Blog for Martin Schultz at GarageGames.com

20% discount for Flight Game Example (limited time)

Martin Schultz — 2008-05-23T19:15:00+00:00

FGE (nearly) 1 year anniversary
Wow, time passes so amazingly fast. It's nearly a year ago I launched the Flight Game Example for TGE(A) and as pre-birthday gift I want to give out a 20% coupon code for anyone who buys the FGE until the 22nd of june, the first anniversary of the FGE. To get the 20% discount, enter the coupon code "SPRING2008" (without the quotes) in the corresponding input field in the payment process.

For those not aware what the Flight Game Example for TGE(A) is, please have a look here and here as well as my blogs about it.

FGE Sales Stats
As some might know, I published the sales stats of the FGE a while back here (scroll down until nearly end of page) and I thought it's a good time to publish some new numbers, after nearly 1 year of beeing on the market. Meanwhile the FGE sold 132 times. 20 times sales via PayPal payment and 112 times via Plimus.com.

That's it for the moment, have a nice day! :-)

Martin

Development Diary: Balls of Steel

Martin Schultz — 2008-03-27T14:01:59+00:00

In Magnus and my last blogs we were showing a bit of our game Balls of Steel that Thomas, Magnus and I developed in roughly 1.5 months. The game is, except a few sounds, full developed and polished and is currently approaching a bunch of publishers to see if they like it or not.

As I personally always like to see screenshots and images of games during their development phase, I thought I share some photos and screenies of the development phase of Balls of Steel. Maybe you find it interesting/amusing too. :-)

We started the project on a weekend where Thomas, Magnus and I met at Thomas house in sweden. We decided that wanting to create an air-hockey style game like the old skool game Crossfire we all mostly know from our childhood. That was more or less all we knew at the beginning plus we wanted some nice extras in there like pinball walls and stuff.

Here the first hand-drawing of the game board how we wanted to have it:

Magnus did some hand-painting too of the guns we wanted to have in there.

Magnus prototyped the puck in the game in a few minutes in 3DS Max:

The first rendering of the game board - very barebone this time without any textures in the beginning:

Very detailed board with the ball feeder mechanics:

Top down view on the goal post:

Score display, alarm sirene and some (fake) wires:

Board first time with textures:

Game becomin' alive:

Evolution!

We needed also a GUI like main menu, about screen, instructions page etc.:

if I remember right Magnus told once something that some PSD files in Photoshop have more than 170 layers... :-)

The nearly final game menu:

The development IDE (Unity) - main view:

Anyway, that was a short photo and screenshot walkthrough through our 1.5 months time of developing BoS.

Have fun!
Martin :-)

New Game Out - Have fun playing!

Martin Schultz — 2008-03-05T21:18:40+00:00

Hey guys,

just wanted to show a bit of what I've been up to the last months. As written in my last plan, I'm currently working on a game with Thomas and Magnus and that game is nearly finished. But before this new game I created in december a little bubble popper browser game called "Bubble Bang!":

If you find some time, I'd like to hear feedback from you if you like the game, what is good/bad etc. The game requires the Unity browser plugin, but it is only a small 3 MByte download. The game itself is only 340 kbyte in size, so super small and loads very fast. Try to start in "Wondercubes" or "Easy" mode for the beginning. The ultra modus is really only for the die hard Bubble Bang fan! ;-)

Anyway, have fun testing the game and try to get a decent score! :-)

Martin

Meeting Thomas and Magnus in Copenhagen (and in sweden)

Martin Schultz — 2008-02-03T21:52:43+00:00

Just wanted to post some little report and photos about the fantastic weekend I had. My friend Thomas Lund invited Magnus Blikstat and me to come to Copenhagen (CPH) / Denmark and to his home which is a few kilometers away from CPH behind the swedish border. Idea was to meet in person (although we know us already over a year now from chats and projects) and try to find out if we like to make a small nice game together. So we surely accepted and made us on the way up to CPH. I drove by car with my wife to CPH which was a 4 hours ride approx. from Hamburg while Magnus took the plane from Uppsala/sweden to CPH.

On the first day (friday) we meet first in a conference room in CPH which Thomas organized for us to first discuss the general things about working together and sorting out what kind of game we like to do. Later on friday we moved over to a nice cafe/bar called "Bankerat" (means: Bankrupt) which was located near the conf room to continue our discussion and have a nice beer (forgot to say thanks for the beer, Thomas!). :-)

(from left to right: Magnus, Thomas)

Again later we then met with our families together in an awesome Sushi restaurant called "Sticks 'n'Sushi" (best in CPH!) and had a super nice evening with lots of laughing, talking and fun.

