Sometimes a picture is worth more than any number of words, and while it's hard to show visually all the code changes going on we can show off a little bit of what we've been working on.  For 1.0, Generations will be offering full support for the Team Arena mission pack.  To run Generations Arena in Team Arena mode, it will require a legal copy of the Team Arena mission pack.  However, if you do not own the Team Arena mission pack you will still be able to play Generations Arena in its normal mode.  You do not need Team Arena to play Generations Arena as normal, only to play Generations Arena in Team Arena mode.  

That being said, here's a little taste of what's on the way.




There's more where that came from:
http://www.wireheadstudios.org/gallery/TeaserShots2

And how about some video to top it all off?  Keep in mind these are test footage - and the only gameplay video I've personally recorded to date.  I'm not a cinematographer.

Test Video 1
Test Video 2

The first video is a game play test of the Heavy Chaingun and 1-Flag CTF mode for Team Arena.  Note that the Tesla Mine is not yet in place in that video.  You'll notice that Persistent Techs are in use in this video, as well as some classic sounds and gib effects.  You'll also see some fully-animated weapons from first-person view, and to a lesser extent, third-person.

The second video highlights the visuals on the Heavy Chaingun and Ion Gun.  Once again, the Tesla Mine has not been introduced at this point.

Now as for the weapons, here's a description of each.

Heavy Chaingun:  Note that the classic Doom Chaingun was referred to as Heavy Chaingun in .99f and prior.  That weapon is now just referred to as "Chaingun" since that was the classic name, and while not fired in the first video, you can see the item is in place on the Railgun spawn.  The Heavy Chaingun is Doom's answer to the Team Arena Chaingun, and fires 3 pellets per shot, putting it on part damage-wise with the Team Arena weapon.  It also has that nice beefy shotgun sound to it.

Ion Gun:  It's basically a long-range ion shotgun.  It fires 3 unstable plasma balls that inflict moderate damage at close range.  After about half a second of flight, they explode into ion spikes that travel much faster and overall inflict much greater damage than they do in ball form.  This is Doom's answer to the Team Arena nailgun.

Tesla Mine:  Not shown in the video, but present in the image gallery, these are hand-thrown dynamos that adhere to any surface and lash out with a steady stream of electrical energy at any unfortunate foe that wanders too close to them.  They'll attack and keep attacking until whatever they're zapping moves out of range or is reduced to a pile of steaming gibs, or the mine itself is destroyed.  An individual Tesla Mine isn't much of a threat.  Several clustered together are absolutely lethal.  Mines can be shot and blown up, and will explode after a short time as with other proximity-based weapons.  They do not deal much explosive damage, but you can attach them to other players and like another electricity-based weapon in Generations, they don't mix well with water.

In addition to the Doom Warriors, the other three original Generations will be receiving new weapons for use in Team Arena.  What those will be I won't say right now, but they're in the works and some of them may be very familiar once you see them.  All game play modes for Team Arena will be supported - Capture the Flag, 1 Flag, Harvester, and Overload all work.  The Kamikaze and Invulnerability powerups function as expected, and the ability to enable either Persistent Powerups or Persistent CTF techs adds even more depth and chaos to the game play.

Take a peek and let us know what you think!

We appreciate that people like the work we've done on our weapon models.  Unfortunately, some people have been taking this a bit too far and exporting these models to other projects.  That's fine if someone does this for their personal use, but it is not fine to distribute our content in this manner.  We've encountered several examples of this happening with other projects for Quake 2 in the past.  We were just recently informed of a .pk3 file made for GZDoom using our Doom weapons.  We take pride in our work, and while we would like to share our work inside the games they were based around, the current models in the .99f build are in an incomplete format and are not ready to be shared in this manner.  Please do not use our models outside of our project without our explicit permission.  This is in the EULA, and unfortunately we do have to uphold our copyright to our creative works.

