Coming Soon - Hive's Nexus

Its still in beta and waiting on the Frozen Throne expantion to come out before all of the details are worked out. The game engine is complete and seemingly bug free. Many features have already been added and many more planned. Depending on what the new editor in TFT can do other features might be added once we get our hands on that. With our first map we broke the mold on TD's. Now we take on AoS/RPG's. Just like Revenge TD was nothing like any other TD this one is nothing like DoTA or any other AoS. Here is a overview....

Storyline-
The Nexus is a mysterious artifact that has been around since recorded history. Long ago Morticus, a powerful wizard, unlocked its secrets. He found a way to open the Nexus. When opened it formed a gateway to another relm. Morticus entered the Nexus and was never seen again. Shortly after, demons started coming through and attacking anything in thier path.

Four of the most powerful kingdoms formed a alliance and built fortresses around the nexus to hold back the demons. For ages the alliance and fortresses have held back the demons. Slowly the demon attacks have become more rare and smaller. Till they where hardly seen at all.

Recently Morticus's journal has been discovered. In it was the secret to unlocking the power of the nexus. It tells of great power to be found on the other side of the gate. To claim it one must reassemble Moticus's staff and use it to enter the Nexus. Its parts have been hidden in caves near the Nexus.

Soon the news spread. Shortly after the discovery of the journal the alliance crumbled in a fit of short sighted greed. War was soon to follow....

....and the return of the demons.

Game Concept-

It is a AoS/RPG combo

AoS (Age of Strife) style Concepts-
There are 4 teams of 3 players with limited unit control. Each player only controls a hero. Each team has a castle as a base. Inside the castles are a barracks for each player. In each castle is a king. If the king dies that team loses. Much like the Castle Defense maps except with 4 castles. To win the game kill the king from all the other teams while keeping yours alive.

RPG (Role Playing Game) style Concepts-
In addition to supporting your troops in combat your hero (and his hero allies) can go on a large number of quests. Some quests are simple, quick and easy. Others are complex, long and hard. But dont fret. The reward is compairable to the dificulty. Some quests give items others help you or your team in some other way. Quests are not a afterthought thrown in for flavor. They are built into the balance and strategy of the game. Questing can be a important step to victory but never a required one. You can always do your gate busting the old fasion way.

WAARRRrrgggg! :bangH:

The Random Factor-
We are making heavy use of randomness in this map. Each game will be different. Special locations and terrain features are found in different spots each game. Some quests may not appear every game. Many quests are based on random item drops. Troops attack random targets. Troop spawn is random. Other randomness may be added as well.

Quest types-

Main-
There is a main storyline quest that has 5 subquests. It is long and hard but if completed it is almost a victory condition. Most (not all) of the items recovered from this quest could allow a hero to defeat a whole army supported by heroes and kill the king singlehanded. Uber Items arnt suposed to be balanced. They are suposed to be game enders. Thought it would be much cooler that way, wrather than just having the game end when you complete the quest.


Combo-Items-
There are varius combo-item quests. These are items that can be combined into a more powerful/useful item. Some need to be taken to special locations and others just auto combine. With this type of item your 6 space limit on you hero is better used.

Upgrade Quests-
Some quests allow for upgrades for your team. It might be upgrades for heroes, castle upgrades, troop upgrades or a upgrade to your king. Many of these are multi-tier. In other words you can repeat the quest (or a simular one) to get additional upgrades. Most of these are team quests Ie: they benefit the whole team.

Neutral Faction Quests-
There are neutral factions in the area. The game will keep track of thier attitude toward each team. There will be a variety of quests involing them. Some may even convince them to join your cause or support it in some other way.


Game features-

-Four teams of three players each. Took some fancy triggering to limit the unit control (and stop abusable loopholes) with all player slots assigned as user. It wasnt easy but it was possible. Dont try this at home kids...We're a professional.


-Quality game engine. The basic engine has been under construction for months and has been fully tested on B-Net and has no known bugs. New features will be fully tested as well. Its a complicated engine requiring 100s of triggers with 1000s of trigger functions. More than any B-Net map we have seen. It was a lot of work but has turned out realy well. And its all yours for free. Marry X-Mas.


-Lag free. Even with a full game of 12 players server side lag was not even noticable. Some of the users lagged but after many tests we are convinced it is only on thier end. It is a large map with a lot going on so lower end comps and 56k users wont fare well. We tested it on a 1G system with a 64M G-Force 2 and did fine on all except the largest battles. Which are fairly rare. Even then it wasnt unplayable and all the lag was graphic on our end. It didnt effect the other users at all.

