So it’s been a month since our last website update and things are simmering in the big pot of Ham and Jam goodness. This month however won’t be progressing as well as we want due to two main things:

• Those people on the team who go to School/College/University will be starting up again and moving back to where they came from.
• We’ve been seconded for “Special Operations”….

Now we can’t go into this at all (we’d have to kill you…seriously). A good portion of the team has been hired to work on a project for a commerical entity and being mostly students we’ll do anything (legal) for money.

Don’t ask us about it, we can’t tell. We’re only letting you know this so as not to expect a huge amount of work done this month, whilst the rest of the team are carrying on the main department heads are working on this project.

Normal service will be resumed hopefully by October.

Mod wise in the last month the maps have been coming along nicely, Radar is pretty much ready for some final testing then its the 3D skybox and all they pretty stuff to do.

Pegasus is having it’s Skybox added, we decided to only concentrate on the one bridge as Horsa/Ranville/Euston II bridge was a bit of a non event, a few shots were exchanged and the German sentries retreated. So now I don’t have to do that part I’ve extended the map upto the junction between Benouville and Le Port. KominAaa has made me some lovely models for the 3D skybox so if you look down the river like in real life, you’ll see Benouville Chateau. Look down the road at the junction and you’ll see Benouville Church. It’s all top notch stuff.

One thing we have to comment on is the sheer ammount of research that we’ve put into getting Pegasus right. We amassed something in the region of 30 unique period photos of the bridge from before and just after the battle, period briefing maps, aerial recon photos, copies of French resistance reports, veterans own stories and descriptions - plus two of the team actually went to France to look at the area themselves. It’s been amazing the ammount of stuff we’ve managed to discover. For example…

• It’s well known that the original bridge was replaced in 1993, but did you know that in the 1960’s the original was lengthened by 5 metres?
• The AT gun at the bridge was a Kw.K 39/1 L/60 mounted on a “Behelfssockellafette” (Bh.sk.L) and mounted in a RS-65a ringstand bunker.
• Some buildings shown in aerial photos were demolished just to make the bridge area easier to defend. In fact the defences were only compelete 3 days before the invasion took place.

Needless to say, we could start our own library with the stuff we’ve collected!

A few weeks back I went on a house cleaning session and sorted out who’s doing/done what and got rid of the people who weren’t doing anything. So to fill the breach we brought in some new applicants and one of them AgentSmith is working on a Merville Battery map which hopefully we can show soon.

Model wise we’ve got our first skinned weapon ingame and aside from one or two animations its done. Following closely behind it are the Fairbairn Sykes knife and German Nebelhandgranate and Stielhandgranate, all skinned by Hellspike and being animated by himself and Johnny.

mXed went on a modelling blitzkrieg and finished off all the weapon models we had left to do, the first beta should have at least 12 weapons for players to smack each other around with.

Jed’s also been busy working on new players models and has just finished up modelling and rigging the new Commonwealth player model. It’s very nicely done and features a lot of little details. It’s also been rigged for face animations so when you yell voice commands or your player makes a vocal sound the mouth doesnt just move, it forms the sounds as well.

Currently the model is going through the process of having detailing added via normal maps and being textures then the same process will happen for our German player model too.

Well as you can see, no news doesnt mean bad news and we’re still pounding away in the background. We tend to have long quiet stretches then an explosion of new media and screenshots. Consider this one of our “lulls” which means the next update should contain lots of new stuff!

And now, back to the secret mission…