Next day after having a sightseeing tour with my wife in the morning through CPH I went in the early afternoon by train over to sweden to meet Thomas and Magnus in Thomas wonderful house to continue our discussions and decide on one game concept and nail things down.

Although we thought on friday we found a game concept we all like and get completed (Codename: "Paradise Cat Saloon Marble Ultra Blaster" if I remember right...) we switched plans again on saturday because we felt it might be too big as first project together and we didn't want to risk having a failed project ("not another failed indy project"). So Thomas came up with a game idea that is super simple to code and can be extended to something really awesome. Although we still love the first game idea (the "cat" game), we decided to do this game later and focus first on a game that can be _really_ done.

This is btw something we all agreed on upfront to make sure our new team works good together and to clear already upfront expectations to not come into a situation in the project where we split up because we all had different expectations:
- Make a game we all like and stand behind
- right sized game idea
- all members spend a good amount of time per week on the game
- Get game done (polished) in about 2 or 3 months max.
- Have fun developing this game
- No feature creep
- If first game does not sell, no problem. First game to test team and if "chemisty" between us is right.

So we took the time then to write down the basic game concept and made some drawings how the game could look like. See here the overall game screen (super secret... sshhhh!) :-)

Then we fetched our notebooks (we're all equipped with Macs now) and started testing the first things out for our new game:

(from left to right: Thomas, Magnus, Martin)

Magnus quickly prototyped already some art for the game:

In-between we had some session "Guitar Hero 3" on the Wii and I have to say Thomas and Magnus really kick ass in that game (not to forget Thomas little son also called Martin which is a real guitar hero!).

(Magnus playing Guitar Hero 3)

(Thomas playing Guitar Hero 3 too :-)

Later the day Thomas wife Lone made a fantastic dinner for all of us and we chilled then the rest of evening and talked and talked and talked and had a great time.

On sunday my wife and me left early around noon back home then while Magnus flew later the day back and was prototyping a bit more with Thomas on the game before. Btw: On sunday night we already had a simple prototype working!

Overall it was an amazing weekend, awesome to meet Thomas and Magnus in person (and for sure the families) and work now together on a game. Thanks to Thomas and hife wife Lone for beeing so fantastic hosts! My wife and me plan to go to CPH again sometime soon again.

Will be back here once we have something to show and tell!

Best,
Martin

FGE 20% Christmas Discount

Martin Schultz — 2007-12-10T09:59:36+00:00

As last year too, I'm offering this year again a special 20% christmas discount on the Flight Game Example (FGE) and all other products. So for the FGE you save 6 US$ and get it for 24 US$ instead of 30 US$.

Use the coupon code 2007 in the order form and press re-calculate to get your 20% discount. The coupon code is valid from today until the end of this year.

Have fun :-)

New Reticle HUD resource / FGE Update

Martin Schultz — 2007-11-03T12:44:58+00:00

New GUI Reticle HUD for TGE(A)

A few weeks back I stepped out of the Panzer Ace development team and after a little pause I started working again on my game Subsonic. For that game and the homing missiles inside the game I needed a reticle HUD display thingie to cycle through all available targets in the view frustrum, select a target and fire a missile on it. I took the famous guiShapeNameHUD control and modified it until I got a nice reticle hud working. It has today the following features:
- Implemented as gui control
- Drawing a solid rectangle or only corner-stlye rectangle around every shape in the view frustrum
- Colors for normal/highlighted shape can be freely chosen
- Minimum size for the rectangle can be defined for shapes far away (to have a min. size bounding box around)
- Cycling through all targets using the mouse wheel via script
- Turning on/off the reticle HUD
- Ability to have it only for selected weapons
- Resolving the client ghost id on the server to a valid player id (via this resource) to have a homing missile be able to track the target

See a screenshot here:

A short 10 MB video shows the target cycling in action.

A big help was Ben Garney (although not knowing :) with his explanations in this thread about bounding box rendering and alike. Very helpful stuff, Ben, thanks!

As I got asked to release this as a resource I do so now and please find here the whole reticle hud as free resource here:

Gui Reticle HUD for TGE(A) With Target Cycling

(Update: Resource is approved and available!)