-Abuse free. All known abuses have been removed. Every feature we add we try to figure any possible abuse and remove it. If any new ones come up they will get the axe. we am very serious about this. we will remove a feature, no matter how cool, if we cant find a way to stop its abuse. There are no cheats, super secret codes or other sutch nonsense. Everything in the game can be discovered through the course of normal play. May take a few games to learn it all tho.


Heroes-

-There are 24 heroes atm. Each race has 6 unique heroes from 3 classes. Waiting on the expantion to do any customization of skills. When it comes they will be fully customized.

-The classes are mage, ranged and melee. That may change into more specific classes latter depending on how the skills come out.

-The classes are balanced based on team play. Some are good hero killers while others are good at base busting or mass troop killing. All are able to do any quest.

-Hero stats are the same for each race but not for each hero. So between the 6 heroes there will be a identical counterpart in each other race. Thats stats only, not skills.

-Elvoling heroes may be added. Or something much like it. We have some ideas on a new way to do this. Might be part of a quest as well.

-When you die you are given a choice. Respawn minus some gold after a short period or repick hero right away. If you repick all items will be dropped from your hero and may be recovered.


Castles-

-Walls. Of cource it has walls, its a castle. Why nobody elce does this in AoS maps is beyond us. Most bases in AoS maps look like a flea market.

-Castles have gates that will open for allies and stay closed for opponents. We know why nobody elce does this. Its a bloody pain the in the :cuss:. Took over 80 triggers to get them to work. Dont even ask how much fun they where to troubleshoot. But if we want something in our map we put it there. Pain in the :cuss: or not.

-A variety of shops to buy items and reinforcements. Five shop types in each castle so far. After FT we might make race specific shops and items. Not all items in the game can be bought. Many are quest only. Currently no items use slow poison or purge effect except uber items. No cheese lightning orb for you.


-Castles have prebuilt defenses. More may be added by the players. Towers can be built anywhere. A variety of spawn buildings may also be built. They are expencive and spawn 1 unit only. This is to keep lag down. Mainly they are late game cash sinks but can be saved up for early with decient results. Extra units genorate extra cash.

-There are 5 types of towers each race can build. One of those is race specific. Other are common between the races. More may be added latter.

-Barracks spawn random race specific troop types. Each barracks may also be upgraded multiple times to produce better troop types. This works on a % basis. So each upgrade gives you a chance to spawn a better troop type. The number of troops remain the same to keep down lag. Same idea as the Chaos Gate in Hive's Revenge TD.

-Upgrades for troops can be researched. Each tech works for the whole team and will effect all spawned units. Race specific tech may be added latter.

-You will be able to sell items for 50% of thier value. Right now the king does this. Just give him the item and its sold. The items is removed from game so you cant stack up the king with items. Latter there may be a NPC that does this.

-Quest NPC's and locations for team quests can be found in the castle. Team quests can be done solo but they affect the whole team.

Enviroment-

-Random terrain. Right now that consists of special locations and trees. Rumor has it that the new editor will allow terrain changes ingame. So there may be more latter.

-In addition to the open combat area there are caves and other special locations that can be entered by heroes.

-Large play area. It is a 12 player map with lots of quests and special locaions. There is plenty of room for all this and the war at the same time without getting cramped.

-Portal pads allow quick transport between certain locations. Most will send you to your castle. There is one in your castle that sends you near the middle of the map. This makes the game go faster since the map is so large. Town portal scrolls are also available.

-Creep camps are randomly located around the main map. They may be attacked by heroes. When destroyed they will spawn some creeps. Lvl of creep depends on the camp type. They will reapear after some time. Many quest items are random creep drops on a low %.

-Caves are located around the main map area. The entrance to a cave looks like a goldmine and can be seen on the mini-map. Just walk near them and you will enter a cave. There are 4 main caves. When the boss is killed there will be a short delay and respawn will be available again. To cause a respawn re-enter the cave after a min or so. You must re-enter. Waiting inside the cave will do nothing. This is to reduce lag. No reasion to have a ton of creeps hanging around when nobody is killing them.

-Neutral faction locations havent been implemented yet. The plan is to have them enterable like the caves. Location will be random. They may or may not spawn units depending on how laggy it gets. Each will have a number of quests specific to them. Might not see every faction every game. We may go nuts with these if we dont hit some kind of trigger/item limit. So there may be lots of different ones that will change each game.

-There will be other non enterable quest locations at random locations. Havent figured out how all of them will work yet. They will do something cool tho.

