Infernal is the first of what could/should be a series of maps centered around the SCCAP module I've been developing. The idea is a seemingly simple capture the flag style game where each player controls a single unit from overhead with WASD movement and using the mouse to fire its various weapons. This system relies entirely on straight-fire weaponry so your accuracy, tactics and maneuverability will serve you well. This is also the sort of game where you cannot survive long as the lone hero, you need to work as a team to over come your enemies who are just as hell bent on getting those flags to where they need to go as you are.
Now for a pretty video which I recommend going full screen HD mode, it was shot and encoded at 1280x1024 using about 90gb of fraps capture source material and then one xvid compression post editing:
I dig industrial music and haunting ballads, my apologies if you don't. :P
Your Goal: This particular map features two flags which spawn in the center at the start of the match. The objective however is that you must bring both flags into the heart of your enemy's base, increasing the challenge as you drive closer to your enemy's spawning locations and defensive advantages. The flags themselves slow your movement, making the flagger more vulnerable and all the more reliant on forwards and flankers to keep them alive. Simply running over a flag or goal marker will automatically shift their possession.
The middle ground of the map, the two green dots are the flags.
What you're given: Your weaponry is powered by your energy bar which rapidly replenishes but is still very exhaustible for short and usually critical moments. Your special weapons additionally rely on charges which regenerate up to a maximum of three bounce lasers and two grenades. The bounce laser reflects off any surface, allowing you to perform trick shots to get at people you otherwise can't fire at, they are also stronger and faster then regular lasers so they also work as ideal direct-fire blasters. The grenades have the advantage of ignoring barriers and causing splash damage, also scoring a 'touchdown' on an enemy has proven to be consistently lethal. One note about the grenade: It does not use traditional splash damage but instead releases many little missiles that are stopped by walls, barriers or allies so get one of the above between you if at all possible. Your unit has both shields and health and will regen both, however the shields regain strength much faster then your armor.
Your allies: Because of the importance of team work the computer player AI was developed to allow you to bolster the numbers of either side in the lobby to better suite your needs. They will fight hard, defend your base as needed, fearlessly spear head assaults for flaggers and even take up the flag themselves to try and score. They do this all autonomously, the players need only concern themselves with how to best work with the team's inertia. You can further adjust the numbers beyond adding computer players though with an additional switch that can either amplify the available AI units or turn them off entirely. By default there are a total of five AI units that are part of each team and they will usually resort to base defense, adding further units take on new goals like flag capturing, flagger guarding and general predators. If you watch the demo video please note that I am the only live player throughout all of that, the rest are AI driven. Their only limitation is I haven't been able to teach them how to use bouncing lasers off walls so I've opted they not use them at all, but I'm hopeful. Besides since they don't have to click or key their non-delayed reaction time makes them potent enough as it is.
Death: You spawn back in your team's pen then wait for a short period of time and get released back out to one of your base's spawn points. An added point to make is the bases in the Infernal map are designed so that even dead players can help defend their base, each pen has two bunker walls which face critical junctions and allow them to help fend off invaders until they're ready to truly rejoin the fight.
Spawn pen and 'dead' player dispensing justice on a hapless would-be-invader
That number next to your name: Its your current score, the way its calculated is every kill is +1, every death is -10% of your score so if someone can consistently keep their score at 10 or above they know they're getting pretty good at the whole killing enemies thing. whenever you hold down TAB you will also see the full score board, conveniently updated every second and sorting from highest score downward. (btw if anyone knows of a prettier way of showing that I'd love to hear it)
Your base: Each base features a combination of defender favouring architecture along with a few one-way walls and doors which repel incoming direct fire to provide cover. The AI recognize six crucial points that they will stress defending from, usually bunker positions with one-way barriers between them and choke points. The grenade and/or precise bouncing lasers are an invader's best tool against these positions, use them wisely. The landscape on a whole I've tried to keep relatively clean for now, there are already enough units and doodads behind the scenes making all the weaponry do what it should and introducing more I fear might reduce playability for some people, we'll see as time goes on.
