Cold War Crisis Public Demo

[gekido]

I've packed up the Cold War Crisis game that I developed a while back finally & posted it online.

There are 2 downloads, but I'm going to need some place to mirror these files otherwise they won't be able to be online for long due to the bandwidth i'm sure they will cost me:

Main Cold War Crisis installer (68 Mb)
http://www.realityfactory.ca/downloads/CWC_setup.exe

Contains:
1) intro cinematic 'machinima' level
demonstrates:
- machinima within RF, including camera cuts, scripted pawn movement & scripted 'credits' for the game, all done 'in-engine'

2) 'base' briefing level
demonstrates:
- conversations, attributes (weapons, ammo, health & armour), messages & scripted conversations

3) playable mission
demonstrates:
- another machinima movie (intro)
- dozens of pawns to fight (they're very stupid mind you)
- large outdoor terrain, complete with foliage, dozens of fliptree's, destroyable props (actors) and much more

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All resources in the game are either normal mapped (dot 3) or bumpmapped (embm). Actors are normal mapped (weapons, badguys etc) and the world itself is embm bumpmapped (the levels bsp's).

This was created with a pre-072 release - before the stencil shadows came out, but everything else is pretty new, and I don't think they have been demonstrated in a full game yet.

The main mission level runs pretty slow, but this is mainly due to the size of the textures that I used for the weapons, pawns and level geometry itself. If someone went through and resized the textures down to a reasonable size and rebuilt the actors it would run fine on pretty much any machine. I just didn't have the time to do this before I stopped working on the game.

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Cold War Crisis SDK (146 Mb)

http://www.realityfactory.ca/downloads/CWC_SDK.zip

Contains:
- raw level files (3dt) for the 3 levels
- texture library (txl) used to create the game, including bumpmaps & specular
- all actor files for the weapons, in raw (in these models cases, mdl counter-strike) format as well as normal maps, animations, and compiled finished actors, including apj actor studio project files.

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These files are too large to upload to the FTP that was provided to the community, so i'll host them for a while, if anyone wants them to remain accessible to the community, please email me (mike at gekidodesigns dot com) and i'll arrange to get them posted whereever necessary.

Enjoy.

[gekido]

i know it's not the 'greatest' game in the world, but no comments even?

considering that these two downloads demonstrate 99% of what people are asking for on the forum as far as 'getting started', 'making complete games' and so on, i am surprised by the lack of responses ;}

please someone play my game ;P

The first thing i'd like to point out is that there is NOTHING in this game as far as triggered events, conversations etc that isn't demonstrated on Terry Morgans (hike1) site a LONG time ago. All i've done is combine numerous of them into a single, playable game.

As far as RF-specific features that are demonstrated:

By level:

Level 1 - intro cinematic:

This level is basically a highly modified version of the 'RF Movie' demo that Ralph Deane created way back, souped up and tweaked to be more visually impressive.

Entities:
- pawns (all actors are pawns)
- foliage
- fliptree with LOD (actor & bitmap)
- message (all credits are just different messages that are turned on and off from script & triggers)
- cameras (changing cameras are done same as messages, just switched from script)
- particle effects (chopper weapons attached to actor bone, triggered from script)
- explosions triggered from script (chopper blowing up)
- destroyable geometry (chopper blowing up, swapping out to 'damaged' actor)
- actor spouts (chopper gibs flying from explosion)
- coronas & pulsing lights (chopper lights attached to bone)
- fade in / fade out from script
- soundtrack (mp3)

Features:
- bumpmapping (terrain)
- normal mapping (all actors)
- complete 'machinima' movie level with no player input required. basically the intro 'movie' is one script that runs in parallel with the 'credits' script - both are timed appropriately so that the credits are shown as the movie is played out.

Level 2 - Briefing

This level is a typical briefing level, you talk to the loadmaster to get the key to open the weapons locker, then after you get your weapons, you talk to him again and get the mission briefing.

Entities:
- pawns & pawn conversation (loadmaster)
- messages (tips, 'door locked' messages etc)
- attributes (multiple types of weapons, multiple types of ammo, health & armour are all demonstrated)
- logic gates (locked weapons locker is logicgate waiting for the loadmaster to give you the key)

Features:
- environment is bumpmapped (embm)
- all actors are normal mapped
- first person view weapons, complete with custom projectiles for each weapon, actor spouts & dozens of types of particle/weapon effects, custom for each weapon
- branching conversations that lead to either successful briefing or a 'restart' of the level (if you don't listen to the loadmaster)
- pulsing lights
- semi-transparent textures (chainlink fence)
- rotating worldmodels (the locker door), with semi-transparent textures & solid brushes combined
- soundtrack (mp3)

Level 3 - The Airfield

This is the 'gameplay' level. It begins with Pickles '3 scenes' script as a mission/movie briefing, complete with camera changes, etc, then jumps into a first person LARGE playable environment.