-Nexus will begin to spawn random demons as soon as one of the bosses in a cave is killed. They will attack all teams. Some of them are heroes so dont confuse them with players. So far this hasnt caused lag. If it does it will be towned down of removed.

Troops-

-Four different races with a large varety of troop types. This includes several melee types, ranged, mages, artilery and flyers.

-All troops are being customised for good balance.

-Many troops have special abilities. Many of those are race specific. Again waiting for TFT before finalizing details.

-Each time a troop is spawned it picks a random castle to attack. This causes the balance to change throughout the game. Sometimes one front will be strong and other times weak. Heroes must deal with these little problems as they come up. This also means that when one barracks dies troops will still attack along all paths. There will just be less of them.

Quests-

Already talked a bit about them so we will give you a discription of one of the side quests as a teaser.

Weapon Infuser Quest-

Items needed-

one of these (can be purchased or found)...

Finely Crafted Weapon
Enchanted Weapon
Power Weapon

And one of these (can be found on random creep drops)...

Cold Infuser
Fire Infuser
Lightning Infuser
Power Infuser

Take both items and find the Master Alchemist. He can be found wondering around in the main map area. He has raven form so sometimes he wont be accessable.

Give him a Infuser while you are holding one of those weapon types and you will get a new item depending which infuser you gave him and what type of weapon you have.

Power Infusers upgade the wepon class. Elemental Infusers turn them into Elemental Weapons. There are three classes of Elemental Weapons corrisponding to each of the weapon classes. A Power Infuser will also upgrade Elemental Weapons up to the third class. Ie: Greater Cold Weapon. There is a fourth weapon class for non elemental that can be gotten by using a Power Infuser on a Power Weapon. More elemental classes may be added after TFT.

This is just one quest type. There will be many others. This may not be the only one involving the Master Alchemist. There will be a lot to discover in this map....and knowledge will be power.


After we get a 1.0 ver of this out we will go back and update Hive's Revenge TD. We have some idea about the lag problem and will add TFT content as well. Expected release date around Jul 7-10 and Hive's Revenge II shortly after. Then maybe we can finish our sea battle map which is about half done. The release date is dependant on what Santa brings us on the first.

i can hardly wait :D your maps own :D

I'ma kill you because it's a bigger feature list then my Quest SMALL Open RPG :P

@E-F: Ty.

@D-I: Thats the uhh.....abreviated features list. Didnt want to bore everyone with all of the details.

8)

omg... ABRIVIATED?! thats the size of 10 of my maps features lists!

sooo.... when will it be published... it sound great :D

It sounds great :ggani:
Can't wait till it finishes!

Dark Dragon

That sounds awesome.. But as the lag free thing stated.. I can almost hardly believe that...

I myself have a 1.7 ghz with a Radeon 9700 vid card and a 1 gig mem base... I would probably not have a problem with this.. If I wasn't a 56k..

I live in an area that isn't provided by cable or dsl yet... And I know alot of people online like this as well. It sucks.. Yeah.. I can afford cable.. But can't get it for another couple of weeks...

:nono: But.. 80+ triggers for a simple gateopen and close feature?


Okay.. That's just a small base for the system.. The action code I stated isn't "exactly" the same as it would be but would be close enough.

But anwyays... Just ranting on.. Hope that helps you guys out alot.

How big is the map actually.. Like 256 x 256 or whatever.. If you take a look at mrp1-91p or mrp1p You'll notice that the main problem of this map is.. Too big with too many triggers. Half of the games you play end up being cut short because someone's computer stalls because of memory problems and they look like they lag out...

Just be careful... And good luck with the map.

80+ triggers does seem lame... Why didn't you just do two unit groups and check the player who wants to get in if he is in one or the other. One is allies, one is not, then have this as an array and use it for all towns with diff numbers for eatch town.

My jaw hits the floor already.

I am very confident in Hivemind as i was a great fan of his unbelievable Revenge TD.

As for the 80 trigger system for the castle gates, i am sure Hivemind is aware of the commonly knowned basic destructable open/close triggers, but i bet he needed them 80. I am sure we are unaware of what the whole castle gates system that Hivemind made really is able to do.

Let's wait and see, i bet this map will get all of our arses into gear and try to make even better maps as we will, i am sure, come with a new reference.

Thank you again Hivemind

Regards

The part about the reassembling of the staff sounds like Diablo 2...

If your map is going to be big enough, and if you want a similar zoomed out screen like in your Revenge TD, but that doesn't need to be reset every x seconds in case of mousescroll, feel free to ask me, i'll give you my instant zoom out cinematic camera model that will zoom out the game camera and disable mouse scroll.

