Project announcement: Zero-Projekt

C

chewie

Look, Ma! Two Heads!
Hi @all :)

As some may already know, there is a project out there, which is called "Zero-Projekt". We are one of the first games which are using FIFE as engine.

In the past, we only handed out some press releases to the admins of NMA. Now our project is stable enough to get his own thread in this community. :lol:

You can find most of the information about our project on our homepage. (The link points to the english version)

Here comes our new press release:

Update: The first location and current progress

Europe is preparing for autumn and the members of Zero-Project are returning from their holidays. That´s why we are glad to report that we have made some new progress. Here comes a short overview and some new graphics:

Location "The Spider´s nest"

Currently, the team is about to work out the details of the project´s first location. We are working on artworks, 3D-renders, NPCs, quests and so on.

The location is called "The Spider´s nest" and is descripted as follows:


The Spider´s nest is a city of looters. The settlement has its name because of its construction. The whole place is looking like a web of a spider due to the steel cables which hold the citys platform. These cables are attached to the surrounding skyscapers. Building the city this way, the inhabitants wanted to protect themself from mutants and other dangers of the wasteland. The location is situated in a former metropolis of Germany.
Click to expand...



Artwork - Spider´s nest​


Artwork - Ghoul

Render - Pylon for the entry platform

New music

Fluxx has made a new track which can be found in the download section of our page. Of course, you can discuss the track in our forum. (The thread is linked in the files section)

[..]
the deep dejection and the mourning which is meant to be expressed by this track is
perfect to describe the atmosphere of the wasteland. It is a symbolical description of the destruction, the omnipresent death and the preposterous attitude of a post-nuclear world.[..]
Click to expand...

Internal tools

The scripting team is tinkering with some tools for the project. Currently we are working on a content management system. With this tool, the team will be able to organise their stuff and control different versions of the content.

Another tool in the pipeline is our DQL (Dynamic Quest Library). ATM it is only a draft, you can read some lines about it at the FIFE-wiki. When finished it is meant to help us with the integration of our content in FIFE. Therefore we are planning to export MySQL data into Sqlite. Sqlite then can provide this data with LUA, to get the ingame scripts running. Of course, this tool has a heavy dependence on FIFEs scripting API.

We are using both PHP and MySQL to create these tools.

Other artwork


Artwork of a wrecked aeroplane

Regards,
the Zero-Projekt-Team

edit: fixed urls​
 
Update: Building a RPG

It has been a while since the team released its last news on the progress of Zero-Projekt. This time, we will talk about some information on the ruleset, some pieces of the story and the gameplay. (Prepare yourself for a huge amount of text ;-) )

Story - the introduction

The day of the apocalypse. The day when more then a half of mankind died within the great war. No one knows single details about this day. And no one remembers who started it or why this war took place at all. Today, there are of course, more important things to care about. The survivors have to take the best out of the new situation and fight the new threats which arrived some years after the bombs.

Only the ancients know about the wonderful days where noone had to fight for his food and his water. And only they know that before the war not each single human had to resist against murder, violence and despair day-to-day.

Okay, now I am outside in the wasteland. I can watch the wads of smoke in the distance while I am sweeping the cryptical tattoo on my forearm. On my own and without a memory about what or who I am. The words of this damn computer are banging through my head - but I have no clue what they stand for. "fatal error. fragmentary memory. G7WWC, how are you?" I´ve searched for hints all over the place but I didn´t find any. The whole complex can´t tell me why I am here. The only things I´ve found are some logs about a huge war - and a second capsule. It is similar to the one where I woke up. There were signs that it has been opened shortly before I woke up. So I can´t be the only one who left the building. Walking through the entrance was no big deal - at least for me. All the dead bodies there showed me that the guntowers normally prevent everybody from passing this way. Lucky me, they seem to be disabled - for now.

