"Gamers seldom make passes at players with classes"
Dorothy Parkour
This is the first formal announcement of the release of MekArcade 0.4 this August. We are calling this 0.4 release the 'Developers Edition', because we need your help taking it further (mappers at the ready!) and we still haven't decided if this should be a public release or just within the Cube community. You can see some pictures and an old vid at the http://www.moddb.com/games/mekarcade, and you can keep up with our plans at the SF site. While it is really only about half done, it is in fact fully functional - one of the benefits of forking from a working cube engine game like Red Eclipse. Now the spruiking is over......
The first major change to the RE code base is the implementation of a player class. Indeed you can think of MekArcade as RE + playerclass + Mek content + a few other bits and pieces. Quin has done a splendid job implementing 'cube with classes'; and it is classes I want to talk about, as there are many potential uses for a player class, and quite frankly I don't think I have the wit to think through all the possibilities. I also feel we have a significant responsibility to do this right. Obviously it makes class based games possible like TF2, and vehicle games of all types, implementing special class based abilities (eg the light engineer mek will be able to carry stuff) and will also aid us in building defensive weapons. I am sure there are many of you with your own thoughts about classes and what could be done with them, please share.
Currently the player class is simple and there only a few attributes at this time, below is the relevant code:
const char *classmodels[NUMCLASSES][3] = {
{ "actors/mek1", "actors/mek1/hwep", "mek1" },
{ "actors/mek2", "actors/mek2/hwep", "mek2" },
{ "actors/mek3", "actors/mek3/hwep", "mek3" }
//{ "actors/mek4", "actors/mek4/hwep", "mek4" }
};
#else
extern const char *classmodels[NUMCLASSES][3]; //3
#endif
#define CLASSES(a,b1,b2,c1,c2,c3,c4,c5) \
GSVAR(0, class##a##name, #a); \
GVAR(0, class##a##health, 0, b1, VAR_MAX); \
GVAR(0, class##a##armour, 0, b2, VAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##xradius, 0, c1, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##yradius, 0, c2, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##height, 0, c3, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##weight, 0, c4, FVAR_MAX); \
GFVAR(0, class##a##speed, 0, c5, FVAR_MAX);
// name health armour xrad yrad height weight speed
CLASSES(mek1, 300, 80, 3, 3, 15, 200, 65); //80 recon flyer
CLASSES(mek2, 400, 100, 3, 3, 15, 300, 50); //50 base beholder medium
CLASSES(mek3, 330, 90, 3, 3, 15, 250, 60); //70 light engineer ?carry health
//CLASSES(mek4, 500, 100, 3, 3, 15, 350, 40); missile mek
For the 0.4 release we will have 4 or 5 classes, some very similar to TF2 classes. (Why not!) Jumpjets and hover should be attributes of a class by release time.
The 0.5 release later in the year should bring in a destructible entity, next gen weapons, possibly defensive weapons. Underpinning this will be a change to using multiple weapon tag points. There are a few implications for this in terms of modelling (the weapons will make up part of the mek shape), the weapon management will be less FPS like.
0.6 will bring in a Mek/heat cycle like MekAssault had, and a few other bits and pieces that got missed in 0.5. At that point the MP game, as planned, will be mostly be in place, and we will then decide whether we need to continue to develop the MP game play further in 2013 or work concentrate on single player.