Hi all! Time for another update. Not a HUGE one this time, but an exciting one, nonetheless.
First off, I appeared on an episode of the - rather unorthodox - gaming podcast DDoS to talk about Malevolence and video gaming in general. It's quite a long podcast, but I'm only in it for about the first hour. The hosts are quite young so it was interesting talking about Malevolence to people who had never seen or played anything like Might & Magic before. A bit more laid-back than the usual appearances I've made, but still fun:
We were also interviewed by the ZedGames radio program, which was awesome. We linked to this on the FaceBook a while back, but I have an edited down version here showing just the talk about Malevolence:
But enough with the interviews. I also have been making some serious, SERIOUS coding progress lately! One thing that happened is finally having all three areas in the game linked (underground, countryside and towns) which means that we just have to implement the Kevin Bacon quest system and the rest of the game is just polishing and bug fixing [edit: the quest system is already working fine, but it's in a separate program so that we could simulate it working in the infinite world. We just need to merge the code files. Won't take too long, really. Expecting to have that done within a couple of weeks!]. That's pretty exciting. I also started working on implementing the maps in countryside mode, and - in doing so - found the cause of two major bugs that have been plaguing me for about 3 weeks. It's a huge relief actually as those bugs have been causing me substantial grief. Anyway, I got quite excited about it all working and did up a gameplay video to show you how it's all rolling. Please forgive my sleepiness as this was recorded at about 1am and I REALLY needed to go to bed...
Now, first of all, sorry that the video is so choppy. I didn't actually check this video before uploading it, which was a big mistake, as I found out too late that it seems to have recorded at like 8fps, which sucks... The game was running between 37 and 60fps... I need to get new screencap software. But in any case, I'll be doing up a new, better gameplay video for you very soon:
We've also got a new bit of art from Carrie, which looks AMAZING as always. I thought I'd show you guys here:
Anyway, in the meantime, keep on rocking! And be sure to check out our LAST update. Even thought it was about game content, because it was all text it got archived rather than authorized, so you may not have seen it. You can read it here.
Thanks for all the support and kind comments over the RPG Codex interview! Made us feel all warm and fuzzy :) and definitely gave us plenty of vim in terms of working on the game! You're all awesome!
Amazing indeed :)
Thank you!
Awesome art and interesting gameplay video!
Thanks 13branniy :) we'll get a better quality gameplay video up soon
Oh my god those guys on DDoS aren't qualified to be game journalists. They hadn't heard of monkey island!
Other than that great interview.
Or Quake 3! It was very bizarre, but still had fun though lol
Nice, this deserves to be tracked ;)
Why thank you :)
Technical question:
I'm wondering how you're handling streaming, I noticed that it loads bits in chunks (similar to how Morrowind used to). Have you considered instead using a LOD system?. This is just my impression from the gameplay videos so far, I think ideally people want to avoid having to load anything so having a LOD system in place could eliminate/reduce load times. I'm a little bit concerned that when the game comes out this'll be the main thing people complain about because they're too used to having LODs in place nowdays. If its not feasible then consider its use for the sequel ;)
Yeah we've had quite a few people bring that up, but unfortunately there are limitations on how to handle streaming when it comes to an infinite world. To stream info you need to have a reference point, but with an infinite world there IS no reference point :( we'll actually be getting the chunk loads happening much faster as time goes on, though. The countryside part of the game is still pretty early on in development. We're focusing on getting content happening and then going through and sanding all the rough edges :P