Orb

by sinsky on 12/24/2004 06:21, 10 messages, last message: 12/31/2004 19:09, 1659 views, last view: 04/30/2024 12:29

Some of you may see this as a Cube mod, personally I prefer to think of it as a separate singleplayer game. The purpose of this preface is to introduce this mod/game to the Cube community, and answer any general questions you may have.

I don't want to break any mapper hearts, but in case there are people here who make Orb maps and want to see them on the Orb site, I'll make a patch installation for the 2004 version which will be released one year from now. Take your time. Basic criteria for inclusion in such project are small file size and diversity. No matter how wonderful your work is, it must not contain custom textures, music, etc., and no matter how ugly, if I see something about it I like, I will include it. Please don't get mad at me, it's just my decision. You can actually distribute the whole game with your work independently, even merge them.

Orb media can be distributed commercially. This doesn't mean you can't get into trouble if you try to make money with this software, it only means that I will not be the source of such trouble. As a man who does not understand the Law very well, I have made the following arrangement (see license) in hope that it is.. compatible with your laws - to make money with Orb, extend it. Don't try to sell the game exactly the way you received it from me. Personalize it, do whatever it takes to make it attractive to customers, but keep relevant copyright information intact. In other words - just try to stay out of trouble, I hope you don't need me to explain how to do this (I'm not very good at it myself:)

The Orb site is at http://www.orbhome.com . If you don't have Windows, you will need Windows emulation or a PC with Windows installed to start the installation. If there are any nerds around here unhappy with this procedure I'd like to announce that the installation program does not add anything to the registry, there are no hidden files, spyware, etc., it will not screw up your PC, it will not try to blow up your washing machine or shoot your cat. Game sources were compiled with MinGW and are compatible with GCC and to some extent with the .net SDK 2.0.

I don't know what happens next, if everything goes smooth the orbhome on the web will be active until the end of 2005. Then it will either die or reemerge for another year with a new release, which is my intention.

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#1: ..

by hampus on 12/24/2004 10:38

hard game...

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#2: wow, nice

by Jcdpc Mozilla_is_teh_cookie_monster on 12/24/2004 15:44

I looks really good. It is pretty hard, and i cant really figure out what im doing, but it looks so nice that wondering around aimlessly is a lot of fun.

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#3: Wow :D

by jean pierre on 12/24/2004 15:58

How did you compiled it what program you used and how did you compiled it(i want to know :D)

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#4: ..

by sinsky on 12/24/2004 16:49

Well hope you guys have fun.

jean pierre: I used Dev-Cpp, install it, open orb.dev, click Compile.

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#5: ..

by tentus on 12/30/2004 04:08

it's funny how it's the exact opposite of death illustrated. shows the diversity the cube engine can support.

beautiful game sinsky, i love how small the download is too. i haven't figured out how to play yet, but in time... :) again, beautiful

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#6: Re: ..

by sinsky on 12/30/2004 15:41, refers to #5

Thank you. I didn't intend the game to be hard in a bad let's-waste-some-time way but many people may get stuck. I don't know what to do about it, should I write a solution? It sure pushes Cube but the large map will run slow on low-end systems and the small introductory one is not very challenging. Also Aard keeps making notes about using small lights, when I showed him a preview of the game some time ago he told me just that but I wouldn't listen. So it looks nice if you keep moving.. but many Cube guys like to stand somewhere and gaze, especially at the lights, and they won't be very pleased. Death Illustrated does not have such problems. I haven't tried making maps for it but I think it's very hard to make a wrong move there. If I knew how to do it, I would have made some black-and-white episode in Orb too (with the respective trigger that enables and disables it). Or have one of the powerups make that effect. Actually what triggers it is not very important now that I come to think about it. The thing that would look really nice is slow transition between color and grayscale.

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#7: DI Lighting

by pushplay on 12/30/2004 20:40

Lighting in DI was incredibly easy, you just fall back-asswards into something that looked pretty decent. I think it was because of the amount of white in the textures. It brought out the subtlety in the Cube lighting.

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#8: Re: DI Lighting

by sinsky on 12/30/2004 23:46, refers to #7

I'm not sure but also noisy textures are less subtle and mixing other lights with cyan produces better results in certain cases. But I may be wrong about that, some, or all of it.

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#9: ..

by tentus on 12/31/2004 03:55

death illustrated didn't actually have some output code making it black and white- just every texture used was black and white. you'ld have to write something new and cool to do that with rgb textures
(actually, that'd be an awesome little way of doing visors, like in metroid prime. perhaps make something that would make cubes and mapmodels (but not enemies) b/w?)

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#10: Re: ..

by sinsky on 12/31/2004 19:09, refers to #9

Orb is mostly design work, not much coding in there.. but I'll see what I can do ;)

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