I’ve been busy working on the conversion of our sprite sheets to normal sprites usable for various objects in-game, like enemies, player weapons, decorations, etc. It’s been a bit slow and tedious work, but it will give us a huge boost on the work we’ll be able to do code wise, it will allow us to implement new enemies using DECORATE and VavoomC to provide interesting new attacks for enemies and nice looking new weapons for all the player classes in our RPG project. The latest additions for DECORATE in Vavoom will make it easier to work with adding new weapons and for fixing the existing ones.

It might take another month (or longer) to convert the spritesheets to normal enemies, I hope to make it faster… I’m looking for a way to automatize part of the task to make it faster. Unfortunately I’m having some hardware issues on my end and I’m unable to work on this as I would like .

Ramborc and Sahadia have been busy working on the story and locations for the RPG, the progress has been good on this part too and we already have planned most of the locations the players will visit throughout the game. Ramborc has also been importing new textures for giving life to these locations and make them look good in-game.

Crimson Wizard has been working on additions for AI for both Korax Arena’s bots and enemies in our RPG MOD, which will enhance the game in the RPG MOD and allow us to implement further gameplay modes on KA.

This is the work we are doing as of now, as

That’s when SF.net began adding hosted apps to project pages, then was when the idea hit us…. we could use these apps to help us  communicate our progress with you all in a convenient way, this is what we came up with:

• Installed and using TaskFreak! you can see what is actually being worked on on each project we are doing.
• Added a changelog, this one will tell you the most recent things added code-wise.
• Added a gallery, this gallery has albums for each of our project, what’s the best way of advertising our projects? With images! And what could be better than allowing our very same users (and the developers ) to upload cool screenshots of our projects in action . These albums will also contain some preview screens of work in progress stuff, so stay tuned to them, so you all can comment on the screens you like .
• Added a guest book, this one will allow you to praise our site and projects as you feel fit .

And this is just the beginning, we are planning even more cool things, we’ll be talking on them as they become available, for now, begin enjoying the new stuff up and running that the Korax Team prepared for it’s community, as a ‘thank you’ for your support!

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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!

The public beta was released around 4 years ago, and most fans around back then have probably moved on or passed away for all I know. Due to several real life issues I’ve never actually managed to finish the blasted thing off, but I’m back once more to give it a shot. With the intent of releasing a new beta soon, and a final release shortly after. And that should be it for KMod, I’ll move on to help the others with KA and KRPG so we can get them released sometime before the end of the world.

For now I’ll just tease you a little with some of the new features added since the last beta.

Firstly a few minor things, mainly graphical, pretty things. That while nice aren’t going to change the way you play, the HUD has been updated to show more information in a nicer cleaner format, as well as the addition of contextual help screens, that show information relevant to your current class.

I’ve spent some time adding to the character creation menus, especially the setting of your initial stats. You now have full control over how your character starts, this should hopefully allow you to set your character up for your playing style, and also add greater replay value to the mod (Fancy playing as a Fighter with all attributes set to 1 for an added chalenge).

The Spell system has been greatly modified, rather than having each spell binded to an individual button, you have one active spell at a time which is cast via the aptly named “spell button”. I’ve found it makes casting spells much easier and more useful while mid battle.

I shall bring you more updates next week and perhaps even a date for that beta release.

Stay tuned, I might post some actual screens of spells once I get everything working as expected, it should take a couple of weeks for me to test it all properly. If you are more interested in how something might work, I would suggest you to post on the forums, since it’s the best place we might take some attention, heh!

- Pathfinding works almost perfect; yet it has limitations, but they could be changed in future. If nodes are placed wisely on map, monster may find its target most of the times (if there IS a possible way). As for game speed, it does not seem to become noticably lower because of path calculations.

- Monsters now have Team attribute. Those of same team treat themseves as allies, those who are from different teams think they are enemies and act correspondingly. Teams could be changed.

- Monsters now have ‘threat reaction’ parameter, that determines their eagerness to notice and attack enemies. It varies from complete abstraction to high-alertness (this is needed primarily for scripting tasks, so that – for example – a soldier, ordered to patrol and defend some area, would not run for anyone in sight, unless enemy is too close).

- Monsters now can perform simple tasks; here’s full list:
= cancel all orders
= cancel current order
= stand still
= walk to (a point on map)
= walk along a path (a sequence of nodes)
= patrol between 2 points
= patrol along a path (either looped or bi-directed)
= evade a point (run from it)
= evade a thing
= follow a thing
= attack a thing
= attack everyone endlessly (berserc mode ) – this one was added just for fun.

- All of those orders could be issued using common Hexen map script, as well as Team and Threat Reaction could be changed.

High on the list stands creature AI. Basically, it should be divided into 3 “levels”; first “level” is pathfinding. I have already created an experimental algorythm which made monsters use node graph (built with common mapspot objects placed on map) to determine most effective way of moving to player. Compared to original Doom engine “pathfinding”, results were fantastic! However, whole thing worked very slow and caused game to freeze periodically. I had a guess then, that main reason is general slowness of Vavoom progs execution; now, when Vavoom seem do it faster I may try this again; and still there’s last option – to put pathfinding procedures into engine itself. Last variant will make it much faster, however there will be an obvious disadvantage: if Janis Legzdinsh won’t allow to put such a thing into main Vavoom engine, we’ll have to create separate executable for KoraxRPG.
Second AI “level” should allow to give tasks to creatures using map scripts (ACS); this should include all the possible basic orders like “wander around” “defend the area”, “goto”, “attack creature/player” etc.
Finally, third “level” is personal Behavior. Primarily configured in code and customizable by map script this should make creatures and NPCs more alive. It will be more complicated, but I belive we can do them have scheduled tasks and predefined reactions on game events.

After all, I am expecting creation of a good amount of new monsters, weapons and spells.

As for extra stuff, me, personally, would like to have some fun and implement new theatrical effects like player view shaking and swaying when player is wounded, toxication simulation and so on.

What do you think we could add? we would like to hear your voice, since the site is oriented on giving you information about our projects, we know what information we want to give about them, but we need to ask you how you would like to receive it? do you think these dev blogs are good? you think we should remove something you don’t like? or just revamp the site’s design, keeping the amount of information like it is now?

We are giving you the chance to voice your opinions on this, so it’s your chance to adapt the site to what you would like seeing, that’s it for now, take care everyone!

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!