Posted by Calsa at 5:33 pm, 1/2/10  |  Category: Announcement

Dear Ascension Community,

      It is with great sorrow we announce the halting of the development of Ascension. It has been a long and exhausting road at times, with many obstacles and difficulties along the way. Some obstacles we plowed through. But at the end, we simply did not have the resources available to us to make the game the way we wanted.

Many developers within our team have dedicated countless hours of their time to create what was on paper a fantastic idea - a game created by gamers for gamers, capturing the game play and essence of a game we have come to enjoy for many years. I believe we have grown in leaps and bounds over the years. And as we made our rounds through the long development process, it was done with no rewards along the way but the satisfaction of things coming into place, and amounting sense of accomplishment that came with it.

But reality got in the way. We encountered one too many crippling faults in the game engine we have been working with, and the engine simply proved to be too incomplete and buggy to work with. Furthermore, many developers have become a victim to circumstance. Many have moved on to take on full time jobs in aspiring fields, many have become enveloped in their schoolwork or are working towards their careers. Some have life-changing events happen to them, some for the worse, some for the better. It simply became a matter of priority that many people have had to leave the development team.

If there is anything I cannot stress enough, it’s the fact that developing a game with such scope like this took a lot of time, effort, and especially patience. Patience with the engine, patience with each other, patience with in-compliant software, and patience and with the development process. I for one want to thank every one of you who were patient with us, and believed in us. The community breathed life into us and kept us motivated- we were always doing it for you guys. I really feel like we let you guys down. But sometimes one has to face the music and move on. New beginnings come from other endings, and you can bet you will see great things done by the members of our development team in the future. Not only did we possess talent, skill, and an eye for aesthetics, but also a lot of passion.

 After much discussion and internal debate we have decided to release our code base much as it is now. Although its a far cry from a final product we felt that releasing what we created back into the community would allow everyone to see what we accomplished. Our intent with this release is to allow the community to take a peak at what we have completed as well as hopefully use, play, and learn from our work.

Finally, we want to thank every member of this community for all of your hard work and support. You the community are the reason we started this project. You were the driving fuel that kept us motivated throughout the countless sleepless days and nights. You should be proud of your contributions to this project. I know every member of this development team feels the same way as I do when I say thank you for all of your hard work and support. You are the only reason we made it as far as we did.

Sincerely,

 The RenWerX Development Team

 

Ascension Download Links:

RenWerX Official 1

Mirror 1

 ** NOTE: I virus scanned the main DL links and posted mirrors before zipping it up. To the best of my knowledge its clean, but take any precautions you see fit we are not responsible if anything happens. This is a naked release, license and warranty free, use it as you see fit. Hopefully someone can have some fun with it or find some use for it.

You might also want to join us on IRC as hopefully we can get some games going. Our IRC info is server: irc.darkmyst.org and the channel is #RenWerX.

Feel free to post your comments and thoughts here.

 

Posted by teratos at 6:29 pm, 4/11/09  |  Category: Highlights

Update

 

            At RenWerX, we constantly reevaluate our operations looking for ways to improve, or just adapt to changing conditions within RenWerX. Over the years, this has taken us from a group modifying the Tribes Series of games, to a team working on Ascension - a complete, free game. During our April 7^th meeting, we decided to make several changes to improve our current development program.

 

As many of you know, we have run an internal alpha program for a few months. We have used this program to sort out the various difficulties that we might encounter during our closed beta program. Between the feedback we have received and our own observations, we have identified several changes that need to be made so that our closed beta program will operate smoothly.

 

Replacing our developer blogs is the first change we have made. The blog posts were often overlooked by our community, and occasionally the blog system would eat someone’s post or attachments. We will now use a set of sub-forums that operate similar to the blogs, but allow the developers greater flexibility in their posting and responses to comments.

