Blog for Sam Redfern at GarageGames.com

Deathracing Firetrucks (many images)

Sam Redfern — 2008-10-31T14:45:56+00:00

Just a youtube and a bunch of images from one of the 'Halloween Special Events' we have been running in Darkwind: War on Wheels. This one involved heavily armoured firetrucks with flamethrowers, missile launchers, tank guns, and HMGs. The race was abandoned after one lap, when a bunch of players ambushed the rest and it descended into a brawl.

[youtube=v/GGYS_0MYDtU width=640 height=480]

Youtube movie: (can't get the darn embed above to work):
www.youtube.com/v/GGYS_0MYDtU

Happy New Year: 2046

Sam Redfern — 2008-06-23T10:19:45+00:00

Darkwind: War on Wheels

It's nearly 6 months since my last blog post. I'm still working on Darkwind: War on Wheels, of course. It's becoming a lifestyle rather than a project (I started it 3 years ago...)

For those of you that haven't heard about it before, Darkwind is a post-apocalyptic cars-with-guns MMO running on Torque, with a PHP/MySQL back-end looking after the master server, lobby, website, various updates daemons and event spawning. We now have two servers, one in France and one in Ireland, both running Linux/Debian.

The unique points about the game include:

* It is turn-based. That's right, turn-based racing/car combat. Many people see a strong resemblance to the classic board game Car Wars.
* It has perma-death. The lack of real danger in nearly all commercial MMOs ruins them, for me. By adding perma-death (and a plethora of nasty permanent injuries such as missing limbs and eyes) Darkwind gains a lot in terms of the dynamics of courage, cowardice and the consequences of player actions. We have a dynamic game economy driven by a systems dynamics simulation, and without dangerous travel, this would not be possible.
* It has an extremely detailed combat system, which includes over 500 critical hits, over 50 different weapons, over 50 different vehicles, and a detailed system of leadership, courage, demoralization and surrender. There is also a range of different skills and specialisms that characters build up over time, including weapons skills, mechanic skills, first aid, leadership, etc.

We now have more than 9000 players registered, with a few hundred typically 'active' at any given time. Most evenings you will find 30 or more players online.

Pedestrians

Since my last blog, the most significant new feature has been pedestrians...

The introduction of characters-on-foot allows players to get out and run away from a broken car before it explodes, engage in carjacking fun, and also to turn over a 'turtled' car. I spent some time working on pedestrian-specific features, for example they can crouch down behind cover and when they fire the engine does multiple raycasts in order to find an angle from which they can fire rather than blasting away into their cover.

Artificial Intelligence

I have also spent significant time improving the AI of enemy cars and pedestrians. Including Dan Keller's excellent pathfinding resource is central to this; every game played by my players is logged and the paths taken by their cars and characters are recorded for use by the AI. (In fact, car paths are cached for 5 turns before being committed, and thrown away should the car have a significant collision). I also put a lot of time into AI tactics - getting their peds to seek out and fight from behind cover, getting their cars to move themselves to their optimum range for their weapons, getting them to avoid becoming isolated in a combat, etc.

Player Community

If you're interested in reading up on some of the in-game happenings from a roleplaying perspective, our player-run bi-weekly (in game = bi-monthly) Darkwind Gazette is a good place to start.

The player-run Darkwind Wiki gives a good flavour of the depth of detail in the game rules.

Deathsports

The 2046 season has just started, and runs for the next 12 weeks. So now is a great time to try out the game and try your chances in our 13 different leagues and ladders, all of which are free to play in. This season sees the introduction of pedestrian combat leagues, including a paintball one.

Marketing

We have continued to turn over a modest profit, despite having near-to-zero marketing. (I'm a programmer and game designer, not a marketer). We had a publishing deal almost lined up last year, but I decided to pull out of it as the publisher seemed very unprofessional. A one-paragraph mention in the Games For Windows magazine earlier this year helped us to our best-ever month.

I'm very interested in obtaining help from someone with marketing savvy, and there is of course a modest budget for this, so please feel free to get in contact with me by email: sam # psychicsoftware dot com

Darkwind: War on Wheels - for all your persistent-world turn-based post-apocalyptic vehicular mayhem needs.

