Posted by BloodRayne on Saturday 24th of December 2011 10:59:59 PM.
In the course of the last year my management role in Hexen has become less and less up to a point where my active participation in the mod has ground to a halt. The main reason for this is time constraints and other projects that make demands on my time. Management has been taken over in the very capable hands of Deadite, Caffeine Freak, Zeroth, Slash and other long standing members of the mod, who have all invested as much as I have into this game. In the seven years that I worked on EOC I learned more than I dared hope and have spent more hours on coding, mapping, creating sounds and other stuff than I can even begin to count.
But life goes on and so must I in the form of my new project called 'Grimm: Quest for the Gatherer's Key' which had it's release on the 25th of December, yeah that's today. Go grab it!
And with that I leave EOC in the capable hands of the team!
Posted by deadite4 on Wednesday 21st of December 2011 08:42:02 PM.
For anyone who has stopped by our twitter page lately you probably know that we've been making solid progress on moving the project to a standalone, free game. Our programmer, Solarsplace, has been hard at work getting all the code, scripts, and defs all set up for quite some time now. Mr. Rocket has been hard at work creating any needed art to fill in some of our lingering holes.
Fortunately for the majority of the project we kept fairly strict rules of avoiding anything from Doom 3 as much as we possibly could throughout the development of the project. While some things inevitably inherited Doom 3 things, the amount has been incredible low compared to what it could have been. This has made our move progress at a rather fast pace. We'll have some more detailed information on that next month when we hopefully are in the final stages of the move. We'll continue to be posting small updates via twitter until then, so be sure to check us out!
Also recently we posted a track from our new composer Mystic Realmz. It's one of his first, complete tracks and is already being used with more on the way. The whole team is quite excited with all the new music!
Posted by deadite4 on Monday 21st of November 2011 07:57:47 PM.
It doesn't feel like it has been a year since our first demo release. People joined, people left, solid progress has surely been made. Our current team is still very much enthusiastic about the project and daily updates in at least one department of the project is the norm. So what have we done? What is our future?
Well as all of our past news items have stated progress continues daily. Mapping, models, textures, sounds, music, code, you name it! Really the whole team is jiving pretty well right now and things continue to stay on course.
For the future? Well our next release has always be planned to be the entire first episode and would conclude the Cleric's journey. That includes 3 full hubs(about 3.5 levels per hub) and would be a little over triple the size of our demo release. There's also discussion on what to include on the other classes if for nothing else than some public testing of their mechanics. It will all depend on how things continue to progress in the time frame we are eying. A couple new team members of course wouldn't be a bad thing!
We hope to have some very cool updates in the coming months so stay tuned!
Posted by deadite4 on Thursday 20th of October 2011 06:48:16 AM.
It's been 2 months since our big Roden update(which had some great feedback!) and it's been quite busy since! We bring only a small update this time around. All departments continue on their tasks. We have 2 maps ready for play and 4 currently in difference phases of development.
Maxetormer has alredy sent in some animations for Roden along with another character model on the way from our other 3d artist, andy_a. New textures and fixes to old ones continue from Mr. Rocket while squeezing in some mapping as well now. We've finally(!) fixed several troubling code bugs that have plagued us since release thanks to the hard work of solarsplace. Music has been streaming on in from our semi-recently acquired composer.
All in all we've been progressing very nicely. Below we're showing 2 very WIP shots of h3m1 and h3m2 in their layout phase in progress by ShadoW and Mr. Rocket respectively. Until next month, where we plan to display more goodies, happy gaming!
Posted by deadite4 on Tuesday 16th of August 2011 06:22:00 AM.
"As the foremost Librarian amongst his fellows, Roden is widely regarded as having the greatest cohesive sense of the history of Cronos. Before founding his grand library, he feared that records of the past could one day be destroyed - either through mere accident or malicious intent. To safeguard against such an intellectual loss, he set out with his most trusted allies to create a bastion against the march of time.
Roden is, as he has always been, simply an observer. It is then horribly poetic that he is fated to continue this role now that he is stuck somewhere between the bounds of life and death. Korax was killed. The world rejoiced. The world rebuilt. But Korax's existence set the current stage, allowed a new darkness to lead that march of time. And Roden must watch as he always has, and watch, and watch..."
This month we'd like to formally introduce our main NPC of the first episode....Roden. From start to finish it took the collaboration of several people and input from the entire team to get the character to where he is today. The following is a developer commentary that is hopefully both interesting and informative on how many things are done internally. Enjoy.
Spookt:
For me, Roden always seemed the most necessary character in the first episode. The player was always going to learn of him, his research, and the world's past in the Library, but there was something too emotionally detached about that idea. Reading about the man was never going to be as powerful as actually meeting him. He is, I think, a visual metaphor for a theme running through the Cleric's story: impotence in the face of overwhelming circumstances. As knowledgeable and wise as Roden may be, he is now bound to an existence where he can do very little. In terms of practicality, he functions as a means to explain the situation to the player - in my mind more in a System Shock 2 Janice Polito sort of way, as opposed to Atlas a la Bioshock. Further, he is a presence of stability. We opened the game in a ravaged city, thoroughly raped and left for ash. The Library presents a calm disparity, as does Roden. True, the building has seen better days, as has the man himself, but what I wanted to accomplish most at this point in the narrative was to allow the player an opportunity to get a sense of what our Cleric has been thrown into and what might be done to fix it.
