Hello!
As bcoolface mentioned in his last blog post, he has opened up this news feed to members of staff.
Myself along with other staff members will be compiling a community round-up hopefully every fortnight, comprising of recent events, tournaments, maps, mods, forum threads that we feel need some attention.
Recent dev news:
Private beta testing for 0.75 went ahead today amongst the staff. We got to test for ourselves the new click & drag building, as well as the after-death spectator mode.
There were a few major bugs, namely crashing upon head-shotting and on the name entry screen, but those were fixed by bcoolface during the afternoon’s play. Shift-walking had been removed due to a few updates to player input, but we’ve put forward our case and bcoolface is re-adding it, possibly with another extra speed-related feature too, but we’ll see whether that’ll make it into the next release..
Have to admit, the new main features are pretty nice. With the length of a normal server’s spawn time (10-15 seconds), spectating on death gives you just about enough time to figure out which direction the shot came from and possibly follow the player for a second or two. With the longer default respawn of 30 seconds, you generally get a wider tactical picture of the server, meaning gameplay for the individual would need to be more varied. The wave respawn in general is great, since there is not a fixed time between dying and respawning, it can be nearly 30 seconds, but it could be instant (though you regularly get 10-20 seconds). I can see it being good for groups to spawn at base together and organise coordinated attacks.
Click and drag is also neat, can quickly scale buildings without too much effort or build two-high walls quickly – it’ll be a nice cover-building tool. The issues with block-spam do spring to mind, but now the primary shovel action is 2-hit, it is speedy to remove it. Rifle also has 2-hit block removal now as well, SMG and shotgun seemingly the same as it was for the moment.
There are still a few bugs to be fixed and features added/tweaked, but all is looking good.
Script release: hompy’s boss battle!
Those of you visiting sham’s little pony may have heard deadly rumours about a mysterious sea creature.. the rumours are infact true. hompy has recently finished his Kraken scenario, involving some AI to get great interaction between the players and the marauding calamari.
Links: Video | Download info
Map: ‘Remus’ by Yourself
Want an urban map without towering skyscrapers? Give Remus a go! It’s based off the Roman twins Romulus and Remus, who by legend founded the city of Rome. It is made by resident script, tool and map-maker Yourself.
Links: Forum Thread
Discussion/Poll: Click & Drag + Spectator mode implementation
Myself and danhezee recently setup polls about two upcoming features: click & drag and spectator mode.
We have had alot of decent discussion about the two ideas, and some good feedback. Get your voice heard for future releases!
Servers: pyspades map generator API
As y’all know, the Ace of Spades game began with ‘gen’ maps, which is a randomly generated hillside, with trends towards mountains for the blues and the lowland/rivers for the greens. Triplefox, a great mapper himself, has created a map generation API for pyspades which takes the content of a .txt file and randomly creates the terrain for you. It includes features such including automatic colouring and noise and multiple biomes (water, grass, hill and snow). Triplefox plans to continue expanding this, smoothing transitions between biomes further and adding map objects (such as trees). It is certainly something to look out for and try yourself.
Links: Forum Thread | pyspades source
More to come in the next round-up!
~tGM
