I thought it was probably sensible to do an update, now that the name of our little project has been revealed, explaining what it means and what it’s origins are.
In reality, there was no great mystery to the name - I chose not to reveal it because there were still elements of the design related to it that weren’t finished. It would actually have been quite trivial for someone to look up the domains that I’d registered and find it.

So - the etymology. Tide’s Reach. The reach of the tide. Or rather, the Tide. They’re an entity within the universe that we created for the game; an organisation, really. If you think in terms of highly-funded religious lunatics with a fleet of spaceships, you’d be on the right lines. The Tide are, through the overall arc of the story, the principle enemy. More than that, I don’t want to give away at this point.

The origin of the name could be seen as somewhat silly. Many years ago, when I first came up with the general concept of this game, I had a tendency to listen to one particular tape while I was driving (yes, tape. It was that long ago. Be thankful it wasn’t an 8-track…) In this case, it was Use Your Illusion II by Guns ‘n Roses. The first track is called Civil War, and some of the lyrics read thusly:

My hands are tied
The billions shift from side to side
And the wars go on with brainwashed pride
For the love of God and our human rights
And all these things are swept aside
By bloody hands time can’t deny
And are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

I misheard that first line as “I am the tide” and, while thinking about that, I had such a fantastic mental image of this galaxy-conquering, unstoppable force called the Tide. It fitted so well with my concepts that I put it in immediately, and the name quickly evolved from there.

Some other aspects of development have evolved in similar ways - a mental image that just works so well that it has to be included in some way. Obviously, whatever it is has to fit. I’m not going to compromise the overall design just to shoehorn in something that really doesn’t belong, just for the sake of it looking good.

Here’s an example - a couple of weeks ago, I was driving along a road near my home, and I saw in the distance what I assumed to be some kind of tipper truck, with the rear elevated to about 45 degrees and sticking up above some surrounding trees.. I only saw it briefly, but the image developed in my mind of some kind of large anti-aircraft (or even anti-orbital) emplacement, positioned in a clearing.
After a couple of days, I did the following quick sketch:

and then I followed it up by making a fast mock-up and dropping it into pre-existing maps (apologies for the roughness of these shots - they’re just concept and not production)

While it’s unlikely to form any part of the actual gameplay (although as I type this, I can think of at least 3 ways in which it could), it will definitely work as an atmosphere piece. So now it goes on the production list to be modelled properly.

An alternative example is the cave/mining scene in the new media that Mike put up in the redesign

The mental inspiration for this one came from a briefly-glimpsed scene of a cartoon that my children were watching one Saturday morning. I don’t know exactly what it was (I try my hardest to tune these things out..), but there was some kind of rock wall, some gantrywork, and a bright light. I envisaged the bright light to be the front of some kind of train emerging from a hole in the rock, and then made a quick version of the scene.
This fits into the Tide’s Reach universe quite well. I’d already considered the idea of RockShips before - quick’n'dirty starships created by mining into a suitable large rock, affixing engines and creating a habitable section inside. Particularly favoured by pirates, who would have access to large quantities of spare parts. Mount some weapons, and they’ve got what amounts to a pretty much disposable strike craft.

So, a brief insight into how I come up with some of our concepts and ideas.

I’d also like to just briefly address some of the concerns that people seem to have had when we announced the change in gameplay. Since then, we’ve evolved the new concept - Tide’s Reach is still an FPS, but now there’s a very strong (you could really say compulsory) strategy element in it. You will be in control of an NPC in addition to yourself. Each of you have different skills, different strengths and different weaknesses, and it’s using them together that makes the game work. I intend to address this in more depth in an update soon.
Also, why have we been so quiet for the past 8 months? Quite simply because I’ve been busy. As an individual, I have created over 99% of the Tide’s Reach content myself - maps, models, textures, concepts, along with all the initial design work. It’s all very time-consuming, and I tend to work in one discipline at a time, rather than constantly swapping over between mapping/modelling etc.
So the obvious question here is - why don’t you hire more people? Well, I want to, and have previously tried to. People have a nasty habit of disappearing without notice, though. Or of wanting to be associated with a project without actually contributing to it in any way. I’m hoping that this time around, we can get a couple of “keepers”. I still want to keep the numbers down - overpopulating a project can be counter-productive and actually slow things down. So, if there’s any talented and interested modellers/artists, either drop by our forum or send me a mail. I’d love to hear from you.

That’s it. I promise it won’t be another 8 months until the next update…

There are only so many ways in which we can jump up and say “Hey! We’re still kicking”.

Hopefully this is one that we all come to enjoy!

So, hey, I’m Yorick. We haven’t actually met yet, though you may know me from elsewhere. In addition to being one of the writers for TR, I’m also responsible for the new website design you see. Hopefully that’s another thing that you like.