As it stands this map is live on the North American & European server clusters (Thank you Devrak for hosting on the Euro side!), this is also my first release so please be patient if things aren't going according to plan. :) Unfortunately my usual handle of BumpInTheNight didn't fit into Blizzard's puny account name space so I had to settle for an old one, you will see the author as Ragnar instead. I also just want to take the time and again thank everyone in this forum who's contributed information towards understanding how to unlock the Galaxy editor's potential, as I only joined this community after launch I truly feel that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Psst since you read all the way to the end I'm going to give you a bit of insider info: If you deploy a grenade directly on your character it will instead release as a mine which has roughly a five second timer and detonates with twice the force of a grenade, those are sure to ruin anyone's day who's trying to follow you.
Pending Change log for next release:
08/10/10 - Redid how missiles refer to their creator, fixes bouncies awarding kills properly after bounce.
06/10/10 - New Unit Selection menu when you first enter the game, no more race hackery to pick.
05/10/10 - Changed up the weapon animations a little, same weapons just better looking.
04/10/10 - Pressing M will cycle the minimap between the corners or off completely.
04/10/10 - Fixed a bug in the health & shield regen from scoring a kill, it works now finally.
01/10/10 - Holy crap, I got turreted units to react to abilities, Immortals & Goliaths for all!
Current version Change log:
25/09/10 - Fine tuned the 'move distance per loop': you'll stop more abruptly, improves dodging abilities.
25/09/10 - Version 1.25 released to the NA battle.net servers.
23/09/10 - Lobby switch to adjust the pen spawning time.
23/09/10 - Had to change grenades to use radius damage, prev method broke too many things :(
22/09/10 - 3rd and 4th team support for engine (not for the Infernal map though)
22/09/10 - Respawn Timer window
22/09/10 - Increased grenade charge time to 45 seconds(from 30), bouncies to 15 from 10).
22/09/10 - Shifted entire engine over to SCCAP.SC2mod file, maps are now relegated to being maps!
22/09/10 - Engine's initial bounce-net setup function made much more efficient(way less CPU eaten)
20/09/10 - Flag center better centered on map.
20/09/10 - Flag Center features a neutral spawn location, own it to shift repops to it instead of base.
20/09/10 - Improvements in AI methods unlocked two more player slots, 7 vs 7 now possible!
20/09/10 - Lobby switch to turn on Fog of War
20/09/10 - Lobby switch to adjust how many AI will hang around in base on defense duty.
16/09/10 - Scoreboard added, holding TAB will display it
16/09/10 - Bouncies are 90% less flaky now, made a huge breakthrough in cliff angle detection methods!
15/09/10 - Changed amount of AI that pull base guard duty to 4 from 6, more on the offensive now.
I welcome all suggestions, concerns and ideas surrounding this system. Please feel free to offer them up!
One thing I'd like to request actually is a little help on a topic: I'm still looking for a decent way to add the Zerg race into this engine as a unit to represent them, so far I really like the Queen for this but sadly she has no rotating turret type appendage. If anyone has the knowledge and skills to bisect her at the midriff and reattach her upper half with a TurretZ bone, I'd be eternally grateful.
Another thing to mull over is providing some variations to each race's unit, I'd really like to just create a whole slew of neat abilities for these that keep in the theme of this engine but at first I'm thinking just minor differences like faster speed vs heavier armor vs energy regen or something along those lines.
Glad you think so :) If you're on a US server definitely give it a try, I'm anxious to get more feedback on the game play to better tune it. So far from my own play sessions with friends it seems you need at least 4-5 active players or computer per side to making flagging possible, otherwise the defenders and repopers are just too overwhelming and you can't break through before they wear you down. I'm contemplating raising the repop time from 10 seconds to something much higher like 20 or even 30 seconds just to give attacks more a chance to actually get a foot hold.
Meanwhile with the scoreboard and score tracking up its given the scraps that happen in the center of the map a better feel since you can aim for a high score count by just laying waste to enemies.
