Developer Diaries

Twenty Years of Movie Battles 2 Twenty years ago today, RenegadeOfPhunk released the first build (B14) of Movie Battles 2. Last year on the twentieth anniversary of the original Movie Battles release for Jedi Outcast, we ran through a brief history of Movie Battles as well as a look into our first open mode class upgrade in years. This year we will be focusing on what is coming in the near future as well as things we plan on delivering over the course of the next year. Our focus this year is to deliver some of the largest sets of new abilities & weapons, revamps to existing ones, and overall class updates than we have ever delivered before. Back-end Refactoring Since 2019 we have been slowly working on refactoring many of the back-end...

Rend 2 - A More Modern Renderer Rend 2 is a more modern renderer being developed by SomaZ to add features such as: Physically Based Materials, HDR Rendering & HDR Lightmaps, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, and more. Starting next release Movie Battles II will begin to incorporate those modern features in new and old assets. With this new renderer and release, we will continue to upgrade bits and pieces of Movie Battles II to increase visual fidelity with each update going into the future. However, with an increase in visual fidelity comes an increase in cost. While Rend2 comes with a host of optimizations over the base renderer, definitely expect increased file sizes and increased memory usage when Rend 2 is active. In a coming update...

Manaan: Ahto City Uprising Manaan is a new level based on the iconic location, 'Ahto City' from Knight of the Old Republic. The initial goal was to create a large map for a high population, with both teams having their own objectives. This would allow them to choose between attack or defense, making the gameplay more dynamic. The map was started almost two years ago and has undergone many changes along the way. The original layout closely resembled the version in KotOR, but this design posed serious challenges from a gameplay perspective. A few months later, @FrenzY joined the project and contributed new ideas to create a layout that would align with MB2 standards. The main change was the merging of the two parts of Ahto City into...

Enclave Layout Update Enclave is a level that has been overdue for changes for about a decade. The southern, or right side route (from Rebel perspective) has always been too long, too straight, and with too much of an uphill battle at the end. While the northern, or left side route (from Rebel perspective) had a large issue with getting past an easily camped elevator close to Imperial spawn. These two spots in Enclave are what this update attempts to do some things to address. The first and probably largest change is the complete removal and reworking of the elevator route as seen in the image above. The area is now much more wide open and has a more gradual slope to the upper landing pad area of the level. It also enters the upper...

A Beta and a Mandalorian A Beta Twenty years ago today was the first official beta release of the original Movie Battles by RenegadeOfPhunk. Back then there was just four classes with simple loadouts, a round system to facilitate the last man standing gamemode alterations, and a few tweaks to the original Jedi Outcast combat. Some of those tweaks drastically change the arena style combat of Jedi Outcast by making blaster projectiles faster, adding a reloading system, removing pickups from the world, giving lightsabers more stance variations and new defensive capabilities. For those last twenty years we have continued to expand upon the initial idea. Adding more features, models, maps, and various balance changes to get to the point we...

Resupply Nodes In the next update to the Capture The Flag, Resupply Nodes are being added in order to give people opportunities to sustain the fight. These resupply nodes vary based on the needs of a given CTF level. In one map they may be situated near the flags or spawns and only the defending team may access them. On another level they may be more centralized requiring both teams to fight over access to them. The parameters that resupply nodes have will also vary based on level. Health resupply nodes may supply both health and armor, or just one of the two. The same with ammo resupply nodes. Ammo resupply nodes may supply both weapon ammo, and expendables such as grenades or fuel, or also just one of the two types. Each node will...

Years ago Frost created a Marvel map that was never finished but was really fun to play so rather than letting the idea stay unreleased I decided to make the map again from scratch and add in some more MCU elements. Map The map is split into seven different areas, the main area of the map (where both teams spawn) is a section of New York with Grand Central Terminal and the Avenger's Tower in the middle. In New York there are portals which lead to the six other areas of the map; Odin's Vault on Asgard, HYDRA Siberian Facility, X-Men Danger Room, The Red Room, Sanctuary and Oscorp Lab C35. New York Asgard - Odin's Vault HYDRA Siberian Facility X-Men Danger Room The Red Room Sanctuary Oscorp Lab C35 Objective The...

A new Death Star level is coming with the release of Capture the Flag. It is an entirely new level created specifically for the new game mode with 4 routes directly into each of the flag areas. The level is symmetrical and each route has way more interconnects than a typical Movie Battles map. Everything is spread across three separate vertical levels. Each team has their own set of three "sheltered" spawns. The enemy team cannot physically access these sheltered spawns but both teams can shoot into and out of them to help prevent both spawn camping and a little bit of flag camping. Below are the minimaps for the various levels so you can get a feel of the actual layout of everything as well as details about each one. There are two...

Developer Diary - New Launcher and Open Beta For some time it has been our ambition as a team to be able to be more open with the whole community with in progress development and testing. Those of you who view and follow the Development Roadmap will have not only been able to see the first glimpses of that philosophy but also what is coming down the pipeline to aid that. The cornerstone of all this is the Launcher - so today I am glad to announce the Open Beta of the new launcher ... which will enable Open Betas for MBII! Where we've come from Today's launcher has been end of life for some time. Work was started on it more than 11 years ago and the landscape of computing has changed immensely in that period. The approach to a cross...

Developer Diary - Game Stats In the next release we will be adding the capacity for game servers to send back statistics for analysis by the development team. This is one of the most important features that we have ever added to MBII. Up until now all design decisions and feedback we have had has come from anecdotal evidence and different people often disagree wildly. Gathering statistics will allow these discussions to be data informed rather than relying on different people's often irreconcilable points of view. To that end, with the next release of MBII libcurl will be a required component for server hosts. For windows users this library will be supplied, pre-packaged in the usual way either via launcher or the manual...

