Welcome to our March release! The March release is our anniversary release, with our very first alpha having been made public on February 29th, 2012. We’ve certainly made a lot of progress since then, and it shows! Four years of constant monthly releases have brought us to this point, and we’re closer to beta than we’ve ever been before. We have a home-grown map pack, our model set is close to being finished, and our engine has taken on a life of its own, with other projects interested in porting over to it. Here is another step forward to our long-awaited goal!

In this release, we have a very large new feature in the form of our new renderer. This is a tile-based forward+ renderer, and brings with it a new method of doing lighting that allows for a much larger number of dynamic lights to be present on-scene at once without horribly degrading performance, without many of the drawbacks that come with a deferred renderer. We also have patches that increase the performance for those using our graphical effects, which should hopefully lighten the load on those with weaker hardware, as well as support for physical-based shading and many fixes to some old renderer bugs. Shadows currently don’t work on the tiled renderer, but that’s next on our agenda for it.

With the enormous amount of work we’ve done on our renderer, which was originally forked from a fork (!) of XreaL, and considering that it has undergone a very wide divergence from the renderer it initially came from, it would be more appropriate to call our renderer the Daemon renderer, which is how these articles will refer to it from now on.

Naturally, some new bugs will have evaded our testing, so be vigilant and report them on our GitHub issue tracker! The two renderers will co-exist for a few months while we add features, and you can switch between them by setting r_dynamicLight and r_staticLight to “2” for the new tiled renderer and “1” for the old one. Most of the visible differences in the current state of the tiled renderer will be in the form of the dynamic lights and improved performance.

By now you’re very likely sick of seeing “renderer” repeated, so here’s what else is in our release! We have two new models, with the new lucifer cannon and the new egg making their debuts. The lucifer cannon now looks cool and futuristic, while the egg is a cool blobby addition to your alien base. But wait, there’s more! The shape of the egg was specifically chosen to fit the bounding box better, and as a result, we’re allowing it to be built on walls, a very long-requested feature. All alien buildings should also display their proper icons on beacons and the circle menus. Finally, you can now see dynamic lights on the projectiles of the lucifer cannon and blaster, as well as the detonations of the grenade and firebomb.

We’re now done with alien base models as of this release, with human base models having been finished some time ago. Now, all that’s left would be the battlesuit for human player models, the dragoon for alien player models, and the HMG (chaingun replacement) and painsaw for human weapons. We can (and will) update models as we go along, but those four models are the last models that absolutely must be finished before we embark on getting all the sounds done. Then we’ll be finished with our asset pack, and before you know it, we’ll be swapping monthly alphas for beta release candidates. It’s getting closer than you’d think!

Thank you for reading these posts over the years, and for following the progress of our project. Now go download the game!

Commits