Oh sweet, the map's been featured! Okay well I'm going to make an effort to hang around the forum for the day then so if anyone's got any questions, comments, concerns etc post it up and I'll be here to respond as much as possible!
Thanks and I think you're right, I'd never heard that song before but they definitely match in terms of style when I found a link to it. This one is a great remix cover by Claire Voyant of the song Majesty which is originally by VNV Nation who are one of the more influential Industrial bands around. I'll be honest that for game play videos I tend to gravitate towards music from bands who's labels won't be dicks and pull the sound tracks on youtube so this cover was by a relatively unknown whom I'm hoping will appreciate any additional exposure and Vigilante has actually previously congrats'ed me on a video where I used his song Answers so I think I'm cool with him too. :)
This is something I'm thinking needs to happen. All I guess that's really needed is a player willing to host both the module and this particular map :) So two slots used up with a combined footprint of about 2mb. At this stage I'd also ask that both have a 'locked' status since well I'm still a little 'mine all mine' about the concepts used but know I have every intention of making the module openly available once the module has sufficient independence from the map to house the engine for any future maps anyone else wants to make.
Anyone up for the job? I'd feed you updated versions through PM or email. I imagine it'd be a matter of publish updated modules and then load the map in the editor, update its online half of the module dependency, save and then publish itself as needed.
Good news everybody! Devrak has volunteered to host for the EU servers!! We're sorting out the logistics at the moment but you guys should have access to the map in the relatively near future! :)
For the shootings will the unit turn to fire if it's in the opposite direction? Say he is facing left and you fire at a guy who is on the right side, will the unit turn and fire?
The unit doesn't turn but it will fire in any direction you click regardless of its facing, the stalker and those lasers just look okay when you do that. Ideally if I added further units like the terran tank I'd want the turret to turn and match the direction its shooting though for sure.
Are you inspired by anything? Say Attack Retrieve Capture? ARC? now known as Spark really awesome capture the flag game where little spaceships using 3 bouncies, 2 gernades, and a missile launcher with respawn pens that are sometimes used to attack from and bunkers that only a one way wall. It started in the late mid-late 90s and had a really huge community. The similarities to this mod are huge, you must have played it?
I dont actually have SC2 yet, I was looking for some good mods before I get into it, stuff comparable to WC3 mod scene a few years ago when people actually played different stuff. This is looking great and I am really tempted to try it out, looks like i will need to be getting SC2 noow....
Awesome, I'm so glad someone remembers that game. I make no bones about it, it is the entire basis for this module system :) That and the infernal map is pretty much a hybrid of the soccer map and the one where its two bases pretty much facing directly against one another.
I'd also like to add that the reason I'm making both a map and a module is so that using the module you could easily build other maps based on this engine and with more then two teams and more then two flags etc, trying to make it as openly configurable as possible.
...oh and right now I'm investigating how I'd best go about making conveyor belts :)
I don't see why not, the marine would look weird firing in any direction they weren't facing but it really didn't take much to hook the stalker up to work under this system. I've already toyed around with an immortal as the player unit but until I learn more about siteops vs ability launch locations it just looked really strange firing its lasers directly out of its chest.
Since its new you may have to host one yourself to get the ball rolling, don't worry you can even play entirely with comp players and get not only a good feeling for it but a very challenging experience. I really cannot understate how dangerous those guys are since they have better then player reaction times :)
Starcraft Capture Assault Pwn! - Infernal
Infernal is the first of what could/should be a series of maps centered around the SCCAP module I've been developing. The idea is a seemingly simple capture the flag style game where each player controls a single unit from overhead with WASD movement and using the mouse to fire its various weapons. This system relies entirely on straight-fire weaponry so your accuracy, tactics and maneuverability will serve you well. This is also the sort of game where you cannot survive long as the lone hero, you need to work as a team to over come your enemies who are just as hell bent on getting those flags to where they need to go as you are.
