We wanted to end the patch cycle with Patch 5 but we need to do one more small patch to fix a few issues. A change we made to the brake model in Patch 5 is causing problems with some airplanes and we’re going to undo that change. There was also an issue with some jitters in the Track IR implementation that has been fixed. We also made a change to the clipboard that caused a potential problem by making it possible for someone with their level of detail slider set below the default to lose their clipboard if they shrunk it too much.
We need to get this patch out and finalized so we can merge the work that’s been going on with 2.02 into the main code base. We’ve been having to work around this extended patch cycle and that’s somewhat of a pain. We don’t have a whole lot of time left before we want to get 2.02 out the door so we really need to bear down on it.
The skinning experiment that we’ve been running has been successful. We’re very happy about that because that means we can move through the plane renovations that much quicker with an assist from the skinning community. We haven’t decided how we’re going to structure this, but we do plan to recruit a group of skinning volunteers who want to get the first crack at skinning any new or redone planes as we make them.
We’re pretty much ready to release the updated terrain editor and the new object editor. We’re still doing work on the shape library but that should be done pretty soon. We’ll probably go ahead and release the editors before the shape library is completely updated to give people a chance to try it out.
Effects are still being worked on for 2.02. Sudz has finished quite a few new effects and is currently working on hit effects. Once we get the code base merged and get some more artwork completed, we’ll put up some screenshots.
In addition to reworking the P-38L for 2.02, we also plan on introducing the P-38G and P-38J but we'll have to see how that goes as this whole new skinning process gets hashed out.
