Vortex

LOL Cipher one of the best classes in the game? Not sure if serious. Its pretty worrying that they needed to be adjusted in the day 1 patch....

The new character highlighting looks like total crap, like i mean it’s just atrocious....If that gets implemented give people the option to turn it off....Not sure I understand what’s so bad with just having the selection circles below the selected characters...

PayPal is up!!! http://satellitereign.com/pledge/

And they hit their funding goal!!! YAY

I'm sure they will hit 440k Hopefulyl they manage to have paypal open before the last 48 hours and reminders....Btw stretch gals annunced:

AI for emergent gameplay Update #17 · Jul 13, 2013 · 40 comments MikeD here. I thought I'd write a piece about AI and how I'm coding it up with relevance to emergent game-play. You may not want to read on if you prefer to think its all done by magic, but if you want to take a glimpse behind the curtain read on. I like my ai's to react meaningfully to stimulus, which basically means giving them the ability to see and hear. That may sound obvious, but a lot of ai's in games don't react to anything, they are simply pre-placed in the world, told to go to sleep and are woken up when the player enters a specific trigger box, perhaps halfway down a corridor they are in. So they wake up and start executing their pre given command shoot player. You can get away with this in linear games and sometimes its actually the best way if you want to have total control of your game, everything tightly scripted, almost like the ai's are following a movie script. Zombie dog jump through window 3 seconds after player steps into this invisible box. It can make games atmospheric, but the downside is its totally the same every time you play through, you die and restart the level, same guy triggers, same dog jumps through window, Yawn! I much prefer games that take a behavior driven approach, you basically code up multiple behaviors make them react to stimulus and give them a bit of decision making capability. So lets take a standard behavior, Guard. You can imagine this as a typical security guard, night after night given the duty to guard an area. Lets give him an area he is going to guard some kind of compound, nobody should be entering this secure area. The guard has 2 main senses we need to worry about sight and sound, sight has a field of view (FOV), say 150 degrees and a range, the range might be a km, but he also might not care about what anyone is doing 100 meters outside the volume he is guarding. Hearing has no FOV but has a range much shorter than sight lets say 100 meters.Sound travels slow so would take about 1/3rd of a second to travel 100 meters. Then we factor in reaction times too. Events, events are the means by which we communicate things happening that ai's need to know about. Fire a gun, broadcast that event to everyone within 500 meters say, here's the key though, the sound of the event goes into a queue for everyone within range. They will receive the event when the sound has correctly reached them, the visual of the event will reach them instantly, but if its outside their FOV or something is blocking their line of sight (LOS) they won't react to the visual cue. So really 2 events are created and are propagated at different rates, Gunshot audio event and visual event. Audio Events also are less precise they may only provide the listener with a possible volume for the source of the sound and the volume will be bigger the further away the sound is, and again if there's no LOS maybe the sound had to bounce off a few surfaces to reach the listener so its even less accurate where the source is. How people react to events is decided by their current behavior as well as various stats they may have.So back to our guard, a gun shot outside his guarded area is probably going to raise his attention if its close enough, what's some of his basic responses we may have actions for. Go investigate Take Cover Sound an Alarm Run Away and hide Simply turn and look in that direction and wait Ignore it With a bit of fuzzy logic we can decide which of these options the guard is going to take, we might factor in his boredom levels/ tiredness/ bravery perhaps its a violent area where gun shots are frequently heard outside his compound. To decide which action we take, we look at a set of essential properties that the AI is looking to maximize such as Financial, Safety, Food, Sex, Excitement, Sleep, Respect. These properties generally decay over time, people get hungrier,sleepier,hornier..Doing something heroic might increase your respect levels and excitement levels.Running away might decrease respect a little but increase your safety but decrease finance (you are not paid to run away). Now each of the 6 actions above can have a +/- value assigned to each of the 7 essential properties for each of the type of events that might happen. Investigating a gunshot might increase heroic and excitement and decrease safety a little. The amount these essential properties changes can be scaled based on distance of the event, and also base stats such as how brave the ai is, or intelligence, or monetary greed etc. So now this Guard can compare the scores for all his choices choose the highest scoring option, compare it perhaps against his current activity and decide what to do. For extra dynamics the essential properties feed into each other, too much excitement can be detrimental to safety, sleep and hunger. Too much food can make him sleepy. We can factor sleepiness into reactions Everything feeds into everything else causing a chaotic system, but also a believable system, a systems where the Guard will go get some food because his hunger level got too high, or he fell asleep on the job because he got to sleepy, or he decided to run away from a shoot out because he’s basically a bit of a coward and the financial gains of defending the compound didn't out-way the risk of being killed. These stats can also factor into taking a bribe, or being distracted by an attractive member of the opposite sex, or what the guard is going to do when his work shift finishes. Of course the event might not be a gunshot, it might be a car crashing through a gate, or having a gun aimed at you, or being offered a bribe, or an explosion, or a bullet ricochet, or a near miss from a laser beam, or a muffled grunt or a soft foot fall behind you, the lights cutting out, a siren blaring, discovering a dead body... The bottom line is by giving AI’s behaviors, and a behavior being set up with lots of possible reactions to lots of different events, and factoring in base genetics of each AI with their current state and needs, we can make the world react to the player in a believable way, and can remove the scripted feel to the game as the AI reacts different depending on how you break into the compound to steal the computer equipment, by stealth, by explosives, by sheer gun power, perhaps you just offer the guard enough money, perhaps one of your female agents seduces him.

