The office will be closed Thursday and Friday. We wish everybody a happy Thanksgiving. For those of you outside the U.S., we wish you a happy Thursday.
We plan to have one more patch to version 2.01. We really don’t want to go beyond one more if we can avoid it because we’re really looking at getting 2.02 put together quickly. In the last 2.01 patch, we’re just going to continue to make some fixes and there are some performance issues with the Ki-84 that I plan to change.
As I mentioned before, there’s been a lot of work going on in the terrain system and that is close to coming to fruition. The structure of shapes and objects has been stripped down and reorganized. There has been some fixes to the terrain editor and a new version of that will probably ship next week. Shortly after that, we plan to release the new object editor. The object editor allows for the creation of custom terrain cells and object groups. You will be able to texture terrain cells again as well as define the physical features of a terrain cell such as hills and trees. The object editor also allows you to make custom object groups so that you can make up new object groups for airfields, towns, cities, factories, etc. Finally, the object editor will allow custom terrain shapes created with third party software to be imported into AH.
We’re spending a lot of time right now working on individual terrain shapes. We have to go through and create dead shapes for everything. A dead shape is the shape that’s left after something has been destroyed. For example, if you destroy a building you would still see the bombed out shell of the building. That would be the dead shape. We also have a lot of optimization to do to the terrain shapes when they are viewed from a distance. We’re not very efficient in this area at the moment and that takes up some extra frame-rate. This is something that we’ve wanted to get done for awhile but we’ve had to wait until the shape/object structure was reorganized.
Once HT finishes up work on the terrain system, his time will be spent almost entirely on ToD development and we expect that to start progressing very quickly. While that’s happening, work on 2.02 will also be underway. In fact, it’s been underway and is progressing very well.
2.02 won’t be a huge version as we want to get it out quickly. The holidays will slow us down a bit but we’re looking to have it ready in January. We won’t get a ton of work done on planes for 2.02. We’ve had to commit a lot of art resources towards the terrain system and new effects, but we don’t anticipate a tremendous amount of art for ToD so we’ll be going full bore on planes after 2.02.
The biggest advancement in 2.02 will be graphics. With the new terrain stuff in place, you’ll see improvements in that area and 2.02 will add a new and expanded library of graphic effects. Sudz has been working on this and he’s already produced a lot of cool stuff. He’s got a new fire effects in place, water splashing off of the PT boat, vehicles kicking up dust trails, guns making smoke puffs when you fire them, tank turrets getting blown off, spent cartridge casings coming out of the ejection chutes on a plane or kicking out the ejection port on a manual position, smoke coming out the exhaust stack when you start up, a lot of stuff like that. As a whole, his work will add a tremendous amount to the immersion factor as we’ve been getting by with some pretty dated effects and lots of missing ones.
As mentioned before, the P-38 is undergoing renovation. We’re doing a little experiment with this to see if it’s feasible for us to get assistance from the skinning community in updating planes and creating new ones. We’ve been so impressed with the quality and quantity of work put forth by the skinners that we want to see if we can open the door to the skinning community so that their work not only enhances the game, but also allows the pace of development to increase. What we’re looking to do is see if we can make new or revised planes available in advance for skinning. We would just put a blank skin on them. We recruited a skilled skinner to try this out with and see if this idea is feasible and whether it really saves us any time. There are some doubts about it, but we want to give it a try and see. If it does work smoothly and saves us a little bit of time per plane, it could be a win-win solution for the community and us alike.
Speaking of skinning, we still have a lot of skins in cue that are being released as quickly as possible. We hope to be up to date on all skin submissions by the end of next week.
One thing that we’ve talked about to the skinning community is the problem of skinning natural finish planes with painted schemes and vice versa and the problem of having the wrong lighting specularity for a skin. We have decided on a solution to this problem that will allow skinners to define whether their skin is for a natural finish or a painted scheme. This will come out with 2.02. We’re not yet sure whether this will be backwards compatible with non-updated planes or if it will only be available to those planes that have been updated.
About the process of updating, we do want the skinners to know what planes are being updated so that they don’t create a skin that will soon be obsolete. It’s been requested that we provide a list of the order that we’re going to update the planes. Unfortunately, we cannot provide that because we really don’t know that far in advance. It’s most efficient for Superfly and Natedog to update the planes that they created rather than work on an unfamiliar plane that the other guy did. The amount of work it will take to renovate an airplane is going to vary from plane to plane. So we’re going to take a flexible approach to it so that we can always make the decision that best fits our situation at that time. As soon as the decision is made, we will let the skinners know.