Normally we try to directly contact the person in question as most people are just like us - fans of the games that just want to do something cool with it - and ask them in a polite manner to not use our content and explain why.  For the most part, we've had a great deal of success doing this.  Most people don't understand how copyright works, or they're new to modding and don't understand that using someone else's material in your own project without asking is not the way to go, and this provides us an opportunity to educate the modder.  We don't want to see someone start a project just to get shut down as happened with the original Generations for Quake 2, the Reborn mod for Quake 3, and others that have run seriously afoul of copyright law.  Unfortunately, in the case of the Doom models as noted above, there was no way to contact the user, only the host provider, and that only through a DMCA form.  We do not like having to do this, but when someone misuses our creative works without our permission and without even giving us credit for having made the models, there's little alternative.  We work hard to make Generations what it is, and it is rather upsetting to see someone else take our hard work and pass it off as their own.  We try to be helpful to other modders as we're all gamers at heart, but we do have to watch out for our own stuff.

So please... if you want to see our weapon models in another game, be patient!.  We have animated versions of the weapons and improved versions of some that are far superior to what's been released in the .99f beta.  Some time after Generations 1.0 is final, we most likely will grant permission for general use.  Until that time comes, we must insist that our models and textures not be used for any purpose outside of playing Generations Arena.  We're not out to get anyone here, especially aspiring modders.  We've been on the wrong side of copyright and intellectual property law before, and learned a long time ago how it works and how to do things the right way.  If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to contact us.

It seems the computer I'm using for Wirehead's Generations server is unstable and keeps freezing up.  I'm not sure if this is from hardware or a software problem, but I'm working on fixing it.  I'll have the server back up once I know the computer is stable, or if it won't stay stable, after it's been replaced.  Thanks go to MadTux for bringing the problem to my attention.

It's come to my attention that people have been trying, unsuccessfully, to register on the message board.  A few weeks ago I discovered a problem in the email system for the site, and I think it's preventing people from activating once they register. If you've tried to register unsuccessfully, please send me a note to

phoenix
wireheadstudios
com

with your desired username and email address and I'll register you and send you back a password which you can change once you're logged in.  Fill in the "at" and "dot" in the appropriate places of course.  Sorry for not providing a direct link, but I don't feel like getting spammed, and sorry for the inconvenience.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/oculus-...rage-against-facebook-sale/1100-6418553/

So why is this on Gen's front page?  I had thought about possibly coding in support for the Occulus Rift in Generations down the line.  Following this news it's not going to happen.  This is an ethical decision on my part as Failbook has a policy of permanently and irrevocably storing user's data with or without their consent.  Once on Failbook, always on Failbook.  I cannot, in good conscience, in any way support an organization with that track record in regards to user privacy.  In addition, Palmer Luckey sold out Occulus before even a single consumer unit was finished.  That's a kick in the balls to every single person that supported Occulus on Kickstarter.  Those were people that supported Occulus from the ground up and believed in what it could be, only to see the creator just pocket $2 billion, make up a lame excuse as to why he did it, and leave their project at the mercy of Zuckerberg's greed machine.

Wirehead may be non-existent on the "organizations that matter" list, but there has to be a line drawn somewhere, and I guarantee you this:  As long as I'm in charge of Generations, this sort of crap will never happen here.  Principles matter.

Even the most seasoned warrior of the Arenas makes mistakes beyond the usual explosives-related variety.  Here we managed to catch Ranger with a less-than-optimal swing from his grapple.

Wishing you a Stroggy Christmas and a Fraggin' good New Year from the Wirehead team.  Hope you unwrapped some awesome stuff that makes you as happy as this guy!

Self-explanatory.

Several people have been reporting a "-1 servers" in the in-game browser.  This isn't a Generations bug.  This is due to Id's master server being offline or otherwise unreachable.  Normal Quake 3 Arena is affected by this as well.  It is still possible to locate servers for Quake 3 Arena by using a third-party program such as Qtracker or Xfire.  This affects regular Quake 3 Arena and all mods.  It is unknown when or whether the Quake 3 master server will come back online at all.  We'll let you know more as we find out about it.

Wirehead's Generations server is also temporarily offline, but this is only for maintenance.  It will be back up shortly and the address will be available through our Servers page on the website.

If anyone has been having trouble registering on the site, we had a glitch in one of our anti-bot utilities.  It has been corrected, so please try to register again.