Development Blog

We have opened the official Korax’ Heritage video channel on YouTube, thanks to Sahadia, who will be managing it, we’ll be able to post more than screenshots of the new features we implement in our projects.

Sahadia has re-encoded and uploaded the first video to the channel, it’s a gameplay video of Korax Arena v1.0, recently recorded by Ramborc, the background music was written by 4th Class, it’s named ‘Ego’.

We hope to bring you new videos from features of all of our projects in the future, stay tuned to the blog, since it will be here where we’ll post about these videos, in the future, we’ll add links to the video channel on the screenshots sections of our projects too, we hope you like this new way of giving you updates, as always, you can comment about it and new suggestions you have on our forums.

On the next blog entry I make, I’ll take some time to talk about the progress we are getting on KRPG development, see you again soon!

Strange title for this entry, huh?

Well, that’s what we are looking for Korax Arena, since the last beta release, Crimson Wizard and me had been discussing about the bots and their much needed AI enhancements, I’ve been researching for ways to improve certain aspects of the bots AI and it seems this whole things can be extended greatly for other projects, like the RPG project, so you can expect new enemy AI for our projects besides new AI for bots in the next release, I’ve got some ideas, and Crimson Wizard is also working on this, so by combining these efforts we’ll be able to extend something to enemies and make some tests on our findings, we are focusing for now, in making bots to look for paths to reach things and enemies in a more realistic way, once this is done, we’ll be able to apply all this for other bot reactions, like strafing missiles, jumping for reaching something, etc.

Imagine if we could make enemies that jump to reach for the player in our RPG, or enemies who instead of attacking alone, get a group of other enemies and attack the player, or enemies who won’t attack if another one is in front of them, things like this can increase the challenge of the game for the player in a great way . That’s it for now, see ya all again soon!

Okay, people, trying to think of what can I write in these Development Blogs, I decided to state following. We are approaching Korax Arena public beta release. Hurray. Period.

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This happened since saturday when I’ve got a mail from Crimson Wizard, it said that the new scoreboards were ready, frankly I didn’t imagined them like these, I’m surprised to watch the screenshots, Crimson Wizard has also implemented death messages for every weapon/monsters already included and we are already planning a totally new single player mode for KA like nothing you have already seen, we’ll give more details of what’s to come in the next days and maybe even a small overview at which gameplay modes KA will get on it’s first release, enjoy the screens!!

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The hard work of Crimson Wizard has given us an advantage in a moment where I’m unable to work at full pace, I recently found a new job, and it’s taking most of my time for working on Korax Arena, fortunately Crimson Wizard came to save us, he has been working on implementing scoreboards, and has done a cool work doing it! I’m very impressed with his work and I think he will be a very good addition for our team, and just to prove I’m not wrong, I’ll post a few screens of the new socreboard in action, it might not be the final version, since we have planned some changes to it, but it’s a very good show of what’s to come for the final KA version, so prepare! The wait could be almost over, a new release might be soon than what we all expect, that’s it fow now, see you again soon!

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Now featuring, the all new Korax’ Heritage Theme for the blog, done by me using the default template and changing the CSS styles for some stuff, hope you like it , it took me some time to complete, but I think it was worth my time and effort, hope you all like it!

In other news, I’m now in the process of revamping the maps for KA, my main approach with this is to add the new powerups, the path nodes for the bots, and make some additions to the architecture where applicable, if everything goes well, the could be a KA release very soon.

That’s it for now, see ya again!

Just finished and uploaded the 2nd Korax Arena trailer. I like to think that it’s showing definite progress, not only the game but also the movie. This time I’ve had about 30 minutes of raw material recorded before I started editing, and since we agreed with 4th Class (our musician) on which song should be played during the trailer, I went a different way than last time and cut the clips and titles to match the music. I rather like the results, feel free to leave your comments on what you think.

For those who are interested in techie info, I recorded the game with Fraps and encoded it with DivX so that it can be read on other computers. Then I transferred the resulting about 1 GB of files to my Mac where I imported the clips into iMovie HD, this took forever (more than an hour). The resulting project was about 7 GB. Editing and previewing was all real-time, I did the whole cutting and editing in maybe 1-2 hours. Encoding took pretty long, about 20-30 minutes for the highres and 5-10 minutes for the lowres version. This is mostly due to the relatively slow CPU (1.25 GHz G4), but since the parts of the project with my interaction (cutting/arranging/editing) always worked with little to no delays, I don’t complain. Especially if you look at the older Korax’ Heritage trailers from 2001-2003 and see the immense differences in quality and possibilities, that’s what a PC is good for no matter how fast the CPU – unless you buy a $5’000+ video editing application and a similarly priced high-end PC of course… this in extreme contrast to the Mac mini which costs $499 retail and includes iMovie HD which while a consumer app beats the hell out of most so-called “pro” applications on Windows.

I’m happy with the results of the source code for version 1.0 of Korax Arena, everything seems to be working as expected, we already have a beta tester for it now, I have fixed almost all the problems it had and there are a few additions to be done, like a scoreboard and other small things that need to be completed to start revamping the maps for the official release, I’m already working on a new map for DM and another new map for Castle Sweep, they are coming along nicely so far, I hope my next post in this blog to be the announce of the final release, let’s hope it is, heh!

That’s it for now.

I have been working a lot on adding more stuff for the Korax Arena code, I have managed to make scores for Team DM and Castle Sweep modes, which work just fine, also, I added invulnerability when respawning in DM modes, the bots have a really fair behaviour against monsters and players now too, there are some other things I would like to add before releasing the next internal beta test, like a score board for every gameplay mode, that’s all for now.