January 2044 Roundup

Sam Redfern — 2008-01-06T08:41:48+00:00

It's January 2044 in Darkwind, or 24 years post-apocalypse. But the signs aren't good.. recently the Daytime Aurora started to appear again over the Northern Desert. The last time this happened was in the years leading up to 2019 when the sun wreaked havoc on the world.

We have been very busy in the past 12 weeks (1 year in-game), and below there is a list highlighting the key new features that you might be interested in.

News and New Features Added in the Past 12 Weeks

Our 5th town (Firelight) has been added. This is a uniquely pirate town, with some special rules which make it more attractive to 'evil' players - for example they become local heroes by killing bountyhunters, allowing them to get the first choice on rare hardware in the mechanic shop.

Player-owned camps have been added. allowing hardware production, resource extraction and farming. This allows us to continue the gradual shift towards a dynamic player-driven economy, and the emergence of new sources of gameplay and income are showing - for example, we have our first occurrence of one gang's mechanic characters being paid a wage to work in another gang's camp; we also see an upsurge in the need for resources such as Car Parts and Fuel, and the need for players to make cross-continental trade runs to supply these to the camps. We are currently discussing the mechanism for attacks on other players camps, but it is certain that this will raise the ante on pvp play hugely. Camp attacks are likely to involve multiple skirmishes over a number of days as well as sieges and resource blockades. The recently added NPC contract attacks have already added some spice to pvp politics.

A lucrative new type of mission has been added: the trader escort. Your gang may be hired to accompany and defend a trader squad between two towns.

Our gritty post-apocalyptic roleplay has been boosted with the introduction of drugs. Your characters may become users or addicts of various substances, from mundane things such as alcohol and steroids, to the psionic-inducing 46-Ys and the psychotic combat drug Zerk. Each of the drugs has short-term effects on your character's in-game abilities while under-the-influence, as well as longer-term effects on their skills, abilities and training.

We ran an event over Halloween where special spooky decals were to be found on wilderness-looted vehicles. These won't be available again for a long time, so those that were gained by players have become collector's items. The decal system has also allowed custom badges and racing insignia to be dynamically added to cars in-game.

Significant improvements have been made to the driving AI, especially in the wilderness.

The detail and variation in weapons has been further enhanced in several ways, for example with 'internal spread' and 'damage versus soft/hard targets' factors, and with variable reload speeds (see www.dark-wind.com/weaponTypes.html and www.dark-wind.com/chassisTypes.php)

The community has continued to grow, with the Darkwind Gazette taking on some great new editors. Other players are making Darkwind Podcasts (www.dark-wind.com/podcasts.html )and running the Darkwind Wiki (www.graymattercomputing.com/darkwindwiki/doku.php).

2043 League Honours

Once again Advanced Race Labs have been the most successful autoduellers, scooping two of the three major leagues (race and deathrace) as well as the deathrace ladder, the Northern Summer League and the two minor leagues running in Elmsfield and Gateway Truckstop. The other major league (combat) was won by Fish Heads, regaining this title for the 3rd time in 4 years. The race ladder and combat ladder were taken by Forsaken and The Reeking Pukes, while the inaugural season of the Northern Semi-Pro Combat league was won by Xander of Advanced Research Labs. Here's hoping for a competitive and bloodthirsty 2044 season ;-)

Thanks for reading, hoping to see you on the track..
Sam

www.dark-wind.com

Happy New Year 2043

Sam Redfern — 2007-10-15T13:38:31+00:00

Happy new year! It's January 2043 in Darkwind, and a new set of leagues are just starting. This is a good time to get in on the game if you have hopes of league glory...

The developers have been very busy in the past 12 weeks, and below there is a list highlighting the key new features that you might be interested in.

But first, a quick mention of the league honours from 2042. Advanced Research Labs gained an unprecedented clean sweep of the three major leagues - Somerset's Race, Deathrace and Arena Combat Leagues. Kudos to Alocalypse! Xander of Advanced Race Labs took two of the Evan Ladder victories (Race and Deathrace), while Fish Heads won the Combat Ladder. Fish Heads also took first place in the minor Summer League, while the two minor Autumn Leagues were won by the Toecutters (Elmsfield League) - and Advanced Race Labs (Gateway League). This season we're adding a new Semi-Pro arena combat league which runs from February to July, 2043.

