"Eventus stultorum magister."
August 24,2008
07:05:29 PM
With our new policy of non-weekly news updates, we've found that we now have SO much news that we can't remember it all. However, I'll try and extract the choicest tidbits from our news vault for you today.Two main things come to mind: beta testing and voice acting. Let me start with testing.
No matter how many times we test our own work, we will never discover all the bugs. When you're as close to the project as us it basically becomes impossible to see things from the outside looking in. There's also the fact that we tend to spend most of our time *developing* and mostly just test bits and pieces. For the past few weeks we've had a valiant team of testers running through our Beta 1.0.0 (and recently 1.5.0) builds ferreting out every bug they could possibly find. And they have found...a lot. Of course, they've essentially all been small, easy to fix logic bugs, which is the kind of thing we tend to miss when testing on our own. With a system as complex as we have with TNM, it's inevitable that bugs will tend to creep into the game logic. We've done our best to foresee how the different quests and character interact and predict what the play will do, but it can never be 100% without testers. Our bug tracker recently surpassed 1000 bugs. That's not to say that there are 1000 *open* bugs. In fact, there are currently only 85 open bugs, which we are quickly chopping away at.
Our next (and final) round of beta testing will begin once we have finished the voice acting, which brings me to that very subject.
As we've mentioned before, the incredibly awesome and amazingly generous Jeremiah Costello is the man who lost his mind and offered to voice our player character, who has a line count numbering in the THOUSANDS! Recently, Jonas ventured down to Hamburg to direct Jeremiah's recording session live. What might sound like a bit of a vacation was in fact an arduous, intense weekend filled with hours and hours of recording. Over 2000 lines were recorded in that single weekend. A couple hundred remain, which are being recorded this week via a Skype session with Jeremiah. Those same lines are being processed by Jeremiah's compatriots at T-Recs Studios. In fact, they have already been processed, and are currently ingame. We're having a slight technical issue with the lines 'sticking' (you currently have to click to advance to the next line in the conversation), but it's a minor inconvenience that we've encountered before and shall soon remedy.
Of course, there has been loads of other voice acting activity, as well. We've recently managed to pull down a large handful of skilled voice actors simply by asking existing actors to recommend their talented friends. It's a strategy that's payed off, and things are speeding along. We've finally managed to nail a few of the large female parts that we've been waiting on, and several other large characters are being worked on at this very moment. You may note that I've updated the Voices status bar to better reflect the current situation.
And now I must go check the bug tracker. Au revoir!
β
July 25,2008
04:24:54 AM
Wednesday was the day our Beta 1.0.0 build went out to our 10 dedicated testers. We took great care to eliminate the bugs we could find before sending out this build, so our testers would at least not be bothered by bugs we already knew about - we want them to have as good an experience with TNM as possible. That said, there are some things that didn't make it in. High scores for our in-game PC games, for example. And about 6000 lines of dialogue audio out of over 13,000.If 6000 lines strikes you as quite a lot, take comfort in the notion that just over 3500 of them belong to Trestkon, our protagonist, and will be recorded by Jeremiah Costello in the beginning of August. I'll be going to Hamburg to direct the recording at Jer's sound studio, and I'm quite excited about that. In addition to Jeremiah, we currently have 6 excellent actors working on the remaining parts, and we've recently knocked some pretty large and important roles off the list. The plan is to send out the second beta build to our current testers and 10 or so more (making 20 testers in total) around the end of August, when Trestkon's lines have been implemented and we'll hopefully be missing very few parts, if any.
Let me talk about some of the work that went into compiling the first beta build. Wednesday's release was preceded by a mad dash to getting the last features in-game. This included excellent contributions from Chris, who was tasked with recreating one of our older maps from scratch to bring it up to our general quality standards; Nick and Shane, on whom fell the responsibility of fixing as many bugs as possible; Leo, from whom we needed a soundtrack for our intro, to give the beta testers the best possible impression; and Grub and Brian, who managed to process all the re-recorded lines in an effort to eliminate partially voiced characters from the build.
In the process of finishing up that last map, Chris managed to drag his friend Phil on board for a cameo, as we felt that a crystal was needed, and Phasmatis is busy with HDTP-related matters. If you turn your eyes upwards, you will be able to feast your eyes on the results of Phil's work. Gelo was nice enough to contribute a great piece of background text for the crystal so you won't be wondering why it's glowing (though frankly if that's enough to make you wonder, you'll be wondering about quite a few things in TNM).