Note: The forward/backward selection code is a bit "unoptimized" yet and not working always super flawlessly, but I will improve this soon and post an update to the resource.

Flight Game Example Update to version 1.4
Along with this new control I also updated the FGE to the 1.4 version including the above resource so that the homing missiles in the FGE work now with the reticle target selection. All existing customers find the new version now in the FGE owner's page as 68 MByte download.

Have fun with this one! :-)

Martin

Flight Game Example - post mortem

Martin Schultz — 2007-10-09T15:25:35+00:00

This blog is about the FGE post mortem and the FGE sales stats. No pictures this time, sorry. :)

Flight Game Example: post mortem
My good old buddy James "Burning" Laker poked me a while back to write a post mortem about the FGE and end the story with some sales stats. That was a good idea I think as the FGE has a long history and it might be interesting for other people. How did it all start? A long time ago back in 2003 I had a rupture of the cruciate ligament of my right knee and that year was bloody ugly with 2 surgeries and beeing 4.5 months at home until they got my knee working again proper. As you might guess - I had a lot of time sitting in front of my computer and playing with Torque. I was thinking what kind of game *I* would like to play and remembered back some fantastic LAN parties we had even more back in the past with a game called Terminal Velocity (TV) from 3D Realms. Yay, I wanted to create a game like TV! That said I started to learn how the flight stuff is done in Torque, read the forums, tested in Torque, looked at the resouces section, read the forums, asked people in IRC, read the forums... you get the point. But one day I was at a point where I had a more or less decent flying "thing" that had some weapons, afterburners, missiles and all that stuff in one game. Subsonic was born and I submitted a dev snapshot to the GG site. As you might see, a lot of things were already in there that the FGE has today. But life changes sometime your plans and I stopped working on Subsonic due to real life (tm) interruptions. The project dissolved to the background.

Early in 2007 I was talking during lunch with my co-worker Tom Vogt about gamedev issues (our favorite lunch talk) and we were talking that before GarageGames it was a long time the biggest problem that there was no real and reliable game engine technology available to indy developers and got "solved" after GarageGames appeared on the market (Yay!). We then talked that for today's indy games often the unavailability of good game content is the limiting factor. Baaang! Like a flash it came to my mind to make a flying pack with all the stuff from Subsonic and sell that to indy developers to solve the chicken-egg problem. The idea for the Flying Starter Kit was born.

Impatiently waiting that the work day gets over I went home and immediately began checking what was in the Subsonic prototype I developed 2003 and what was missing to make that a starter kit. I started working on a fresh TGE 1.4.2 build and incorporated a lot of the things from Subsonic and soon got to a point where I had a detailed documentation and a demo level full with ugly programmer's art. I posted a blog about the progress the FSK made and began talking to GarageGames' Tim Aste about if they like it and would put it in the GG store. Tim redirected me to James Wiley who took over the content store job from Tim at that time. I submitted the whole FSK and waited for an answer from James. The days went by and I wrote a couple of mails to James. Oh dear, you can't believe how impatient I was getting an answer from GG. But they needed more James replied because there are a lot of guys like me submitted stuff and it all takes time to check them (beside their regular work!). Ok, so I needed to wait a bit more and polish the FSK.

Around that time the new Apple Macbook Pro came out (I _love_ that one!) and I told my wife that this will be my next development machine and I'm going to buy this new notebook once and if the sales of the Flying Starter Kit ever made enough to get it - as kind of a challenge. So, target was set: Get something done people like _and_ earn enough to buy the new notebook. Full steam ahead! Personally I find it important to set small and reachable targets like that so that you can work on something towards you really want to have or archieve.

More days went by, more work was done on the FSK and I renamed it to Flight Game Example because I studied the TGE(A) engine license and fount out that making starter kits is something you're not allowed with an indy license - only making games. So I thought I simply change plans and sell a game with source scripts to avoid trouble with the license. Silly thought. Really silly thought. It was Tim Aste pointing me in the right direction that regardless how I name it, it's a tool/starter kit for a developer and not a game that is sold to the masses. It requires a commercial TGE license AND needs to get approved by GG. There's no way around. Period. Additionally, the GG guys _carefully_ pointed out that they like the FGE in general, but it was missing more features and esp. good looking graphics. But they said too that's something I can work on and get back to them.