Now for a pretty video which I recommend going full screen HD mode, it was shot and encoded at 1280x1024 using about 90gb of fraps capture source material and then one xvid compression post editing:
I dig industrial music and haunting ballads, my apologies if you don't. :P
Your Goal: This particular map features two flags which spawn in the center at the start of the match. The objective however is that you must bring both flags into the heart of your enemy's base, increasing the challenge as you drive closer to your enemy's spawning locations and defensive advantages. The flags themselves slow your movement, making the flagger more vulnerable and all the more reliant on forwards and flankers to keep them alive. Simply running over a flag or goal marker will automatically shift their possession.
The middle ground of the map, the two green dots are the flags.
What you're given: Your weaponry is powered by your energy bar which rapidly replenishes but is still very exhaustible for short and usually critical moments. Your special weapons additionally rely on charges which regenerate up to a maximum of three bounce lasers and two grenades. The bounce laser reflects off any surface, allowing you to perform trick shots to get at people you otherwise can't fire at, they are also stronger and faster then regular lasers so they also work as ideal direct-fire blasters. The grenades have the advantage of ignoring barriers and causing splash damage, also scoring a 'touchdown' on an enemy has proven to be consistently lethal. One note about the grenade: It does not use traditional splash damage but instead releases many little missiles that are stopped by walls, barriers or allies so get one of the above between you if at all possible. Your unit has both shields and health and will regen both, however the shields regain strength much faster then your armor.
Your allies: Because of the importance of team work the computer player AI was developed to allow you to bolster the numbers of either side in the lobby to better suite your needs. They will fight hard, defend your base as needed, fearlessly spear head assaults for flaggers and even take up the flag themselves to try and score. They do this all autonomously, the players need only concern themselves with how to best work with the team's inertia. You can further adjust the numbers beyond adding computer players though with an additional switch that can either amplify the available AI units or turn them off entirely. By default there are a total of five AI units that are part of each team and they will usually resort to base defense, adding further units take on new goals like flag capturing, flagger guarding and general predators. If you watch the demo video please note that I am the only live player throughout all of that, the rest are AI driven. Their only limitation is I haven't been able to teach them how to use bouncing lasers off walls so I've opted they not use them at all, but I'm hopeful. Besides since they don't have to click or key their non-delayed reaction time makes them potent enough as it is.
Death: You spawn back in your team's pen then wait for a short period of time and get released back out to one of your base's spawn points. An added point to make is the bases in the Infernal map are designed so that even dead players can help defend their base, each pen has two bunker walls which face critical junctions and allow them to help fend off invaders until they're ready to truly rejoin the fight.
Spawn pen and 'dead' player dispensing justice on a hapless would-be-invader
That number next to your name: Its your current score, the way its calculated is every kill is +1, every death is -10% of your score so if someone can consistently keep their score at 10 or above they know they're getting pretty good at the whole killing enemies thing. whenever you hold down TAB you will also see the full score board, conveniently updated every second and sorting from highest score downward. (btw if anyone knows of a prettier way of showing that I'd love to hear it)
Your base: Each base features a combination of defender favouring architecture along with a few one-way walls and doors which repel incoming direct fire to provide cover. The AI recognize six crucial points that they will stress defending from, usually bunker positions with one-way barriers between them and choke points. The grenade and/or precise bouncing lasers are an invader's best tool against these positions, use them wisely. The landscape on a whole I've tried to keep relatively clean for now, there are already enough units and doodads behind the scenes making all the weaponry do what it should and introducing more I fear might reduce playability for some people, we'll see as time goes on.
As it stands this map is live on the North American & European server clusters (Thank you Devrak for hosting on the Euro side!), this is also my first release so please be patient if things aren't going according to plan. :) Unfortunately my usual handle of BumpInTheNight didn't fit into Blizzard's puny account name space so I had to settle for an old one, you will see the author as Ragnar instead. I also just want to take the time and again thank everyone in this forum who's contributed information towards understanding how to unlock the Galaxy editor's potential, as I only joined this community after launch I truly feel that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. Psst since you read all the way to the end I'm going to give you a bit of insider info: If you deploy a grenade directly on your character it will instead release as a mine which has roughly a five second timer and detonates with twice the force of a grenade, those are sure to ruin anyone's day who's trying to follow you.
