Friday Hurray Day - And The Secret Is Revealed

Allowed myself the luxury of spending Friday testing my HOT FIX V1.0085, and making a video for a new toy we will be releasing next week. As you are my loyal blog readers, I can reveal to you first that the secret project was indeed a JET PACK.  Took less than a day to create the mechanics for first person player flight, and the rest was artist time and small tweaks here and there. The result is a quite frivolous collectible that will not fit well with your existing level projects, but instead disrupt the trend and produce some interesting new level ideas.

http://youtu.be/eY891zzKBn0

We further thought that by producing a non-critical item, we could have something which might be used as an optional incentive for existing pledgers. The purpose of this virtual borble will be made clear next week when we announce a new scheme you might be interested in.

For the die-hards out there, the above was literally a few hours of work and some testing, so it barely affected the progress of engine development, and in fact has contributed a new system called HUDLAYERS which will allow more HUD objects to be created and used in your games in the future, such as helmets, ecto-skeletons, equipment that cannot be classified as a weapon such as a ladder you might want to carry around the level, e.t.c.

With some key fixes Thursday night, my BUILD C is looking good so far and my plan is to continue testing it and only change this installer if I (or my alpha testers) find a show stopper. This will then become the V1.0085 HOT FIX to be released Monday.  For your reference, these are the improvements available in the next version:

• Support for the Jet Pack and new Zombie Script commands
• Added real brass ejection to the Colt 1911 complete with physics
• Added new Shotgun character to the Modern Day Asset Library
• Added Proximity Mine to Weapons, booby traps for the player!
• Single Stage Undo feature for terrain editing and entity creation
• Added RAGDOLL field allowing custom characters to use Ragdoll
• Transparency Mode 5 (glass) now renders in correct order
• RPG Weapon can now be zoomed for more accurate explosions
• Improved 'The Escape' level to make initial minutes easier
• Fixed issue causing weapons and ammo to turn blue after test game

Also got a link to a GREAT review of Reloaded, and on reading it I started to remember just how cool the whole FPS Creator concept is.  Thanks for the review and I hope to justify the coverage with even more features and cool assets to keep everyone spinning. The review from N4G is here:

http://n4g.com/news/1563314/fps-creator-reloaded-pc-preview-chalgyrs-game-room

Last night I also had a play with the Importer (due for V1.009) and it's looking very solid. It's so empowering being able to take what had been fixed and rigid entities, modify them in the editor, and save out new variants of them, in mere minutes. When you start to use it, you will see what I mean. Top work Ravey!

Next week my list shows that I could be working on characters 'inside' building, tri-planar texturing of the terrain to improve cliff visuals and starting the ambient occlusion pre-step which will turn any level into a stunning version of itself (replacing dynamic shadows that will speed things up too). Alas I also have a huge raft full of Zombie feedback which effectively stalls most of this while I figure out what I can do to make the Zombie pack better before it goes out to the public.  I will continue the dialog with the internal testing team until we reach a good balance of quality, without spending the next year on it ;)

P.S. My plea for more pledges in yesterdays blog did not work too well, so looks like I will be loosing my £5 bet with Rick :)  Not giving up though, I am going to rack my brains over the weekend and think of some clever scheme. Failing that, I will personally make 50 pledges and hope no-one figures it out. Here is a helpful link which you can use to stop me emptying my bank account: http://fpscreator.thegamecreators.com/order.php