Phew. Time to sit back and think about the whole project. Is it worth all the effort? And additional 600 US$ for a commercial license? Upfront? Without knowing if the money comes back in? I already thought it looks good? It does not? It has not enough features?
This is the moment in projects where you need to have balls like an elephant and say "Yes!". It's a hell lot of work, stress, sleepless nights (I really had them!) but in the end I _believe_ it will all come to a good end. So stand up and face the issues I said to myself.

But what exactly did they mean with "more features" and "better graphics"? Isn't it enough to get some basic thing there and sell it and call it a day? No. I began to understand what they mean. It looked like shit and had _way_ too less features in it to be compareable to other products in the GG content store. Really, that's something that has to do with developing yourself. You thought you already were good in or with something and suddenly someone says it can be done way better. You suddenly feel like you evolved a lot in a couple of seconds and see now things in a different light. Without knowing (or with knowing??? :-) Tim and James created a process in my head to evolve and get better even more. Woah that felt good. The FGE made a big step ahead. It made such a bit step ahead that I thought that it could now compete with other products in the GG store and re-submitted the whole thing to James.

Honestly the answer wasn't what I expected. It got a lot better, but there's still room for improvement. Unfortunately this time I hadn't that Bang! thing and it didn't evovle in my head this time and saw what they meant. So I asked them for permission to release the whole thing on my own and call it a day. After some back and forth and upgrading to TGE commercial they finally gave me the permission to get the FGE out of the door. Big thanks here again to Tim and James!

If you read carefully you might wonder why I said "Unfortunately this time I hadn't that Bang!" some sentences before. Why? Now afer some time that the FGE is out of the door and sold so far somewhat ok I made the evolvement _afterwards_ and understand now what they meant the second time. Tim and James were right the second time too. I see today that there is a lof of more potential that can be put into the FGE. But it is kind of a learning process. I didn't see it before. It's like standing in the middle of a staircase. You can see downwards what you already archieved, but there's plenty to learn and take when you look the next steps upwards although you can't see _what_is on top of the staircase. What does that all mean? I learned a hell lot out of this project and there will be further improvements to the FGE.

Side note: If I ever manage to get to Oregon or to the indy games con, I'm promising to spend Tim and James as much beer until they're drunken. ;-) Thanks for beeing so kind and patient with me. I know I wasn't easy.

What was good / What did I learn:
- Listen _carefully_ what others say about your stuff. Esp. when they are known to have lots of experience listen carefully to every word they say.
- Torque is wonderful.
- GarageGames is a bunch of highly intelligent and friendly people.
- Work more closely with artists next time.
- Plimus.com is an awesome and cheap indy sales platform.
- Mac and XCode are wonderful.
- Visual Studio Express compiles a lot faster than Visual Studio.net 2003. Less optimization in VS Express?
- Blogging to announce your product and get feedback is a good thing.
- If you blog and put in videos, plan enough bandwidth for your webserver. I had up to 70 GB traffic a month!
- If you think you product is finished, take a break and get back with a fresh look to see if it is _really_ finished.
- Beta testers are a good thing if you listen to them.
- Making a demo is one thing. Making a _product_ out of it is a complete different story.
- Having a _released_ product evolves yourself a lot.
- Finishing a product brings you new job offers.

What was not so good:
- Work on my impatience.
- Don't let Plimus deliver your download to the customers. Uploading 69 MByte to Plimus via http sucks and fails often. Let Plimus deliver a serial and build your own product owner page where you can supply the latest downloads.
- Before release, test on more machines. Didn't notice the initial FGE TGEA bug due to different DirectX SDKs.
- The currency difference between US$ and Euro sucks (currently around 1:1,4). The more the Euro raises the less I get because I set the FGE price to US$.
- Plan some time for bugfixes after your release!
- At the time of the release my webserver was too weak for all the traffic that came up. Replaced it with something more powerful.

Conclusion:
Good project, learned a lot. Would do it every time again.

Flight Game Example: sales stats
Sales numbers is something that a lot of people are usually interested in. Some because they try to make estimates for their own projects, some because they want to see if other people have success, some because they want to get a feeling for the market or special products and some have completely others reasons that I'm unaware of. :) Unfortunately sales numbers are also often unavailable to the public because of contracts, NDA's or simply because of privacy. I'm going to tell a bit about the sales stats of the project and the costs I had because I think it belongs somehow to the post mortem, has somehow an educational factor and for some people I'm sure it will be a little "shock" because they might have wrong expectations how much sales such a pack can generate (or not generate).

