Apocalypse Rising AR: Blast from the past

[moonsense715]

Hello there people of W3D Hub!

 

I think it is time I shared some good old videos of Apocalypse Rising that most of you probably have never seen before or are just really old.

 

Time for a blast from the past!

 

AR awakens

When AR was launched, the developers were really enthusiastic about it and were pushing a development blog every week, containing a load of progress images and sometimes videos. There was not much to show, as the game was just shaping up from scratch, but One Winged Angel always collected enough content for a full blog.

There was a huge fanbase of the game and a lot of people playing Renegade and RA:APB at those times who eagerly commented an average of 30 posts on every update.

 

The first video is the most ancient that I know of, featuring an ancient map that has never seen the day of light probably since that old build:

These were in times when AR was not a standalone game, but a Renegade mod.

Here's another classic from OWA, with his "cheesy voiceover"

 

The first standalone builds

After getting persmission from Electronic Arts to be a standalone game, danpaul88 obviously started whipping up standalone installers for AR. Yes we always had to manually download the installers, in old times we had no launcher to auto-download and update our games!

 

Here is a video that shows how the game looked like in those builds, which features content produced up until 2007 summer (but does not include any old buildings):

You can clearly see that it was still a very early standalone build, with a lot of texure files that were forgotten to be included in it (hence the dozens of white/westwood logo textures everywhere).

 

One Winged Angel has produced a Mirage Tank logic demonstration video at those times too, where you can see half an allied base too, as well as the first version of the War Miner:

AR wins ModDb award

At the end of 2008, AR has won the 3rd place in Player's Choice: Best Indie Game of the year category.

This was the showcase video for it:

(Link to the moddb post)

After the trailer comes another walkthrough video by OWA. Actually we had a few updates since the ModDb trailer here, for example the new V3 Rocket Launcher.

As you can see, we still had no proper base-setup and the list of units was still pretty thin, along with a load of placeholder models and missing textures.

 

Contributing mods

There is a long list of games/mods that contributed to Apocalypse Rising by donating their assets to us.

For example, the Flak Track and the V3 Launcher in the moddb video above came from RA2: Vengeance.

 

Here are a few more assets that we have gotten our hands on, some of them even made it into the internal test builds:

 

Most of these donated assets either got upgraded or have been totally replaced by new models now.

 

 

Old Dune Patrol and Rocky Pass in APB Beta

Did you know that I tested all of the old maps in APB Beta and not in AR? I only had an APB Level Editor at the time when I modelled them (2007-2008), which is the reason of this.

 

 

OMG the white buildings!

It is no secret to people who have been following this game for a long time that AR has not had textured buildings until the internal Beta 1 build came out to testers in 2012 (and it had no buildings in the test builds at all until 2009).

 

One Winged Angel created a developer-commentory video of the Alpha 6 build (2008) with really old buildings:

 

Also, here's an old trailer of the internal Alpha 9 build (2010), featuring new, but still 100% white buildings that burn your eyes out and make you get lost inside (with the exception of the Barracks)!

 

Garrisoning Battle Bunkers

I was playing with Battle Bunkers back in the day in C&C Renegade, without the power of today's scripts in W3D. Basicly they were using keycards to let friendly people in/out, and there were constantly respawning hp/armor powerups at all the windows to keep the garrisoning people alive inside (we can make players not take damage now).

 

Classic AR bugs

You can now take another look at how AR looked like with all the partially complete models and placeholders. This was a motivator video for testers to find bugs that I collected together into a funny compilation to point out they were not reporting them

 

Beta times

With the introduction of the internal test build "Beta 1", the game was finally stable and fun to play. Of course there were balance issues but everything was textured and all the units were implemented into the game.

 

A video from 2012 that Verti60 complied:

 

Currently the game's version is Beta 4 Patch 1. The most recent updates include a move to "a new engine" (improved w3d) that is scripts 5.0 and now all the placeholder weapon rigs from C&C Renegade are gone.

 

 

Release date?!

So you are asking why AR has not been released yet. To be honest, it's not at all far from a public release.

But here are a few things that are holding it back:

• The game lacks proper infantry models (hello character artists?)
• It lacks a level designer person who creates more maps
• The Terror Drone does not function properly
• I need to finish the Allied building interiors

After these are crossed out, the game will be released through the launcher.

 

 

End

Well, that's it for the history lesson.

Tell me what you think about all the sections, and I do also expect current and old devs feeling nostalgic and posting some of their feelings

[GeneralCamo]

Couple other things:

• The deploy mechanic mentioned in the RA2Vengeance videos were based off of an improved version of the Reborn 2003 deploy code. Thankfully we don't need to kick people out now, and we have raytracing code calls to check how high a vehicle is off the ground.
• The game is fun to play, except for the fact that a few features are buggy or missing. Scripts 5.x contributed to most of these issues. The scripts team led by Jonwil and Jerad recently fixed many many issues with scripts however, and it is very close to being released. It could even be released with TSR, depending on how it runs.
• The taco car is still in.
• I haven't seen the soccer ball anywhere.

Oh, and I might post an update in the next few weeks for AR to show off something neat.

[OWA]

Some brilliant old videos here. Thanks for rounding them all up moonsense!

[VERTi60]

Ooo so nostalgic!

[moonsense715]

At the end of the Pre-Alpha video, Teamwolf kept jumping on my head with the Grizzly dart tank, even though I was deployed. Those were really fun to record

[TeamWolf]

Hahaha I remember that, that was some serious fun to film .

[TK-421]

Get moving please?

[Einstein]

On 7/4/2015 at 0:51 PM, TK-421 said:

Get moving please?

Did you watch the videos?

 

Also, I just realized the Iron Maiden music in the first video +1

[danpaul88]

Yeah, I didn't realise it would record the music too at the time

[dawnblaze]

Hello

[thedisclaimitory]

so now we just need some more people and a  1 level designer  for it to be released but when people we need advertisements for this to be released including dune and ecw maybe we need ads to go on youtube like ones that you can't skip  and  put on when people watch a vid they can click on the thing in the vid ad and we need a good one so people can come tell them what we need 

 

[Einstein]

Please don't drag up threads that haven't been active in nearly two years.