News and New Features Added in the Past 12 Weeks:

New Age Gamer magazine published a 4-page interview about Darkwind in last month's issue: www.dark-wind.com/NewAgeGaming-Darkwind.pdf

The Darkwind Gazette is a new bi-weekly player-written newspaper covering all sorts of in-game topics and news. Here's the first two issues: www.dark-wind.com/gazette.php?y=2042&m=9 and
www.dark-wind.com/gazette.php?y=2042&m=11

Lots of new types of vehicles have been added - we're now up to 47 - see www.dark-wind.com/chassisTypes.php

Lots of new weapons and vehicle addons such as nitro boosters and rocket boosters have been added - we're now up to 51. The new ballistic weapons such as mortars have added tactical variability to combats since they can fire over obstacles.

Improvements were made to the driving physics, including slipstreaming/drafting and handbrakes.

Custom events have been added, so players can create their own race/deathrace/combat events and define their entry fees and prizes. 'Pink slip' challenges are also possible, allowing the winner to take the loser's car.

A number of additional wilderness maps and a number of new racetracks in Elmsfield and Gateway have been added - this is Gateway's "Trench", for example:

NPC Contract Attacks and Bounty Hunters have been added, spicing up the PvP intrigue and increasing trader-versus-pirate tensions.

Specialist skills have been made available to high-skilled characters - see www.dark-wind.com/specialisms.php

Many environment objects (buildings, trees, etc.) are now destroyable - this is a precursor to the addition of player-owned camps, which is a feature currently under development.

Integrated Browser - currently in prototype, we're streamlining the gameplay process by embedding a web-browser within the game client, so you don't need to switch applications when you want to do some gang management or set travel orders, etc.

--------

Thanks for reading, hoping to see you on the track..
-- Sam

www.dark-wind.com

What you get when you give an indie developer a free reign to rant, and don't argue with him

Sam Redfern — 2007-09-06T11:08:52+00:00

This is the 4-page interview I had in New Age Gaming magazine (South Africa's biggest gaming mag) this month. They have kindly allowed me to distribute the pdf:

New Age Gaming -- Darkwind Interview

Darkwind Retail

Sam Redfern — 2007-08-08T13:59:38+00:00

Lots of exciting things have been happening over the summer with the development and promotion of Darkwind: War on Wheels.

Recent In-Game Features

Since May, the substantial new features that have been added include: a detailed courage+morale system (you need to carefully manage your troops to stop them deserting when things get nasty); a destructible environment (which is a precursor to player-owned camps, a feature currently under development).

Also a lot of work has gone into balancing the wilderness scouting/travel/pvp systems. When you take your cars away from town, the stakes get very high ('permadeath' is only one of your worries) - so we need to have a well balanced system that suits newbies, veterans, pvpers and non-pvpers alike. The victories and defeats of the wilderness NPC gangs feed directly into the amount of danger you will meet on the road, as well as the piracy factors that are applied to the economic simulation. When things start getting a bit nasty in a particular region, players are forced to band together and form large vigilante squads to go and hunt NPC pirates, in order to clear the roads and allow trade items to start flowing again.

Retail Sales

We have finalised a contract for the manufacture and distribution of the game via retail channels - here's the current state of the box and CD art:

In-Game Media

We have also continued to add new missions (29 in total now) and new chassis types (34 in total now) - including some big lorries, musclecars, and rare vintage ones. The dynamic economy and real-world-timescale travel makes sure that a busy player-run market distributes the rarer items around the game world.

Interviews and Reviews

We are currently under review at wargamer.com and will also be featured in a ~4 page interview in the print magazine "New Age Gamer" in the next few weeks.

Who's your audience?

I'd have to say the main lesson learned since we went 'officially' live in early May is that you have to know your target audience. The fact is, an uncompromising turn-based vehicular combat wargame isn't exactly mainstream. A small amount of exposure on sites such as rpg.net and wargamer.com have brought excellent return, while much larger exposure on the more mainstream sites such as mmorpg.com, while bringing decent traffic, have had a much lower rate of return.

