Hello Kines and Kindreds,
While it isn’t our decision or will to abandon Project Vaulderie, we do not see a future without struggle and harmony for the project and because of that we have decided it is time to move on. However something like this was foreseeable, as our project was getting stronger, which was seen more as a threat than a benefit and lead to its shut down. However, something greater has emerged from its ashes. Continue reading
Hello fellow Kines and Kindreds,
There were a lot of good things happening for Project Vaulderie and we were very excited to find the opportunity to announce them once we had a better grip at stuff that was going on, however now with the Cease and Desist being issued, none of that will ever come to pass, and so we think it will be a miss if we didn’t at least share with you what was going to happen. Continue reading
Fellow Kine and Kindreds,
As of now, you may be wondering why we haven’t been sharing any updates on the behalf of the project as of late. We are aware that all of you wait patiently for our news as always.
We’re very sad to report that we received a Cease & Desist e-mail from CCP Games, asking us to cease game development, remove any materials that might contain Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, names, locations or related elements from the sites we control, and cease any further use of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines property, and in a disappointment shared among our team we are complying with that request. All of this invalidates our effort and the meaning of the entire project: as a remake of Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines cannot be a remake without its original contents.
Over the course, you have fought with us and been patient. You have trusted us when we were silent and listened when we spoke. Many of you have done what you could to help us. And for that we would like to thank you. You’re a wonderful group of fans and have been very supportive. It goes without saying that your interest was far greater than our team would have even anticipated.
We have been deeply honored by the support we have received from you all and we believe that the best relationship we can have with you is that of honesty and transparency.
Along with your support, we’ve received a lot of sympathies from former developers on Bloodlines and former White Wolf employees along the way. Our contact told us that the copyrights were with Activision, Inc., so we pursued there instead, with a pitch being prepared for the company to discuss what we were going to do with the property. This contact we knew from CCP has since left the company.
We made it quite clear that this is a fan re-imagining of the game. We simply want to do this to keep the game, the story, and the world it lives in, alive and re-imagined for a new generation. Both the game and the idea behind the project was made sorely with out of passion.
Since support of the game dropped long ago, ever since the fall of Troika Games, Inc., and it’s almost impossible to play without patches or bug fixes, sponsored by the community, and there is so much left that could be finished that hasn’t been touched. We want to see this game thrive, in a time and industry where games with deep lore and storylines like Bloodlines simply are hard to come by. Project Vaulderie would help revive interest in a game that was forgotten with time, and I believe all parties could have benefit from its creation.
But that will not be the case anymore, and it’s clear that there won’t be any newer titles created under the Vampire the Masquerade brand, as this project was the only hope for Bloodlines to reborn from the ashes they were left to cease.
We are avidly seeking a resolute course to continue working on a future game, but we cannot at this time discuss this publicly and with that I urge you to please be patient and hopeful that we will find a way.
I hope you understand, and as always we appreciate your support (in the distant future).
Below you can find the cease and desist letter:
Dear Project Vaulderie:
We are writing to you on behalf of CCP hf. (“CCP ”), a company incorporated in Iceland and the exclusive trademark and copyrights holder for Vampire: The Masquerade (USPTO registration no. 3495901; USCO registration no. TX0005782175, et. seq., for the same line of books).
Recently, it has come to our attention through your website, http://www.projectvaulderie.com/, that you are planning a modification or “re-imagination” of the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines game, first published a number of years ago by Activision, Inc., under license from White Wolf, Inc. (now known as CCP). While Activision retains certain rights to the game it created, CCP continues to own all other rights associated with Vampire: The Masquerade, including the copyrights and trademarks noted above.
It appears that Project Vaulderie is now engaging in the unauthorized creation, use, and sale of products bearing the name of CCP’s registered intellectual property, Vampire: The Masquerade, without any license, authorization or permission of CCP.
You do not have permission to use CCP’s trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property as the basis for your products and services, nor do you have permission to make or distribute any copy or derivative work, including electronic copies, of CCP’s intellectual property. As a result, we believe you are infringing CCP’s intellectual property rights.
