17 replies to this topic

[Azrael Strife]

I just found these on YouTube, quite recent videos.



After a bit of googling around, I finally found it! A leaked Alliance build! I'm downloading now, can't wait to try what should have been

Here you go: http://www.assembler...ad.php?p=552929

Not sure this deserves a news post, and I couldn't find a more relevant sub forum in the X-Com section.

[silencer_pl]

Nice find, although the voice action is pretty terrible. Very good use of Unreal Engine, though I think the origianl (I mean Unreal and UT) are quite better.

Shame of the game but it dosen't look that good as trailer / teaser promised. But then again this was alpha build.

[Space Voyager]

Thank you for posting! What is this now, all kind of new X-COM related info flying around... I will not be trying it out though, I fear my old dreams of what Alliance should have been would be destroyed.

[Bomb Bloke]

Ah. It all makes sense now. Firaxis decides to make another X-COM, then Alliance comes out? Really I've been dead these last couple of weeks, and this is clearly my heaven.  

... Or it would be. Why's my download crawling along like this? What does it mean, "hours"? Perhaps I went to the other place...  

Seriously though, I've been moaning about lack of Alliance for I-don't-know-how-long now. And... and... and... now it's been dangled in front of me! And I won't have time to properly mess with it for at least a couple of days! ARGH!!!!

The guy who posted it sounds like he'll be putting up more links (he's already posted two for those not paying attention), so it may be well worth watching that page over the next few months.

I took a read through the other threads in that "unreleased games" forum section, noticed a few titles of interest, but very little in the way of links. The general rule seems to be to auction content off. Hah! Perhaps I should've posted about that EU beta there, instead of dumping it into our files section.  

[Hobbes]

Has someone tried the alfa or the beta yet? How much close to completion are them?

[Azrael Strife]

Not yet, the thing keeps asking me for the Alliance CD to run... anyone has an X-Com Alliance NoCD?

[Bomb Bloke]

Game files have to be dumped in C:\Alliance.

Still fighting other errors trying to get it to actually start, but it looks like there's files for a UFOpedia (mostly made up of smk clips) and more (tons of cinematics for losing missions, intros, and what-not). I'm seeing multiple armor sprites, including Apoc's Marsec armor, and some yellow suits I've never seen before.

Have to go to work now, got stuck on glide init errors. Suspect I need a glide wrapper, though installing one at random didn't seem to help.

[Azrael Strife]

Bomb Bloke, on 13th January 2012, 1:35am, said:

Game files have to be dumped in C:\Alliance.

Still fighting other errors trying to get it to actually start, but it looks like there's files for a UFOpedia (mostly made up of smk clips) and more (tons of cinematics for losing missions, intros, and what-not). I'm seeing multiple armor sprites, including Apoc's Marsec armor, and some yellow suits I've never seen before.

Have to go to work now, got stuck on glide init errors. Suspect I need a glide wrapper, though installing one at random didn't seem to help.

Tried eVoodoo but did not work so good, the briefing for the missions gets randomly stucked, let us know if you find one that works.

[silencer_pl]

In old Unreal engine you could switch to software renderer. They made so good that you mostly don't notice the dfference bettwen opengl and software.

[djlogue]

silencer_pl, on 13th January 2012, 8:03am, said:

In old Unreal engine you could switch to software renderer. They made so good that you mostly don't notice the dfference bettwen opengl and software.

Wow looks really good for late ninetys. Must have been a hevey decision to drop it. What other games was it going up against??. It looks as good as say swat 3's graphics and that didn't come out till about 2001 ish.

[silencer_pl]

The main adversary of Unreal engine was ID tech 2 engine (Quake 2).... and I say it won both hands down... Sometimes I try to return To Na Pali just to remember good old times. When UT came in 99 they added DirectX support but unfortunetly X-Com Alliance is from 98. Only X-Com Enforcer benefited from upgraded Unreal Engine...

This is strange enough that Alliance project didn't make it yet Enforcer did.

[Pete]

silencer_pl, on 13th January 2012, 11:31am, said:

This is strange enough that Alliance project didn't make it yet Enforcer did.

Well when it all went tits-up I understand they used a chunk of the Alliance assets for Enforcer and therefore probably some of the code. Enforcer was developed pretty quickly whilst Alliance still had a way to go, but again from what I can remember it wasn't long enough that they couldn't have given it a chance.

