Atharon: Armistice's End Revealed

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Atharon: Armistice's End is a newly introduced total-conversion Half-Life 2 modification set in a fantasy world resembling the medieval times. This game steers away from your basic first-person shooter and focuses more on third-person melee style game play that revolves around the principle of excellent teamwork. The team behind this game are tweaking the source code to implement unique graphical features such as self-shadowing and parallax mapping to create a truly immersive experience. Today, Atharon: Armistice's End has launched its website, sporting some first-look screenshots and character/weapon renders for everyone to enjoy, as well as a quick technical video featuring some cleaver programming. [br]

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[br]The Atharon family is looking for some new members to help create this mod, so if you are character modeler, level designer, or have any talent in something specific to creating games, you can send them an application here.[br]For more information and media on Atharon: Armistice's End, head on over to the official website and maybe sign up at their forums to show your support.

 

[Ghil]

looks great so far, can't wait to see more ^^

 

[pvtbones]

it appears it's from the makers of the Valandil mod.

what happened to the Valandil mod anyways?

*edit* media looks great, wish my crappy computer could run it that well

 

[keats]

Valandil became Armistice's End. It's a PR move mostly I think, or they'd ve mentioned they were valandil originally at least in the FAQ. But if you got to www.valandilmod.com, or check out the subtitle in the Discussion forum,... . They've changed the story I think, and cleaned out the team, but it's the same core team.

Looks good to me, I'm interested in their Source tweaking.

 

[Amicus]

Its mainly just a pr thing. Valandil was kept private and we needed to change that for recruitment purposes. Also valandil really didnt have any sort of back story. Atharon is actually a world Joshua (writer) and Pal (team lead) already had running. http://www.atharonrpg.com/main.php The Rebels V. Imperials thing just felt a little cliche. But you should probably ask Pal on our forums for more info. Thanks for all the comments so far.

Matt - Character modeller

 

[Mutley]

Looks good, nice concept art. I look forward to seeing more.

 

[Sulkdodds]

Promises to be an in-tents experience.

EDIT: On closer inspection, those are thatched-roof cottages and not tents. Shit!

 

[Rupertvdb]

lol, so close to good punnery.

This mod looks like some good stuff. I've been playing plenty of Oblivion so the swords and shields thing is all I want right now. I just realised that the 'item' in your second hand can also be a weapon, this shall fill the void in Oblivion that prevented me from being a crazed dual axe wielding Redguard, awesome!

 

[SubKamran]

Looks cool. I am working on a SP/MP-hybrid fantasy RPG at the moment, but it's in preliminary stages right now. Besides, I don't know how long it's going to take us to finish it

But, I must say that the way we have combat planned out, nothing will ever come close :cheese:

 

[Trefall]

Thanks for all the nice comments, and good try Sulkdodds

Yes, you will be able to duel wield any weapon combination (as long as the weapon can be wielded in one hand). We believe in player freedom, and don't want to restrict players more than we need to (with unfounded preventing gameplay rules).

We are indeed developers from Valandil, but as Matt already stated the change of name had several reasons. For me the greatest reason was the backstory, which is truly extensive for anyone who care to look that deep into our About section.

And melee combat design is a very interesting topic, mainly due to the fact that there hasn't really been made a system yet that doesn't feel awkward. We are confident that we have the solution though

 

[melat0nin]

What is parallax mapping? I've heard folk go on about it ad infinitum but Google and Wikipedia don't tell me anything I can understand

 

[NeoNight]

um I think its a special method of bump mapping that makes textures look 3d or something.


http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/index.html

 

[Angry Lawyer]

The new title's so pretentiously fantasy. I love it.

-Angry Lawyer

 

[Trefall]

We now have Relief Mapping implemented that backsteps to Parallax Mapping, thanks to Igor Todorovski, or better known as Canuck, who worked on our team previously but is now dedicating his time 100% to Dreamscape. In the very basic explanation, Parallax Mapping simmulates 3d shape on a flat surface by the use of heightmaps. Relief Mapping is a more powerful version of this that basicly does the same, but with much more convinsing results. We'll be showcasing the Relief Mapping in our next media release.

The new title's so pretentiously fantasy. I love it.

 

[Monder]

Parallax mapping is a technique that makes surfaces appear to have depth, it looks like the surface has been displaced (with the displacement controlled by a heightmap) while in reality it's still a single flat polygon (you may hear this technique and other similar techniques such as relief mapping refered to as virtual displacement mapping). It works by altering texture coordinates (where the texture is placed) on a per-pixel level. The manner in which is alters the coordinates is simplistic so you have to be rather careful in construction of the heightmap and it can only handle smoothly, slowly changing slopes really.

Relief mapping is a better version of parallax mapping that actually uses raytracing offset the texture coordinates in a better manner (basically it traces a ray from your eye to the texture and sees where it hits the heightmap and renders the bit of the texture you should thus see), you can also use the same raytracing to perform self-shadowing. This allows for some rather nice stuff, the disadvantage of it is it's a whole lot slower than parallax mapping (parallax requires a few simple arithmetic operations while relief mapping requires that you trace a ray) and the implementation we have requires SM3.0. I do know of a better technique that's faster and works on SM2.0 cards but I haven't got round to implementing it in Source yet.

(I'm the lead coder on Atharon BTW).

 

[Amicus]

Greg laying down the knowledge smack down.

Matt- Modeller

 

[polyguns]

i could never pronounce vallandil anyways. I love the new layout for it, it gives the mod more meaning, also glad to see that Val wasn't a waste of time, and ya'll are continuing. I love the grass, did the dude from dreamscape make that too? hes doing to source graphics what garys mod did to ragdolls . i love the grass, all over the place, similar to DS and farcry and oblivion. One gripe i always had about source is it never appeared like you could have that degree of polygons in the view at once, glad to see it can.


tech demo looked great, but that screenshot used to make the banner is AWSOMe. I want to see some more of that please

 

[Trefall]

The Main homepage banner was photoshopped. But thank you for the kind words.

The grass implementation wasn't done by Dreamscape's Igor, but by our lead programmer, Greg Chadwick (who also was the first one to implement parallax mapping in Halflife2). There are quite a few differences between our grass implementation, and the one Igor did for Dreamscape. Both looking good in their own respect imo. But ours being billboarded allows for larger grassfields without too bad performance hit. Our grass is also affected by the lighting model, as well as an implemented script system similar to the vmt format for level designers to get hands-on control over grass colour and colour variation, grass height and height variation, which grass should be displayed on what material, how often some grass sprites should appear compared to others. Additionaly there is a perlin noise applied to the grass to add subtle, random variation to colour and height.

 

[NeoNight]

All of the graphical extras are great but please don't forget to include an option to turn it off! not all of us are running dual core 64 bit machines!

 

[Amicus]

Duh..

Just messing around yeah thats definately an important topic.

We'll be testing it extensively aswell to insure a system thats both aesthetically pleasing and efficient.

Matt - Modeler

 

[Trefall]

Yes, we'll definately add features for players to optimize performance.