New update for the Syndicate successor Satellite Reign is up. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/posts/534343 Talking about classes and agent death etc.

Agent Death Agents can and will die! If your agents body dies their consciousness is removed and implanted into a new body. Agents will keep their skills and abilities which are carried across with their consciousness. New agents are cloned from a selection of bodies back at base. New bodies can be obtained by multiple means, like: purchasing them from the black market or harvesting them from the population. Cloned bodies have genetic traits that give small bonuses to your agents. Agents lost in the field will lose their augmentations and equipment but if you are fast enough you can salvage the corpse for spare parts or we have multiple insurance packages available to suit your needs. Classes Your squad is comprised of 4 different agents, each with their own class or speciality: Soldier, Support, Assassin or Hacker. This is only the agents starting point. You are free to customise each of your agents to be fully combat oriented, fully espionage oriented, or anything in-between. Agents will be able to be customised by giving them different augmentations, skills / abilities, weapons and gear. Each of these customisation options will allow them to play more of a combat role or an espionage role, or anything in-between.

We're doing a reddit AMA at 21:00 GMT, 16:00 EST (in approx 8.5 hours) I've posted about the reddit iama to a few subreddits , you may like to go upvote them for visibility. http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1i03om/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i03re/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/1i03sw/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1i04px/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

Boxed copy tier added

Agreed, I'm sure these guys still have a coupletricks up their sleeve as well. Can also vote for them on GOG and Steam now: On GoG: http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/satellite_reign_5_lives_studios And Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/…

Should pick up now that its Monday.

Yeah thats the huge issue. This is also my first game in pouns. If it were anythign but Syndicate or if the pitch wouldnt of been so damn good I wouldnt of entered my CC number either. I'm hoping it doesnt hurt them too much. The Pitch one of the best I have seen on kickstarter and it will be an insult if Double Fines Massive Chalice ends up with more money considering their pitch was an insult.

Being unable to edit my original post is unfortunate....people backing Syndicates spiritual successor that I appreciate!!! One of my all time favorite Childhood games deserves a real successor.

<iframe width="640" height="480" src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/widget/video.html" frameborder="0"> </iframe> Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game. You control a team of four agents, each with distinct and unique abilities, collectively battling for control of a fully simulated, living cyberpunk city. The game world is designed to facilitate emergent gameplay, giving you the tools and freedom to play how you want to play, so you can create strategies and scenarios that not even we had anticipated! Customize your team with the strength to destroy your enemies head-on, or hack into their facilities to manipulate their infrastructure without them ever knowing you were even there. Will you take down your enemies with brute-force? Covert espionage and infiltration? Or will you use propaganda to influence the citizens of the city and overthrow the controlling powers? The city is huge and you can move around and tackle objectives however you want to. You won't be spoon-fed one mission after another, you'll be able to use whatever means you can to get to your final goal. Bribe scientists to advance your technologies, and kidnap doctors to augment your agents. Steal money from the banks to fund your war against the corporations, and exploit neural implants to bend the will of others. Or, try to take your objectives through good old-fashioned brute-force. <iframe frameborder="0" height="380" src="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/widget/card.html" width="220"></iframe>

Obvious cash grab - will most likely put all the money into Broken Age seeing they mismanaged that project so badly. Cant understand how so many people support this game with them having noting to show and the track record of the team is a total joke. Meh ****y devs are ****.

Tribute Sector As a thanks to our friends at Obsidian, we’ve decided to make a special sector in their honor. The 5000 backer sector will be an Obsidian mine, where a secret cult of scientist resides and are trying to develop a new formula to become immortal, called “Eternity”. We thank the community for coming up with these awesome suggestions :D As Jesper is still hard at work finishing the diorama the visualization of the sector will have to wait, but we’ll get it up as soon as possible and also come up with the 5500 sector. Made me laugh