Corellia, like many popular maps, has a long and storied history. It has existed almost as long as Movie Battles II itself and undergone multiple revisions with work contributed by several map makers. Earlier this year I began work on the map's first major revision in over a decade, and possibly its last. Scroll down to the "Corellia 2020 Update" heading below if you only care about previewing the upcoming changes, but I strongly encourage looking at the history for a better sense of how much it has changed and more context for how the current update came to be. A Brief History of Corellia Original Click for Album Layout The original map was created by L-5-R and =Profcorron= and released in 2005 with the very first Community Map Pack...

Almost 1 year ago I threw together the official web-based server list as a replacement for Jacklul's after it stopped working. Since then it's received some visible and less visible enhancements, the most significant occurring earlier this year when we started collecting server statistics. Now I'd like to introduce a new service that reuses some of that prior work: a Discord bot! Features Just like the web version of the server list, the bot makes it easy to see what servers are active without needing to start the game: You can also get some basic stats or a list of maps distributed with the launcher: While that's all useful, I don't think those commands alone would be enough of a reason to bother writing a bot - if you're...

One of the goals for the team for the last two years has been to add some statistics collection into the mix to help us see things from a broader perspective than just the experiences of developers and players that shared their experiences with us. This has mostly been a side project for those working on it, as obviously working on the main parts of the game still take priority when we have a team a small as ours. However, over the last month or so I have made some large progress on the visual front-end using information from the master server with some additional help from Spaghetti. As of the moment of posting about a week of data has officially been gathered outside of the testing environment. Instead of going over the whole process...

A Brief History About three and a half years ago, after a rather disastrous loss of hosting, the active team and many retirees pulled together to rebuild from the ashes. For those around at the time, it's fairly well known that LoU did all of the backend work setting up the website, forums, and development infrastructure, among other things. Less well known is that our main hosting and beta testing servers were generously provided by Hexodious. Alas, all good things come to an end... The team was given notice at the end of last year that this arrangement would need to come to an end soon, so we have been assessing our options. While the timeline for completing the move is undefined (no need to panic over an encore of 2015), the...

Before we begin, we would like to note that a lot of what you are about to see is a work in progress and the final product(s) may change from what you see here. Tutorial Over the past few months we have slowly progressed towards the first release of the tutorials. The first thing you will notice when starting up the game after the initial release is a new popup that asks you whether or not you would like to play the tutorial. If you click yes it will take you into the first tutorial. If no it will take you to the main menu, and remember your choice for the next time you launch. If you decide not to do the tutorial right away you can then hit the graduation cap icon to access the list of tutorials, their requirements, and completion...

15 years ago today the original Movie Battles released its first full version for Jedi Outcast. Hard to believe isn't it? On eve of the release of a new Star Wars movie none the less! We wanted to take this opportunity to show off some of the upcoming changes to Movie Battles II. However, for those who haven't seen the 10 year anniversary send off by our founder RenegadeOfPhunk I highly suggest checking it out here: 10 Year Anniversary news - Movie Battles II mod for Star Wars: Jedi Academy he goes over some of the history creating the very first version of Movie Battles. The core new player experience for Movie Battles is about to change drastically. We are working on making the UI much easier to navigate and handle, adding...

Hey everyone. I know that a lot of were expecting changes for the current state of saber v gunner and/or saber v saber in this patch but I assure you, things are still in motion to get those settled and pushed out! As a preface, MB2 has had a theme of changing things for the sake of changing or trying to address problems in really weird/roundabout ways and not actually solving the issues. This leads/has led to problems not actually being solved and/or creating new ones (although there's been a lot of cool stuff along the way). Moving forward, there's going to be more focus on adjusting things to being able to have more static baselines (e.g. there shouldn't be any major overhauls to saber v gunner interactions once all of this stuff is...

Hey everyone here to share a quick update with you all a few new additions to the rosters, that will be coming in the next update! Along with a small preview of what's to come :) General Hux First up is the First Order's Elite favourite whipping boy, General Armitage Hux. Naturally he will be joining the Commander role, and will come with the option of being coat or coatless. First Order Office To go alongside Hux there will also be a Generic First Order Office being added to the Commander roles. Initially I was going to have both a male and female version of the character, however due to time constraints, and the mere fact I didn't want to homogenise so many different First Order officers (since Hux was being added) I ended up...

Hey guys! Another map update for you today! Here we have a new level from Plasma. He started working on this after working on Starkiller Base. Scarif is centered around the beginning portion of the campaign to get the Death Star plans from Citadel Tower where you are part of the Rebel infiltration team setting up explosives as a diversion while the plans are retrieved. You must place explosives on one of two locations marked by the Phoenix Squadron logo and prevent the Imperial security forces from defusing before the time runs out. Lets have a look shall we? Rebel Spawn - Cargo Shuttle Imperial Spawn - Krennic's Shuttle Jungle Interior Corridor Bridge Objective Areas - Bomb Sites A and B Overview

Hey everyone! Sno here with a new level to share with you all that will be coming to MB2 in the next few weeks! First off, a little history. Dxun began development by a team member named Droidee roughly 7 years ago. Droidee managed to complete most of the map from the beginning. The framework and terrain were all setup and Mace had started working on the vis a bit. Though when I joined the team I ended up picking up this project mid-way, which was about 5-6 years ago. Something had come up and Droidee was unable to continue development. Credit goes to him for a large portion of this project. Anyhow, I started working on Dxun and over the course of a year I managed to add in the objective, add in the East Side Route and the underground...