Welcome to Alpha 19!

Talk about anything related to Unvanquished.
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kharnov
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Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by kharnov »

Here's our ninteenth monthly alpha release! Read on for what's new.

ImageGameplay merge!As of this release, we've switched to our new gameplay basis by merging the gameplay development branch into master for the first time. This is our first major step in moving away from the gameplay of Tremulous, and is the result of months of planning and testing, aided in no small part by our summer tournament. All of our official servers will be running the new gameplay now, and you can practice it on our training server with bots. Successive releases will continue to feature new gameplay changes, and you can take part in testing and influencing our direction by playing our weekly development games on Saturday afternoons.

So, what's new? Many things, for someone coming from a Tremulous perspective. Build points are earned through a resource system, and will require you to make extraction structures on both teams. Stages are earned through what we call the ‘confidence’ system, which rewards you for spreading through the map and penalizes you for remaining in your base all game. In addition to those two macro-scale changes, we have a bunch of smaller ones, too:

  • Radar for both teams functions as a motion sensor. If you stay perfectly still, you will fade out of radar on both teams. We added this last year, but it deserves a second mention.

  • Dretches can now evolve into the advanced dretch, which has 35 health and can use a dretch pounce ability, which works instantaneously and has a short cooldown period.

  • Humans and aliens above the dretch are capable of dealing crush damage if they fall on something, which scales up depending on the mass of what's falling and how long it drops.

  • Flamethrowers will now set things on fire, and can also be used on the floor to light it up for a brief period. Grangers can put out burning structures with their spit.

Renderer updates!We now use SSE vertex skinning by default, which will give a speed boost for MD5 models on the vanilla renderer, and for people using GL3 with MESA or with manually disabled GPU vertex skinning. In addition, we no longer do an extra pass for glow maps, which should provide a performance increase for models that use them, like the acid tube and the new alien player models. Finally, the amount of data sent to the GPU each frame was reduced.

Assorted fixes!The human now has new hand textures, which match the new third person textures we gave him last release. As we go about upgrading or replacing our weapon models, the new hands will be used alongside them. So far, you can see them on the shotgun. The animation.cfg file is no longer read when a player spawns, which should help with lag. Also, we have another update to the medistation texture, and a higher resolution texture for the blaster. We have also finally squashed the dreaded sticky key bug.

Language updates!We now have a Russian translation, as well as updates to Galician and Ukrainian. This brings our total foreign translation count to seven, with translations for French, Galician, German, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian. As always, our community-driven translation effort can use all the help it can get. If you know a foreign language and you'd like to translate for us, make sure to tell us!

Click here to read this article on the main site!

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icaro440
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by icaro440 »

Helloo girls and boys, there is no universal zip this time?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/unvanqu ... ersal_Zip/

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kharnov
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by kharnov »

It'll be uploaded sometime today.

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icaro440
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by icaro440 »

;) ty

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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by Unregistered »

Considering individual installation files, have Macs been dropped? There has not been one since Alpha 16. Will Mac users have to use the universal zips now?

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Ishq
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by Ishq »

No, we plan to have an installer this release. The mac installers have been slipping through the cracks the last few releases.

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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by Unregistered »

I still can't see the latest universal zip?

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danmal
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by danmal »

This is my fault. My machine which I usually create the installer on get wrecked so I have to try and setup the environment again. Unfortunately the last few weeks have been absolutely crazy in regards to work and Uni. I'll have them up as soon as possible and I'll work out a system so that this doesn't happen again.

As a Mac user I know how sad it is when we get left behind :(

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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by Unregistered »

Muzzle flash seems overdone. Seems you guys are a bit focused on being flashy and hip rather than being practical sometimes. Like having to have 'badass' graphic effects on everything. I'm saying that because I care, I want this project to succeed. I'm sure you know what you're doing, so just take what you want from that.

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icaro440
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Re: Welcome to Alpha 19!

Post by icaro440 »

danmal wrote:

This is my fault. My machine which I usually create the installer on get wrecked so I have to try and setup the environment again. Unfortunately the last few weeks have been absolutely crazy in regards to work and Uni. I'll have them up as soon as possible and I'll work out a system so that this doesn't happen again.

As a Mac user I know how sad it is when we get left behind :(

So you're the responsible for creating 18 installers for the 18 versions that you have given us (wasting your time and money)?

1/19 x 100 = 5,26%, pffffff, what fault are you talking about? :grin: :grin:. I can wait for the alpha 20.

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