Alpha 29 is here!

Talk about anything related to Unvanquished.
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kharnov
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Alpha 29 is here!

Post by kharnov »

Now for our 29th monthly alpha release! 

Hello everyone. There was an issue with our unvanquished.net domain name over the weekend, and we've been trying to get in touch with the registrar. We had hoped it would be resolved on Monday, but since we haven't heard back about anything substantive, we figured we'd release anyway under an alternate domain. The site and forums should work fine, just replaced unvanquished.net in all of the links with the current domain. You can also reach us via our #unvanquished and #unvanquished-dev channels on Freenode.

And now for what's in the release:

[img]//www.unvnet.net/images/alpha_29.png[/img]libRocket!We've finally added our new UI system based off libRocket. The effort has spanned many months of design and work, and we are pleased to have finally merged it into the master branch. Gone is the old clunky interface with its awkward design, now to be replaced with a modern interface of our own creation. Considering we are still in alpha, you may expect some weirdness here and there, but as players you are the eyes of our project, and you will be valuable in spotting glaring inconsistencies and bugs for us to fix. Please report any and all strangeness you find on our forums, IRC channel, or GitHub bug tracker.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

  • You no longer select items, freeing the mouse wheel for other binds.

  • There is now a default grenade bind, assigned to the ‘g’ key.

  • Making new HUDs is a different process, which will be explained soon.

Our menus have been greatly improved, both in and out of the game. Take a look at the options menu for instance, or the server listing. You can now easily start a local server without needing to bother with console, and you can even add bots to it, as long as the map has navmeshes included. For both teams, there is now a circle menu that will allow you to purchase upgrades and other things much more efficiently than before, and all items have clear explanations regarding what they do, hopefully leaving the game more comprehensible for new players.

The addition of the new libRocket interface brings us closer to our long-awaited beta, and once we've ironed out most of the bugs by next release, you can expect to hear about the next big thing we'll be up to.

A new map!Or rather, a classic one in the process of being upgraded for our engine. We now have a testing version of a retextured Station15, and the map will be available for you to play around with and provide much-desired feedback on. Considering that it is now our eighth map, and we have fulfilled our beta goal of at least six maps, we have made the decision to drop all of the old Tremulous maps from our default set. This leaves us shipping only our own maps, but you can still play the old Tremulous maps on your own servers as long as they are modified to work with our new filesystem.

Other changes!A lot of other things went on this month for the game, although they've been dwarfed by libRocket. The human soldier now has cleaner armor textures, and the armor set has been modified so that the "unarmored" human is wearing a vest instead of charging into aliens in nothing more than chainmail pajamas. You can also expect the usual lot of bug fixes, of which there are too many to summarize here but can be viewed on our GitHub page.

Oh, and you should now be able to view our development section as long as you have ten posts or more on our forums.

Click here to read this article on the main site!

Last edited by kharnov on Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:29 pm UTC, edited 6 times in total.
gnales
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by gnales »

Awesome update :smile:
Even if interface layout seem a bit broken, but I think it will be fixed in a future alpha.

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Ishq
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by Ishq »

Could you post a screenshot of your issues so we can an idea of what issues are bothering users? Also your OS.

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Tom
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Location: France

Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by Tom »

Positive points:

  • The new interface is very nice and customizable.

  • The new interface is way more intuitive.

  • We can use server browser ingame.

  • This bug no longer happen!

Regressions:

  • FPS drops, which is a major drawback.

  • No more server info menu, which was useful to see if a server was up to date or the names, scores and pings of players on it.

  • No longer possible to abord a download from a server, previously we could escape it by pressing [Esc].

  • No demo menu.

  • No main menu music.

Ideas:

  • Allow to escape all menus with [Esc].

  • Add a circle menu for beacons.

To players like me using binds, replace in your autoexec.cfg file:

  • messagemode by message_public

  • messagemode2 by message_team

  • messagemode3 by message_admin

kharnov wrote:

Oh, and you should now be able to view our development section as long as you have ten posts or more on our forums.

Why this limit?

kharnov wrote:

A new map! Or rather, a classic one in the process of being upgraded for our engine. We now have a testing version of a retextured Station15, and the map will be available for you to play around with and provide much-desired feedback on. Considering that it is now our eighth map, and we have fulfilled our beta goal of at least six maps, we have made the decision to drop all of the old Tremulous maps from our default set. This leaves us shipping only our own maps, but you can still play the old Tremulous maps on your own servers as long as they are modified to work with our new filesystem.

