I had an eye on this mod for a long time, thinking it's either a really cool idea that will never see the light of day or one of my future favourite mods. With the mod being seemingly finished with a release date of September 23rd it looks like it will be a future favourite.

They got both spaceship and indoor/FPS battles which seem to take place in the same map. Pretty cool. I'm definitly looking forward to this.

OmegaSlayer is working on that mod. It does look nifty, thanks for bringing the impending release to my attention.

---

o

:biggrin:

Yup Im a mapper on their team. Although none of my work is going to be
in the initial release, you can see my stuff in the near future. It was
a sad fact Ive had to cope with. The fact is we spread our resources
too thin (our 3 modelers) over 3 maps, so it was decided to just pour
efforts into one "senario" map. They showed it to valve and they said:
"Why hasn't this been released yet?". They reply was: "We dunno." (I
wasnt actually there).

Heres the break down:

before sat 23: we release the server clients to people who want to host ES games (at least I think we are)

sat. 23: 12:00pm (eastern time) we release the mod

sat. 23: 1:00 pm we release the patch to fix problems people encounter

sat. 23: 8:00 pm we all hang around in the irc channel getting dead drunk in celebration.

I can tell you from watching the beta develope its pretty fun, and the space to inner-cap ships is seemless!

Edit: also watch the steam news!

---

Posting And You

"sat. 23: 1:00 pm we release the patch to fix problems people encounter"

wow, fast :biggrin:

omegaslayer, this is a great project. I think your team can be very proud of it from looking at the things I've seen in the trailer/screens/info pages ect.

I haven't seen a game yet that has a seemless transition between space and ground battels in this scale.

That's looking really good! I like the ingame screenshot of Aethera, the one of the core looking area.

"sat. 23: 1:00 pm we release the patch to fix problems people encounter"

wow, fast :biggrin:

omegaslayer,
this is a great project. I think your team can be very proud of it from
looking at the things I've seen in the trailer/screens/info pages ect.

I haven't seen a game yet that has a seemless transition between space and ground battels in this scale.

It was really meant as a joke seeing as how a lot of mods are subject
to bugs on an inital release within the first 12 hours! But in a
literal sense a patch WILL have to be released to fix bugs that we
didnt find if not within the first hour then within the first 3

_>.

*sudders at the thought of you guys getting p_Attacker asserts while
blasting people to oblivion* (but this was taken care of long ago if
any ES team members are reading this)

I can't take too much credit however, I don't have anythign to show in
the initial release, but hopefully things will get picked back up on my
maps (Im managing 2 right now).

Show your thanks at the web site. I immagine the site will get over
100+ new members on the forums on the release date of people
complamenting us, reporting bugs.

---

Posting And You

I've been watching this one for a long long time. :biggrin: I've also shared
that "Why hasn't this been released yet?"-line of thought. But I'm damn
glad that the mod has survived without dying out, like quite many mods
that have really long developement cycles before the initial release.
I'll definedly be eating you bandwidth on saturday. :razz:

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

Holy awesome, this could well be the best mod for any game ever.

---

"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

i agree with Mr. Wil5on and all of the above

hooray for OS and the team

Anyone fire up steam and see the news? Apparently we are a "Big" mod
(really at a given week only about 6 of us were actually working on it)

---

Posting And You

I've been downloading it for about 15 minutes now. :razz: And I just woke
up. 33 minutes to go. :smile: Good download rates(58kBps steadily).

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

Im donwloading it as we speak as well. Im afraid the version I keep
updated (Through a program) is very different than the actual release

_>

---

Posting And You

You aren't likely to get many bug fixes implemented in 3 hours man. I guess you could perhaps get a few map fixes in, but I'd be wary about rushing out a patch for anything but the most major of issues - doesn't allow a lot of time for proper testing!

---

[img]http://card.mygamercard.net/sig/Default/reno84.png[/img]
Designer @ Haiku Interactive | ReNo-vation.net

A lot of the art looks unpolished, but hey, who cares - you've got a playable version, which is more than most mods can muster. I'm looking forward to this. :smile:

I wouldn't call it playable. The space combat is a lagfest where
everyone has a rubberband tied to their arses. Also the supposed
carbine is burst firing rifle, although I though that carbines were
meant for rabid indoors firefights were fully automatic fire triumphs.
I wasn't surprised to see that no one used it(I played several games
for four hours today). Also servers kept crashing like no tomorrow... I
remember someone saying that these guys weren't going to do
"Empires"(extremely laggy first release), but it seems that they did
after all... Oh and the pistol is far more effective weapon than the
hackers smg. :biggrin: And the portals(hangar entries)... One would assume
that when you shoot inside them your bullets/laser fire would enter
through them(you can see people running around inside), but nope it
stops in mid air. Also you can't fire indoors with the ships for some
odd reason and the scoreboard messes up half of the time you're flying
a ship. :smile: I was ready for some lag issues, but this was way more than
I was expecting... Also this first release seemed a bit thin. Just one
map and no own vehicles for the other team.

I think I'll wait for the first patch before I play again. Lots of potential though...