Regards

Gee..open gate, close gate. Would have never thought of that.
:Heh:

We are actualy one of the trigger gurus around here. Yes we need 80 to run the doors. Unless we realy went out of our way to condence them. Here are some of the reasions why....

Gates must open for alies and stay closed for enimies.

When a gate opens or closes WC decides that it has died and resorects it. It will also fire any death conditions. If its dead and gets a open/close command it will come back to life opened/closed.

You need a trigger to open each one....

...A trigger to close each one...

...Turn those 2 triggers on and off...

...have a death detect trigger...

...The death deth trigger will fire ever time it opens or closes....

...so you need to have a trigger decide weather its realy dead or just opened/closed...

...If it does die you need to make sure it never opens or closes again since that will resurect it...

...each gate opens and closes seporately so they each need a set of triggers to oporate them. We have 4 castles with 4 gates/doors in each.

You dont want gates closing on someone about to go through it so you need to keep it open if someone is near it unless they are a badguy.

Gates are not units. So a seporate attack command must be give for ai units.

If they kill a gate or it opens then they must be ordered to attack somewhere elce, since thier ordered target has just "died".

You cannont own a gate so its aways neutral. Changing this would make it much simpler.

When a base is killed you need to change how the AI works so attacking units dont just sit there. This isnt exactly a gate trigger but gates cause this to get more complex so we include that in the 80. For just the open and close part takes around 60 triggers.

Ther are a few other gate issues that are a pain to deal with. If you still think we are off base go grab a unlocked AoS map and put some gates that open for allies and not for oponents. Units retarget if gate is opened/killed. Can be killed...and stay dead. Its not as simple as you think.
;)

About Lag-
Even though there is a large # of triggers most are conditional and not fired often. Quest triggers for example. Pick unit triggers are a common source of lag when a lot of units are picked. This type of trigger is very rare in this map. Generaly only happens for retargeting after a king dies.

Even though the map is large the total unit count at one time is low. The spawn time for troops is long and the number spawned is low. There are a lot of neutral units but they are only spawned when someone is availible to kill them. In most cases when a dungeon is not ocupied by a player it is totaly empty. Creeps will spawn only when someone goes in.

The map has been tested on B-Net with 12 players. When all had good internet connections the play was smooth. Player lagg-outs and lost connections where about as common as in DotA. More content is being added that could make it more laggy. We will test for too much and remove things if it doesnt stay smooth.

As we said it prob wont be the map of choice for 56Kers. We make maps because we want to play them. We put a lot into them because that is the kind of game we enjoy. We dont make maps for the masses. If we did our maps wouldnt have so much strategy. Strategy is a concept that is lost on the masses. To them if it requires thinking then it must be unbalanced.

Staff in D2?
Was there a staff in D2? Oh yea act 2, right. Well we wanted a multi part quest and after looking at the graphics avaliable for items we chose the key of the three moons. Its a obvious one since it has the asembily shown on the graphic. Since we wanted a 4 part quest we decided it could be a staff head and then use a headless staff for the shaft graphic. In addition Morticus was a wizard and is shown in the intro using a staff to open the nexus. The choice to have a staff as the quest item was purely due to the graphics available and it fitting the storyline/intro.

In short...no we are not so lame as to "borrow" storyline/quest ideas from other games. Especaly one with as weak a storyline as Diablo. Diablo was a great hack-n-slash treasure hunt but not exactly great storytelling.

Release Date/Beta test-
We posted around the 8th up top but after finding more about the new editor and what we will be able to do we expect a 1.0 ver out by 10-11 Jul. Online beta testing should start anywhere between the 6th and 8th.

Wont have any scedualed times for beta tests since we make changes and then test them online and make more changes. Put us on your friends list and you will see when we start a game. If you message us dont always expect a resonse. We get a lot of ppl messaging us and dont have time to answer all of them. Also we are dislexic and have trouble with some of the nik's ppl use. We are mainly on west but also go to east and euro sometimes.

Our online names are...

West - Hive-Mind
East - Hive_Mind
Euro - Hive-Mind

Camera controls-
Thnx for the offer ChrydGod but we have a new camera system that is conditional. It wont fire unless someone zooms.

Took a quick look at your Cube TD. Am on a old laptop right now and couldnt play it online but what we saw of it looked cool.
:foot: G/J

Wow sounds awsome. I have played Revenge TD, but i uninstalled war3 so i need to dl it again... anyone know where i can get it?

You can find it in chrydgod's sig (though is it the latest version?)
Ive played hives revenge a bit with friends, but my only nag is that it was a bit hard, and we defeated each other before we got very far.