Just finished and uploaded the 2nd Korax Arena trailer. I like to think that it’s showing definite progress, not only the game but also the movie. This time I’ve had about 30 minutes of raw material recorded before I started editing, and since we agreed with 4th Class (our musician) on which song should be played during the trailer, I went a different way than last time and cut the clips and titles to match the music. I rather like the results, feel free to leave your comments on what you think.

For those who are interested in techie info, I recorded the game with Fraps and encoded it with DivX so that it can be read on other computers. Then I transferred the resulting about 1 GB of files to my Mac where I imported the clips into iMovie HD, this took forever (more than an hour). The resulting project was about 7 GB. Editing and previewing was all real-time, I did the whole cutting and editing in maybe 1-2 hours. Encoding took pretty long, about 20-30 minutes for the highres and 5-10 minutes for the lowres version. This is mostly due to the relatively slow CPU (1.25 GHz G4), but since the parts of the project with my interaction (cutting/arranging/editing) always worked with little to no delays, I don’t complain. Especially if you look at the older Korax’ Heritage trailers from 2001-2003 and see the immense differences in quality and possibilities, that’s what a PC is good for no matter how fast the CPU – unless you buy a $5’000+ video editing application and a similarly priced high-end PC of course… this in extreme contrast to the Mac mini which costs $499 retail and includes iMovie HD which while a consumer app beats the hell out of most so-called “pro” applications on Windows.

I’m happy with the results of the source code for version 1.0 of Korax Arena, everything seems to be working as expected, we already have a beta tester for it now, I have fixed almost all the problems it had and there are a few additions to be done, like a scoreboard and other small things that need to be completed to start revamping the maps for the official release, I’m already working on a new map for DM and another new map for Castle Sweep, they are coming along nicely so far, I hope my next post in this blog to be the announce of the final release, let’s hope it is, heh!

That’s it for now.

I have been working a lot on adding more stuff for the Korax Arena code, I have managed to make scores for Team DM and Castle Sweep modes, which work just fine, also, I added invulnerability when respawning in DM modes, the bots have a really fair behaviour against monsters and players now too, there are some other things I would like to add before releasing the next internal beta test, like a score board for every gameplay mode, that’s all for now.

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I just started the internal testing on Korax Arena version 0.6 (yes, this is the 4th release since the last public beta test) and the new game mode called Castle Sweep, it’s a bit like a classic cooperative game in Heretic or Hexen, in that you have a big map chock full of monsters and you have to kill them all, but you don’t have to do it alone, because it supports the full number of players other game modes (like deathmatch) do, i.e. you can play it with a couple of friends over LAN or spawn a bunch of bots to help you out. It’s quite a fun thing, wading into the horde of gargoyles, centaurs and chaos serpents with a machine gun, with a sword-swinging fighter on your left and a crossbow-shooting elf on your right. 😉