 

            To allow us to make changes to the balance of the game faster during the beta testing period, we are going to separate the balancing from the bug reports/fixes. Instead of updating the beta client balance when we push our patch out of the developer copy of Ascension, we will be updating balance independently. This means that we can make balance changes more often, allowing us to test more values within the beta program. I will be in charge of making these adjustments, so I look forward to lots of long discussions with all of you in the future.

 

            The last major change we made was a reprioritized list of features for the beta program. In the interest of making visible progress, some features that will require major modifications to our code, engine fixes, or (in the interest of timely completion) purchasing and integrating third party assets have been placed on hold. This list is relatively small. The remaining features consist of mostly mandatory features and a small set of “maybes”.

 

            These changes will allow us to better interact with our beta program and focus our attention on the core Ascension behavior while still being aware of features to be implemented later in the development process.

 - TT

Posted by teratos at 10:08 am, 11/18/08  |  Category: Announcement

I have not written an update for some time. We have spent a considerable amount of time working on preparations for our beta testing program. These include ironing out how operations will go for the program, building an installer and automatic update system. Most of these things were mentioned in previous updates and none of them are very interesting.

We have also spent a considerable amount of time searching for hardware compatibility problems. We have managed to identify and fix a wide range of these problems.

As we began to actually do more playtesting such as playing capture the flag, we began to notice some problems with Ascension. There were some depth perception issues and problems with balancing. We began experimenting with some changes to try to resolve the issues. Approximately one month ago we decided that we needed to rescale virtually all of our art assets and then update the appropriate scripts. We have spent the last month fixing this problem. I am happy to say that as of last night, we have completed the rescaling. Today we are finishing up some improvements to the team code. We plan to test this new build tomorrow.

After we test this new build and correct any bugs, we will have to rebalance a good portion of the game.

If this new build works as intended, we feel that we will be able to finish selecting testers for our first round of closed beta and begin shortly after*.

We appreciate your continued support. We are trying our best to have Ascension to you as soon as possible.

 

- Teratos

 

* As always this is subject to change, modification, etc. I may in the future completely deny making this statement.

PS: As always, if you know anyone that is talented and able to help us, especially texture artists/skinners, please have him or her contact Calsa or myself.

Posted by teratos at 4:11 am, 9/27/08  |  Category: Announcement

RenWerX Studios is now accepting applications to participate in our Ascension Beta Testing Program. We will select a number of applicants to help test Ascension. We encourage everyone to fill out the form because we will be choosing testers with diverse hardware, gaming background, and technical knowledge.

 

More information can be found here.

 

The application can be found here.

Posted by teratos at 10:43 am, 8/30/08  |  Category: Highlights

Introduction
So far the response to these smaller but more frequent updates has been positive. Continue to let us know what you think and how we can improve them. We will attempt to implement your suggestions.

Also I want to say that if you have sent a message via our contact form and did not get a reply from me, please contact me directly on the forums. Occasionally a message gets missed/filtered in our system. If I see your message, I will reply to it in some way. I apologize if I have missed your message.

 - Teratos

This update will cover:
Community Highlights
 - Reminders
Developer/Staff Updates
Ascension Updates
 - Playtesting
Open Positions


Community Highlights
Noteworthy threads:

·        PB*Tech’s “Working on Ascension teaser video” – Complete with (his) teaser video.

·        StarSeeker’s “Suggestion: Recording and playback” – Discussion of recordings, what people would like to see in-game, and existing limitations.

Reminders:

We want to encourage our new members AND old members to take the time to introduce themselves in our "Introduce Yourself" thread.

We encourage all our community members to chat with us via IRC - the quickest way to ask a question and get a response from the RenWerX team. More information can be found here.

Also, don't forget the Q & A Time thread where you ask questions, and we answer them.

Inside Ascension

Engine

The Engine Department continues to work on the beta build of Ascension. The installer and patching system have been tested by multiple team members over the last two weeks with no errors. The engine department has also been removing some software we integrated to make up for missing functionality in TGEA that has become available. Byte has also begun working on clan tag support. The current system is limited but working.