We ask that you immediately cease and desist from the use of CCP’s name and other trademarks on http://www.projectvaulderie.com/. Specifically, please remove all references to Vampire: The Masquerade and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines from your website, software, and related materials. In addition, remove all artwork from the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines game from your website and software modifications, and discontinue any future use of such artwork. If we do not receive an immediate affirmative response from you indicating that you have fully complied with these requirements, we may be forced to take further legal action against you, including but not limited to a DMCA notice to your Internet Service Provider. Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
CCP Legal
For the Vaulderie Team
Arthur - Project Vaulderie lead
Map progress, new modelers and taking a break.
The Santa Monica pier map is done, and now the focus for this week was on the Warehouse and Ocean House maps. The process on porting the map is really time consuming, and because of the workflow it has, it takes time to do it right. We want to be able to get back to them and edit them if needed, which on the long run, the current workflow helps the rest of the team to be able to easily edit them without breaking anything else. Continue reading
Bolt Multiplayer, Mecanim and Santa Monica Pier.
This is the biggest news, as we are very excited to announce that we’re switch from Photon to a new networking engine called Bolt. Its current status is still beta, but so far it has been proved to be a very solid and to be the best choice for a networking engine. Continue reading
Things are moving on nicely, here are the highlights for this Friday’s development blog:
The weapon system has gotten quite a nice treatment, with having the M37, the rest of the pistols and rifles all coded and working as expected. There’s still some work left to do on the melee weapons, but overall we’re happy with the progress.
Continue reading
This marks the 10th weekly and first first bi-weekly blog so far. Here’s what happened:
The weapon system has gotten a great momentum, albeit with a few visual bugs. There’s still the view bob and view kicking to add but it’s working as intended even on the current multiplayer. Continue reading
This week most of the focus was put on the art pipeline. We’re a tad late this time, but before I start, there’s something I’d like to mention first.
What does this mean? I have to be honest, getting to the point to have something stunning to showcase on each Friday can be cumbersome, especially with such small man power at the moment. That means instead of posting on each Friday, I’ll be posting on each second Friday, starting as of now. It’s something I should have done a while ago, but do not worry, it’ll revert back once the rest of the A-Team are out of AWOL. Continue reading
It’s been a productive week, so here’s what happened in brief:
A lot of work has been done on the inventory system, now it’s using JSON to handle serialization and easier modability. Equipping an item will also handle outfits. Right now it only handles external cosmetic items (hats) but the system works.
Continue reading
Another week, another set of work done, especially on the main game mechanics. Unfortunately my planned vacation ended up being postponed because of a mild flu, so I’ve been working on and off this week, so apologies for the lack of contents for this week. Hopefully there’s going to be a lot of contents to show, some exciting, some less thrilling, nonetheless, all pointing to progress.
This week a lot of work has been put into the inventory system, so it is the perfect time to talk about it in-depth.
Basically an inventory system is just a list of array that contains the needed data for each item that exists in the game, followed by the item type. It handles the item type, name, and other UI related information.
However, the purpose of the item is dictated by the item type itself, which are being handled by a separate class. The item itself is an empty representation of the functions it provides. Here are some of the various item types, similar to the setup found in the original game: Weapon Melee, Weapon Firearm, Ammo, Armor, Money, Generic Items, Cosmetic, Powerup, Bloodpack and Hidden.
Weapon Melee and Ranged: The melee and firearm weapons will handle different attack types, melee being blunt attack while firearms will use bullets for attack. They will project the necessary projectiles, but the bullet itself drives the attack damage and damage types. However, the bullet damage for vampires for normal firearms are considered blunt ones.
Ammo: Ammo handles the data for the amount of ammo to add to the given weapon. As it is within the inventory system, it will not be drawn on the inventory interface, but will be added to the weapon’s ammo count instead.
Armor: The armor will handle the amount of soaking it does depending on the armor level. In the original game it changes the entire outfit for the player, something which we will want to change to accommodate the customization support on the player.
Money: It handles the amount of money the player has within his wallet. Any stored money goes there, from which the player will subtract money from. Or gain to. Depends on the player’s lucky gambling.
Cosmetic Items: They don’t serve much purpose except for the physical appearance on the player, this can be gender specific.
Generic Items: They don’t serve much purpose either, infact, many quest items fall into this category because you won’t be doing much with them, other than giving it to the person in quest.
Powerup: Powerup items are usually the Occult power up items, which acts as a passive booster for the protagonist’s power.
Bloodpack: It’s nothing more than a usual consumable item type, used for increasing the player’s blood pool.