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

The only annoying thing I ran into was trying to control the space ships with a mouse. Holy God! What a pain in the ass. It feels very polished though, the server I joined was just a bit on the dead side. But it ran well and looked great ... so. But I only played it for a few minutes.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Ohh yeah lag was terrible last night (anything over 6 players gets
laggy). But a lot of mods are subject to that. But I can assure that
with subsiqunet releases it will slowly go away (the coders spent about
3 weeks on predictions).

The code is actually pretty solid in terms of basics. I can recall in
alpha stages pne would get constant P_Attacker asserts off the nose.

And I can agree that the art isnt "very" polished, but when working
with 3 modelers (only 2 of whom knew how to do UV maps) you cant expect
much. Even with the lead artist leaving (RaZ) for a short time. Even
the lead mapper learned how to map 3 years ago, and he didnt come into
the game with very much knowlege.

Still I'm actually quite happy that it was finally just released and got it
out there. A lot of the team members were getting pretty worried that
if something didn't get released then it wouldnt get released at all.

Heres to the future cheers

Edit: to crono's post:

Yeah the controls were a hard thing to get down, as you can see we had
to throw out the regular keybindings tab in the options and throw in a
dual key binding set up in order to set up the mod with a
joystick/mouse set up.

---

Posting And You

I have to disagree with Pvt.Scythe, the mod made a surprisingly solid impression to me! This is definately what I expect from a first beta!

The ship controls with the mouse are easier to manage if you inverse the y-axis. (and it took me a while to figure it out!

This would be my only complaint: The lack of a proper manual! I couldn't find one. Maybe it's there but I guess most people spend even less time searching for one...

reaper47 said:
I have to disagree with Pvt.Scythe, the mod made a surprisingly solid impression to me! This is definately what I expect from a first beta!

The ship controls with the mouse are easier to manage if you inverse the y-axis. (and it took me a while to figure it out!

This would be my only complaint: The lack of a proper manual! I couldn't find one. Maybe it's there but I guess most people spend even less time searching for one...

idd it's quite nice. lag depends on the server imo, i played on one which had no lag at all. i'm personally not a fan of space shooters, but i like the indoor part, reminds me of parox in a dm way.

gj!

---

These words are my diaries screaming out loud

couldnt load it for some reason....but im on the case... :heee:

"Engine Error"

"could not load client library"

any ideas lads?

Doc B... :dodgy:

I think you get that error when the client.dll and/or server.dll files under mod/bin/ are missing. There is also a custom shader file made for it, so you might be missing that.

I could send them to you if the mod people have no problem with that. Two of the files are over 10MB though.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

ok, cool crones....i appreciate it.....ill pm ya.....it still begs the question though, why would it miss/not set them unless there was an installer problem....? or am i missing something?

Doc B... :dodgy:

Anything could happen, this isn't a guaranteed solution. I just read somewhere where someone had the same issue with hl2. The solution was to replace those files. It's worth a shot, in any case and I can't find any documentation on the error at steampowered.com

You'd think every possible error message would be covered there. Or even in a help file.

---

Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

You need to download the source SDK base (if you havent already). This
way you don't have to pay for HL2 to play the mod (or any mod thats
released in the future). Hope that helps.

---

Posting And You

Well, I just played for a while, and its damn good for a first release. Space combat definitely needs tweaking, and the hangars are pretty hard to land in (and every time I made it in I got mowed down before I could capture anything past the hangar) but I can see this being a great mod. Good to see mods like this being released these days.

---

"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher

You need to download the source SDK base (if you havent already). This
way you don't have to pay for HL2 to play the mod (or any mod thats
released in the future). Hope that helps.

So does this mean that you can play mods with only HL2DM or CS:S installed/bought in the future?

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

So does this mean that you can play mods with only HL2DM or CS:S installed/bought in the future?

Umm no (maybe its just your wording) you don't even need CSS or HL2DM
(although they both come with the purchace of HL2). But all mods from
now on are suppost to use source SDK base as the aplication launcher
(SteamAppId 215). And since Source SDK base of FREE (as in you don't
need to pay to get it), people who havent purchaed HL2 or CSS or DoD
dont need to anymore, they can just download the mod and Source SDK
base and you can play the mod.

You can thank Valve for this.

---

Posting And You

Does that mean you can make a mod that anyone can download, even if he hasn't bought any valve game?

Thats exactly what it means.

---

Posting And You

Or is it?

Yes, yes it is.

Honestly, this is quite... exceptional.

Truly... But then think of the amount of new Steam users after the word
of this spreads out. Valve is just increasing their market area by
using other peoples work as a carrot. I see nothing wrong in this as
mods have always been a carrot. A carrot that gets more people buy one
game. Now Valve has just turned this carrot into a supercarrot that
increases sales for all Steam distributed games(by introducing more
people into Steam).

It's a WIN-WIN situation for all. Modders get more players for their
mod(and publicity, which helps those who want a job in the industry)
and players get games for free and Valve gets more potential customers
from those players.

---

''Everyone wades in s**t until they're competent enough to walk on it. Jesus style.''
Dystopia - Empires

Really? This is probably the best thing yet to come out of Steam.

---

"If you talk at all during this lesson, you have detention. Do you understand?"

• My yr11 Economics teacher