March 09, 2003
Shazbot!! Developing a Tribes 2 Mod
I've been accepted on the Exodin development team (www.exodin.com) in the capacity of a lead programmer to help with the development of a new, totaly cool, and breathtaking mod for Tribes 2.
The game runs on a rather extensive and robust Torque engine developed by the GarageGames boyz (www.garagegames.com). A lot of the game itself could be easily scripted with their own custom scripting language that has borrowed pieces from Perl and some C. Thus far, I find their design and approach to handling the environment, game state, and AI pretty impressive.
At the moment, I'm leaving AI work out and concetrating on implementing a new team based game where teamwork is not only encouraged but more or less enforced. The game play itself will enforce the rule, actually. At the moment, the original Tribes 2 is lacking a strong team game spirit. It is a very common occurance for players on the same team to fly off into various distant corners of a map in hot pursuit of frags and points to only beef up their own statistics. This is definitely a bad thing. My personal opinion is that despite of the hard work the Tribes 2 dev team had put into assuring that sort of thing wouldn't happen, very little has improved in that regard. As a result, we see a lot of players wonder off in the general direction of such fast paced FPS titles as Half-Life (and the CS mod in particular), Unreal Tournament and such.
Well, with the introduction of the Exodin mod, our team hopes to change all of that. This mod will be a total rework of the game engine. We'll borrow whatever is good from other moderately successful game titles such as American Army, Operation flashpoint, DoD, and other. A slew of new and exciting weapons, base models, and map environments will be added as we progress through various stages of the development.
Stay tuned, for great things are about to happen!! ;-)
Posted by vladb at 06:41 AM | Comments (0)