But that’s the whole point of it all, is to show the contrast between the two sides so that the horrific stuff makes the beautiful stuff stand out and the beautiful stuff makes the horrific more hellish!
I’m down to one cutscene remaining on this map, a handful of military vehicles to scatter about and that should be it for this map! It’s been the fastest cleanup of any level so far (maybe a little over a week of work)
…it almost looks like a deer hunting simulator at times! I’ve started to clean up the outdoor maps that take place further away from the city and the thought had occured to me to replace all the zombies with deer and see if anyone notices. XD
I hope everyone is having a good 2025 so far! I meant to post much earlier, but there ended up being so much new to report that I kind of lost track on what to report! I’ve been on quite a roll with the progress that I just didn’t bother concentrating on the updates anymore!
First, a great preview video was created by Jonathan Sheridan that contains some insights into the project! I made some footage for him that isn’t anywhere else, so head on over and give him a thumbs up!
I’ve already started on the Outskirts/Blood Marshes map and cleanup has been 1000 times faster than the Grinwood Police Department map! (that is the most complex map in the game) Since then, I’ve tightened up a lot of game mechanics, I made 50% more monsters that haven’t been alluded to yet (no screens or info, no one knows what these are), did a great deal of bug fixes and just more things that I can’t even remember now.
When I first opened this map up to be cleaned/optimized, the visuals were a little different than I had left them. I made many changes and improvements to the post-processing, lighting system and materials since I “finished” this map a long time ago and so there were visual discrepnacies.
Some other silly little errors started popping up like below:
Since everything was so bright and blue before, I didn’t see the fine white outline on some of the alpha materials. Crap on a stick!
I also had to fix a bunch of foliage materials because I had a problem with distance assets showing up far too bright because they lacked shadow casting (for reasons of optimization, distance objects don’t receive or cast dynamic shadows) so I had to find a way to hide that, which I did with a couple of workarounds)
I also forgot to mention earlier that I brought in some weapons from the mod version! The pistol, axe, crowbar and machete can all be found at certain places. There is also an armor item you can get that gives you a similar uniform to the mod. I thought it would be a neat nod to the fan community! 🙂
There’s been an influx of new fans to the Youtube and Discord channels, and so I would like to extend a big hellish welcome to all of you! I’ve also (finally) created a public Steam page so that you can follow the game and be notified once the trailer and/or demo hits.
You can find the page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2082530/Out_Of_Hell/
Please keep in mind that I will be updating the Steam page as the game nears completion and the screenshots currently posted are taken from the beta version. Those screens will be replaced over time with newer content!
I really wish I could show you a video encounter of this thing, but I already spoil so damn much and I want you to be genuinely terrified by this creature!
These images are from a “Boss” encounter where you’re stalked by something known as a “Gorehound” and after two weeks of tweaking the visuals, ambience, sound effects (that was super important) and game mechanics, I think I finally nailed it and it all turned out to be really freaky!
I wanted to go into more detail about this entire map, such as my thought process behind the visuals of the monster(s), the contrast in environments, the logic of the setup and eventual payoff of the horror elements, etc. but there’s just too much to talk about.
I’ve decided to hold off on that and save it for the Dev Journal later on, so you’ll just have to suck it up and take this image dump instead! 😉
…also happens to be the most tedious! I’ve been going through the maps and tying up all the loose ends, fixing whatever bugs I find and polishing or optimizing whatever I think needs it. It’s mostly visual stuff that I’m working on at this point, as I’ve already fleshed out all the mechanics and fixed all the uncovered bugs, thanks to the efforts of the testing team.
I ended up re-lighting certain places in some of the maps and added other little subtle effects that you might not notice right away, but I think the mind picks it up and adds to the overall picture.
As always, I’m still trucking along! 😀
The Out Of Hell mod had been absolutely plagued with a terrible framerate issue, even on modern hardware since release in 2009. It was something that I tried to look into, but lacking any real knowledge, the best I could do was try to change a few settings here and there and release a patch.
Still, the problem persisted…until now. A User named ImmersiveSinner joined the Discord channel recently (who also happened to be a member way back in the old days on the forums. Remember those? :p) and told us about a fix they discovered!
Here is what they posted:
8:53 PM]immersiveSinner: What I found … recently when I played it last (last year sometime) was that it still kinda ran like shit lol unless you did one thing then it was smoooooooth as butter.
[8:53 PM]immersiveSinner: I have a 13th Gen i7 and an RTX 4070 TI… so I was still surprised when I had such horrible frame drops…
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: but if you just close the console printout window… Damn it’s like a whole new game.
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: No idea why.
[8:54 PM]immersiveSinner: like 500 fps constant no matter what’s going on.
[8:55 PM]Chicken+Ribs Combo: Hmm, I havent heard of that! Maybe we can repost that in the bug forum. Theres some folks that tried to get to the bottom of that frame drop
[8:55 PM]immersiveSinner: Yeah so when you switch to OOH in the mod menu in UT2k4… the console windows opens up right?
[8:55 PM]immersiveSinner: just alt-tab. close it. get back to the game… no issues.
So uhhh…there you have it. A framerate bug that’s been there for 15 years was caused by an open console window. I can only speculate as to why that would cause such a framedrop or consume so much resources, but that was the problem this entire time!
Now, do understand that the mod itself still has issues with optimization, so it probably won’t run completely smooth in all scenarios, but this is definitely better than the alternative!
Thanks @ImmersiveSinner!!!
What an absolute struggle it’s been since the first official beta test! There were a lot of bugs and issues uncovered (some game-breaking) and I thought it would only take a couple of weeks (at most) to fix. Well, that turned into 2 months! Not only that, the weeks leading up to launching the revised beta were just fraught with problems.
The biggest issues had to do with the save system which I had implemented so poorly. It was doing all sorts of unintentionally weird stuff so I had to basically rebuild another save system that was more efficient and easier to decipher (I even get confused by my own code much of the time!) I mean, just have a look and try following this in order to bug test! XD
Even though it took so much time to implement the changes, I got it done and we moved into Phase 1.1, where it was the initial beta with all of the fixes and improvements applied. That’s still ongoing as it launched yesterday, but the bugs found in this version so far are fairly minor (spelling/grammar mistakes, some collision issues, small coding stuff)
I’m going to fix these ones up as quick as I can and begin tying the other maps into the game which will make up the second phase! I don’t believe it would take as much time as the first phase, since this is where most of the coding and mechanics are fixed, so those won’t be an issue going forward. Any issue will be with the maps themselves and not the actual framework of the game.
After the second phase is complete, I will release a trailer before moving into Phase 3.0, which is the last stretch of the game. If that tests well, then I’ll release a public demo while the testing team does a final run through of the game as a whole.
This entire process has been frustrating, amazing, eye-opening and educational all at the same time. In hindsight, I am so glad I did this since releasing this to the masses without proper bug-testing (like the 2005 demo and the 2009 final) would have been hilariously disasterous!
LONG NGUYEN | Digital Artist & Game Designer 