Re-Volt I/O - The Future of the Community and RVF

The Future of the Community and RVF

9 years ago, 10-06-2015

For some time now I’ve been wanting to make some tutorials about track and car making. It’s been rather hard to get into the matter, I have to admit. Having learned how to create content for the game from community members, rather than tutorials, I know that something has to change.

It all started with Ali who programmed tools that made it possible to export content to the Re-Volt format. Users had to use a 3D modeling software that exports to ASE, which is a simple format for 3D objects, to then convert it to Re-Volt’s .w, .prm or .ncp. The situation has changed over the years. More and more tools have been released to make everything easier. The breakthrough, however, is Jigebren’s Blender plugin. This plugin allows you to create nearly everything of a track or a car in Blender itself. Mirrors, surface types, shadows have never been that simple.

The problem is that Blender has a very steep learning curve. Coming from 3DS Max, there weren’t many problems for me. I learned by trial and error and developed my own workflow. Whether or not it’s perfect, it works for Re-Volt. My goal is to make video tutorials to get makers closer to Blender and its workflow combined with Re-Volt. Looking at the most recent tracks (sidebar to the right), there are only a few promising ones. Now imagine that every track would be good in playability, flow and visuals. A look at Steam Workshops also shows that other games have much more available tools in order to create content.

Now, the Blender plugin is currently for closed testing only. You will have to send Jig a PM. If that doesn’t work out, I’m sure there are other ways to obtain it, although it wouldn’t be as nice. That is the main thing that’s holding me off right now. There are just no public tools.

Why am I thinking about this right now? I think that we have hit a critical point, especially with WeGo further contributing to the decay of the community. Yes, there are more people joining the forums, more people talking about the game – but those are the ones who fall for WeGo’s pay-trap. Those don’t add anything to the community. That might sound harsh indeed. In their defense, they probably don’t know any better because Re-Volt 2 is probably the first part of the game they’ve seen. I don’t want to imply that those people joining are bad guys. What I want to say is that we have to defend the game, or rather the impression people get from it. Re-Volt is no crappy F2P title that you have to empty your wallet for. It is a community-driven game with custom content and respectful competition.

One part on the way to achieve the just said is the series of tutorials that I announced. There are many other ways apart from that. First of all we need a place that represents the game at a glance (that’s what I set Re-Volt Frontend up for). The website is, however, lackluster for the most part. I would not consider it accessible. Thus, I have been working on the site as well as on the Youtube channel. Regarding the Youtube channel, I think that some kind of news digest would be nice. Giving the channel a face or at least a voice is a necessity, I think. If anyone would like to join me on that part, I’m glad to work with someone. There are many more topics to cover as well. Stay tuned, hopefully I’ll manage to set something up. Help is always appreciated.

Hope everything is going well!