Now I am outside in the wasteland - in an unsociable and hostile world. Thats for sure. Thats what the logs told me. But I have to go out there. To find answers, to find myself.
Click to expand...

zero-projekt-wachroboter.jpg


The Gameplay:

While playing the game, your actions will directly or indirectly influence the main quest and its ending. But the wasteland can be changed by your behavior and your decisions, too.

You will meet interesting characters and small groups which all have their own story to tell - and you will be confronted with 5 big fractions. They are fighting each other with different motivations for the dominance on the wasteland. It is up to you to identify yourself with their aims - and it is your choice whom you want to help. Your inteference could be things like helping them in fights, supporting them with equipment, resources and so on. Whatever you do - they will notice it, and you´ll be able to have your benefit, too. That´s why we developed the Domination Point System (DP). The fractions will gain or loose DPs for each quest you´ll fullfil for them. At the end, you can watch one getting more powerful than the others - with all the consequences. (Yeah - buzzword)

Another big difference to other RPGs in this genre: We won´t provide money but a special barter system. To simulate an authentic wasteland, we will establish a system of supply and demand. You may call it "Barter to its best" - because from our point of view, that´s what the people in the wasteland would do. They will trade for needed goods instead of creating a new monetary system. The value of the traded goods depend on their availability within the location where you want to trade. And you´ll be able to influence the prices. As an example - if you help one fraction to craft their own ammunition, they have a bigger supply on that type of item - which you then have to pay less for. But on the other hand, you have to pay more for the resources which are needed to craft ammunition.



Crafting:

As you may already have guessed, there will be the possibility for crafting within Zero. We talked about ammunition already, so let´s go further to the items. You can build your own equipment - or you can improve it. To do so, you´ll have to skill your character in the available disciplines. But there are also some nice NPCs out there, who will show you certain tricks about crafting. So you´ll not always have to wait for the next level-up. Resources and material for the crafting can be found in the wasteland. Of course, you also can barter for them - or receive them as a reward for finishing quests.

Ah, and tell you what: If some of you remember Arcanum (a really great game, too) - don´t panic. You won´t have to carry all the bits and pieces on your own. You will get a "little helper" for this issue.


The Ruleset:

Truly the most important thing an RPG has to have. As you may know, Fallout is our archetype when developing Zero. But we also discovered some things we didn´t like in Fallout. We decided to tweak some things when creating our own ruleset.

Let´s look on a detail to explain our plan:

One problem with SPECIAL was, that some mainstats were more important than others. IN was one of them. If you raised it, you gained more skillpoints for each level-up. Doing so, you could develop your combat skills better then a "real warrior" (stereotype: "dump but strong") could do.

Our little workaround for problems like this will be: Skillgroups. Two attributes will provide a certain amount of skillpoints in the corresponding skillgroup - but they won´t affect another. So if we take the skillgroup "science", there are the attributes IN and PE which are the base to calculate your additional skillpoints for each level-up. Ah yes, and this won´t lead to predefined classes - we only want you to have the possibility to create more individiual characters.

Another big change will come to the skillchecks when you adopt your skills. We won´t make them random like in Fallout did. You character will be successful when using a skill - or not. As an example: If lockpick is high enough to open a door, your character will have no problems. Vice versa, you can´t cheat by quicksave / quickload the game. It is quite annoying that a well educated thief will fail in his highest skill while a lucky newbie to this discipline gets all the cash. At least we don´t like that.

So the way you develop your character and send him out in the wasteland (Choice), he will be able to do certain actions - or not. (Consequence)

Regards,
the Zero-Projekt Team

edit: fixed urls
 
The armory of Zero-Projekt

Again, we have a little update for you. To be honest, we had some delay with our last post about the story. (At least the problem was the translation ^^)

So the following screenshots shows you the work of the last two weeks. Most of the weapons were created in this time. The Talking-Head is still WIP.



(1280x1024 - klick to enlarge the picture)

Some weapons the picture shows:
- a Flamethrower
- a Microwavegun
- a 4-barreled Pistol
- some melee weapons
- a Minigun
- a MG-42
- a FG-42
- a Laserrifle

(Names are just WIP, so there could be changes in the future)





Let us know what you think about them :)

Regards,
the Zero-Projekt team
 
New Pictures & new screencapture from Zero

Sorry Demonslayer & Corpse - I was very busy in the last months. Please appologize for not answering your posts :?

