Plan for Mychal McCabe

Garage Games has approved a proposal which will allow members of Badlands Games to assume a leadership role in the production and editing of the Garage Games Monthly Newsletter. This doesn't mean that we aren't moving onward and upward with Grav.

Been a while since I've gotten one of these together. The last two months saw me contributing heavily to a contract web project that I thought would help keep me afloat while production on Grav churned along.

Grav's churning was impacted in a big way by the hours this project required. But in the interim an important thing happened.

Garage Games has approved a proposal which will allow members of Badlands Games to assume a leadership role in the production and editing of the Garage Games Monthly Newsletter. The monthly newsletter will continue to be published under it's current name, "The Garage Games Tune Up". Content will be solicited from the community, the editorial direction of the newsletetr will be defined by the community, and important roles remain to be filled by members of the community.

The format, presentation, and editorial standards for content of the newsletter will be standardized while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the community and also Garage Games.

A key requirement of our proposal for the newsletter will be ensuring a regular release schedule, which will be based on a recurring production schedule.

Anyone interested in contributing content or talent to the newsletter should drop me a line - [email]mychal@badlandsgames.com[email].

This doesn't mean that we aren't moving onward and upward with Grav.

Joel Baxter is in the middle of some signifcant modifications to our physics. While we won't have the thoroughly cool rag-doll physics of ut2k3, players will be able to smack each other around, send them spinning and etc. This is a big part of what Grav will be about.

I confess to having spent a lot of time with ut2k3 becasue the Bombing Run game type is so close in spirit to what we are trying to accomplish with Grav. In a beer soaked bout of banter I even tolod a friend that we should just make Grav a ut2k3 mod. What frustrates me though is how little player to player physics you see in UT. This goes for just about every fps I've played.

Close quarter weapons like the Q3 fist, or the knife that you see in some games are all just fake projectiles. When two players run into eachother they either neutralize each other's forward progress, or they neutralize each other's forward progress and kind of slide off of one another laterally.

Firepower and etc. minimize how goofy all of this really is - shooting someone into chunks and goo prevents the engine from being responsible for depicting the physical event of two adrenally charged muscle bound combatants plunging head long into one another.

So, yeah, we're concerned about physics.