Blog for Jondo at GarageGames.com

Ruin Online - Feature demo "Movie" and...

Jondo — 2008-05-08T18:09:32+00:00

....Rev 365 update

Well, Ari managed to get the bulk of the CSK (combat starter kit) engine code into Ruin. Its not all "playable" in the live client yet, but for the most part all of it is working in the dev build. This includes:

Upgraded (much better) ground and air vehicles
Ground and vehicle-mountable turrets (needing work still)
Control point 'flags'
Fixed stances (prone, crouch, swim)
Better weapon code
Commander map
Few other less notable goodies... oh, did I mention:

Parachutes?!

Those have been pretty fun.

In addition to the CSK implements Ari got some more updates in there too:

Enhanced bullets (they are smarter and prettier).
Jetpacks (yes!), hmm what else...?
Much better human skins now, some animation tweaks.

Upcoming:
Moe, Rex and I have been putting some final touches on the 1.0 release of the Ruin Male character and his source files, code-named: ACK! (advanced character kit). LOD's, full clothing stack, multi-racial, about a million anims.

Big rewrite of the DB is underway. Pretty crazy stuff Ari is doing there, will be a couple weeks before we see it live, maybe sooner. Characters, or at least their inventories will probably have to get smoked to test properly, so enjoy the lazer katanas while you have em...

As promised here's a movie. Basically a feature demo, but if you can't tell we were role-playing out a 'lil story too! Nothing to be alarmed about... just us expressing our creativity!

that's about it for now...
Jondo

BrokeAssGames - Ruin Online - 2007 Year in review

Jondo — 2008-02-10T18:54:51+00:00

Happy New Year! (somewhat late)

Let me first say "Thanks!" from all of us at BAG to those members of the community that have stuck with the project in 2007. I'd also like to send a 'shout-out' to those of you who took the red pill and chose work with us on development and community support. Too numerous to mention you all here, that's what Credits are for!

It was a big year for us. If we can keep the momentum up, 2008 could be the year we release. (Would probably take all year, but it could happen.) We've had our ups and downs, but managed some forward progress. Here's a recap:

Early 2007, we had just finalized the format of our new character set with an in -house workflow for easily creating Torque characters. We didn't realize it was so easy at first, but now we're proficient at character work, especially for Torque. We released our characters as a dev kit for Torque, still in 'Early Adopter' phase. (Look for the official release of our characters soon.)

At the end of BETA3 in Jan. 2007 we had a tough decision to make. "Do we keep the BETA3 behemoth version of Ruin alive", or do we "scrap it and start fresh with the latest version of Torque and our new character base?" We decided to scrap it... load times were terrible and some bugs/issues went back to when Ari was first learning Torque. What'd we learn? "If something works, delete it and start over. Build it better..." Best decision we ever made.

By April, we had enough of the bugs worked out of the new build and went live again with BETA4. One zone, new characters, new melee combat system but not much else. Many of the little features from BETA3 were missing, but we all managed to enjoy the new clothing items, dual wielding, mad kung-fu, etc and got a bit of development done during that time.

We acquired a new dev, Rex, who among other things is a character artist. He has a solid Torque background and wasn't doing much of anything else, developmentally speaking. This was great, our team of three turned to four. Unfortunately, Moe had to go to Denmark for about six months... Additionally we drafted a writer from within the community, who for the first time ever, managed to get some quest/story content in game. It's only a fraction of what's expected from a decent mmo, but it's more than we had before. Project Oasis (nub hunting zone) is littered with NPCs, some of which will give you quests/rewards.

With BETA4 we also started using a file repository system, Subversion (SVN). This kept all our developers updated with the Lead Dev's build. We as under-devs could also add our new work to the dev build, with a few clicks of the mouse. This was great, but we still had a big issue: publishing patches for the client version was a nightmare. This could only be done by the lead dev, and for him it was like pullin' teeth. The more files that had to be patched the harder it became to publish, and patch days became fewer and farther between. Finally, the idea of using this SVN system to manage the client build too dawned on us. This was just a theory at first, a pie in the sky idea. There were many issues to 'figure out' for keeping a dev build and client build together, but separate.