Good luck and good hunting!
-BumpInTheNight
Pending Change log for next release:
08/10/10 - Redid how missiles refer to their creator, fixes bouncies awarding kills properly after bounce.
06/10/10 - New Unit Selection menu when you first enter the game, no more race hackery to pick.
05/10/10 - Changed up the weapon animations a little, same weapons just better looking.
04/10/10 - Pressing M will cycle the minimap between the corners or off completely.
04/10/10 - Fixed a bug in the health & shield regen from scoring a kill, it works now finally.
01/10/10 - Holy crap, I got turreted units to react to abilities, Immortals & Goliaths for all!
Current version Change log:
25/09/10 - Fine tuned the 'move distance per loop': you'll stop more abruptly, improves dodging abilities.
25/09/10 - Version 1.25 released to the NA battle.net servers.
23/09/10 - Lobby switch to adjust the pen spawning time.
23/09/10 - Had to change grenades to use radius damage, prev method broke too many things :(
22/09/10 - 3rd and 4th team support for engine (not for the Infernal map though)
22/09/10 - Respawn Timer window
22/09/10 - Increased grenade charge time to 45 seconds(from 30), bouncies to 15 from 10).
22/09/10 - Shifted entire engine over to SCCAP.SC2mod file, maps are now relegated to being maps!
22/09/10 - Engine's initial bounce-net setup function made much more efficient(way less CPU eaten)
20/09/10 - Flag center better centered on map.
20/09/10 - Flag Center features a neutral spawn location, own it to shift repops to it instead of base.
20/09/10 - Improvements in AI methods unlocked two more player slots, 7 vs 7 now possible!
20/09/10 - Lobby switch to turn on Fog of War
20/09/10 - Lobby switch to adjust how many AI will hang around in base on defense duty.
16/09/10 - Scoreboard added, holding TAB will display it
16/09/10 - Bouncies are 90% less flaky now, made a huge breakthrough in cliff angle detection methods!
15/09/10 - Changed amount of AI that pull base guard duty to 4 from 6, more on the offensive now.
I welcome all suggestions, concerns and ideas surrounding this system. Please feel free to offer them up!
One thing I'd like to request actually is a little help on a topic: I'm still looking for a decent way to add the Zerg race into this engine as a unit to represent them, so far I really like the Queen for this but sadly she has no rotating turret type appendage. If anyone has the knowledge and skills to bisect her at the midriff and reattach her upper half with a TurretZ bone, I'd be eternally grateful.
Another thing to mull over is providing some variations to each race's unit, I'd really like to just create a whole slew of neat abilities for these that keep in the theme of this engine but at first I'm thinking just minor differences like faster speed vs heavier armor vs energy regen or something along those lines.
@BumpInTheNight: Go
Looks Pretty fun!
@Metal1Dragon: Go
Glad you think so :) If you're on a US server definitely give it a try, I'm anxious to get more feedback on the game play to better tune it. So far from my own play sessions with friends it seems you need at least 4-5 active players or computer per side to making flagging possible, otherwise the defenders and repopers are just too overwhelming and you can't break through before they wear you down. I'm contemplating raising the repop time from 10 seconds to something much higher like 20 or even 30 seconds just to give attacks more a chance to actually get a foot hold.
Meanwhile with the scoreboard and score tracking up its given the scraps that happen in the center of the map a better feel since you can aim for a high score count by just laying waste to enemies.
that's odd... the music in the video is making my head scream Earth 2160 LC faction theme..... o.o anyways map looks neato ^w^
Oh sweet, the map's been featured! Okay well I'm going to make an effort to hang around the forum for the day then so if anyone's got any questions, comments, concerns etc post it up and I'll be here to respond as much as possible!
