside the story is different. The code is totally different. We have started everything from a clean plate, by using the most latest version of dquake plus, the very same engine used by NZP, CoW and L4Q, While our game logic code (QC) is done from scratch. But enough, lets actually get to the features we have.

Here is a screenshot of our current main menu. Notice that the style of the menu resembles the halo 3 style. I chose this style because it looks sleek and clean, and is very psp friendly, since it does not require many images to be drawn. Everything you see here is handled by the engine and the background map. Technically our menu is actually ran on a active multiplayer map.

Here we have a image of our player customization menu, as of right now it is very limited. Players are limited to 8 predefined colors chose from. You can on the right preview what your character will look like.

Here we have a demostration of what our lobby screen looks like. Everything you see here is 100% functional. You can switch maps and game modes easily, change some tiny game options like point limit and time limit, and change bot difficulty. And the biggest thing we have here is the bots. You can add up to 7. If you are playing team game, you can also chose the bot's teams with trigger buttons, and of course you can remove bots.

When you actually get in game, you will be surprised how good the thing looks on psp, and actually still runs at playable frame rates (above 30 most of times). We have completely functioning hud. With a mix from all the halo games. Mainly halo ce.

Here you can see some of the stuff we have. Shield bar and health bars are 100 % working and smooth. they change color depending on the situation (shields flicker red when they are low, health icons switch to red and yellow just like in halo ce). Radar works, and shows also friendlies. Ammo counter works too, and incase you are using covenant weapons there is also a color changing heat bar. When you are out of ammo or you can switch weapons on ground, there is a string that tells you to do it, and it even prints the button you need to do it and the icon of the weapon. One last thing you can see is the point meter on the bottom right corner. It functions like the halo 3 variant. Showing you or your team either on the top, or at the bottom depending on the placement.

One final picture I am showing you here is the scoreboard:

It resembles the one from halo reach. And it also has a variation for teamplay!

As you can see, there are also medals functioning, and the team score board updates with the teams positions and what not.

We have been very exited to bring this project to public. We have been teasing this project for a moment now, code naming this Project Calcium, or Milk. So seniormeatbox, that was not a replacement model, but a teaser of this! Stay tuned and remember to follow us, expect a lot of content coming out, including game play videos, feature demonstrations and what we actually have to show in very near future! Remember to spread the word and follow us on here moddb.

Solitude reborn team