Today, I’d like to highlight some of the many recent developments on the master branch of Red Eclipse.

But before we adress the development version, I’d like to note that we updated the game jolt thumbnail with another image and a very short gif-snippet of the trailer. I hope this will help Red Eclipse to stand out on the list of top rated games, given it will stay there for a while.

Since the move to github, there are two branches of our base repository: The stable branch provides automatic updates for the release version, while the master branch holds the most recent innovations for the development version.

You can test these bleeding edge features already today: Just grab a copy from github, as described on our wiki. However, please note that the stable and master branches are currently not compatible for multiplayer games, and servers for each branch are up and running.

My previous article here was about open development in general, and my editing menu overhaul in particular. First of all, I’d like to address another example of community driven and open development.

Above screen-shot is a small, random preview of the brand new game stats page. Thanks to an awesome community contribution from Beha, Red Eclipse is ready to support a fully fledged stats system. This allows to gather detailed game statistics from authorized servers, using an sqlite database on the master server. It is possible to keep track of stats for each registered player, evaluate overall weapon usage and accuracy, compare the popularity of different game modes, maps and mutators, or list the fastest lap times for each race map. Right now, there’s only some test data recorded, but once we have a bunch of multiplayer games played using the development version, this will be a really cool feature.

Open and community-driven development does not mean the core developers sit back and only coordinate things. There has been a huge amount of tweaks and improvements to the game’s engine and core routines. For instance, this does not only improve game performance, but also the way map data is synchronized in multiplayer games. As a result, it is now possible to enjoy an even better multiplayer map editing mode.

Those of you who are familiar with Red Eclipse (or other games using the Cube 2 engine) know that cooperative mapping is a great feature to be creative together, but suffers from some technical limitations. In contrast to offline mode, it was not possible to undo or redo your editing actions, or to create new textures with a different tinting, scale, rotation or set of shader parameters. All of this can now also be done in multiplayer editing games.

This brings me back to the editing menus.

I won’t bother you with details here, but since I wrote my last article here, there has been some progress with these. For example, the above snapshot shows the texture editing menu with a bunch of new gimmicks. Furthermore, I’ve added a small experiment to the help menus:

These weapon stats should help new players to get a first overview of the various weapons and their characteristics. As a side note, there’s also a backport of my menus, which is simply a cfg file you can use with the stable branch.

There are also small improvements to other menus, like better search filters for our variable and command lists. Furthermore, weapon balancing is still in progress, but that’s better explained by someone else.

If you are curious about other upcoming features, there’s a list of milestones for the next major release, but at this point, we really cannot tell when the next update will be ready.

Happy fragging, mapping and running,

~ Bonifarz