[Titled] IVA: 6DoF FPS: 2nd tech demo now available!

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
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I do plan on having much more debris & objects in the scenery, as well as defeated robots turning into bits of floating debris. Maybe some robots will have parts that can be shot off; weapon turrets, pieces of armor, etc. Getting accurate physics in low-gravity is expensive though, so I will have to use persistant props effectively.

Recently, I added a shot-out window, with the shards of glass still semi-arranged in a ‘bubbled-out’ position (like bullet-proof glass that wasn’t quite bullet-proof enough for whatever shot through it):


It’s quite fun to fly through, and works effectively as carrot on a string to lead you into the next room, without using a literal carrot on a string (ie a nav-pointer on the HUD I originally had planned…yuck)

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We have signs of intelligent life!

Well, this is what I have after one day of developing enemy mechanics. They will track you, fire when they have a solution, move away from you when you get too close, move closer to you if you get too far away (but not far enough to deactivate their awareness of you), and will attempt to dodge away from your lasers when they get too close.
My machine can handle about 8-10 of these little bastards at a time before things get choppy, if I’m not recording. So having several active enemies on-screen certainly looks possible.

The ship crash sound effect is borrowed from an old build of Pioneer, and is meant as a placeholder until I can create my own.

Voice acting by Gespeaker

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Here is the 2nd alpha demo for you all to enjoy! Now with 100% more explosions!

IVA TEST 2: THE BAY ROOM


Controls are more or less the same as they’ve always been, with a couple additions:
MOUSE MOVEMENT - Steering
WASD - Lateral movement
Q & E - Roll left & right
SPACE - Move up
LEFT SHIFT - move down
LEFT CLICK - Fire lasers
(no more turbo boost. I stopped liking it and threw it out!)

ESC - quit game
TAB - Toggle free/captured mouse
F1 - take screenshot (stored to your blender folder)

B - spawn Police Bots

Police Bots will take damage from your lasers, and explode into debris after a few shots. Explosions also damage nearby bots caught in the blast radius. If you manage it right you can get chain-reactions to take out several bots at once, which is very cool :wink:

Don’t worry though, I haven’t implemented enemy damage to your ship yet, so their weapons won’t hurt you. The bots also do not get hit by friendly fire (yet).

BUGS/ISSUES:
-the ship engine sound loops tends to cut out if too many other sounds are playing on top of it (too many ogg that should be wav, and/or stereo sounds that could/should be mono?)

-objects caught in the explosion globe get ‘shoved’ when they should be getting ‘blasted’, sound does not sync well with visuals

-impact force from hitting walls doesn’t seem to calculate very accurately. You almost never take damage from full-speed head-on collisions, but can take max damage from a slight bump.

-debris pieces need LoD for further optimization.

Again, all assets were created by me, except for the following sounds:

policebot chatter sound is from freesound.org: “LAPD Scanner 1.mp3 by FlyinEye” with lots and lots and lots of processing
ship collision ‘crunch’ borrowed directly (unaltered) from Pioneer Space Sim

I have been have a lot of fun designing the sounds for this project. It is one aspect of game design I’ve never really attempted before. I’ve always either had sound assets already set up (such as modding for other games), or just found/ripped/borrowed sound from other places.
The voice-synth work has been particularly interesting. Gespeaker comes packed with several languages you can use, which can effect the accent and pace of the voice. It also makes them try to pronounce words as they would in their language, so I am often using very funky phonetics to get the voices to say some words without it coming out indesipherable.
For example, the policebots use the language ‘Lojban’. In order for the voice to say “Target Aquired”, I used “Target Aqua-Yert”
I am reserving the French accent for the player ship’s onboard computer, if it has one (“Picky Pierre”?)