Since the beta went out, a small group of testers have been hanging out in our IRC channel (which can be accessed from inside the game, courtesy of Nick's rather nice utilization of some unused Unreal Engine code), and the feedback thus far has been pretty positive. For some testers, the game crashes quite a lot in our first hub map, the Downtown district, but we're taking steps to address that since we can't have our very first mission turning you off with instability. People generally seem impressed with the mod, and presumably it will be even better come release, when all the voice acting is implemented.
I've been pleased to learn that TNM works more or less in Linux with WINE, though our resident Linux tester, EER, is encountering a few issues with his video drivers. There was some initial concern when the game turned out to be unopenable in Linux, but EER quickly realized he needed to install Microsoft's Visual C++ 2005 runtime to make it work - we'll be sure to mention this in the troubleshooting section of the manual, with a proper download link to the runtime.
Another persistent issue we're aware of is that Steam's version of Deus Ex doesn't play well with mods. What we do upon installing TNM is we make a copy of DeusEx.exe and rename it to TNM.exe to ensure that TNM and DX are run as seperate instances. With Steam's .exe, that doesn't work. We contacted Valve two weeks ago, and they kindly looked into it, but informed us that there was nothing they could do, since they were just distributing it. The solution right now seems to be for us to include the DeusEx.exe from the 1.112fm patch with the mod, which we're pretty sure is not illegal (since the patch is freely available and you'll need the DX data packages anyway). We'll let you know how that solution turns out.
If our testers permit it, perhaps our next news release will include some quotes about their experience with TNM. Until then, please try not to die from anticipation. Remember to breathe! And if you absolutely must know, I'll probably be posting some of the more incidental tidbits over on my blog.
Chris Levels Up
June 7,2008
04:45:47 AM
Ahem. May I have the word please.I'm not much of a speaker... so it's good most communication here is written. Throughout the years we've worked on TNM, we've all experienced some pretty cool things, and obviously also a lot of not so cool things. Today, I am about 2 weeks late in congratulating our last remaining level designer, Chris Potts, on his marriage on the 25th of May. Chris has been absent for about a month and none of us had any idea why, but a few days ago he dropped back online to let us know that he is now a married man!
Obviously that's one of the cooler things we've collectively experienced. So please everybody stand up in front of your computer monitors and let's hear three cheers for Chris and his exceptionally lucky wife. And here's to finishing TNM before they have a kid too!
The Voices Compel You
June 1,2008
07:57:42 AM
I believe you are long overdue for another news release, and to compensate for the long wait, I'll throw in four new screenshots, free of charge. The benefit of no longer sticking to a weekly schedule is that I won't have to go into detail to fill out the post - in fact I couldn't even if I wanted because so much has happened since the last post that it could fill a whole book.The Big Bug Hunt of 2008
As you might expect, however, it's mainly been about voice acting and bug hunting. I'll start with the latter, because there's not much to say: It's going pretty well. Jim and Kale have both reached the next to final mission on their playthroughs and are about to finish their respective games, after which we'll eradicate the final bugs they find, tweak a few more features, and then release our beta. Most of the bugs they and Erluk find are small and quick fixes, but a few pretty epic things have cropped up. Most have been fixed, and the rest won't last until the beta. There will be no mercy.
Those who are signed up for the beta can tentatively expect the Beta 1.0.0 build to arrive some time in July.
I'm Hearing Voices
Voice acting is an indescribably huge undertaking. I've mentioned this before, but it cannot be overstated. Nick has programmed a parser that can get line counts and word counts out of our conversation files, and a complete count reveals that we've recorded just over 50% of all our lines. Currently, 5891 lines remain to be recorded (that's five thousand lines), 3562 of which belong to Trestkon - our protagonist.
The only reason we can even hope to ever finish this work is because of Jeremiah Costello, Creative Director of T-Recs Studios. Jeremiah, who is a professional voice actor, has graciously recorded a couple of parts for us, including the 312-line part of Scara B. King, the implementation of which was finished a couple of days ago. Jeremiah has not only offered to also record the 241-line part of Phasmatis, but also offered us the services of volunteer voice actors that he knows. Needless to say, we are extremely grateful.
Another big step forward in the voice acting came last weekend when Grub returned with a vengeance to work his way through about a dozen characters (including a couple of fairly major parts) in two days of non-stop audio processing. This was a big leap forward for our entire voice acting department, which now also counts dialogue editors Stephan, Brian, and Seishiro17 in addition to Grub and Spaic. With Gelo, Larry, and I now focusing primarily on voice acting, it wouldn't be exaggeration to say we've escalated the voice acting process.
Look at the size of that thing!
