OK, first up, apologies for the delay. My phone died, and while that doesn’t sound relevant, it’s much more of a problem when you consider that I get my internet through it. So I’m up at work at the moment, which means no screenies or pics – I’ll have to add some new ones when I do next fortnight’s update.
So, new stuff. Well, there has been some news, big and small. The small is mission related – one mission has been scrapped and is being rebuilt into something more plot relevant (the old one was... not up to par, so it’s no great loss), and I’m considering inserting another near finished mission that lost its spot during one of the Act 1 reshuffles – it’s an interesting, hide and seek type mission. “But Black Wolf”, I hear you say precognitively, “Making major changes to the mission structure at this late stage is potentially a major risk! How will this affect your 2011 release date?” Well, unfortunately, that’s the big news.
I’ve discussed it with VA, and the Dec. 31 goal is, unfortunately, not looking realistic. However, this is for a very specific and, thankfully, not gameplay-critical reason. Let me explain:
When the 2011 date was set (some time around August, if memory serves) we still had a few assets yet to be finalized. Since then, several have been finished and made it ingame. However, there’re three key assets still missing (HTL Orestes, Blackwood Station and the MMI Harmony (No, I’m not going to tell you what that is
)), all of which are painfully close to being finished – you’ve probably seen the shots of the textured Orestes, and possibly VA’s pics of Blackwood (
Here for the forgetful)). Unfortunately enough, all rely on skills that I just don’t have to get them finished, thus they fall into VA’s domain, and he’s currently buried in finishing his thesis before the end of the month. Any two of these projects might have been manageable by Dec 31, but all three are, unfortunately, probably untenable, and will have to wait until early 2012. Which, as I said, puts the December release outside the realms of realistic likelihood.
However, I did make a promise, and I do still think that the Dec 31 deadline is valuable one. And so, this is what I’m thinking. Public release is not practical. However, we have working, in-game models for all three assets. There’ll be nothing stopping anyone playing through the entire act, it’ll just look distinctly sub-par. So Dec. 31 will now be the deadline for a Beta release, possibly open, but more likely closed – realistically, even with the modified mission layout, completion of FREDding should be reached well in advance of that deadline. Thus, we’ll be able to get a few testers to help us bugfix the campaign while we wait for the remaining few assets. These testers will have to put up with a plain grey Harmony and Orestes, but everything should work and be balanced just fine.
I know that this is definitely far from ideal, and that it seems like we’re catching the BWO disease here, but I assure you, we’re not. If we had working low poly assets for all three models, we might just release with them, but the Harmony never existed as a low poly mesh, and both the low poly Blackwood and the high poly, non-baked Blackwood have too many textures to work with FSO (Yes, the low-poly asset is that old
). So our options here are pretty limited. And the additional time (since I was originally hoping to have the Beta finalized early to mid December, I’ve gained 2-3 weeks of FREDding) comes when I’ll have time off work for the wet season, so I should be massively more productive, allowing the changes to the missions to get done inside of the allotted time
By the way, please don’t use this thread to put your name forward as a Beta tester. As yet, there’s nothing for you to beta test, and besides, I expect to be tweaking and changing right up to the last minute
. We’ll put out the call closer to the date.