If you feel like trying your hand as a post-apocalyptic highway combatant, pay us a visit ;-)

www.dark-wind.com

Darkwind Official Opening May 4th

Sam Redfern — 2007-04-26T13:44:41+00:00

As you may know, Darkwind: War on Wheels has been in a period of closed testing for the past few months as we have been integrating and balancing substantial new game features. In addition to our racetrack and arena based racing and combat leagues and ladders, we now also have out-of town travel, multi-player squads, and wilderness battles with NPCs and other player squads.

Three of our towns are now live, with more coming soon. With travel times running to tens of hours, on-the-road piracy and a detailed systems-dynamics based economic simulation, trade is a viable gameplay approach that we have put great effort into making possible. Resource locations, distances, and fluctuating piracy levels (which are tied to actual player activity) all contribute to the supply-and-demand calculations underpinning the economy.

We plan to re-open the game next Friday - May 4th. From now until then, we are offering substantially reduced pre-release subscriptions. The game will remain free to play, but many of the more advanced gameplay features will only be available to subscribers.

Thank you for all your support over the past 2 years.. :-)

Sam,
Stephan
-----------
Core Developers, Darkwind.

www.dark-wind.com

Here's some new screenshots..

Speedealer's autoduelling academy.. combat 101: don't get caught out in the open when there's missile launchers around

Gateway Truckstop, an important trading hub on the edge of the Badlands region towards the centre of Evan, our game's continent

You thought arena combats were nasty? Just wait until you get into an out-of-town rumble..

Yeah, we're RPGers, we just love complicated combat systems and critical hits tables

Attacked by Pirates at the Gates of Somerset Town

www.dark-wind.com

Characters on Foot

Sam Redfern — 2007-04-04T09:43:13+00:00

After spending a full month 'pending approval', my latest dev. snapshot appears to have been rejected from the 'development snapshot/advert of the day'. Not to worry.. here it is anyway. Unfortunately the carefully written text I had with it is gone also.

But anyway... many thanks to our character modellers Paul and Alan.. that was the important bit :-)

Vehicle AI

Sam Redfern — 2007-02-07T23:48:32+00:00

Darkwind: War on Wheels is a turn-based car combat MMORPG set in a post-apocalyptic near future. I've spent a lot of time working on vehicle AI, so that all those computer-controlled deathracers and on-the-road pirates and traders can put up a decent challenge.

Driving paths: the basic racing AI involves waypoints (using a heavily modified AIWheeledVehicle2). I actually spent quite a bit of time early on using self-learning strategies using things like neural networks, but pre-defined paths turned out to be the best all-round approach. The waypoints also encode differences for different tyre types, and there is variation due to the aggression (and skill) of each AI driver. Aggression varies during the race, depending on how well a car is doing as well as its driver's state of health.

Collision avoidance: at the start of each move (it's a turn based game) the AI cars build a list of nearby obstacles (moving: other cars, rigidshape objects such as mines and spikes, or trigger-implemented objects such as oilslicks, and static: InteriorInstances and StaticShapes) and then based on the current velocities extrapolated over 2 simulated seconds, decide whether evasive action is necessary. In a combat (depending on relative mass and armour values) an AI car may actually decide that it wants to ram an opponent rather than avoid them.

Shooting targeted and dropped weapons: again, this is only done once per turn, at the start of the shooting phase of the game. The AI gunners evaluate all nearby opponents to see whether they're in the line of site of their guns (which have 90 degree firing arcs) and what likelihood they have of hitting before selecting their best shot (this is quite a comlex calculation: see this blog on the Darkwind combat system). Dropped weapons are a bit different: the AI gunners merely look for enemies nearby in their own rear firing arc, with the additional proviso that they themselves must be not cornering too hard (or else the mine/spike tends to just spin out on the corner and not pose a threat to the car behind).

Arena combat driving strategies: here, I use a combination of path driving (with multiple paths to choose from) and, when an enemy is close enough and has a clear view with no obstacles between them, direct chasing. When chasing an enemy, an AI car may take on a 'ramming' strategy or a 'non ramming' strategy (in the latter, they will circle away rather than actually crash, before turning towards their target again, while firing guns of course).