Terrain was created in Nem's, it's just a BSP - you could do something better with an actor and/or static mesh these days.

There are 2 main reasons why the framerate is so low:

1) Textures are too large: most of my textures are 512x512 AND are bumpmapped, which is just ridiculous for such a large terrain. If I dropped them down to 256x256 or 128x128, the level would run infinitely faster.

1) too many pawns active at one time. The second you put pawns into your level i've found that the framerate will drop significantly. If you remove the scripts & load the 3rd level by itself, the framerate will be 2-3 times what it is with all of the pawns in it. The simkin script processing is very intensive, and as such you should use as many optimizations as you can to reduce the number of pawns being active at once.

In this level, the Pawns actually are in a 'null' state until they are activated by the player's approach. This means that they aren't doing ANY processing until the player approaches - this speeds up the framerate alot but still could use more optimizations even...

Entities:
- foliage
- fliptree (dozens/hundreds of them)
- pawns (friendly and not friendly) there are a number of 'hidden' objectives that you can find to get bonus points
- pathfinding via script points - there are 2 types of pawns 'patrolling' and 'guarding' - watch out for them ;}
- static meshes (buildings, props etc)
- lightning bolt (used for power lines, set to 0 wildness)
- messages
- destroyable geometry - props with explosions (shoot the barrels, etc)
- soundtrack (mp3)

Hope it's useful to someone - as i've mentioned, the raw txl files and levels are in the SDK download - if someone wants to try and optimize the level (ie reduce the sizes of the textures) I wouldn't doubt if you could increase the framerate by double or more easily...I just didn't have the time, and this game was done primarily as a demo more than a serious attempt at making a game...

The hostage that you find is SUPPOSED to follow you, but I couldn't get the script working in time to release the demo, so you can't actually 'win' the game unfortunately. I'll leave that as an excercise for the readers ;}

[Master]

Downloading...

[AndyCR]

first impressions: very nice opening sequence. half-life prop and sound rippage lowered the immersion a bit though. great music.

i only got as far as the armoury before i had to stop, and im waiting to play it again... the knife looked very, very nice though... looked normal mapped, and you said they all are... sweet...

[gekido]

the main thing i suspect everyone will get snagged on is the performance - everything up to the actual mission level should run fine, but the mission will probably lag out pretty hard for the reasons I explained above...but the raw levels should be a good demo for people to check out and learn from if nothing else

[Master]

Too high end for my computer to handle. I had to change bpp to 16 and ZBufferD to 8 just to get it to run. Even then, when i gained control of the player it lagged out. However I did see the opening cut scene - nicely done. And from what I've read about it and seen in the screenshots I've never seen a project that displayed so many of RF's features so well. Nice work.

BTW, when can we look foward to Zombi City?

[gekido]

i'd like the demo to at least be semi-playable...

here's what i think i'll try (notes for anyone else working on games):

1) resizing the level textures down to a more reasonable size (fairly simple, just needs a rebuild of the level)
2) resizing actor textures & rebuild the actors (will take much longer unfortunately)

i'll see if i can get these things done this weekend and will post a 'patch' if i find some time

[Supreme Hobo]

im just downloading. looks awesome!

[jonas]

Downloading.......... any rf demo this big should be pretty good! Thanks Gekido!

[Gamespider]

The m249 model is some 6000 polys. How would it run fast?

[SithMaster]

what do i have to change to get it to run. i installed it and clicked new game went to loading and crashed. if it helps i'm running a celeron 2.70 ghz 768 ddr ram, 3d intel extreme graphics 64mb (i know need new card want to buy the verto geforce fx 5500 128 ddr mb pci (only have pci) for less than 50 usa dollars without going online (dont trust anybody)). Thanks.

[wiseman2]

Gekido if you want you can put it on my site... I'll send you a pm tomorrow ... gotta go now or I'd set it up for you today...
I got plenty of bandwidth... but If you could I'd appreciate it if you cold wrap it up into smaller files.... that way those who have connection problems and don't use dl managers can get it without having to try a bunch of times....

[gekido]

yeah that would help

not sure if i'm going to have time to experiment with optimizations of the game, finding enough time in the day to find & pack down the zombi game i did is tough enough, and it doesn't look like i'll have any more time in the near future either...

[gekido]

as far as debugging any crashes - it's the same as any rf game - check the realityfactory.log file

you may (will) likely have to tweak the d3d24.ini file for your video card

[AndyCR]

update: the actual mission level ran very poorly, unplayably so... specs 1.3ghz celeron m, intel extreme graphics 2 for mobile 64mb shared, 512mb pc2700 i believe ram, laptop.