Blood Omnicide blog

Today we bring you a fresh news from the project's development front:

New SVN changelog

Now you can observe most recent changes of omnicide working copy using new SVN changelog page, which contains a full project development history since the very start, updating on per-day basis.

Bloody Sounds Update

After the months of polishing Emandes presents stereonized/reconstructed Steve Henifin's Nupraptor's theme, one of the most notable tracks in Blood Omen OST. One more track named Slaughter represents a reconstruction of ACT1 background. One of the "unsort" tracks finally get it's destiny as Spirit forge background. We suggest you listen to all three:

•    Emandes - Nupraptor's theme (reconstruction)
•    Emandes - Slaughter (fmv reconstruction)
•    Evellnirt - Spirit Forge

Modern inventory

Adam Brown, known for his high quality inventory design works, continues to improve design of inventory screen. As a result of long term work he presenting the modern kain inventory, which combines a modern looks to the Kain's itself (Adam has tried to bring all of known kain's depictions - inventory one, fmv, game sprite, into one realisting design), new color theme, clean lines and lighting. This design is a part of optional "modern" GUI.

Work-In-Progress screenshots

A pile of WIP-screenshots, demonstrating Wilderness foliage in-works (already shown on Facebook/ModDB community pages), plus decore models for Nachtholm smith, new dynamic weapon/spell glow effect.

Test loader for Blood Omen map format

One of the results of a work on Blood Pill tool, which experienced a 1.0 version relese some time ago, is a document describing internals of all Blood Omen game formats (including sounds, sprites, levels, tiles, videos etc.). The most perspective thing by our opinion is a map format specs. With the knowledge of the level format internals one can make a loader for original maps with all features, or even a map editor. Having about 80% of map format investigated, we are tried to implement a loader for original 2d maps in Blood Omnicide. You can see a results on the right.

The principles and details for a processing 2d map to 3d environments, actual problems with rendering, physics, game logic is worth a separate article. Support for original 2d maps would automatically gives opportunity to finish the game with no waiting for all locations to be remade in 3D. Unfortunately, there is still a blank pages in map specs. A technique blood omen using to store map lighting, NPC walking paths and some other features are not unveiled yet. If you are familiar with Hex editing, you can help us with this interesting task and and push gained knowledge to wiki page.

Work-In-Progress screenshots

SVN log is coming back

Subversion changelog, which notes all changes made on Blood Omnicide is back online now. Thanks Icculus for fixing it! It can be found at Blood Wiki.

Today's news is dedicated to a date that is influential to each member of Blood Omnicide development team. Some years ago a small programm named Codenamed: Blood Omnicide has been published. It was a one-level demo with no gameplay or effects attached, build on Darkplaces engine (enhanced Quake 1 engine). Project has been actively developed for four years. Today we would like to travel back to the times project was just started, and then return to its current state, noting the differences.

How Blood Omnicide looked in 2009:

Here are screenshots taken some weeks after Codenamed: Blood Omnicide was published.

And, after nostalgic part, how Blood Omnicide looks now:

Work-In-Progress screenshots:

Progress of Spirit forge

Spirit forge is one of the most notable and influential locations of Blood Omen. Recreating it in 3D is not a trivial task. Currently, the location passed the long stage of pre-designing work. On the shots below the phases of spirit forge location making are shown:

Updates on Bloody Sounds page

In the past update of Blood Omnicide site, new tracks were added to the Bloody sounds page:

   Emandes - Trailer theme (reconstruction)

   Emandes - Solemn Dirge (extended)

   Emandes - Against All The Odds

De-voiced tracks for FMV's

FMV soundtracks without voices were both requested and masterfully made by Lorenzo Forini, the main creator of Italian localization for Blood Omnicide. Sound tracks with no voices can be used as a base for Blood Omen custom translation/dubbing packages.

You can check out those works by either heading over Bloody Sounds, or visiting FMV's YouTube channel.

The website is now completely migrated to Joomla! 2.5.

New section “About the team” has been added, where you can learn how is the Blood Omnicide team organized. One of the new features is now a complete support for multiple languages, which came in handy for Giorgio 'Zelgius' Di Nucci and Lorenzo Forini to create and support Italian translation of the game, website and the wiki.

The site engine change caused some losses as well: the “World of Blood Omen” section was moved to wiki where it belongs, also some comments were lost and the user base was wiped.

It’s been a while since the latest news, and though we have something to show, we haven’t got much time to prepare large update for we are drawn in Blood Omnicide v. 0.1. Henceforth our news will cover small portions of the things we want to talk about.

In today's update: stuff that was done during summer/autumn 2012 and overall Blood Omnicide 0.1 progress.