In addition to the new design, there are two new pages: ‘About’ and ‘Media’. The About page has a bit more information about the project. And the Media page has a whole bunch of new screen shots, previously unseen in any of the diary updates. And yeah, you’ll notice that we’re still using the abbreviation, “TR”. We’re still keeping things pretty under wraps, at least for now. There’s a way to get more of an inside scoop though!

If you’re a talented and committed modeler / texture artist or UI Designer and Artist, we could certainly use your help on the team. Drop by the forums and show us what you’ve got.

Stay tuned, there’s a lot more on the horizon.

A change is underway. The way in which this game will be played has been quite radically altered. To be more specific:

This is no longer a First-Person Shooter

Well, not entirely. There’s quite a large grey area. To explain better, I’ll thrown in a bit of genesis:

On a forum that I frequent, someone brought up an old game called Bioforge - a third-person exploration/combat affair with a good storyline. I liked it a lot at the time, and it’s still worth a play now if you can get the DOS emulation working. Anyway, Bioforge used 3D models for the characters, but pre-rendered backgrounds. The thought occurred to me that TR could look pretty good in that kind of setting, although there’s obviously control issues. In discussion with some peers, it seemed obvious to extend the paradigm. Prior to this revelation, you played as the character that boards ships, does the FPS thing and then leaves. You have an NPC character that “guides” you through, pointing out objectives and telling you plot-advancing things.
Now reverse the roles.
You are the controller. You are sat in your support ship, watching your colleague via security cameras, and advising him. Advice in this context consists of a context-sensitive point-and-click interface. In effect, you’re controlling an NPC in a pseudo-RTS style.
Now the grey area - you, the player, are sat in an FPS world. You can move away from the screen. You can go for a walk. You could even fire guns.
So, there’s still likely to be FPS portions, although these certainly won’t be the main focus. When used, they’ll integrate with the Command mode in a clever way.
Spaceflight is still in. In fact, there’s likely to be more of it now that you’re the guy on the support ship.

So, that’s how we’re changing the game. I’d love to know people’s thoughts on this. Here’s a quick’n'dirty idea of how it looks:

High-res version (5Mb, Xvid-encoded)

We’re not dead. I’d like to emphasise that point a bit more - we’re

not

dead.
Personally, I’ve been enormously busy with Zombie Master, which ended up being far more popular than anticipated after we released it. Consequently, I’ve been working flat out to fix bugs and create new content.

In addition to that, the entire TR project has just undergone quite a radical transformation. The general scope is the same, but the way in which you’ll approach it is quite different. I hope to be able to reveal more in the next couple of weeks, after my work on Zombie Master has settled down more.

Spaceflight. Yum.

Higher quality AVI is available here (5Mb, Xvid-encoded)

We’ve been playing around with skyboxes recently, trying to make the illusion of space a bit more aesthetically fulfilling and also to prepare things for a soon-to-be-implemented feature. That I won’t mention yet.

The skybox implementation has thrown up a few interesting technical issues. In one test, I put in a model of a planet. One that fitted inside the available space wasn’t sufficiently large (in comparison to the player) to be a planet. After a few more tests, I settled on taking a roughly square section of a much-enlarged planetary sphere and using that. It’s sufficiently large that the player can’t see where it cuts off, and the boundaries of the space area prevent too much exploration in that regard (at the moment, said boundaries are just standard “invisible walls”. They’ll be replaced with a more suitable paradigm later on.)

Unfortunately, even with a very high resolution texture, it looks like this:

That is with a 2048 x 2048 texture, which is big, and the pixelation is atrocious - it’s like 1996 all over again. I could increase the resolution (or use multiple textures - same effect), but performance drops off exponentially. An 8192 x 8192 texture would use 226 Megabytes of memory, and that’s unacceptable.

Several options have been considered, but the approach I’m going to try for this particular planet (Earth-like - primarily water with some land masses) is to have the whole planet textured blue, and then have the land masses as separately-textured meshes. Hopefully, that’ll look a lot better, and it also allows me to animate the land masses to give the impression that the planet is revolving.

I also put together a new skybox texture (Crab Nebula courtesy of NASA). I was actually somewhat awestruck as the hangar doors opened and I caught a glimpse of it in place. I flew round a bit (ah, the joys of spaceflight…) and took this suitably dramatic shot:

Simon has also been working on some experimental skybox trickery, and this is the result:

It looks enormously better in motion - I’ll put up a video soon.

Beyond the skyboxes, Andy has fixed some bugs in the Environmental Control System (the vacuum stuff) and started on the Terminals. I intend to do a future update going into more detail on those at some point soon.

Finally for this update, I’ve been working on a new fighter model. Here’s a quick clip I did to test the animations (all of them!)

Not so much a blog update, as an open letter to Valve. It’s pretty wordy, so you can skip to the bottom to see some pictures if you like.