[silencer_pl]

Yeah but Enforcer was released in 2001 ? That is 3 years... by that time Alliance should be released... Maybe they fought that Aliance isn't the project they were looking for... I mean the trailer was too good from what we see on those alpha videos.

[Bomb Bloke]

Alliance wasn't "dropped" so much as it was forgotten, passed from company to company, none of whom could get organised enough to do anything with it before they got bought out by the next corp...

Anyway - I'd been messing around with version 219b, and after finally working out how to switch from glide to a software renderer, I got stuck with similar errors related to the galaxy audio device it wanted to use. At this point I got pissed off and moved onto 220a. This one worked for me with no reconfiguration; glide and all! However, as it only offered three levels, I moved everything from the 219b installation sans the System folder over the top of 220a, and most of the maps (there're tons of the things) load without issue. The audio seems to be very buggy for me though; I don't get any speech or anything like that. Mostly I got crackles that got louder in certain areas, though there was some sort of background ambiance that was suitably creepy.

Most maps start with you and a team mate crashing into a complex via some sort of capsule. Once you've landed, your seatbelts come off and you're free to run around and kill Sectoids or whatever.

The team mate can follow you, or be ordered to go to certain locations, grab guns, push buttons, whatever. When shot, and otherwise unoccupied, he'll usually pull out his medkit and heal himself. For whatever reason a fair few buttons don't work when you push them but do when he does - at one stage, when I didn't know how to have him follow me (it's a numeral button that does it), I asked him to run to my location from where I'd left him. He correctly ran away from me to a stair case, through two button-activated doors, into the lift and up we went. Decent pathfinding for the time.

Combat is nothing flashy, you shoot enemies and they die. Usually with the same death animation. Seems to depend on the amount of health they had when the last shot hit them, versus how much damage it dealt. Having their heads fly off is fun.

If memory serves, it was supposed to be possible to drag injured team mates around; haven't played enough to run into that scenario. Think I have god mode on or something. It seems some Sectoids spawn next to guns but aren't equipped with them; when you show up they run over to them, but can't seem to work out how to pick them up...

Will have to grab a smk player tomorrow and have a mess around with some more files. May even pull out one of my old compies (I've got one with a voodoo and everything) to see how that fairs.

[Pete]

This plays smk files and is free: http://www.radgameto...com/bnkdown.htm

It was actually used in several games around that time and earlier to actually play .smk, and later.bik, cutscenes.

[Bomb Bloke]

Yep, I know the one - thanks, worked perfectly!  

One of the videos showed Snakemen and Chryssalids. Not sure if any of the maps include them - the briefing videos make it pretty clear that the primary enemies are the Sectoids, the leader of which is called "the Nexus".

One is mostly made up of sketches interspersed with CG animation. Notable features include a female voiced by a man, and a Sectoid ship that looks exactly like an Imperial Star Destroyer.

The videos also talk about a data extraction unit device you have in your inventory, a little computer-type thing. You probably have to use this on certain buttons/terminals, which'd explain why my team mate knew how to activate them but I didn't. Either that or the team mate really knows stuff my soldier didn't (one of the briefing videos makes it sound like she's brought along for brains rather then combat ability).

There's a UFOpedia animation for a decent selection of weapons; nothing too fancy (the usual rifles/plasmas). The freeze gun apparently shoots helium, and there's a guided launcher in there too. Much to my annoyance, the awesome gun that looked like an expandable blasterbomb shell doesn't make an appearance... More to my amazement, I can't find a copy of the picture of it anywhere other then on my hard drive, though I'd be surprised if no one knows the one I'm talking about. Will have to put our Alliance site section back in order.

Some maps appear to have Ascidians (or however it's spelt) assigned to them, but it doesn't look like there are actual models for the engine to load (even the briefing videos only show concept-art type stuff). The Microprose logo is still on some of the videos, suggesting these particular builds haven't been touched since they were bought out (though as I said above, I don't think *any* builds were touched since then).

There's probably enough content to get a pretty good picture as to how the overall plot was going to go, though I'm not seeing much as to how the relationship with the Ascidians would progress.

[Space Voyager]

Is it possible to upload the vids to YT?

[Bomb Bloke]

Yeah, but they'll take a bit of conversion/sorting. The UFOpedia ones are supposed to loop, so I'll probably make one video with all those together.