SITREP - Week 018

Kim (ZPSHicks)
Game Director

"All I've been working, thinking and dreaming of this week has been our terrain, tree, grass, foliage pipeline/work-flow, which is quickly getting to a point, where we feel we can start producing serious magic. It's been one hell of an emotional ride (Unity performance, Occlusion culling problems, etc.) and we still have a few exciting challenges ahead of us .. but like a famous district attorney once said: "The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming!". Up next is combining all of our efforts into the first artificial cave environment which you'll be the first to test in a DevBlog in a couple of weeks.

Our beloved community member and extreme weapons-whore Mr. Kosai106 (please pardon my French) stopped by the office yesterday and have committed a bit of his time to model one of our pistols in production quality, stay tuned on how this turns out (no pressure Kosai :)) .. It might sound crazy, but we do not currently have the time to administrate "free" help from our community, but we just had to give Kosai a chance (he holds nude pictures of us all (don't ask! :))".

Mikael (heks)
Lead Programmer

"OFFLINE - Vacation"

Jesper Andersen (Scribblehead)
Concept Artist

"Starting to settle in with all the cool people at ZPS - Kim, Cotta and myself had a great meeting along with Anders about my next task, which is the training area modular buildings. One might not even notice it, but there's a ton of details and work that goes into these, modular buildings hardly exist as more than square boxes, so its a difficult task to research applicable real-world designs - in my experience its one of the hardest things to create a "functional" design for -  you just can't 'fake' it. The training area itself is an ongoing work-in-progress, but i think it'll be an absolute blast for MP :D...

Also been looking at a lot of older movies for inspiration, i mentioned OUTLAND in the last sitrep, in the meantime i've found quite the gem which is called 'Bye Bye Jupiter / Sayonara Jupiter'...

Cheers!".

Von Cotta
Concept Artist

"So, I am still forging ahead on the modular designs for the training environment. The biggest new thing to report is, that I have started using google sketchup. And I must say, that I am pretty stoked. After an initial day or two of sceptism, I started getting into it. And now I am cranking out platforms and railings and stuff like that. Compared to the time you spend lining a good perspective grid up in 2d, and making sure all your lines are alligned perfectly, this is so much faster. Some things are still a little hairy. It's not good for organic modelling, but I just browsed the interwebz, and discovered that there is actually a third party organic modelling plugin for it, that I will propably check out. But for now, just familliarizing myself with the basics are keeping me busy. And I love learning new tricks.

Cheers".

Anders (cptKickASS)
Lead Artist

"Heks where are you? I now have a functional character controller with walk in all directions and separated look in all directions. I have focused on design and mock up. I now have a good idea of what to do, going forward. This means : when Heks is back, we can get started testing it out in network play, yjehaaa. The next test will focus on finding a good solution for adding and switching between weapons. I will also start refining the animation.".

Jess (NecroSonic)
Level Designer

"During the past week I have been constructing some of the bunker templates that I talked about in the previous SITREP. I am designing these bunkers so that they can be placed pretty much anywhere in an outdoor environment like the one Kim created for picture of the week.

I feel that the template idea makes sense in relation the training facility setting, as the bunkers are different in layout but still smaller modular units that ITO would be able to assemble and configure easily to suit the training.

For the actual construction of the bunker template I had to do some creative hacks in terms of how I use the old RM modules, for instance turning most of the walls upside down. Many of these modules will probably be replaced or changed at some point anyway, but it continues to amaze me how far you can come with a little creativity and unintended use of the old modules".

Nicolai (Reese)
CEO & Composer

"Stupid spam bots messed with our website this week. I had to call in Tax (our beloved system fixer) as backup and he was able to stop those annoying autobots by implementing a CAPTCHA module and then cleaning up the forums of apx. 23.000 spam posts registered the last 30 hours.

Anywho,- im still composing and testing different music themes. I am well on track although I have an outstanding matter in regards to the five previous released pieces of music, your feedback and of course my current compositions in regards to videolog / devblog. Although the ideas of sharing music early on is a great idea and fits perfectly with our indie development methodology I must admit that i'm having some trouble finding out on how to execute this the right way in practice. This is primarily due to my personal need for establishing an extensive library of music more than receiving early feedback on unfinished and in-development scores. I could continue to share my music and stop thinking much of it; however I constantly feel an urge to follow up on your feedback, despite after either "canning" a piece or completely rearranging the score beyond recognition. I hope this makes sense. I'll get back on the matter when I figure this out.