SITREP - Week 020

Kim (ZPSHicks)
Game Director

"Things are really moving fast on the terrain side of things (not to forget multiple leaps forward on all other areas of production as well) .. We now have a small TDM map materializing inside our dynamic cave environment, which will properly be part of your first Deadlock experience, as soon as humanly possible.

If you're interested, then here are a few of our latest Unity discoveries which are/have breaking/broken "our chain" so to speak, in various areas; 4 textures on your terrain is max, that is, if you want to make sure that you're not rendering the terrain in two-passes, tree's billboard alpha channel outline is gray in dark environments (our hot fix at the moment is to make billboards darker inside the shader), we've also been faced with billboards not being updated with dynamic changes in the lighting, unless the shader receives input updates from the rotation of the mouse all the way to stuff like if the near-clipping distance on the Camera is set too low it will result in heavy shadow z-buffer flickering (pretty standard depth priority issue, not Unity's fault) ... You'll most likely take this map for a spin late next week!".

Mikael (heks)
Lead Programmer

"Been working on kick ass multiplayer stuff. 'nuff said :)".

Jesper Andersen (Scribblehead)
Concept Artist

"Greetings Marines,

Once again its time for an update - that was one extremely fat week! I've just finished up the first concept design for deadlock modular training buildings.

Next up is more love for the interiors, also we've talked about moving the style into something that's more representative of "planned" out training area. So at the moment I'm looking at a lot of clean room reference.

Its been pretty tight with deadlines for university, so I still don't have a final eta on my process, but I'm determined to get it online this upcoming week, so please bare with me for now :-)

Looking really forward to seeing all of your comments and critiques  for the modules guys, cheers!".

Anders (cptKickASS)
Lead Artist

"Cleanup week! as part of getting weapons and character assets ready for being customizable i had to do some cleanup and renaming, so now all assets and pipelines for character weapons and environment has been reworked to accomodate the changes, AHHHHH... nice and tidy.

Started coding a weapon script to handle extensions and animation controls, and yes Teaching at DADIU filled half of the week. Next week I only have game dev, ahhhhh.".

Jess (NecroSonic)
Level Designer

"At the moment I am working on a few additional outdoor structures. For testing out domination type gameplay I have set forth to create different barricade-like installments that can be placed pretty much anywhere in the terrain and used as capture areas, bomb spots or something along those lines. They are basically composed of little elevated platforms, crates and small walls for cover arranged to work as a small fortified camp. I am also experimenting with a guard tower that might afford some scope action.

If some of you understand my ramblings and know of a map/game that featured a prime example of such a camp/fortification please take a screenshot and share it along with a few lines about why you think that it is a good layout".

Nicolai (Reese)
CEO & Composer

"Hoorraah.. Finally got some more music online. Nest week I'll be starting on  more serious basis working with sound design and implementing the basics on the Deadlock level(s).

Now, stop bothering me... I'm busy ;)".