So, if you're still reading this I guess your interested in the sales stats. :) Please take a second and guess how often you think it sold so far. But note that a flying pack is a niche thing and not something for everyone. I'm asking that because a couple of people I talked to in the meantime had _way_ too high expectations about sales numbers of this pack or these kind of packs. Now, roughly 3,5 months after the initial release the FGE sold 77 times so far. That's a bit below my own expectations and still way lower than expectations that some other people had (they thought these kind of packs sell a couple of hundreds instead of below hundred). That's what I meant with a "little shock". These kind of packs are nothing to get rich from.
But in general I'm fine with the sales. I got the costs for the commercial license back in and have a little money left over as you don't have to forget that Pliumus gets some money from the gross as well as some countries deduct the VAT from the price and you need to pay taxes on the income. So, I said it has an educational factor too? Well :) maybe not for everyone, but if you thought at the beginning of this blog "Hey, I'm doing such a pack too" hold on and and spent your time better on actually making a game instead of a pack! Seriously. It has _way_ more potential to sell better than a content pack. Just my 2 Euro-cent. My next project will be a game.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this blog and thanks for reading. If you ask what happened to Subsonic, then wait for my next blog.

Martin

P.S. I'm going to order my new Macbook Pro by the end of this month. ;)

Flight Game Example for TGE(A) - OUT NOW!

Martin Schultz — 2007-06-21T14:18:20+00:00

(continued from my previous blog)

After several months of development, improvement and bugfixing the Flight Game Example has been completed and is available for 30 US$ as electronic download. You can get it right here on the Decane website or from the Plimus store.

The Flight Game Example (FGE) shows how to make a flying game with Torque and includes the complete script sources and the source art in Photoshop and 3DS Max 7, .X and FBX format. Beside that it includes a detailed documentation with general explanations, a script walkthrough, a merger guide as well as tips & tricks. A set of custom C++ classes have been developed to enable AI flying vehicle movement. Those classes are published as public resource on the GarageGames site (to be conform with the TGE(A) EULA) and include a detailed walkthrough of all the necessary engine changes required to get the 2 space ship classes working. The first class is used for a fighter class space ship and the second class is used to steer a mothership kind of space ship and has in difference a trigger that can be sync'ed together with the space ship to allow script-side custom trigger operations (like healing other ships or re-arming). The FGE contains also a complete working demo with pre-compiled Windows binaries of TGE 1.4.2, TGE 1.5.2 and TGEA 1.0.1. Additionally a Mac TGE 1.4.2 universal binary is also included.

Please see here a list of features of the FGE:
- Complete flying game example with a "game" and "common" directory ready to be used.
- 3 different game modes supplied:
- Bot Carnage. Useful for debugging AI. Humans spawn as camera, bots as ships.
- Deathmatch. Classic deathmatch style dogfight game.
- Team Deathmatch inclusive different team skins and team score displays.
- Game-type aware end game screen.
- 2 primary weapons (Blaster, Pulsar) and 2 secondary weapons (MFRL, Sidewinder)
- Player spawns directly as vehicle and not as a player like Kork (so no need to mount a flying vehicle)
- Scout flying vehicle shape with all necessary nodes.
- Repairship flying vehicle shape with all necessary nodes.
- Seperate Scout and Repairship debris shape files provided when the ship blows up.
- Full set of datablocks for the flying vehicle with:
- forward/backward/downward afterburners (booster)
- 2-level damage smoke emitters
- contrails
- ship explosion with debris trails
- Water splash
- Complete source art except the palm tree. Shapes / debris are delivered as Max 7 files, HUD as Photohop PSD files. Please note (and excuse) that the art (except the palm tree) was made by a programmer, not by an artist! ;-)
- Client side HUD with displays for the selected weapons, ammo, afterburner status and ship health as well as a score displays and a radar screen. In team deathmatch mode additional team scores are displayed.
- Homing missile support. The patch for the projectile class allows to have homing missiles called Sidewinder in the demo game. Targets for the missiles can be set via script.
- Further enhancements like auto-explode for the projectile class after a given time is over without having hit something.
- Ability to let explode projectiles by script at any time.
- Direct support for the aiFlyingVehicle and aiRepairshipFlyingVehicle C++ classes from this resource on the GarageGames.com site. Put those files directly into the engine to archive simple AI flying vehicles like shown in the demo.
- An AI state machine purely in TorqueScript to apply some basic behaviour to the AI vehicles featuring:
- "Brains" for the bots. Features a dumb brain and a predator brain.
- Flying to a destination location.
- Randomly flying around.
- Hunt and shoot other flying vehicles.
- Automatic weapon selection with auto-switch over if ammo is empty.
- Automatically search and fly out to re-fill the weapons if they're empty.
- Can have multiple ammo boxes and ship will auto-pickup one of them for re-filling.
- Automatically fly out to pick up health patches if the health of the ship is below 20% or flying to one of the repairships to get healed by the "nano repair bots" the repairships spawn out when flying right behind.
- Auto-usage of the afterburner if target is too far away.
- State machine is easy to extend for your own actions.
- AI Control GUI dialog to have a control over the bots in-game (via CTRL+B). Mainly serves for debugging the bots in the game.
- Mission-area aware ships. Script is set up that ships get damage-over-time as long as they stay out of the mission area. Additionally a bitmap is displayed to human connected players and a warning sound is played back if the player is out of the mission area.
- Demo mission that shows a battle of the bots.
- Pre-compiled Windows and (universal) Mac binary executables to quickly test the complete kit (only need to apply the script changes, not the engine changes).
- 3+1 royalty-free techno-stlye music tracks (complete Decane Music Pack 3 from Decane Music) as 192 kbps Ogg Vorbis files.
- Detailed documentation