Wilderness driving strategies are the most complex of the lot. Here we have multiple car paths with predefined points of connection, along with the potential for switching between path driving and direct chase/ram strategy. Chasing (or running from) an enemy involves deciding which car path leads in the best direction to get towards (or away from) them. When the end of a car path is met, the AI car decides which potential car path to join next (and whether to drive it in the forward or reverse direction). Basically the car path connection points form a graph structure. As well as heading towards or away from an enemy, gangs of AI vehicles may nominate a leader and follow them in formation. Dealing with TGE repeating terrain was also quite a bit of effort in wilderness driving: car paths and car positions are basically mapped into their nearest terrain-repetition position before being evaluated. This means an AI car can drive indefinitely along the repeating roads and the waypoints only have to be defined once.

Hmm.. obligatory image... AI not being a very graphically exciting thing to discuss, I've just done a screen cap of one of our wilderness maps (the 'Gates of Somerset', thanks viKKing), showing two Car Paths joining at a road intersection:

www.dark-wind.com

The Birth of Deathracing

Sam Redfern — 2006-12-30T16:17:07+00:00

The Birth of Deathracing
By Matthew A DeBarth

I remember life before the Solar Apocalypse.

I was born in the year 2006, and my childhood was filled with the soft light of a gentle sun. I remember lying on my back in a field of grass, soaking up the afternoon warmth of summer, if you can believe that.

By the time that I was a teenager, we all knew that there was something wrong with the sun. It was brighter and hotter; an angry reddish colour. The winters were warm and wet, the summers hot beyond belief. At first, we blamed global warming, but we were fools to thing that we had anything to do with it. We were blameless...and powerless.

And the sun just glared down at us from high above, while we all scurried around and hid from its terrible intensity.

When I was nineteen, the sun finally grew tired of toying with us and really started to show us his fearsome power. It was the dead of winter in the northern hemisphere, which meant it was the height of summer in the southern, which meant that they took the full force of the initial onslaught head on.

Almost immediately, the entire communications network broke down. Computers failed, electronics fried, satellites fell out off the sky - but not fast enough. We watched in horror as people died horribly from radiation poisoning all across Australia, Africa and South America, every moment of it dutifully recorded and sent north for us to see in real time. We watched the trees turn brown and the grass turn black. We watched people vomiting and bleeding endlessly from the mouth, and we learned to spot the vacant far-away look of people whose minds had been destroyed by the relentless pounding radiation of the sun. We watched, intimately connected to their suffering, and yet strangely removed by both distance and season.

And then, finally, a blessed silence.

We spent the rest of the winter preparing ourselves for the what we knew was coming. We prayed and partied, we repented and rioted, we connected and clashed. We dug in and gave up.

In the south, it had been so sudden and unexpected that people hardly had time for the worst in them to come out for all to see. We, on the other hand, had months full of hopeless days to use in all the worst possible ways. It was a bad time to be alive. So bad, in fact, that many people simply chose suicide rather than wait to face the end.

And then the sun came for us too.

We didn't die quickly. We cowered underground while the sun burned everything above us away. Plants, animals, anyone still out in the open - all dead. It was a dark, musty, crowded and miserable summer...but a reasonably safe one.

We waited, and the sun retreated south again for the winter. We emerged from the bunkers and bomb shelters and caves to find a very different world. Hardly anything was left alive on the surface, and the things that had survived looked like they would have been better off dead. It was a ruined, blighted world.

Those few of us that still had hope lost it right there, and most of them didn't last the winter. A small group of the hopeless held out until spring, but the hint of dry heat on the wind was just too much for them.

The sun had expended most of its wrath by this point, but it still burned brighter and hotter than before. There was enough radiation to slowly wear the survivors down, to make them age faster and die younger of terrible cancers. But we lived on.

In a way, it would have been more merciful to have been killed outright. The world was a barren wasteland of endless sand, rock and empty cities. The air was always hot but rarely brought rain. The solar wind had burned so fiercely that it had carried off a noticeable percentage of Earth's atmosphere, making it difficult to breathe even at sea level. Nothing more advanced than the internal combustion engine or gunpowder worked with any degree of success, and only a few scanty crops would still grow.

