I've posted about it before in a number of threads, they've now got their engine and tools sorted.
This is the twitch FPS some of us have been waiting for. It very obviously comes from Q3 players, down to the point where they've recreated some of those maps. Engine itself looks great, albeit with a few too many shiny things in the promotional video. Dedicated servers, replays, a "Defrag" mode and such are all part of the plan.
The effects are obviously dialed up to 11 to draw people in. They've shown other videos with varying degrees of effects. I don't doubt that you can turn them up or down as much as you like.
Update #5 Pulling the plug on Kickstarter (but not Reflex)
So as even our most optimistic fans are starting to realize, our Kickstarter isn't going to hit its target (barring some very wealthy miracles). This update will be entirely dedicated to explaining why we're not upset and why you shouldn't be either.
Right now, Reflex feels good. We think it feels good, pro-gamers think it feels good, new players think it feels good. We've succeeded in capturing the best parts of the arena shooter genre in a new, lean engine. Unfortunately, this is something that's hard to sell through videos and marketing bullet points.
The best way to get people excited about Reflex has always been to give them a copy to try for themselves. This has always been the approach we'd prefer to take. We want to grow the game alongside the community, we want to watch people's twitch streams, play their maps, download their frag films and jump on their servers to get our asses handed to us.
So to bring that scene together sooner, we're going to be shutting down the Kickstarter, focusing all of our development towards getting the game ready for Early Access. This work has already started -- that's why we've been a bit quiet the last few days. We've got a little bit more time than usual that we'd set aside for the Kickstarter and we're now cramming as much development into that time as we possibly can.
And we're excited about the change. It's much closer to the approach we've always wanted to take. So why didn't we do it this way in the first place?
Well, Kickstarter was our shot at full-time development with an unrestrained feature list. At least for the short term, Early Access will be a return to developing out of hours which means progress will be much slower. We won't be able to promise release dates and we won't be able to guarantee features without the financial backing we were hoping Kickstarter would bring. But this project page still works as a list of things we want to do (and will do as soon as we have the resources).
If you've pledged and are sad because you wanted shirts and custom melee weapons, we will be looking at ways for players to still get their hands on some of the rewards (with all proceeds going directly to continued development). Keep an eye on ReflexFPS.net / Facebook / Twitter / Greenlight for more info about that over the next few months.
So when can you grab a copy and start playing? Soon! We're currently spending every minute we have working through a todo list that is focused entirely on getting the game in players hands. We can't give any dates just yet but the game will be made available the moment we've squashed enough bugs and implemented enough features for it to be considered properly playable.
In the end, we don't regret hitting Kickstarter at all, regardless of the outcome. The support and excitement of the community has been incredible. We've seen Reflex on all our favourite gaming sites. We've made new connections with people in the industry. We raised a not-insignificant amount of money (even if we never get to see it) and of course we've learned that we're much better at making games than at marketing games .
We'd also like to thank everyone who helped get us this far: Our friends and families for sticking around when all our time was going into Reflex. Sonigo / Beckoning for giving us a whole stack of music to use for our videos. Everyone from our little pool of testers. Vo0, KovaaK, empish, the ZLive team and everyone else who has been streaming. Mew for performing all of the trickjumps that I couldn't. Everyone in #reflex for the crowd-sourced spell checking. Entik for his amazing work on our Kickstarter trailer. Our secret concept artist for bringing my design ramblings to life. Jas Purewal for the free legal advice when we had no money left. Ninemil and Fjoggs for pushing our editing tools to their current limits. All the press who decided to cover Reflex despite getting hundreds of "Our game is on Kickstarter" emails a week.
And of course, everyone who pledged, retweeted, liked, favorited, shared and spammed Reflex stuff -- we look forward to seeing you all in-game soon.
“Early access allows us to work with the community while we are developing the game. It allows players to begin making maps, host their own competitions and make frag films while assisting with development costs.”
How long will this game be in Early Access?
“Reflex will remain in early access as long as it takes to bring the game up to the standard both we and the community expect.”
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
“We will be actively updating the early access version right up until the full version ships.”
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
“The current version is very much a prototype. We have a start on solid feeling gameplay, and a proof of concept shown. The game is fully playable in multiplayer, has a multiplayer map editor, replay editor, ffa/duel/tdm gamemodes.