Dear Valve,

I’ve been working with your tools/SDK since they were first released (and, in the case of Hammer/Worldcraft, since….forever). I’m used to how they work. I can practically use Hammer in my sleep. I’ve even built up an actual workflow for modelling and texturing. And that’s where the problem lies.
Courtesy of RoboBlitz, I recently had the chance to sample the delights of Unreal Engine 3 - or more specifically, the tools. The first thing that struck me is how…integrated it all is. There’s an in-built browser for all the assets. The map editor is there. The script editor is there. The texture tools are there. It’s all there, in one package. It also uses non-obscure file formats. Want to import a mesh? Export it to ASE from your modelling package, then import it straight into UnrealEd. Textures? Import them straight in - even PSDs.
Now here’s where UnrealEd really starts to shine. Let’s take an example of importing a model to be used as a static mesh, importing the texture, then placing it in-game.

Source:

1) Export model to Valve’s SMD format (3 times - reference mesh, idle animation and separate collision mesh)
2) Write .qc file to define the model. Here’s a simple example:

// Output .MDL
$modelname ship1/hangar_column.mdl

$staticprop

$scale 1.0

// whole body
$body “Body” “hangar_column_ref”

$cdmaterials “models/ship1/”
$surfaceprop “metal”

// sequences: all sequences are in $cd
$sequence idle “hangar_column_idle” loop fps 15

//$keyvalues { “prop_data” { “base” “metal.medium” } }

$collisionmodel “hangar_column_phys.smd” {
// Mass in kilograms
$Mass 200
$concave
}

3) Compile model

4) Export texture to Valve’s VTF format (thanks to a third-party plugin for Photoshop. Otherwise, export to TGA and convert to VTF)
5) Write a .vmt file to define the material that the model is using (of which the texture is just a part). Example:

"VertexLitGeneric"
{

“$basetexture” “models/ship1/hangar_column_1″
“$selfiilum” 1
// “$bumpmap” “models/ship1/hangar_column_1_normal”
“$envmap” “env_cubemap”
“$envmaptint” “[ .2 .2 .2 ]”
// “$model” 1
}

I feel that I should point out here that I have got used to this way of doing things. These VTF, VMT and QC files have a relationship that can be extremely confusing at first. Having an incorrect reference in just one of the files, or having them in the wrong directory, will lead to the dreaded Purple Checkerboard Texture Of Death (i.e. the engine can’t find the texture to apply to the model)
6) Open Hammer, find model in browser, place in map and save.

7) Compile map
Wait for map to compile (Not strictly a step in its own right, but anyone that’s used to Hammer knows what I mean)
9) Load game, load map.
10) Admire work.

Easy, isn’t it? Now let’s try it with UE3.

1) Export model to ASE format
2) Export texture to TGA format (for argument’s sake)
3) Open UnrealEd, open browser
4) Import mesh, import texture (which can be done simultaneously)
5) Create material using visual material editor:

6) Apply material to model

7) Place model in map
Play map in editor.

Only two less steps in total, but several orders of magnitude less work. Even taking into account the fact that you’re more likely to copy and paste your QC and VMT files around, changing the relevant details, the Source tools are decidedly…clunky.

The learning curve on your tools, Valve, is atrocious. The lack of integration is appalling, and you won’t win any awards for ease-of-use (command-line tools? What year is this again?).
Now don’t get me wrong - I love Source, and I think you’re doing fantastic things with the engine. But you are neglecting the tools. We had a major SDK update this year that fixed a lot of problems with Hammer, and added some new features. You even added an in-editor lighting preview (briefly) and a visual logic editor (again, briefly). I just wish that you’d look at UnrealEd and see what I’m talking about. I’m certain that your in-house productivity would go up. It would absolutely benefit the modding community.
Being realistic, I doubt that map compiles are going to go away any time soon. But there are things that are quite possible, such as integrating the texture/modelling tools into Hammer, and that would be fantastic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just a little interim update. I’ve posted a series of screenshots and descriptions of the process of modelling and texturing the freighter to be used in the demo. Click!

And in unrelated news, the Zombie Master team have released some videos of their upcoming Half-Life 2 mod (disclaimer: I made the maps). Worth watching, even if I am enormously biased….Go!

Just a little change of theme, no need to panic.

Development-wise, we’ve got spaceflight in and working as specified in a previous post, although we’ve gone for a “soft” newtonian model. It’s more fun thrusting around than it seems. Plus we’ve kept the mouse control for pitch and yaw, so can still whip round pretty snappily and you don’t need to worry about getting stuck in a big spin. Also, the inertia fades pretty quickly (let’s put it down to intelligent flight systems), so you don’t end up bouncing off the edges of the universe.

More media coming shortly.

I get the impression that people seem to like the vacuum system. We’ve demonstrated how it works in a corridor-based system, and it’s very effective. We’ve taken the feedback we received and changed a few things based on it, so thanks for the comments.

Anyway, I’m sure you’d like to see another clip, so here you go:

High-res version here (10mb, Xvid-encoded)

So keep the questions and comments coming, and remember - we have got forums where you can discuss this too.