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Interstellar Marines is an immersive AAA-quality Indie FPS with RPG elements, tactical co-op & nonlinear gameplay set in a believable future.

Post news Report RSS Interstellar Marines: SITREP - Week 033

Deadlock 0.3.5 is online next week. Until then you can pass time with this SITREP

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Read last SITREP [Here]

Team debriefing

Kim
Kim (ZPSHicks)
Game Director

"This week heks has been offline on a well-deserved vacation (doing immersive skiing research), after we'd deployed last week's ambitious shop overhaul featuring complete redesign with PayPal funnel optimization and thorough technical restructuring.

On the "game development" side of things .. it's all about getting everything ready for the next Deadlock update, which is really overdue (online next week).

I've spent this week prepping our work in Unity 3.5 and must admit that its not been without frustrations primarily because occlusion culling of lights suddenly do not work anymore .. After a few days of testing / ping pong'ing with Unity, Anders decided to make a cool little update to our internal "Light Performance" script which now toggles light on/off based on the occlusion culling of special light colliders inside our light prefabs .. It works fantastic and performance is acceptable and way better than calculating all lights at all time.

I'm currently committed to getting the best out of the new 3.5 image effects like the HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering pipeline which based on tonemapping post-processing allow for simulation of screen pixel values beyond just white (255); over-exaggeratedly demonstrated with the "picture of the sprint" below.

One of the current limitations of our server tech is that we can only support 1 map online at the time (soon about to change), so for this next update we've decided to make CR1 online again, so we can get a few test runs done with bullets everywhere.

Other than that we simply can't wait to start implementing more of our hard core tactical gameplay to give more intensity and meaning to our multiplayer.".

heks
Mikael (heks)
Lead Programmer

"SARA: Entry mismatch. Subject appears to be offline. No record stored this week".

New rendering pipeline in Unity 3.5 allows us to process our pixels in High Dynamic Range (HDR); allowing complete control of colors, brightness, bloom and flares etc. to achieve much more realistic images and quality! (Over-exaggerated here for effect
"New rendering pipeline in Unity 3.5 allows us to process our pixels in High Dynamic Range (HDR); allowing complete control of colors, brightness, bloom and flares etc. to achieve much more realistic images and quality! (Over-exaggerated here for effect".

Anders
Anders (cptKickASS)
Lead Artist

"For the last few weeks my focus has been on animation, Unity 3.5, performance, flashlight and laser light. I started out by updating all our movement animations, and did additional animations, so that we have animations for more movement speeds. We now have walk, run and sprint animations in all directions.

Then we updated the project to 3.5 and that gave me a few "refactoring of code" assignments. This last week, I did assets and tech, so that we hopefuly will have flashlight and laser light for the next release, it still need to have heks's coder eyes on it.

Kim and I also did some tech for the lights in order to draw them more efficient, which should empower us to handle more dynamic lights in our scenes".

Jess
Jess (NecroSonic)
Level Designer

"It has been a bit quite in the level design department lately due to the switch to Unity 3.5. Some of you may know that the possibility of doing a level design competition has been discussed on the forum. This competition has been a bit delayed but WILL happen and hopefully we can launch it next week.

The details will follow once the competition starts but the core idea is that members of the community will draw an overview picture of a map layout that you would like to see in Deadlock. Kim and I will pick a winner (yes there will be a prize) and I will start creating a new map based on the winning concept. This way we believe that all will be able to take part in the competition as it solely about imagination/creativity and not the technicalities of actually constructing the level so that it works with our code and all.

I am hoping to see some cool ideas and I am suspecting that you will once again blow us away.

If you want to brush of you level design theory this might be a good place to start: Johnsto.co.uk. If you find other good resources like this be sure to share them with the rest of us.

Nicolai
Nicolai (Reese)
CEO & Composer

"I've been using a lot of time cleaning up in the piles of administrative papers and solving those annoying "loose ends" we always seems to get when digging ourselves a mud-hole of creativity.

Despite these "boring" news I somehow did manage to compose a full Deadlock music theme which will be implemented in a soon to come Deadlock update, the briefing room and in one of Kim's famous in-development community videos".

New SITREP standard

Our current Deadlock release process consist of 2 to 3 week sprints. In order to optimize our production-flow we have decided to rearrange how we do our community updates; hence this Friday's missing SITREP. When we release an updated Deadlock version this includes a Battle Report (changelog, article etc.); our SITREP's will continue, but on a mid-sprint release schedule.

So:
Every 2-3 weeks (sprint): An updated Deadlock version is released

Every mid-sprint: A SITREP is released.

Thanks for your support and feedback on our community website.
Feel free to preorder and support us by upgrading your profile.

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME
Nicolai (Reese) & the team at Zero Point Software

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