Maxetormer:
Like any other project it began with the idea which was written by Spookt, our writer extraordinaire. The main air about the character I'd specifically mention is one of weariness. He's trapped in the library and can really do nothing else but chronicle what he sees. While the player is his long hoped-for savior (for himself and the world), he has long since given into despair.
I began doing some early concepting and at first I was going for a simple monk feel until our Art Director/Viking- Andreas told me the design was looking too bland.
"Keep in mind he's a ghost, and we're talking about a magical entity whose existence for a very long time has been all about chronicling. You have an opportunity to play around with his appearance here, and I don't think we should limit ourselves to the "old man in a robe" option. " Andreas then drew notes over my concept, I went back to the drawing board, and we ended up at our final concept.
Once approved, I started doing the actual 3d model. I'm using blender 2.5x for all of my 3d work, and I must say its a fantastic piece of software. It comes with high resolution sculpting tools and low resolution modeling tools so, all in all, it's like having Mudbox and Maya in the same package...extremely handy.
When I completed the high res model it was just a matter of baking the normal and AO maps into the low res meshes, and painting the diffuse channels with Photoshop. Blender has a really good .md5 exporter which allows us to import the asset and its animations directly into id tech 4 with out any problems which has been another great perk of using Blender in the pipeline.
I have a thread on the Blender artist forum about this character at http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... e-of-Chaos if anyone has further interest in its progression. Currently I have finished weight painting him and now begin setting up rig controls and then finally onto animations. Wish us luck!
When I saw Spookt's description and then Maxetormer's concepts, I immediately knew what type of voice would be perfect. Old, strained, and gritty but rich. As an audio engineer in the Voice Over production field I work with voice artists every day and have many relationships with those I've recorded. I knew exactly who to ask to fit this character and he was more than happy to lend his voice. As luck would have it we actually had a project scheduled together that very month! He loved what he saw of the concepts and well, we recorded his whole script while breaking for lunch.
--
Until next month...happy gaming! We'll have more developer commentaries in the future if it is well-received!
Posted by deadite4 on Wednesday 06th of July 2011 08:32:31 PM.
For this month's news post we'd like to start out by introducing our new composer Mystic Realmz! We've been quietly in search of a new composer for a little while and were directed over to Mystic Realms, who was more than thrilled to hop on board. He's already started producing some tracks for the project and I must say we're all a bit excited to start expanding our musical library for our designers. You can find some of his previous work around the net especially a few that have been in other doom 3 mod projects and in Joe Goss's animated work. Welcome to the team!
We've spent a good portion of the last few weeks updating our website. You can now find updated links, official videos, all of our downloads, and a completely updated media section. In addition to updated information site wide, we've also added a fantastic IRC chat widget right in the site. This is perfect for anyone who always wanted to chat but never wanted to try IRC. Simply go to our contact page, or http://hexenmod.com/irc.php and enter your nickname. It's that easy! Upon connection it will send you directly to our chat channel. No need to install or learn a thing!
As we've had good fortune expanding the team lately, we would still love to add to our pool of level designers especially. If you have some level design experience and a love for Hexen then send us a message! Until next time...
Posted by deadite4 on Tuesday 14th of June 2011 07:01:28 PM.
Welcome again to our monthly news post! We're going to keep it short this month with just a brief update. As has been the case since release much of the team has been working away on just about everything and you can see our daily additions to the build that we feed to our twitter account. Be sure to check it out.
Most recently we've started sorting out puzzles and details for Roden's Library as the level has progressed very nicely. Some structural shots below, the level has seen items and monsters ready for balancing this earlier this month. Puzzles, quests, and story elements have started being planned out just this week!
Also fresh from the studio just the other day, we have finished recording the dialogue for our next character encounter. None other than Roden himself. What he has to say is of utmost importance and our Cleric would be wise to listen.
Like always, feel free to stop by our forums or join IRC for a chat. We've had some increased activity lately which is always welcome. See you next month!
Posted by deadite4 on Thursday 05th of May 2011 07:22:58 AM.
It's been a bit of time since our last media and news update. We've been working out some new fan oriented stuff to help allow you to get a better insight into our team workings. Over the upcoming month we have some new features planned to incorporate into our website so keep an eye out for that! For now we would like to introduce everyone to our server's twitter site at http://twitter.com/TeamEoC_Server ! We've had it going for a little while now, and there are still some adjustments that need to be made. What it allows is for anyone who is interested to see an exported log of our development server. You can see who, what, when, and usually why someone did something as well as keep your own tracking on our frequency of work if you wish. Why would you care about that you say?? Why wouldn't you! Now lets move on to player feedback(that's you guys) and our responses.
