Another Character and the First TA Video! news - Critical Point: Incursion

This time round we bring you news of completed character model and another in progress as well as some much awaited news on the animations. Yep, that means some videos at last!

The last few weeks have been quite busy at TA even though some people are still on holiday! Proto is back in the UK which means he is coding again and we are seeing many different bits going into the game. It's quite exciting to see it evolving from into TA and in places it looks great alraedy. Sadly the map loading screen is currenly a giant picture of Proto so we will ensure that it is changed before we release to prevent scaring off all of our players! We also have several members who have returned from extended absences which has boosted productivity somewhat. The PR machine is still working away (just about!) and we will try and increase the freqency of news releases as we progress further.

We are currently having some small issues with the Alpha build of Tactical Assault. At the moment we only have one character in game so both teams look identical at the moment which can make it tricky to shoot the right team. Luckily however Nizza has come to the rescue with a Special Forces Character who will improve the gameplay quite a lot.

As you can see, the SF character looks distinctly different from the Mercenary model whilst still looking realistic. Our plan is to keep the SF characters in mostly blue solid colours and the terrorists in green and dark camouflage. If necessary they can still be tweaked to ensure that both teams are equally visible and still distinct.

Although it may look easy to create a character model it really is quite difficult. It takes many hours even for a skilled artist to create a model like this. On the left you can see the unsmoothed low poly model while on the right is the smoothed and sculpted high poly model. The sculpting is where the intricate detail is added and is what makes it look almost real. If you have a high powered PC then TA is certainly going to make the most of it!

Sometimes as an artist it's good to take a break away from your main project and start on something else. Luckily Nizza's idea of a break is to start another character (what a worker he is ;)) so what this means is that we can give you a sneak preview of the next Special Forces character who is now in progress. He does look quite scary without any eyes but the close up shows you the detailing in both the model and the texture. Keep an eye out for updates on this guy soon.

And here it is, the first TA video. MrFred has been doing an awesome job recently keeping the animation department on track. When we discovered that he was also secretly a video editor we devised a plan for a whole series of videos to showcase the animation. We considered releasing them all at once but then we thought, hang on a sec. Wouldn't it be better to release them one at a time and keep up the suspense. So that is our grand plan.

If you are wondering why the arms are a little odd then that is infact secret TA code. Red arms indicate a terrorist weapon, blue arms indicate a SF weapon and green arms indicate a weapon available to both teams.

Even though Fred is doing a great job with the animations at the moment, we are still looking for another first person animator to help share the load and speed up development. If you know someone who could help then get them to hit the apply button.

Remember, you can also visit us on moddb at where we post all of our media and news.

See you on the servers,
Your TA Team