Well, I hope you guys like this pack. I put a lot of effort into it and hope to see now some decent flying vehicles in your games! :-)
I should further mention that all future updates to the FGE are free of charge. So if for example bugs are found or I develop new features for it, you will be notified automatically as soon as a new version is available for download. I created a question & answer thread in the TGE private discussions forum if you have any questions.

Finally I would like to thank very much the following people (in an unsorted order):
Thomas "Man of Ice" Lund, Andrew "Ando" McElvenny, Thomas "Alienforce" Alenfors, Tom Vogt, James "Burning" Laker, Thor Zollinger, Matt Webster, Chris "C2" Byars, Stefan Lundmark, Derk Adams, Robert Geiman, Sickhead Games, my wife, the GG community and for sure the guys at GarageGames: James Wiley, Tim Aste, Stephen Zepp & Joshua Dallmann.

Have fun with the FGE and thanks for reading.

Martin :-)

Here is a screenshot medley of the TGEA version of the Flight Game Example:

SuperMaze now Freeware!

Martin Schultz — 2007-06-19T20:57:55+00:00

Today I had a bit of time and I spent it making my Torque game SuperMaze now freeware finally. I thought about doing so already since some time but simply didn't find the time to actually sit down and make an updated freeware version. So if you like, head over to my website and download your copy right away. It's available for Windows and Linux. If I find even more time, I do a Mac build too (any interest?).

Honestly speaking SuperMaze is not the greatest game of all time, but for me it was more a test game to find out several aspects of Torque. And hey, it's a completed game! :-)
SuperMaze is a simple FPS shooter with Smileys in a maze-stlye environment, kind of a remake of the 80's Atari game Midi-Maze. No blood nor nothing, only 5 keys to control your Smiliey.

Anyway, now it's freeware and I think it was a good decision to do so. :-)

Have fun,
Martin

FGE/FSK now feature complete!

Martin Schultz — 2007-05-24T17:57:05+00:00

(Continued from my previous blog)

Just wanted to give a quick update on the "Flight Game Example" (FGE) - it's now feature complete! Latest additions have been that it supports now 3 different game modes like seen on the start game screen:

I made also a quick video showing the team deathmatch mode where bots with different team skins fight each other:

Team Deathmatch game mode (~23.1 MByte)

Furthermore it has now support for homing missiles! Those sidewinders were done by altering the existing projectile class a bit and it gives a great addition to the game. Please see a video of the homing missile in action here:

Homing Missiles video (~7.4 MByte)

Also the repairships are in now. Those are huuuge kind of motherships flying in circles around on the map and if players fly right behind them, a particle stream is started with "nano repair bots". Well, in short those particles make the effect they heal the ship flying behind and it is a pretty nice visual I think. Technically it's a trigger beeing sync'ed with the repairship. Please see a video here:

Ship getting healed by repairship (~23.4 MByte)

So, next steps are to make beside the TGE 1.4.2 version also a TGE 1.5.2 version and one for TGEA + some cleanups and an installer package. Furthermore I need to clarify some things with GG and after that all, the pack will be ready for you guys. Hope you will like it. :-)

Martin