MB Diary

[Vengeance]

I know you guys are all frustrated by the slow release of Molecular Blue.  The developers are too!  We have been slowed by busy times with family at the holidays (which we should probably be thankful for instead of cursing our time away from PS ;-) ) and by some technology issues.

Much like Matze did in the time leading up to the Atomic Blue release, I will try to post here every couple days and let you know the progress.  Hopefully this will both satisfy your curiosity and make you MORE curious about it.  :-)

Enjoy.

- Venge

[Vengeance]

Ok just to give you a current status, here is what I know:

3d team) Most of the world for MB is finalized.  Boonet is currently going through the character models and tweaking their animations so they look better and that sort of thing.

2d team) Working on alternate faces, etc. so player models of the same race can look somewhat different.

Coding) The RAM issue has turned into a big project.  The levels when loaded together take more than 400MB of RAM to load, and more than 250MB while running.  Making dynamically loading zones has been my job this week and will probably take most of next week as well.  There are several other small tasks to do, but mostly this is the major thing holding us up.

Engine) The new world has many rocks and objects laying around on the streets, etc. for atmosphere purposes.  These objects are a certain type of object in Crystal Space called genmeshes.  Until now, genmeshes have never been able to cast or receive shadows from lighting settings, so in our heavily lit levels they look very weird.  MUCH work is going into the engine to make these look right.

Hope that helps...

- Vengeance

[Kada-El]

Thanks Venge, sounds wonderful,

Don\'t worry, I\'m sure by now most of us aren\'t really frustrated at all. We understand the time these things take, especially with it being the time for family holidays. Besides we\'re well used to waiting

Looking forward to hearing more

BTW if you want this as a MB development diary only, just delete away  

[Sarth]

Hey Vengeance,

At the present, enabling the sound renderer will crash the client (at least in GNU/Linux anyway).

Do you know if this has been addressed in the upcoming release ?

Thanks !  

[Voldengrath]

2 things


1. when you guys talk about wanting to make it so everyone can play it what is the minimum requirement for that because I mean if you dont have enough RAM shouldnt it be tough luck go buy some cause for the people who do have it its just like blahhhh (sorry if this sounds a little arrogant, im not trying to.)

2. Lock this thread so that only Vengeance and the other mods can add things of notice too it. I think it would be a bit easier. or just over all add a page to the PS Site with a diary

[Link]

I agree, they should say touch luck, They should not hold back on CPU, Ram, Video Card, or Internet speed, they should not hold back the game just because some people are behind times.

[Monocle]

There should be a vote about whether they should work on the ram requirement or not.  Obviously, if the majority of the people do not have enough RAM to run the game, they should not advance until this is fixed.

But even if it seems like it runs well enough in the tech alpha we still don\'t know, because there is no action going on.  With many people in the town and a lot of action going on it might start running bad.  The devs probably know best.  After all, this game can get choppy on my comp and it gets an 8000 in 3d mark at 1024 by 768.  I also have 256 ddr ram.  

[Vengeance]

512MB of RAM as a minimum requirement isn\'t reasonable, and if you guys think it is then YOU aren\'t being reasonable.  :-)  Most of the devs don\'t even have that, and they want to be able to run it worse than you do, trust me.

Sarth, I think the sound problem is fixed, but YMMV.

Also, no voting.  :-)

- V

[Stagger]

Normally I sit back and watch arguements, being the lover that I am :] However, I need to put something in for the losers here. I have a HP and I have a DSL connection. One of my problems is the ram, I can\'t add more sticks or increase it in any way because HP are nazis who made my computer in one big chunk so nothing can be put in it. Try to make the game as ram-efficiant as possible, theres lots of people out there with sucky computers, most of us just aren\'t in the financial position to do anything about it for the time being.  

[Monocle]

 :baby: k, no point in arguing with the admins 8o

[Vengeance]

Update for 3am Sunday morning:

Dynamic zone loading is working!  Halleluia!  Much quicker than I thought to implement.  Unloading is the tricky part though and is not done yet.  Anyone want to guess what Sunday\'s task is going to be?

- Venge

[Vengeance]

Well zone unloading is working now as well, but there are problems in CS with it, causing memory leaks (bad).  We\'ll need to track those down but god knows how...  ;-)

I spent tonight making the players walk backwards if they actually GO backwards.  It looks pretty good.

Talad has been focusing on the lighting effects in the world levels... I think you will like them.

There\'s the update.

- Venge

[Monocle]

Thats great venge Venge, thanks for the update Des that mean the characters will have lighting effects now?  that would be pretty sweet.  

Although, i really don\'t know what much of this stuff means:baby: .
Could you possibly give give a *rough* estimate of how close you are to finishing MB?

If not, I understand

\"Nope\"

[Vengeance]

We are targeting the end of January... but we\'ve had other targets. :-)

There isn\'t much left on the list that is major.  Just things like making the anims match the actions, debugging and general polish.

\"Finalization\" is just harder and more time-consuming than it always seems.

Just for the record, I don\'t mind questions here.

- Vengeance

[Jessyn]

hehe, there are two types of release dates in the computer industry, the standard(windows 98, diablo II, etc) that keep getting pushed back, and the other(i forget who used it) which first says \"It\'ll be ready when it\'s ready\", for a while, then says \"It\'s ready\" and releases the games.  I am a big fan of the second method, but if you tried it here, you would probably get lynched I can just see the mob of link\'s drawings marching around with torches and pitchforks...

One thing that might keep people from bugging you as much is the miracle worker principle.  Scotty pads his estimates, so when he pulls them off in half the time, he looks like a miracle worker.  

Jessyn

Oh, link, there\'s an idea for your next piece - lynch mob