JAF Team Expansion and Modding Details Update #12 · May 7, 2013 · 11 comments Dear Backers, We have 2 pieces of great news for you today. So lets get right to it!! Chris Camfield is joining the Flashback TeamWe are super happy to be able to welcome Chris Camfield to the Jagged Alliance: Flashback team. Chris has worked on the implementation and design of several Jagged Alliance titles and ended up as lead designer on Jagged Alliance 3 that sadly was never released. He will be joining the team as an advisor while keeping his day job at XMG Studios. Chris’ role will be to help us on essential pieces of implementation knowledge. WHY were things implemented in a certain way in JA2. Not only HOW. The how could be deducted by most programmers by looking at the open sources. Understanding the core mechanisms and how they were designed to fit together is essential knowledge to hitting the right balance once we add factions, better AI and other potential improvements/changes to the mechanics. Establishment of Modding Advisory TeamIn addition we are announcing having established a modding advisory and co-design team. Currently this team includes R@S, creator of the Blue Sun Mod for 7.62 - High Calibre and DepressivesBrot from the 1.13-Crew. We are also in contact with additional high profile modders to expand the advisory team even more. Their role will be to work with us to identify essential modding hooks, directory structure definitions, design the templates for modding files and some proof of concept tests. Having these great modders on board gives us the ability to not fumble the ball on mod support, and will make it easier for everyone to later potentially port their existing mods. Details on Modding SupportModding is a wonderful thing and has kept Jagged Alliance 2 alive for many many years. It is also something that takes time to implement right. If we do not hit some of the higher stretch goals, then we can still support basic modding and hope for adding more options down the road. Together with the modding advisory team we will prioritize the modding capabilities, that we from initial feedback have grouped into 3 areas. 1) Tweaking of configurations For example being able to go into xml files to turn on/off line of sight via a boolean, or change the base movement cost per terrain. 2) Adding additional content Having the ability to add a new mercenary, a new weapon or that “used condom” that you’ve always thought missing as a trash item. 3) Adding additional features Coding new functionality like wind direction having influence on accuracy while shooting or alternatively altering existing calculations for damage models. Exactly what is going to be moddable is something that is decided upon during detailed design and ongoing through development with the help of the modding-community. Our initial thoughts are that we are able to support the first two options here with the minimum budget of our Kickstarter-target. This doesn’t mean the third option is skipped right away. If there’s some spare time in the end, we’ll take care of it as well or will try to introduce this option after the release of the game. In addition to that we are also in talks with other modders who wrote awesome tools for other games and as they will have access to the Alpha version of the game, they will be able to start writing their tools if they feel there’s need to do so. We have to see how far we can push this with Kickstarter and our own money. Right now, we have to be a bit selective as we don’t know where we will end up yet. This also means that functionalities that have not been planned will drain resources from other parts of the game, and this is not our intention, as we want to deliver a game worth the name Jagged Alliance. We hope you understand this point, because most of us have been part of a modding community at one point or another, it's important to us! And we will give our best to support it wherever we can and with whatever we can. We are really excited for the new forces joining the team! The Full Control JAF Team

Just after i posted that got a 10k backer!!! Coincidence???? I think not

Give JA some love, they certainly need any funding help they can get )

Dear Backers, A quick update! We'd like to announce that we have entered a partnership with Humble Bundle, to distribute a limited Jagged Alliance Classics Pack, in English and optimized for Windows 7, only available through the Jagged Alliance: Flashback Kickstarter. You can find the full press release HERE The full classics pack will be available to all who pledged $5 and up, which is why we'll be adding a new $50 Tier. It's Time to Reload Tier: All previous rewards + Digital high quality map of the game world + Digital copy of the Official Soundtrack + Early Access to the game + A Digital Documentary of the making of JA: Flashback Additionally the partnership with Humble Bundle extends to also distribute the digital pledge rewards as well as the JA: Flashback game through their system. We also have a new treat for our backers, the awesome commando hamster backer profile picture. We'll also be adding a banner for the Backer Bonus initiative to the Kickstarter page to show you which new sector will unlock once we reach 3000 backers. Until next time! The Full Control JAF Team

I noticed some people seem surprised at how slow this is moving, but this isn't Obsidian or inXile. This is an unknown studio with no real marquee names. They are probably going to hit their target at the current rate, but I don't see them going way over. It is likely going to take the whole 30 days. The Quest for Glory creators also barely hit their target, so even star power doesn't always work. I dunno if they will at the current rate. Its slow going. But yeah I agree its a unknown studio which doesn't give a ton of confidence but their heart seems to be in the right place and I give them props for involving all the Bear Pit guys. More then anything its probably bad timing with divinity just finishing. Hopefully with next months pay cheques it will see an influx.

Looks like they might be in talks with Ian Carrie and some of the old Sir-Tech Canada folks....So hopefully that goes well and will gve the project a boost. Shame to see this not beign funded yet.

Pretty impressed by this on Bear Pit forums: (RE a list of the most inlencial JA2modders) "Thanks for the list! The reason for the question is rather simple. We are right now discussing about giving some people even access to the tools or the game during the development (in that special case under NDA as you can imagine). Cause with 350k, as we said, we won't be able to realize modding tools as well, but if fans, especially JA die hard fans, feel that they could develop modding tools while we develop the game, that'd be an option. It's not carved in stone, we are still discussing this. Please keep that in mind. We still need to figure out how to do this best. But it's an idea we have right now."

Still not sure about this. Only reason I backed is due to the BearPit guys. Personally I'm not sure what to think about this developer. I havent seen their Space Hulk game either so hard to judge if this is just a cash grab using the JA name. Then again campaign is going super slow anyway, will probably just make their funding goal. Def cant make a good JA successor for 350k