Exclusive Realm Wars Preview @ LoreCon

We are pleased to announce that attendees of LoreCon (which takes place August 20th in Philadelphia, PA) will get an exclusive opportunity to sample a playable beta of the Milestone 1 release for Realm Wars 2. This is the only planned preview of Realm Wars that will be released for the next month or two so don't miss your opportunity to play it and may other great games.

Improved Spawning Code Completed

During our current development we had had an issue with one of the spawn locations on the test map where the games code would fail to find a valid location to spawn the players of that particular team and would spit them out in the middle of the map way up in the air. This provided for a spectacular view of the map while you were in free fall, but unfortunately as the saying goes "its not the fall that kills you but the sudden stop at the end".

Knowing what was causing the issue Markus took some time out of his schedule today to look into the problem which turned out to be a flaw in the current implementation of Torque's spawning system. The basic problem is that the code looks for a valid location on the terrain (within the radius of the spawn sphere) to drop the player, but the code was setup so that if it found an interior at that location too it wouldn't use that spot and would eventually bail out if it couldn't find anything at all and use the center of the mission world to spawn the player. Most teams get around this in one of two ways, either spawn the players no where near an interior (which sucks and wouldn't really work in the long run) or increase the spawn sphere to such a radius that it latches onto a point outside of the interior you are on (which also sucks). Knowing that we needed a better solution Markus went and rewrote this code so that we don't have to use either of these comprimises and can instead drop the players onto or into interiors that fall within the radius of the spawn sphere thus ensuring that in the long run we won't be limited with what we can do with this game. Great work Markus!

Some New Goodies

There have been a variety of updates and additions to Realm Wars since we last updated the blog so I thought that I would take some time and pass along this information to the general public.

Shield Blocking - As you may or may not know, one of the goals that we wanted to have for this next release of Realm Wars was to have the ability for the players character to use a hand sheild to help counter some of the attacks that were coming against them. There are a couple of implementations of this already done by 3rd parties in Torque (which oddly enough are all based on the old Realm Wars hand to hand code that Markus as now redone) but none of them do exactly what we felt were needed. So how exactly does this new code differ from what's out there? Well for starters the sheild will block anything that comes in contact with its shape, there are no hacks here with a simple raycast, its the entire surface of the object. Also when I say anything I mean anything... melee strikes and projectiles, just as long as they collide with the shield first (obviously). If an attack collides with the shield a particle spark system is displayed to denote that you hit the shield (if you manage to hit the player you actually see particle blood). If the shield blocks an attack against it, it also knock the defending player backwards a small amount and in turn the attacking players attack animation is stopped if they are attacking with a melee animation and strike the shield!

New Sword - I took the time this weekend to create a new bad ass sword for the orc. One that looks crude but also a bit viscous and nasty in every which way that an orc would want such a weapon.

Admin mod - Doug continues work on the Admin mod which adds a lot of extra functionality and ease of use to what many of you might have already seen in a Torque game including a voting system to kick players and cycle to the next map if necessary.

Engine improvements and enhancements that both affect performance and visuals in a positive way.

Lastly the new mission is progressing very nicely. We will have some screenshots to pass along soon enough when we feel that the mission is ready to show off and demonstrate to the public.