USA Games News April 24, 2006
Introduction Hello gamers, As we near the month of May I felt it was time to give you all a sneak preview in to what is happening with the various USA Games titles. Final Conflict and Montezuma's Revenge have some important changes and updates in the works. Final Conflict As many of you are aware the current Final Conflict beta has several small bugs. The most important of these is the autopilot system. Sometime early in May we will be releasing an update for the beta that will patch a variety of these bugs as well as some miner updates. Let's take a look at the update. First, in the current beta when menus are used to set the autopilot system the menus are actually pointing to the wrong ship. However, the hot keys for the ships and bases don't have this issue. This patch corrects the issue with the autopilot menus. Second, there is a bug when the Defiant's cloaking device is damaged the cloak is never repaired. In this patch the cloak is now repaired after a given amount of time assuming of course Defiant is not destroyed first. Third, many of you have requested that a better system be used for short range sensors in measuring distances. Staying true to Star Trek Next Generation and Deep Space 9 the distance on short range sensors is now measured in kilometers. For easy measurements short range sensors scan from 0 to 100000 kilometers. So if an enemy is say 15000 km it is obviously very close where as an enemy at 85000 km is still pretty distant, but is in weapons range. Forth, we have updated the new STFC engine to restore the ability of Alpha 4.5 which gives each enemy ship on long range sensors a number designation from 1 to 5 so you can tell the difference between them.Now, if you run a scan you might see Cardassian Cruiser 2, Cardassian Cruiser 3, Romulan Warbird 5, etc. Fifth, we have also updated the autopilot system for following enemy ships. In the present release you can only follow and track ships in short range. Many of you suggested doing it for long range. So we have upgraded it to track any ship in long range, and will help vector your ships in to enemy positions. Finally, the biggest change is that we are revamping the STFC game engine. Upon designing Monty we discovered ways of doing things better than the STFC engine. As a result I am now incorporating parts of the Monty engine in to the STFC engine to update it to be compatible with the new API standards I have set for USA Games projects. For the end user you may or may not see a major change. For the developers though things can be updated easier, better handling of input devices and audio, and things like number processing, speaking directions, and many other self-voicing functions is actually provided by the engine independently of the game. Obviously, I don't have an exact date and time for the release of the patch, because I am jumping between two games daily. I work on one for a while, and then switch to the other for a while. However, the work on the patch is almost complete, and I don't see more than a week or so to finish it, and sooner if I just work on it by itself. Montezuma's Revenge We are glad to say that work on Montezuma's Revenge, Monty, is going really well. As many of you may or may not know we are totally rewriting the Monty game engine from scratch. We are converting the old engine from Visual Basic 6 to C# .NET, and adding allot of nice changes, bug fixes, and updates along the way. Let's look at this new Montezuma's Revenge some. To date we have managed to completely create the first level, the first temple maze, which we have been using to test, add, and work on the major parts of the game engine such as enemy AI, collecting items, falling in to traps, etc. Unlike the old game which was a 50 by 50 maze this new first level is now a 100 by 100 maze. All of the rooms are in the same place, but are much larger to explore. Another small but nice little addition is there is now more treasure to be found in the level. However, with treasure there are also more monsters and dangers to over come. Although, I have tried not to change the first temple to much. After all, in arcade games the first couple of levels are expected to be easy. None of you have seen my designs for temples 3 through 10 as well as the other 3 bonus levels, and those right now are going to get harder and harder as you go along. Which is how the original arcade game was. The challenge of Montezuma's Revenge is the temples get harder and harder while you are probably running lower on lives and health. In level 1 you may only see one monster per room, and may be two. In higher levels you have to dodge two or three per room which makes those areas really tough. Of course, as you go you collect swords, whips, and other weapons which helps you even the odds some. Another nice addition to the engine is joystick and game pad support. Now, like the classic Atari game you can almost mostly play the game by joystick provided you have enough buttons on the device. You can walk, run, jump, climb, and check various status all from the game pad.We have a couple of miner bugs with joystick support, and once fixed it will probably be the main style of play although there is good keyboard support. Unlike the original demo from Alchemy our keyboard support supports navigation both from the number pad as well as the standard arrows. In a way the number pad in of itself is like a game pad with everything laid out for easy navigation and status. Another major change to the engine is there are two navigation modes. Standard navigation mode actually moves Angela Smith around in the game. The review navigation allows the review navigator to move around the maze and let you know where walls, ropes, vines, ladders, treasure, etc is. Jaws users will be vary familiar with this as this works much like a Jaws and PC cursor mode. It's still to early to even speculate at a release date, but i am hoping to start testing the first couple of levels by summer. Work is going very very well, and the game is much easier in it's own way than STFC or Raceway, and that is an advantage. _______________________________________________ Gamers mailing list .. 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