I really don't like to brag (actually that's a lie), but I don't think I'm taking too great a risk if I say TNM is likely to be the largest game modification in the world. Maybe not in terms of weight - although we expect to pass the 1 GB mark pretty soon, mods for more modern games where single models can take up as much disk space as a whole map in DX can probably easily beat us in that area - but simply in terms of content, at least if you count the voice acting. 13,000 lines of fully voice-acted conversations is really insane no matter how you look at it, in fact we have it directly from Sheldon Pacotti that it's approximately twice as big as the script of Deus Ex itself.
And speaking of Sheldon, he's agreed to have a small cameo in TNM. He's writing and recording a couple of lines for a character we'll place in one of our maps as an homage to the work he did on Deus Ex. Being the lead writer of one of the best written games in history, he certainly deserves it.
Did Somebody Shout Video?
Now that I've tantalized you with fantastic numbers, I think it's in order that I demonstrate the general quality of our voice acting as well, so here is a ca. 4˝ minute montage of different lines of voice acting. Chosen more for their availability in-game than specifically for their quality, together they should give you a pretty good idea of what's in store for you.
Note: If Veoh is inexplicably not available in your country, we always mirror our videos on YouTube, and you should be able to watch it here instead. Feel free to also leave us a comment over there if you like : )
Don't Mind the Vortex
April 6,2008
02:56:54 PM
If you've noticed a certain lack of real news activity on the front page here lately (in case you haven’t realized yet, the name change was an April fools), I ask you to please also notice that this post and the post preceding it both contain video material from the mod. Wouldn't want you to just focus on the bad things in life! In fact after last month's post with the Nosferatu video, we decided it's actually pretty silly to keep writing weekly news posts when there's very little newsworthy material going on anymore. As we get ever closer to completion, news will whittle down to two subjects:- We're still fixing bugs and it's going great.
- We're still recording dialogue, and... it's going great!
We were already starting to sound like a broken record, repeating the same "news" over and over again. It's time to try something new. So from now on, we're off the regular posting schedule. We're far past the point when you might start to worry we'll close the mod if we skip a news post, anyway. From now on we're posting when something significant happens, and our posts will contain actual interesting media such as new screenshots, soundbytes, or of course the fan-favourite: Videos.
Speaking of videos
Have another one:
That's one of the more ludicrous new weapons we've implemented – the Vortex Grenades. Allow me to share its description with you:
"As far as you can tell from the packaging, this is a highly experimental and morally ambiguous weapon that manipulates dark matter to create a swirling vortex around a tiny black hole, sucking in anything that isn't nailed to the floor and crushing it into a fine paste. Although it doesn't come with safety instructions, it's probably a safe bet that you should stand well clear of the detonation spot."
Needless to say, this isn't a weapon you'll come across very frequently. In fact if you play on the hardest item difficulty, you'll encounter a total of one (1) vortex grenade in the whole game, and I'm not telling you where. As you can plainly see from the video, it's really a rather effective but somewhat dangerous weapon, and it does tend to destroy pretty much anything except plot-critical items, so we recommend you learn from the video and try not to repeat the mistake made therein.
The alpha and the omega
Of course the real news today is that the Alpha 2.0.0 build of The Nameless Mod has been finished and released for internal testing. This is the first alpha build we've released without any of us (*cough* me *cough*) having to sit up until 4 am on a weekday frantically getting everything together and up on the FTP for Trestkon to put into the installer, and this is largely thanks to our (in the relative time scale of TNM quite new) SVN repository where the whole build is now located for easy downloading. To the core of the development team, the new alpha is nothing but a symbolic milestone, a sort of snapshot of our current progress and a reminder that "remember that build we started planning November 8th 2005? It's actually done now!"
But it does serve a more important purpose: It's a major update for our Quality Assurance team. Aside from the 10 or so of us who contribute to TNM on a daily basis, we have a small group of people signed up to help us find and report every bug from the minor nuisance to the major gamestopping critical error, and with Alpha 2, we can be sure they're all on the same page as us. And here's what's on the page:
TNM is "content complete"
You may remember a year or so ago, we pronounced on this very page that TNM was "feature complete", meaning we would add no further features to the design. That didn't mean we had no content left to add, however, as the design called for several things that hadn't been implemented yet but were quite critical to the product. For example, all our cinematics. This and much more is now all finished and implemented – the secret bonus ending cutscene was completed this week, meaning there are only two major milestones left before release: The beta build where we shoot the mod out to a much larger group of volunteers, and the voice acting milestone when all dialogue has been recorded, processed, and implemented.
We'll keep you updated as we hit major and minor milestones – but not weekly. For once, I will not see you next week. I'll see you when we have something important to report again. Until then, feel free to visit our forums when the withdrawal gets to you. We're thinking about starting a recovery support group.