New and in progress this month we'll briefly discuss our new traveler's map and expanding Journal. We had some feedback on people getting lost in some areas after release. Many remedies were suggested, many we didn't like. We enjoy leaving the player the responsibility to figure his way along however we did understand a need for at least some assistance when a player needs it. We tossed out any ideas of glowing arrows or a position tracking map. What we kept is this lovely hand drawn style map. It doesn't move, it doesn't track and it doesn't give you super radar powers. It does allow you to find your general location based on landmarks. Simple, yet handy to those who need it while not overly revealing to those who don't.
Moving along you can see we also have an inventory page now in the Journal. In addition to a map we heard a lot about players not knowing what exactly was in their inventory. They kept picking stuff up but where did it go and what did they have we were told?!?! Simply put the inventory page of your journal will now display quest and puzzle related items you have acquired or are still missing throughout your journey.
In a final addition to the Journal system we have a brand new secrets tracker. It shows the amount of secrets you've found out of the whole number of the level. As we've watched a lot of videos on Youtube of players playing the release build we noticed an astonishing fact. Everyone was missing almost all of the secret rooms!! Not quite sure if players just don't care or if players aren't used to the old "this block is a little different then the rest" type of secret but we wanted to do something. The secrets tracker, we hope, should at least make aware to gamers that they are in there and they are going unfounded.
Closing out our news post we'd like to welcome Solarsplace who joined us as a new programmer. He's been working hard on all our AI needs and has brought previously waiting monsters to life and they are already being implemented in our new maps awaiting testing. Welcome aboard!
Until next month. Keep making videos and sending in feedback and bugs. We'll keep working, fixing, and progressing. We consider all feedback that comes in so the more we have the more we can hopefully improve the experience for next release.
Posted by deadite4 on Tuesday 22nd of February 2011 08:59:49 AM.
As time keeps progressing so do we! Work continues in all departments of the project at an alarming pace. It's been quite the good problem to have. On top of it all.......more new members!
Maxetormer joined us this past month as a concept artist, and modeler. He's only been here a few weeks and already he's provided a WIP concept on the Centaur and his first in game model, the glorious falcon shield. Times are good in our modeling department, times are very good.
Joining at about the same time as Maxetormer, ShadoW hopped on board as a mapper. He's already started work on some concept for his level and we're all excited to see what he can do. Our mapping department has never had so many active members. Perhaps we should be scared, we're supposed to give feedback on all this stuff!
Also for all you interested programmers out there we have a nice little treat. Zeroth has packed up a unified GNU Patch file from our demo release. Inside the zip package below are instructions on how to apply it to an unmodified Doom 3 SDK 1.3.1 installation on either Windows or Linux (Mac is *theoretically* the same) to attain the complete sources for the first Hexen: Edge of Chaos release. As a note: we use MS Visual C++ 2008 Express to build this in Windows, and GCC 4.4 on Linux.
We would also like to take this time to remind everyone about our IRC channel. Want to come and converse with the development team, or give good and bad feedback? Got an idea or suggestion? Maybe just Idle? Curious about any new features we've added? Then stop on by, say hello and hang out.
For anyone else still interested we are still looking for more members, especially dedicated animators and level designers specifically as they are our greatest needs right now.
Hexen: Edge of Chaos Demo unified patch file: RavenGames Moddb
Posted by deadite4 on Friday 28th of January 2011 06:27:29 AM.
With the new year comes more progress. One of our primary goals of our demo release was a larger testing and feedback pool from the public. So far the feedback has been very constructive from a wide number of people. There are mechanics that need some adjusting and you, the public, have been very helpful on what you did and did not like along with suggestions to help iron out the problems. We're listening to everyone and discussing all the constructive points.
Our second major goal of the release was to show what we have, prove ourselves, and hopefully draw in new talent that will enable us to work at an even more efficient and faster pace. With this goal, we've also been very successful.
Mr. Rocket joined us shortly after release mainly as our new texture artist. He had shown some community interest on our public forums with a map he was working on using our demo as a base. After finding out he has a long experience with texture creation, well......we greased those gears real fast! He's been adding new texture sets since.
Aaron also joined us around the same time as Mr. Rocket. He had messaged our programmer, sent in some code, and expressed a strong interest with A.I. code. Since we have quite a few released monsters that could use smartening, and a bunch of unreleased monsters that have been waiting for their A.I., his talents would be huge plus. Needless to say his first task has been one of the first new monsters in the next HUB......the hellwasp!
Rolls3d, our new character modeler, has been a Hexen fan for some time. We had a forum user post up some renders he had done in the past and they looked great. "Would he do some modelling for us?" we thought and immediately contacted him. The good news is he certainly would!
Now that we had a new character modeler, we also needed more assistance in the concept department. Rei joined us in December and was immediately put to work. First task: Wendingo concept. It's been shaping up very nice!
All said and done the team has been rejuvenated after release. Our old members are continuing what we do and our new members have jumped right into the frenzy. We have a feeling this year is going to be great year for Hexen!
Also to all Mac OSX users. We had gotten quite a few inquiries about playing Edge of Chaos on a Mac. At the time of release we were unable to compile our code for the platform. Luckily, Simulation over at doom3world.org was awesome enough to compile our code last week and send back the universal DLL for you all. You can grab the OSX patch below, Hexen: Edge of Chaos Demo required.
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