@Demonslayer

No, Zero won´t have to do anything with Fallout 1 or 2 (or 3 .. ;-) ). That basically means, we don´t use any graphics from the FO-series. But we create a post-nuclear world - so it will be up to your decision, if Zero joins Fallout in some ways or not. :)

@Corpse

Thanks for your offer dude :) MvBarracuda showed us your soundpacks - and I love them :). I´ll let you know if we decide to use them :)
(up to know, we can´t use them in FIFE - as soon as this works, I´ll start testing)

New Pictures & new screencapture from Zero

Hi @all :)

In the last few weeks, we worked on FIFE 2007.0-r1 and did some tests with some new features. There is an article about our conclusion in our forum, but only in german. I´ll try to correct that within the next days.

In short, we worked on the now better supported XML-maps and created some nicer tiles with smooth transitions. And we created some advanced GUI-elements with the standard widgets. (e. g. we realized the log from FO1 and FO2)

Our gfx-team successfully played arround with Blender and found the correct values for the camera, so that we now can render our graphics in isometric view.

Last but not least, we made a small video to show you "Zero in action". The quality of the video could be better, we´ll try to fix that for later presentations.

But let´s stop talking - here are the pictures:


Test of a new, dynamic GUI (WIP)


Early version of our comat simulator (WIP)


A very large object in iso-view (WIP)


A proove-of-concept for the main menu (WIP)


Screencapturing: Zero in one minute (~8 MB | ogg theora)

Regards,
the Zero-Projekt-Team

edit: fixed urls
 
Light and shadow

There have been no signs of activities on our homepage since we moved to our new server on zero-projekt.net. We want to change this and prove that we´re still working on Zero Projekt. So here are the news with some new media and information about changes in the team.

Unfortunately, our artist Xerxes left the project to concentrate on a commercial project. Shadowrunner, our project leader went inactive for a while, too. Nevertheless we´re making good progress.

Besides the work on our story and gameplay (which we can´t visualize with FIFE yet) we are creating our first tilesets, exporting our 3D modells to isometric view and designing the first maps. We compiled some screenshots which show some of our progress.

Our musician Fluxx created again one nice track, you can grab it here:
Fluxx - spoiled concrete [Ambient Version]

As an extra we show you one of our items - the geiger counter:

geigerzaehler.png

(bigger version)


Screenshots

1280x_zero_village1.jpg

(bigger version)

1280x_zero_village2.jpg

(bigger version)

1280x_zero_village3.jpg

(bigger version)

1280x_zero_village4.jpg

(bigger version)

Cheers,
the Zero-Projekt Team
 
Chewie, I see you have at least a character sprite. Is it fully functional? Is it a placeholder or was it made by your team? if so, which tool did you use? The details, out with the details...
 
@sirren67

Heh.. this is our heigh-dummy. It was "made" by our team with makehuman / blender. (you see, no great deal)

It is not functional yet - we work on this when the first revision of FIFE have a more andvanced animation support. Currently you can only repeat a single animation, like our burning barrel on screenshot #1 or our windmill (not on this map).

cheers,
chewie
 
Thanks Chewie. I thought it was a Poser model becouse of the clothing style...
I didn't think about MakeHuman, even if I use it. Nice little application.
I hope MVbarracuda and his crew will implement a better animation support than the one implemented in the original Fallout engine...
Good luck with Zero-Projekt, and keep up with the good job.
 
Sirren67 said:
I hope MVbarracuda and his crew will implement a better animation support than the one implemented in the original Fallout engine...
Good luck with Zero-Projekt, and keep up with the good job.
Click to expand...
Planned for 2007.2 :-)

The only issue is that there is no set release date for this milestone, though 4-6 months sounds reasonable.
 
