Cry of Fear - News For You

Welcome to the latest Cry of Fear news update. You'll notice if you direct your eyes downward (at time of writing) that we've released the fourth Videocast. Read on!

The fourth videocast begins with a short movie filmed by ruMpel. It's somewhat enigmatic, but all should become clear when you play the mod! This real-life footage sets the scene for the first section:

Not happy with the feeling of our current weapon set, ruMpel took a trip to a gun range to see how weapons handled in real life. He soon realised that the kick and power that you get out of a firearm didn't match the current sounds and animations of our weapon models, so he went back and revised some of Sporkeh's animations to better reflect this. The end result was a much more satisfying experience when in combat. We hope you feel this too.

We then neatly segue into DragonNOR's segment on voice-acting, and it's a real eye-opener! He goes over his methods and thoughts behind the voice-acting process, and shows us how he interprets a line from start to finish. As the actor for the mod's main character, DragonNOR's professionalism and serious approach to his work ensures a great result each time. It's his voice that really brings the character of Simon to life. And while we're on the subject of DragonNOR and modding, why not check his other mod out? Head over to Obmsource.com for more information!

As stated by myself in my segment of the videocast, we have recently fixed the mod's largest bugs. What this means is that development can now zoom ahead even faster, and motivation is at an all-time high. The first bug we crushed was to do with the game freezing up between level changes. As you can imagine, it was our top priority to fix this. After months of frustration, we discovered the cause and promptly fixed it. This was accomplished through debugging and use of the handy .mdpm files that are generated by Half-Life every time the game freezes up or crashes. As a coder, I seriously recommend this invaluable method to other modders.
The second bug was a more visual issue. If you look at some of the older screenshots, you'll notice our lights don't have a soft glow around them. This was due to the fact that we had an issue where any sprite set to the glow mode (where the size is relevant to the view distance) would sometimes take the texture of any nearby prop model. As you can imagine, this was very annoying indeed and simply unacceptable to release the mod with an issue like that. RuMpel discovered the cause and promptly fixed it. This brings us to...

If you take a look at the progress bar, you'll notice that somewhat recently it was bumped up to 85%. This was done on the day we fixed the 2 major issues that the mod had (coincidentally they were fixed on the same day). This should give you a rough estimate on how long there is left on development. We can't give you a release date, although we can say "soon". We release a lot of media (personally I think we spoil you a bit) so hopefully that will tide you over while we continue to work. Speaking of working...

Another thing you may have noticed in the videocast (if you were paying attention) was me talking about the Dual Wield System I've recently implemented. I've been hard at working refining it and ironing out the issues, but here's a breakdown on how it works:

• Both hands are independent of each other. In other words, you can control while hand with your left mouse button and the other hand with the right mouse button. In games like Counter-Strike, the weapons that are "dual wielded" are not truly dual wielded. The left hand can not shoot at the same time as the right. Nor can the left hand reload while the other continues to shoot. It's simply one weapon whose model has basically got two guns on it.
• ANY weapon, so long as it can be wielded one handed, can be dual wielded. This goes for all melee weapons, your mobile, all pistols or the flashlight.
• Weapons can be combined in any order in any hand. Want to hold your mobile and read your messages with one hand while stabbing with the other? That's cool. Want to go police style and use a flashlight and pistol at the same time? Go for it.
• Trying to wield 2 pistols at once like some lame action movie results in an extremely fierce accuracy and viewkick penalty. Seriously, it's stupid.
• You cannot reload while dual wielding. For balancing gameplay's sake, as well as logic's sake, you have to switch back to 2 handed mode to reload a dual-wielded firearm.
• Dual wielding cannot be bound to a key. You have to do it from your inventory, although we are considering making it so pressing your 2 quick-select buttons dual wields whatever weapons you have bound to it.

I hope that answers any questions you may have about the system, but if you have more then feel free to post them at the bottom. That's all for now, see you soon!
Minuit

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