The survivors that had gone to ground in that area gathered and found a place where the water wasn't too polluted and the rain still occasionally fell, and set up a little farming village there. We called it Elmsfield, after the sickly cluster of elms that still clung to life there. Against all odds, we managed to harvest enough grain that fall to supplement the last of our stockpiled food, and we survived what little winter there still was in the world.

The other scattered bands of survivors nearby noticed that we were a little bit better off than they were, and started to show up in town and beg for food. We took in the healthiest and strongest to help with the farming effort, and a small group of us - myself included - lead the rest of them off a short distance to the east to start another town that we named Somerset.

Both towns survived that winter, and the next few as well. Those were years of hard work and an uncertain future, and a few of us began to hope again. We slowly spread out, found other groups of survivors and started feeling a little bit civilized once more.

But then the crops started to grow weaker, and it took more of them to feed the ever increasing number of hungry mouths that came wandering in out of the wasteland. Soon there was only just barely enough to go around, and less with every passing day. It didn't take long for people to abandon any ideas that they still harboured about rebuilding civilization, or for the naked desire to survive at any cost to show up in people's eyes.

I'm not sure if any one person came up with the idea, or if it was purely thousands of years of animal instinct whispering into hungry ears, but it was decided that those that didn't have enough money to buy food would have to fight each other for it. We lived in a land where life was cheap and plentiful stockpiles of cars and guns sat waiting in the decade-old ruins of nearby towns.

The deathsports were born.

The violent, the greedy, and the desperate found cars that still ran and guns that still fired and met in the dry river bed outside of Somerset and raced from one end to the other, blasting away the whole distance.

And we stood along the edge of the old riverbanks and watched them. And, as much as I was ashamed of it at the time, we cheered. We called out for blood and applauded enthusiastically when it was delivered.

And when enough of the racers were dead, we crowned the survivors as champions and made sure that they ate well that winter. That was the summer of 2035 - exactly one decade after the terrifying summer when we had all hid underground together. It only took a decade for our little civilization to descend to outright barbarism.

The following year the crop was good...but by that point the deathsports had taken on a life of their own. More people wanted to race, and more people wanted to watch. So we did it all again, bigger and bloodier than the first time, and at the end so many racers were dead that we all ate like kings, all winter long. And everyone understood, even if no one would come right out and say it - the faster we killed ourselves off, the longer the lucky few would live, and the richer they would all be. And everyone thought that they would be one of the lucky ones, right up until their last desperate gasping breath.

Suddenly, we had an entire economy based on death, polished up with a thin coat of sport. We used up every working car within ten miles in our third season, and some clever people went out salvaging for more in the empty cities - and did quite well for themselves by it. After five years, we had a vast trade network, and the tools of death travelled farther than the grain of life ever had. We started the old oil wells back up and clear the radioactive dust out of old factories and started making new cars and guns and tires. We even built new and terrible weapons that were specifically hardened against the background radiation - progress, after a fashion.

By the tenth season, we were so pleased with our vast empire of vehicular murder that we started to spread out. New tracks were built, new towns started hosting leagues, and we killed more young deathracers than ever before.

And we all cheered louder than ever for our blood-stained champions.

I eventually grew too old to farm, and at the beginning of the summer that I turned forty, I took up a new line of work. When I was young, I'd been interested in history, and that interest had lived on in me even as the end of history came and went. I had a reasonably clever wit and some slight skill with words in the days before the sun struck us down, but there had been others that were better at both than I. But I did have one major advantage over the historians and writers of the past - I was still alive, and they had all given up and died long ago.

And so I ended up in my current line of work, and business is good. I am the wiseman of the wastelands, the devotee of the dead champions, the high priest of the high-speed wreck. If you live long enough and die gloriously enough, I might even tell your story long after you're gone.

I am Markus Korivak, and I am the Voice of Deathracing.

Darkwind: War on Wheels is a turn-based car combat MMORPG set in a post-apocalyptic near future. We're currently in open alpha so feel free to drop in! Windows, Linux, and OSX clients are supported.

www.dark-wind.com