Hi MVB. As far as I could understand your engine is already "productive", even if not for complete RPGs. What about a dialogue function?
 
@Sirren67

I´m working on this already - there is a solution with a sqlite binding. This system is independent from FIFE as it only needs lua.
 
O.k. I'm not part of the team, but...
Just simple tile making for a whole game is a pain... And the guys are making new graphics for a new whole game...
In order to plan new graphics you need to plan how locations will look... Which means you already decided how the story will develop through the game... Which means you already developed at least the main characters...
In short there's a lot you can do before the engine is complete. See you.
 
Sirren67 said:
Hi MVB. As far as I could understand your engine is already "productive", even if not for complete RPGs. What about a dialogue function?
Click to expand...
Ahh well, the best starting point for this is our roadmap:
https://mirror1.cvsdude.com/trac/fife/engine/roadmap/

The 2007.2 release is already quite bloated with features that we want to get done for it so it's unlikely to me that a dialogue system will ship with this release. 2007.3 sounds more reasonable for this; especially as the dialogue system will heavily depend on the script handling / scripting API.

As chewie already mentioned, there is the possibility of using a custom dialogue system. While I think this is great as an option, it doesn't replace a fully compatible and easy to use dialogue system that ships with FIFE. This is just my personal opinion because there are also developers on the team who think that a custom system that is implemented by the developers of the mod would be a sufficent solution.

So there are basically two major options:
a) Wait for an official dialogue solution that ships with FIFE (should be included in the 2007.3 release, though just a personal guess)
b) Have a look into chewie's custom dialogue solution based on sqlite and Lua.

My personal decision would be to wait till this feature is supported officially by FIFE and work on other aspects of the mod in the meanwhile. However it's completely up to you; I didn't test the custom solution to an extend where I could say if it delivers satisfying results. However I think that FIFE is not really ready for a good dialogue system from the GUI perspective, as we plan some GUI changes for the next weeks and months. Though all of this will heavily depend on if we decide to use the engine GUI library for our planned editor or if we go for a different 3rd party library for it.

So I can't guarantee much ATM, but I can surely report back about the recent progress made in some week and keep you up to date about the subject Sirren :-) (if you like).
 
dagorkan said:
How can you be making a mod with FIFE when FIFE isn't complete?
Click to expand...

Sirren67 already pointed out some stuff which enables us to develop a game with FIFE. Before you can start making gfx, you´ll have to know what you need - so the setting, story and gameplay part are the most developed ones of Zero.

Another reason is that we adjust our roadmap to FIFEs one. As an example we´re not creating animated chars before FIFE is capable to support them with an advanced animation format. Or we don´t render videos before FIFE has support for video .. and so on.

We concentrate just on the present features, and help FIFE to improve them with our "modders" point of view.

In fact, Zero-Projekt isn´t really a mod but a whole new game.

@barra

I´d change b) to this:

b) Have a look into skybounds custom dialogue based on sqlite and lua ^^

I´m, only the guinea pig.. :lol:

@Sirren67
There is a demo in content/scripts/demos - but you´ll have to setup the luabinding on your own before you can use it.

Mmh.. perhaps we can improve this demo a bit... I´ll try to work on this when I have some spare time.

cheers,
chewie
 
Hi folks.
MVBarracuda, I'd like to get updates about the dialogue scripting system. I'm not planning about a FIFE port of my mod, but I'm keeping an eye open on your engine project.
Actually I'm still struggling to complete Fall '76, my project isn't dead yet. I also have no real plans/projects about what I'm going to do after this mod. The only thing I know is: if it's a game/mod, then FIFE will be the engine of choice. See you.
 
chewie said:
@barra

I´d change b) to this:

b) Have a look into skybounds custom dialogue based on sqlite and lua ^^

I´m, only the guinea pig.. :lol:
Click to expand...
Ahh sorry, I didn't want to put it that way :-/

But you're fully correct: sky0 developed this system and I didn't plan to not give him full credit for it :-)
 
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