Z-Day's First Alpha release on TGEA

A little later than planned we've finished up our recent alpha test phase, it's difficult as a developer to see just how much our game changes between alpha versions because we're used to seeing it change a little at a time each day, so gaining feedback from our testing team is a huge benefit.

What feedback it's been too - they love the new look now we're on TGEA!!!

It's not been an easy migration from TGE to TGEA and we've had to tackle some horrific bugs, redevelop chunks of work but was it all worth it???

Simply put....

.... YES, YES, YES, HELL YES!!!

We're loving the shiny new features of TGEA and the new possibilities it creates - so much so that I'm almost certain I'll never touch TGE again, why why why did we not migrate sooner?

We've still a long way to go, practically nothing has Normal maps or shaders yet but already the areas we have had chance to update just look remarkable in comparison and the Bloom and DRL adds a lot to our scenes.



Green-Ear voice chat went down very well with the testers as it helped them coordinate their testing a lot easier.... and much nicer to shout abuse at someone when they've just sniped you from half way across the map!! I'm really really impressed with the product, so much thanks to Mike, Leba and the rest of Green Ear team, I want to spend so much more time on this area, sadly though that's not planned for another couple of development cycles so I'll have to wait for a bit.

Our artists are doing a fantastic job in bringing up the quality levels of textures and it's amazing what a difference even small changes can have on the game. Special thanks to Jacob for this example where the old blocky particles are now sharp and clear.

They've been busy working on adding more and more to the city and it's really starting to pay off.

The city is looking creepier than ever and some nice terrace housing leaves you never quite sure where the next Zombie is going to spring from... best keep on your guard!!!

Performance Improvements

We found a big hit on performance was drawing the hundreds of static shapes in game and because even the lowest level LOD's were 100-300polys and rendered right down to about 2px, plus some objects are missing LOD's. The result is we waste a lot of time drawing objects you can barely see...

To combat this we've implemented a system to fade objects out of view once they reach a certain size..say at 20px we begin to reduce opacity and below 10px it's just rendered at all, it's all controlled via the object definition in the mission file for tsStatics or in the datablock for Shapebase derived objects.


The improvement is dramatic...in the worst affected spot in the game we've trebled the framerate without it really being noticeable. I've exaggerated the effect to show an image to the left here, you can see right through the oven.

Next Steps

That wraps up this Alpha and so onto the next development cycle - and our biggest challenge yet - Artificial Intelligence!!!

The current solution was a quick prototype just to get some Zombies working and prove to ourselves the game would work... but as one of our testers decided to show us they are pretty easy to line up and use them to crowd surf!!

Wait til we've finished training our little pet zombies and my beautiful babies will tear them limb from limb :) Look out for another blog soon to talk more about our AI design and Zombies crawling from their graves


Lastly just a mention that if anyone is interested in working with us on the game as ever we're on the lookout for new team members - Designers, Artists and Coders.