By the fall of '07 we launched BETA5. SVN functionality for the client build was the goal for launch, and we nailed it! Ari modified our launcher to do it all automatically and made it (pretty much) nub-proof. A new user downloads only the launcher now and it builds an updated version of the client in a fairly short time. Once that client is running on a system, it is easy to update and stay caught up with the community on the latest version of Ruin. The best part is now more of us devs can patch the client. And it's not as hard as when Ari used to have to 'publish' a patch as a separate program. Additionally, we converted the way the game talks to the database to a system called 'event driven', in which the database calls queue up and wait for a quiet moment to contact the DB. We're talking milliseconds but the difference is incredible. This eliminated the incessant lag players would suffer from prior to this change (lag when other players die or log in, mainly). Thanks to Dave at Dream Games for the hands-on help with event driven.

More good news: Our never-ending work on frameworks will be ending soon! Over the course of 2007, we looked hard at our Framework list, reviewed the scope of our Game Spec document and removed allot of frameworks that were redundant or 'not required for launch'. We whittled the list down to about 12 major frameworks we were still missing and started pounding on the remainder.

As it stands now, we have 3 frameworks to wrench into Ruin before we begin the second to last phase of development!

AFX integration - Done at time of this post.

Web browser integration

CSK integration

Added: We need an AI revamp

Once the above frameworks are in game we have 3-6 months of Feature Development where we will define the major frameworks into many usable features (many of which are still completely missing or borked). That will be a long feature list, but at some point in 2008 we will 'cut the cord' and do a final phase of strictly Bug Testing/Fixing in prep for Gold Release.

As always, we are on the lookout for community members with some development skills to participate behind the scenes building this beast. If you are interested, PM or email me.

If you read this far, its safe to say you are at least morbidly interested...

Jondo

BrokeAss Games - Ruin Online Update, new vids, and a request

Jondo — 2007-08-17T17:17:57+00:00

Hello everyone,

We've managed to capture some better gameplay footage of Ruin and put it to music. So I want to share those and get some feedback.

Videos

If you like what you see and are interested at participating in development of Ruin Online at some level, we'd love to hear from you! info(at)brokeassgames.com

We'll be posting a position soon for programmers, but other skillsets are always welcome, which is what I really wanted to mention in this post:

We could really use some help on this beast! We're in what we consider the final phase of Feature/Framework adding. Some of which have been in game and were removed, some have never made it in. So far the team that developed out of our test community has been great. We've got some dedicated volunteers that make the live-test deployment side of this fairly easy, and rewarding with instant feedback or alerts if things go south...which they do.

Following is an excerpt from our Overlord list on Frameworks, this is just the sort of thing we are seeking programmers to help us with.

So take a look at the videos and Framework list below... if this is something you might be interested in, please contact me or lead dev: Ari.

Ruin Online is: TGE 1.51/1.52 (TMK) MYSQL

Thanks!

jon(at)brokeassgames.com
ari(at)brokeassgames.com

************************************************************************************
Needed Frameworks:

Experience + Skill System (reactivate code from BETA3)

Peer to Peer (for players sending each other waypoints and such)

Save to string (server saving houses and vehicles, items on ground)

Advanced Equip Bar system (drag and drop items from Gryphon inventory to an Equipment slot UI)

Media Player

Email (tie to SMF)

PDA - Datapad (UI)

Game time sync, Day/Night

Quest Journal (per player page tracking)

Special Moves/ Abilities Bar tied to skills/profs (arcane based)

AFX reintegration

CTF game system (for iconic server-unique weapons)

Event Driven revamp

BFT (vehicles, firearms revamps)

***********************************************************************************

Already Added Frameworks (need debugging):

Waypoint system completed March 24, 2007

Containers - Bank/Lootable corpses/Storage/Drag & Drop Inventory completed March 24, 2007

