A bird in the hand is worth...

..Killing two birds with one stone? ...And other metaphors I could butcher to make my point.

It is late and I am in a self imposed crunch mode on my new Environment Content Pack, but I thought I would steal a moment for a quick .plan, it having been ages since my last post.

I once saw a documentary where this native guy was trying to find water out in the wild bush. To achieve this he stuck a chunk of salt through a knot hole in a hollow tree. The next thing you know this monkey comes along and tries to get the salt, so he sticks his hand in and grabs it, but with the chunk of salt in his had, the monkeys fist is now too big to withdraw from the hole. That monkey really wanted that salt and was not soon going to give up his prize.

Now that monkey had been holding on to that chunk of salt for a good while. Setting in the hot sun had taken its toll, and once he gave up, the first place he headed was for water. And the crafty native followed the monkey back to his watering hole and drank his fill.

That story comes to mind because I feel like the monkey with his hand stuck in a the hole and unwilling to give up that mother load chunk of salt.

Over the past several months, I have developed a mother load of environment content. It all sprang from this great white whale of an idea I had for an environment/game/demo project. However, juggling my various content pack ideas, contract work, side projects, and challenges of life, I couldn't seem to either get the time, or clarity to nail down one specific content pack project. So the monster just kept growing.

Now here I am pushing against my deadlines and feeling like that monkey with his hand stuck in a knot hole for not wanting to give up that chunk of salt. Probably not the best analogy, but it will do.

The end result is a compromise. This new content pack definitely ain't the great white whale I started chasing after completion of my first environment pack, but its a pretty big fish just the same.

The new environment is focused on Torque Game Engine, Torque Lighting Kit, and First Person Games. The "First Person Games" aka FPS development approach is worth noting, sine my first environment pack was specifically designed for RTS environment development, and so, has lower texture resolution and poly counts. The new content pack, by contrast, has much higher texture resolution, model complexity, and level of detail support.

I have also included a number of features, functionality, and examples that I thought would be useful to developers like , animated .dts shapes, extensive environment sounds, TLK support, and a few other special features I will keep under wraps until launch day.

Hopefully by adding these extra goodies and documenting the "how to" aspects, you guys will have working examples of various things, like the animated .dts shapes, and be able to utilize these features more easily in the games you create.

As with my first environment content pack, this new one will ship with playable builds and environments created to demonstrate the use of the pack assets.

The two older screen shots below are of assets that were staged in a test map composed of elements from my first content pack and the new one...In other words, shots of a work in progress, but you get the idea. I'll submit and image of the day very soon and do a proper .plan once development of the content pack is wrapped up.

What I don't have yet, is a name for the environment, I have been banging my head against the wall on that one. The best I could describe it would be something like Sleepy Hallow meets the old west...sort of.

Take a look at the pics and see if you can come up with a good one. I am open to suggestions.