Some of the other fixes:

·        Keybinding errors

·        The mission list bug

·        A scripting department error that only allowed health kit usage when player had full health

·        Increased lexel count for AO

Marketing

Two weeks ago we promised to release the FFP interview in this update. For more information, you can look at Magellanic’s “Interview with the Devs: Got questions?” thread.

The audio file can be found here.

~ 12 minutes @ ~ 11 MB

 

We would enjoy hearing your comments. 

Modeling

The Modeling Department continues to work on the smaller items that are left. Fleeky informs me that he is currently doing a grenade set from word (our concept artist).

He has also been doing some Polysoup tests within Ascension. If things continue to go well, this will allow for some interesting additions to our current maps.

The modeling department is also fixing various items on the current issues list. Several incorrect pack rotations were corrected tonight.

Scripts

The Scripting Department has been seeing more bug reports as we are now play-testing more often. In addition to continuing work on the inventory system, Mr. Keen and Guardian have been tuning things like hand grenades, the disc launcher, and the grenade launcher.

There has also been continued work on the GUIs so that the initial group of testers will not need to know our console commands. This includes the first release of the admin GUI.

Other Work:

·        Improved Vehicle Station performance

·        Improved handling of clan tags

·        Fixed gnome-armor bugs

Play - Testing

We are going to continue to include information about play-testing since it seems to be popular.

Since the last update, there have been a few patches put together for the beta build. I had been using the beta build exclusively since the last update while most of the team continued to use the developer build. Not surprisingly, this occasionally caused some issues…

So now I tend to use the developer build more often as it is more up-to-date.

Byte and I hopped in-game a few nights ago to test some things. One thing was the working mine. Byte planted a mine near my base, but I had just spawned so I killed him (I cannot help myself sometimes). In the spirit of cooperation I ran over and stepped on the mine – to my surprise Ascension said “You picked up a mine”! That is fixed now, but it was a bit of a surprise at the time.

After that the game went well. Byte made some pretty good capping runs. He even managed to beat me back to his base a few times. A few other people joined and we were playing CTF until the flag carrier dropped...at this point the flag disappeared. That is fixed now too.

Recently we have been playing on Serpentine quite frequently. Serpentine is something of a shallow oblong-bowl with two small tower bases and few platforms on either end. Fleeky has been adding a little variety to the map – some other-worldly terrain formations - with his Polysoup tests. Calsa has been dying so quickly that he has been using the heavy armor more often. This makes him considerably harder to kill, but the good news is it is easier to MA him (which I do often enough). I am not fast enough yet to steal his flag and get back without him taking mine. I tend to go outside of the bowl for my capping routes in something of an angle bracket shape <, pass just over the type of a rock arch, and grab the flag. This sets me up to either do the same on the return trip (on the other side of the bowl) or come back through the inside of the bowl on the far-side. Coming back down the center to kill Calsa returning with my flag has taught me two things:

1.      Calsa cannot aim a mortar very well.

2.      Calsa is pretty good at dropping a mortar just below a fold in the ground when I am chasing him – this results in me dying.

Last night we kept crashing the server while playing. We narrowed the cause down to an active shield pack. Hopefully that will be fixed by the next update. Between crashes, I did manage to MA/kill Guardian a few times.

The physics continue to improve, but they still feel a little strange at times. We continue to make adjustments. They are a major improvement over the changes we had made towards the end of June.

 More next time!

 

Open Positions

If you are applying for a position, please have a sample of your work ready to show us. We will then give you a test assignment.

Please be aware that the samples must be your own work.

If you do not provide samples, we will not be able to consider your application. If you have any questions, please contact me (Teratos).

Skinning:

If you are a skinner/texture artist, or know of someone that is, please contact fleeky.
Sound Effects:
Our sound effects department is a little behind the rest of the team, if you have the ability to help them catch up, please contact either Calsa.


If you wish to discuss this update, you may do so here. Also, I apologize for any formatting abnormalities - this stuff is giving me an anxiety attack.

 - Teratos