We don't yet have customizations, bots, stats, matchmaking, multiview, CTF/arena/other gamemodes and training.”
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
“Yet to be decided.”
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“We'll be listening to all feedback given by the community to tweak gameplay, add features, and squash bugs. We'll be involving the community in the map development process, we'll be prioritising features based on community demand.”
The effects are obviously dialed up to 11 to draw people in. They've shown other videos with varying degrees of effects. I don't doubt that you can turn them up or down as much as you like.
turn everything down down down, until it looks like you are running in a cardboard box shooting lines. SO PRO!!!
Yeah, you totally play this type of game for the graphics
Anyway, tried it out last night, it feels good. The RL seems a little bit too strong compared to the other weapons, but other than that it has a very Quake-y feel. And the map editor rocks.
The dev sent some keys yesterday. It´s really good, both visually and control-wise. Feels more like OSP that CPMA -the dev stated it was inspired by CPMA- but I like OSP better nonetheless.
There´s lots of placeholders and the only weapon with a proper model is the rocket launcher, but it´s shaping up good
I bought this a couple of days ago and it's been the only game I have been playing since then, apart a dota game here and there.
Even if it's quite raw (no UI so you have to set your keybinds or graphical options via cfg - which is not as bad as it sounds, temporary textures), it looks very promising and I am quite enthusiastic for how smooth it plays .
Last update changed the netcode around and you can really tell by the way hits register while the next one is gonna be UI-centric.
A new patch has been released earlier this week which notably lowers the DX requirements of the game to DX10 and add several granular settings to tweak graphics and performance. It looks more and more promising!
Quote:
0.31.0
Server
Re-wrote server front-end to use windows forms instead of raw console. This should actually reduce CPU loads.
Fixed a bug where the servers Steam information was being updated far more often than it needed to be. This fix should also reduce CPU loads.
When using "callvote map", the returned map list is broken into multiple lines so you can actually read it.
Cleaned up failed to connect messages on both server & client
Fixed bug where clients could get stuck in lag state indefinitely on map change. (always connecting)
Added sv_startmode command
Added server commands "mode", "kick", "remove". This can be used from the server console instead of requiring a vote.
Added callvote "kick", "remove"
Client
Reduced required DirectX version to 10.0
Input is now sent to the server at 75fps (down from 125fps). This should lower the CPU load for dedicated servers with no noticable impact for players (the server only ticks at 75fps anyway so the extra data was largely wasted).
Lightmap format has changed. We now store an extra colour for low end machines, instead of the expensive per-pixel lightmap information. Sorry mappers, this means you need to rebuild.
Ridiculous amounts of graphics optimisations (shadows, zprime, decals, gbuffer format, shader optimisation, normal blending). Players should see significant FPS increases across all video configs.
Created micro/macro texture architecture, giving us more detail, more customization and using less GPU.
Added Image-Based Lighting and removed previous broken reflection pipeline
Added offline DXT1/DXT5/BC6/BC7 texture packer & compressor
Added configs for different video modes. Until we've done our options menu, the easiest way to change video settings is to bring down the console, type "loadconfig vid_X" and then "saveconfig" to store the changes. Graphics presets are:
vid_high
vid_medium
vid_low
vid_hi_vis
Added lots of cvars to scale graphics for different hardware. Generally, 2 is highest quality, 0 is lowest quality.
r_shader_quality <0-2>
r_texture_quality <0-2>
r_effect_quality <0-2>
r_shadow_quality <0-2>
r_texture_resolution <0-2>
r_texture_microdetails <0-1>
r_high_vis <0-1>
Re-did every single material for the new macro/micro material system. Fun times.
Reduced the amount of maps we ship with (rebuilding and reuploading all the lightmaps is tedious and our internet sucks)
Updated lava shader to something prettier
Loading bar is now orange for no reason
0.31.1
Removed bloom from vid_low.cfg
Fixed gamma on micro material tints
Restored energy conservation on IBL pass
Fixed crash bug where r_effect_quality would cause a crash by deleting physics objects while engine is running asynchronously
Fixed jerkiness! Buffered input that had not yet been put into network layer was not being applied on client-side prediction. This was in .30 too, but way more noticeable in .31 when we lowered max outgoing packet rate to 75hz.