Yeah Station15! Thanks Supertanker, you heard my wishes.

For the good old maps, Veyrdite is remaking Niveus, and even without modifications old maps work flawlessly. Maybe in this year we can add bots and minimap to some of them. If anyone needs I backed up all the maps from mercenariesguild.net, see this post.

P.-S. – Is there a way to use relative links in phpbb? Because my post will look bad when the DNS problem will be over.

gnales
Dretch
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by gnales »

@Ishq :
I am on ubuntu 14.04 64 bit here screen shots of the problems :
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/201 ... -48-44.png
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/201 ... -47-07.png
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/201 ... -44-36.png
As you can see texts on selectors are not properly aligned, moreover the text on the selection screen is out of the box.

Else does there are any settings for language ? because the text of the menu seem half french/half english

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Ishq
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by Ishq »

@Tom, Try increasing your max FPS. There shouldn't be too major of a drop in FPS. (The max FPS is weird, it'll be much less than your max FPS. Increasing your max FPS will give you more FPS.

The other 3 on your list are todo and will be address promptly.

@gnales:
I see, you aren't the first person to have that bug and we're trying to track down the cause and why it only happens for some people and not others.

gnales
Dretch
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by gnales »

I have tried to delete the .unvanquished folder and to recreate it but it didn't seem to fix my problems.
I will try to compile the game and I will see if it fix my problems.

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DwarfVader
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by DwarfVader »

hi,

librocket, huh? finaly! :thumbup:

the performance drop for me is huge from 120 fps (unv 0.28 ) to 75-80(unv 0.29). Don't know if it is librocket related thouh...

some bugs i found so far:

  • missing kebindings menu entry:weaponselect (blaster)

  • some comboboxes without default values selected (crosshairsize)

  • build/evo/buy circle menu doesn't update while being open (f.e 4bp become available-> drill is still red ->need to reopen the menu)

personal impression:

  • i don't like the window behaviour of the single menus ( 'X' as close button, ESC don't work closing the menus)

  • fonts are too small and missaligned at some places

  • i miss the menu music and the loadscreen MOTD

I realy hope the UI not only gets polished out, but gets real nice and that librocket is a plus in terms of beeing able to do this. If not, i think it wasn't worth the effort. Because at the moment it looks ugly and unfinished. It took away the quake charme and looks a bit like all the unity3d based games you can find a lot on Steam these days ...

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Veyrdite
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by Veyrdite »

Translation (@gnales)
Apologies for ruining everyone's native language implementation :(

Unfortunately the UI uses completely new text (on the most part) to the old one, so translations are not yet setup. Once we settle down our UI changes we will fix up the translation system and I'll port as much of the old translations across as possible. At that point our open translation system should also be setup for the new UI.

Double-height rendering issues
The in-game UI should look like this. Gnales and everyone else having issues with every line being double-spaced: can you please tell us:

  • What OS you are using, and what version of the OS it is (important)

  • Which version of the game you downloaded/are using

  • Is this issues is always present, or do you trigger it somehow?

  • A copy of any warnings or errors in your console during game startup

  • Any other weird behaviour you are getting

Windowing behavior
... is not perfect in this release. Hitting Esc/clicking resume needs hide the whole in-game ui rather than just one focused window, etc etc.

@DwarfVader "quake feel of UI"
As the person who designed the menu UI: I totally agree that it's missing some of the charm :P. It plays like a law-firm's web-page.

The UI .rml and .rcss (HTML and CSS) files are going to be cleaned and re-organised quite a bit for next release, mainly so that they will be easier to get started working with and maintain. This should lead onto "custom HUD theme" support and the wiki articles I plan to write on getting people started working with our UI system.

For the mean time: I encourage everyone who thinks they have awesome ideas on making the UI prettier and more functional to please share, even if it's just words or basic mockups :) If you want to dive into the .rml files you will find them in the "ui" folder of our latest package and you will need to setup a pk3dir to house your changes.

gnales
Dretch
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Re: Alpha 29 is here!

Post by gnales »

@Veryrdite :
No problem with translation bug, it an alpha after all. ^^
I don't get any special message in the console during the startup here my console :
http://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/201 ... olelog.png

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