Hidden: Self-explanatory, it only serves as a clean way for events to check if user has a certain “item”.
The progress on the inventory is going on nicely, dragging items, filtering the item types. There’s still some work to be done, but we’ll hopefully have some contents to showcase that soon enough.
There are a few important mentions regarding the damage types within Vaulderie with a brief description:
Bashing damage is done by blunt instruments (melee weapons), normal firearms and blunt trauma (falls). When a vampire suffers bashing damage, the damage is soaked using stamina and armor, then the total damage is halved, rounding down. Fortitude provides its level in automatic successes against bashing damage. Mortals and ghouls suffer bashing damage normally.
Lethal damage is done by cutting instruments (swords, knifes) and massive trauma (car wrecks, close ranged shotgun blasts). It is soaked using stamina and armor, and the damage is applied normally. Fortitude provides its level in automatic successes against lethal damage.
Aggravated damage is done by fire, sunlight and supernatural weapons to vampires. Fortitude does not provide automatic successes against aggravated damage, but you can roll a number of dice equal to your Fortitude level to soak aggravated damage, against a difficulty of 8. You cannot soak aggravated damage with Stamina, only with Fortitude. Armor soaks aggravated damage normally.
The quest manager is the class that is going to manage the global quest states. It also allows you to mod the quests, along with setting the variables in real time, similar to the original game.
So how does the quest manager look like? It’s pretty simple. You get a quest table, which contains the quest entries, followed by their unique properties, such as title, ID, description, quest type, awards, and events, and so on.
Title: this is a simple text title, and what will be used to refer to it in dialog.
DisplayName: This is what will be displayed as the heading for this journal entry. These fields can be localized.
CompletionState: This container has all the various variants of a given quest, such as what happens if quest gets failed or if it succeeds.
ID: Each completion state must have a UNIQUE, NUMERIC ID. By default, a player is considered to be at completion state 0, when the quest is unassigned. The quest will not be displayed in the journal unless the player has a valid ID for the quest.
Description: This is what will be displayed as the journal entry for this quest
Type: This controls the font, colors, etc, for the quest. MUST be success, failure or incomplete.
Award XP: This is how many experience points to award to a character when they reach this quest completion level. Defaults to 0.
Award Money: This is how much money to award to a character when they reach this quest completion level. Defaults to 0.
Event: This is script data, such as a flag assignment or a function call, which will be passed to the script interpreter. By default, there is no event script called.
Most of the layout is done and since we’ve only started to rework our current system, it will take a while. The problem with rewriting any code, is that you’ll get better off rewriting it from scratch rather than improve upon it. Since the more you change, the more you need to change. Like art, you will never be satisfied with the results, and since this is programming, you’d always want to find a better way to code it, but sometimes keeping it simple is the best solution. As long as it does the job right.
Teemu has done a great job bringing some fresh life onto the forgotten city of Santa Monica, here are a few:
There’s this thing in the gaming industry and engines that started to pick up dramatically this years. Physically based rendering. But it’s not a new thing. It has been existing on paper for years now, only to be a trend, which is loosely defined, a real time rendering system. For those who don’t know, it’s a modern photorealistic rendering system, where everything is “shiny” and everything has Fresnel.
In short, this makes certain materials look photorealistic, in real time. Everything gets realistic the specular effect (which controls the mirror reflection, the lighting bouncing off the material). It’s been widely used since Unreal Engine 4, and the upcoming Unity 5 release, but it has been implemented before, in Unreal Engine 3 (Remember Me) and various Unity plugins (Marmoset Skyshop). In order to utilize this rendering system, the artist must get the textures to pass the needed requirements for the textures, which I will not get into too much detail. I’ve been experimenting with a few materials to be “PBR” ready, and I must say, the quality does differ from the regular shaders in Unity. For one I’m really excited to move into this pipeline once Unity 5 is released, although not to go too crazy and create an unpleasant visual result.
More information can be found here: http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
Albeit things don’t always turn out the way they were planned, the project has received quite some nice progress even under given circumstances. I hope there’s more to show for the upcoming weeks (and hopefully no more unplanned events, then again that isn’t up to us). There’s always a lot of stuff that gets done but the excitement to show them has to be muted until it’s finalized.
We know development blogs meant to have any detail about anything, regardless on how little or how much has been done. It’s one of those times when a lot of the backend stuff don’t really have a proper result until you get around it.