Fixed bug where input was getting dropped ( ) at certain frame overlaps between outgoing packet rates & client frame rate (this affected subframe too)
Pickup touch and pickup respawn effects have been optimised to be lighter on GPU
Developer materials have been rebalanced (and are slightly more shiny).
Light_spot_small intensity reduced to be more usable with the new pipeline.
0.31.2
Increased max shadow count from 128 to 256
Reduced shadow near clip from 16 to 2
Lag & traffic meter now resets on server join
Fixed (again) bug where outgoing packets wouldn't always be clamped to 75/second
Adjusted lightmap gain settings to rebalance light closer to 0.30 levels.
Added point sampler
Fixed sampler in macro texture for meta texture (filtering issues)
Fixed bug where objects were not getting lit by probes correctly in r_shader_quality 2
Lowered intensity of all placeholder guns
Reduced gloss default texture (again)
Adjusted lift_spot_sml intensity to rebalance light closer to 0.30 levels.
Known Issues
Player colors are broken (color0 seems to be multiplying through all colours)
One frame of rocket explosions is green (particularly noticeable when bloom is disabled)
Reports of video driver crashes and occasional freezing of client/server. Consider this a general stability warning -- huge amounts of the engine have been rewritten and we're expecting some bugs.
A new update has been pushed to the game on Steam. It will be on sale (50%) till 20th May.
Quote:
Reflex 0.34 is now live, featuring racing, sun, suicide and the usual slew of bugfixes and tweaks! But more importantly, it also brings the last pieces of our core tech into the game, marking our transition from pre-alpha to alpha! To celebrate, not only have we released a new development update video, we've decided to go 50% off for the next week.
General:
Added Race gamemode (callvote mode race)
Added "suicide" command.
Added sunlight (can be toggled on/off with the r_sun command or through the options menu)
The menu replay has returned!
Map Editing
Added me_createtype RaceStart / RaceFinish (only visible in race mode)
Added me_createtype WeaponRestrictor (only allows certain weapons to be used).
Added time of day sky with sun/moon, can be configured in EntityWorldSpawn.
Lightmaps should be rebuilt for the new sky/sun system.
Lua Scripting
Added race events to lua log
Added RaceMessages.lua - displays race start / finish fullscreen notifications
Added RaceRecords.lua - displays list of previous records on left of screen, similar to weapon rack
Added RaceTimer.lua - displays current race time at bottom of screen
AnglesDegress variable is now wrapped to the [0,360) range
Fixed low/max ammo reported to lua for stake launcher.
Added log.id to lua to help distinguish each log entry
Exposed lua vars: player.raceActive, player.raceTimeCurrent, player.raceTimePrevious
Replay editor:
Updated replay editor to work correctly with new netcode.
Fixed issue where player "viewing in first person" wasn't being correctly set on players in replay.
Added replay timecode on screen
Improved re_export command to hides console when it starts.
Fixed camera tracking bugs in replay editor (wasn't reporting correct player to lua script)
Hit sounds ( and effects ), now correctly fire in replay editor.
Art:
Added materials: brick_small and concrete_01
Added material: wood planks
Added material: concrete_bunker_01
Added material: chainlink
Added meshes: railings
Added material: tiles
Added map thinktank
Fixes
Fixed particle shader "green" artifacting
Fixed bug where overlapping triggers caused some triggers to be ignored.
Fixed bug where effects were reading invalid data.
Increased far clip to 8192 (up from 4096)
Prevented some potential buffer corruption around paste operation.
I have been playing it quite a lot lately, preferring it over QL but I guess it's personal preference. I like them both but I give Reflex an edge because of its gameplay being faster paced and the moveset being inspired by CPMA.
It's still a rough game around the edges but you can start seeing its potential (the newly added race mode, the scriptable HUDs, the new meshes/materials) and I would say it is well worth 5€.
Also, here are a couple of concept art drawings they are going to go for the art part of the game (dishonored/bioshock/teslapunk look):
@Ankh are there any ways to extract the music out of this game? Cause I'd love to get my hands on a nice, clean and long version of the track from the last dev update trailer.
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