@Mirvra: Go
Thanks and I think you're right, I'd never heard that song before but they definitely match in terms of style when I found a link to it. This one is a great remix cover by Claire Voyant of the song Majesty which is originally by VNV Nation who are one of the more influential Industrial bands around. I'll be honest that for game play videos I tend to gravitate towards music from bands who's labels won't be dicks and pull the sound tracks on youtube so this cover was by a relatively unknown whom I'm hoping will appreciate any additional exposure and Vigilante has actually previously congrats'ed me on a video where I used his song Answers so I think I'm cool with him too. :)
Look really really nice. Not on EU ? I would like to try it.
@BumpInTheNight: Go
is it coming to EU servers too? it looks amazing and i relly want to try it
@tigerija: Go @eilgaard: Go
This is something I'm thinking needs to happen. All I guess that's really needed is a player willing to host both the module and this particular map :) So two slots used up with a combined footprint of about 2mb. At this stage I'd also ask that both have a 'locked' status since well I'm still a little 'mine all mine' about the concepts used but know I have every intention of making the module openly available once the module has sufficient independence from the map to house the engine for any future maps anyone else wants to make.
Anyone up for the job? I'd feed you updated versions through PM or email. I imagine it'd be a matter of publish updated modules and then load the map in the editor, update its online half of the module dependency, save and then publish itself as needed.
Good news everybody! Devrak has volunteered to host for the EU servers!! We're sorting out the logistics at the moment but you guys should have access to the map in the relatively near future! :)
For the shootings will the unit turn to fire if it's in the opposite direction? Say he is facing left and you fire at a guy who is on the right side, will the unit turn and fire?
@Keyeszx: Go
The unit doesn't turn but it will fire in any direction you click regardless of its facing, the stalker and those lasers just look okay when you do that. Ideally if I added further units like the terran tank I'd want the turret to turn and match the direction its shooting though for sure.
This looks really fun....
Are you inspired by anything? Say Attack Retrieve Capture? ARC? now known as Spark really awesome capture the flag game where little spaceships using 3 bouncies, 2 gernades, and a missile launcher with respawn pens that are sometimes used to attack from and bunkers that only a one way wall. It started in the late mid-late 90s and had a really huge community. The similarities to this mod are huge, you must have played it?
http://www.spark-hq.net/
I dont actually have SC2 yet, I was looking for some good mods before I get into it, stuff comparable to WC3 mod scene a few years ago when people actually played different stuff. This is looking great and I am really tempted to try it out, looks like i will need to be getting SC2 noow....
@Gemini89: Go
Awesome, I'm so glad someone remembers that game. I make no bones about it, it is the entire basis for this module system :) That and the infernal map is pretty much a hybrid of the soccer map and the one where its two bases pretty much facing directly against one another.
I'd also like to add that the reason I'm making both a map and a module is so that using the module you could easily build other maps based on this engine and with more then two teams and more then two flags etc, trying to make it as openly configurable as possible.
...oh and right now I'm investigating how I'd best go about making conveyor belts :)
Would you be able to set a marine to be able to use this control setup?
@Keyeszx: Go
I don't see why not, the marine would look weird firing in any direction they weren't facing but it really didn't take much to hook the stalker up to work under this system. I've already toyed around with an immortal as the player unit but until I learn more about siteops vs ability launch locations it just looked really strange firing its lasers directly out of its chest.
Good news everybody! Thanks to the very fine Devrak's generous offer to publish Infernal on the EU servers, the map is now up and available there too!
Give it a go and give him a hand! We both learned entirely too much about localization migrations this evening :P
Map and engine look great. i cant seem to find the game in the US server.
@lenn0x: Go
Since its new you may have to host one yourself to get the ball rolling, don't worry you can even play entirely with comp players and get not only a good feeling for it but a very challenging experience. I really cannot understate how dangerous those guys are since they have better then player reaction times :)
I searched for "infernal" and nothing with your name comes up =( (Nothing with ragnar comes up)