Plan for Jerane Alleyne

The past 2 weeks have been a bit hellish. after nearly 2 years, I finally blew out the power supply on my PC, which effectively put me out of commission for th last 2 weeks. I kept myself busy by posting a few questions on some things I ran into while working on our game. Its been helpful, but not I can truly return to work :)

Incidentally, I got an email from someone applying to our programmer position during my power blowout, but the email was accidentaly deleted from my email server. So if you're reading this, Please resend your email! Thanks :P


General Progress
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Whiel listening to my Xenosaga OST, I've finished something that was long overdue...the redesign of our Sovereign Studios website. After having weeks to think about the design, I got it done over the weekend. Its clean, and light on information, but its enough for now. I actually miss the site I designed 3years ago. Goodbye, old friend! :'(

I was able to finish a small update on our Event Alpha, just included the second part of the back story, and added a position opening for 2D/3D Artists. We still have openings for a Level Designer and programmer.

We'll probably be sending out a press release soon, just want to get it in maybe 2-3 other languages, and finalize where we should send it out to. Once thats out, it'll really be do or die time. To be honest, makes me a little scared :o

We will have some banners done soon too, so I'd still like to see if anyone is interested in a banner trade :)))


Creative Progress
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Before my PC fiasco, I was able to finish the latest version of the player model structure. It includes the extra mount points for particle effects that would show damage or a jet thrust. LOD now works on the models, taking the current player from about 1200 polys to about 500. And finally, I got environment mapping to work! I have no idea how I got it working, but it does, and I ain't complaining :)

I wanted to hold of on any more screenshots of the game, until I get the earth base map completed, and there are other priorities to consider at the moment...

Looks like its gonna be a good idea to remodel our weapons, now that we are using Torque. Originally when we were using Lithtech, we hade the hi-res/low-res method for modeling the weapons. Now that we have torque, which uses both, it makes more sense to plit the difference. Besides, it give me an excuse to do a few things with them :)

Way further down the road, I might consider trying to do a Hi Res opening intro fo rthe game. I've always wanted to use my purchase of Animation: Master for something other than modeling our players. I already like the animation setup better than 3DS Max, even it if is a lot to take in. I'm hoping to play with that after we have completed our first demo, or at least brfore teh release of the full game, which will be a while away :P


Programming Status
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Early work was started on our first laser projectile, so we hope to have that up and running soon. We won't need a lot of projectile classes, maybe a homing type and a variation on the laser, and getting grenades down.

We'll finally be starting our inventory and profile system soon. Its a pretty big part of our game, as quite a bit of stuff depends on our system and the way its organized. I'll probably do a GUI framework and then have the scripters add the functionality.

We have the method for creating our player's "internal components", for stuff like radar, engine, reactor, etc. once the inventory is done, we'll add a few of these along with weapons to see how they function in-game.

It looks like the reload function is not working properly in the game, when we play online. Earlier, it would make the other player reload and deplete their ammunition(!). Thankfully that was solved. Early work has also begun on having the particle FX emit through the new mount points I added that show damage and jet thrust. For the moment, it only shows up on the server's machine, and not on any of the clients. This is a somewhat lower priority item though, but it looks pretty :)

We also have some basic gameplay options done, for inverting mouse axis, drawing the first person model and items, detail textures on terrain, cloud layers, shadows, etc.

We are having 2 different approaches to the radar system in the game. First a fairly complex one that bases probability of detecting objects from farther distances, jamming, type of radar, and possibly the player's characteristics. The second is much simpler, radars based on distance, and using items to make the player detectable or not. Providing the first isn't too difficult to create, it would be nice to have, but either method would work well.

Well, that it for now. I'm sure they'll be more to talk about later :)