Advanced Specials Bar system completed March 24, 2007

Port Engine to Torque 1.4/1.5 completed March 24, 2007

Ranged Combat completed October 19, 2006

2D menu GUI completed October 19, 2006

rpgBrowser: dynamic npc/vendor/scripting completed October 19, 2006

IRC Integration completed October 19, 2006

Basic Inventory/saving completed October 19, 2006

Character Creation/saving completed October 19, 2006

Limited wearables and customization completed October 19, 2006

Melee Combat completed October 19, 2006

Faction system completed October 19, 2006

Realtime world map completed October 19, 2006

King of the Hill game system completed October 19, 2006

Player housing completed October 19, 2006

Nexus Server: Zones/Zoning/Authentication completed October 19, 2006

Vehicles completed October 19, 2006

Mounts completed October 19, 2006

Options completed October 19, 2006

Elite Mobs completed October 19, 2006

Shaders/Mapping: TMK completed October 19, 2006

Basic Characters completed October 19, 2006

Spell/Effects system: Arcane FX completed October 19, 2006

Engine: Torque 1.35 completed October 19, 2006

Launcher/Downloader/Auto-Patcher/IRCSupport completed October 19, 2006

Basic Crafting completed October 19, 2006

Genesis Male - Military Build 1st look (images)

Jondo — 2007-06-15T22:38:46+00:00

This is a WIP of BrokeAss Games' Genesis Male with removable military gear. We plan on releasing the characters with Military, Casual, Sci-fi and Medieval clothing and accessories. All the clothing with come rigged and stacked together for developer's taking advantage of meshon/meshoff. For devs not using mesh hiding, we'll include pre-built DTS versions of each theme. You can also mix and match all the clothes to create new wacky combinations, like for a post-apocalyptic game. The highest LOD builds range from 3500-4000 poly fully clothed with certain body parts removed for optimization.

Clothing isn't weighted yet but the human body is (Rex to teh rescue). Still BVH/mocap, Poser and Mr. Bones compatible with out of the box drag-n-drop to Torque functionality.

Jondo

Introducing myself.... (warning nudity)

Jondo — 2007-06-05T19:46:32+00:00

Time for my first post on GG (not including hacking Ari's account), woohoo!

Hi, I'm Jon. I work at BrokeAss Games with Ari, Rex (aka teh Rexican) and Mo. I have shoulder-surfed Ari for about two years and have often wanted to post comments, but never made an account. I enjoy reading these blogs/forums as part of my daily routine and look forward to contributing at some level.

As for background on myself, little is known and it's closely guarded. I met Ari, the lead dev of Ruin Online and creator of the BrokeAss vision, when we were teenagers, about 15 years ago. Feels like 30. He, Mo and I met in high school in Northern California. D&D, paintball, martial arts, hacking, and home-medicating - the classic skills chicks dig; we embraced it all. So now we're making an indie MMO (about 2yrs deep), its fun.

Recently, Rex has come aboard and has been a major asset! (Did he just say asshat?) He's teaching me alot of the classic character design rules that I missed, since I learned on the mean streets. We spend most of our time working on our characters which are available as a drag and drop BVH/mocap character solution for Torque, and featured in Ruin Online.

The four of us head off the BAG team and work with various web-devs from our Ruin Online Test community, which is about 5000 members (some of which might be porn-spam bots). Our mirror site (mmosite.com) shows nearly 4000 downloads of our BETA4 client, so things are starting to pick up, we're getting a lot of testers and a lot of good volunteer offers. Thanks guys!

I look forward to meeting some new contacts here at GG, so drop me a line if you like to walk on the beach and talk about pixels.

Jondo out

jon(at)brokeassgames.com

Here's some pics (and links) of what we do:

Upcoming casual male from the Genesis pack

Upcoming sci-fi male from the Genesis pack

Random pic from the Ruin Online live test server

Making clothing stacks in ZBrush3 (low poly FTW!)

Genesis character pack (EA) pictures and info

Gen Pack (EA) launch blog

Genesis Character Performance Video

BETA 4 melee video

more to come...