This time a month ago I was dreading having to write this post, development had been slowly ticking over like a car on idle. Things were warming up but not as fast as you need when its a cold morning and you have to be at work in 10 minutes. I was thinking “What am I going to write about this month?” and struggling with any decent chunk of insight and information to come up to fit the bill.

Then something amazing happened. Out of nowhere and by pure coincidence the majority of the team found a good portion of time in their busy lives where nothing was going on, even Olah our coder has managed to dig his way out of a hole and help commit a whole bunch of new stuff. So without further a do, let get on with with whats happened this month

The Maps

There’s only really two dedicated mappers on the team, myself and TheSurgeon, and between us we have 4 maps in the works. Pegasus has had a bit of a shuffle around in its design and been made a lot smaller, one of the objectives is wandering around the map at the moment finding the optimal place for itself and the others are pretty set in stone. The advancing/retreating spawns are also being tweaked to allow the Germans to get a decent chance at defending the Command Bunker and the bridge itself before falling back to the Cafe Gondree and beyond.

Radar is also having some gameplay tweaks, notably at the top end by the Radar and whilst the barb wire does its job of being a hinderance, it does it too well! The advancing/retreating spawns are again being tweaked for optimal placement.

Gold has probably come on the most since the last update on it and my god is it an awesome map. It combines open fields, tight hedgerow lined rows and town combat in one nice neat package. Theres so much in this map I could write a seperate post all about it!

Afrika unfortunatly hasnt had much done to it and after a review we’ve decided that it needs some heavy rework, more updates on this when work starts on it.

The HUD

Up until now the HUD has been pretty horrible to be honest, its been left behind but thats not the case anymore. Spine has outclassed himself by designed and implementing stage one of our new HUD design (for a sneak peak look at the new playtest images in the media section!). Its a bit different to most games and sits well with our philosophy of “make it as real as you can, but don’t take the fun away”. You are given the information you need, but in a way that makes it not completely fake nor total realism. The health/stamina/ammo counters are segmented into 5 sections to give you a general overview of your situation.

In a firefight you can at a glance see roughly how well you are doing, but will also have to use your brain to think about stuff tactically. You don’t know exactly how much ammunition you have left, your counter shows 1 bar, that could be 1 bullet or 20 depending on the weapon and its magazine size. Do you reload now and risk being attacked whilst reloading? Do you wait and hope?

Alpha 0.20 Playtest

Since we had so much work done we gathered the team together last Sunday and had a big test of the mod in its current state and all agreed the mod was really coming together. We’ve updated the playtest media page with a selection of the best images from the playtest, as always these are work-in-progress and don’t reflect the final release of the mod. Theres still some borrowed content in there, mainly the axis player models, but its getting less by the day. Here’s a selection of the images:

Donations

This month has seen the most work commited to our SVN server since the mod was concieved, even outweighing the commit of everything to the new SVN. As such we will shortly be needing to upgrade our account with the SVN hosting company and as life goes, this means more money. $180 for a year to be exact, so we’re opening a donation paypal account for people to contribute money to. We’d really appreciate if you can spare a few pounds/dollars/euros and donate. Our main priority for the money is the SVN server as this is central to the whole mod, without it we’re going to be in trouble. We’ve got a list of things we can spend the money on afterwards such as official dev team game servers and hosting but if we’ve find we have a “surplus” of cash afterwards we intend to donate it to veterens charities such as The Poppy Appeal.

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