battleMETAL

Overview

A Total-conversion for the DarkPlaces engine all about mecha combat.

battleMETAL brings giant robot combat inspired by the Mechwarrior and Earthsiege franchises to Quake's frenetic pacing and tech stack. This project adds the following large features to Darkplaces via the Quake C scripting language and use of external file reading.

This is just a repo for the code, the media assets (models, texture, fx) will not be available as they are part of the commercial release of this game.

An important design goal of battleMETAL has been to create a simple SDK for making small mech games. https://github.com/Subject9x/battleMETAL/wiki

Game Play

• Units can now be mutli-part units, such as the mechs where they have multiple hit locations.
• Refactored damage logic and algorithm to handle location-specific damage.
• Locations on units are visibly represented with unique model geomtry and can be removed with animations and logic.
• Units (and players) can multiple weapons.
• These multiple weapons can be fired at the same time by using Weapon Groups.
• Units have new statistics; Energy, Shields, Radar, pitch limits, etc.
• Weapons and Shields can interact in important ways - certain weapons are better at damaging shields.
• Weapons are assigned to locations on units, and the player can customize their unit.
• Weapons are lost when their parent component is destroyed.
• Buildings also exist in addition to combat units.
• Base buildings can be interacted with.
• Sequential unlocks / progression of mechs and weapons.

AI

• A bespoke solution that replaces the original Quake AI code.
• Packaged into an API for ease of maintenance.
• AI uses most of the gameplay features listed here, almost on parity with player.
• AI behavior is boken down by unit type, each leveraging the API in a few unique ways.
• Implemented a Nodegraph using something close to A* for navigation.

HUD

• Player's Heads Up Display rewritten from scratch.
• HUD layouts are defined in distinct text files.
• API for rendering all HUD elements.
• SFX queue system for playing HUD notification sounds in a defined sequence.
• HUD can display complex information items such as Unit armor diagrams, targeting boxes, reticles, pitch indicators, radar.
• Full RADAR display system.
• Player can choose between 4 different reticles each with their own style and animation setup.
• Player can choose between a few different colors for the HUD text
• Player can adjust the alpha blending of their HUD.

GUI

• I'm defining GUI here as all menus that were not covered by the Main Menu System (Quake keeps these distinct).
• GUI API written from the ground up for the project.
• GUI can render various common elements such as bar graphs, text wrapping, and buttons.
• GUI has mouse support just like the Main Menu.
• GUI is display agnostic, using %'s for screen positions, sizes, and such.

Map Design

• Documented pipeline for implementing full 3D terrain meshes for engine.
• All custom game entities have supporting documentation for use in engine standard map editors such as Trenchbroom, NetRadiant and GTKRadiant.
• Map and Mission file system for loading mission briefing files, game save files.
• Maps can have formal Objectives that are communicated to the player during gameplay.
• Maps can have Navigation (Nav) points that are marked for the player.

Miscellaneous

• An Animatic system for cutscenes. These are defined in their own script files and can be called by the map file using map logic.

Main Menu System

• Completely overhauled
• Implemented Darkplaces mouse function extension to the main menu system
• New layouts for menus.
• Graphical improvements to menus.

Graphics

• New models for almost everything in the game.
• Weapons have been modeled and are attached to units visibly.
• Projectile models have also been made from scratch.
• Particles and special effects have been written using Darkplaces particle system.
• Completely new terrain textures with normal maps.

Sound

• Brand new sounds added to game.

Music

• All new Soundtrack created specifically for the game
• Soundtrack by INNER JOIN