APB Dev. Blog :: July 13th, 2009 news - Red Alert: A Path Beyond Game

[Note: This newspost has been edited from the original. Please click here to view the original post on our forums, with expanded content such as video and community feedback]

Here you go, another hopefully-great blog despite being a tiny bit late due to a combination of being busy, and playing through Final Fantasy 9 again. Heh heh. To get things started, I'd like to mention that we'll hopefully catch the eye of the French C&C community more now thanks to the efforts of MartinMb and his buddy BoneWerks over at www.CnCSaga.com, a very large and professionally handled community site. BoneWerks is translating all of our blogs to keep people up to speed (for example, this one from a couple weeks ago).

Also, MartinMb's now started a French-speaking clan that is appropriately called APB-FR. The brand new clan/playergroup has got a clan server online already, click the link to find out more details. It's primarily community-focused instead of a heavy focus on competitive play. It is always great to see people get involved like this.

About our own site, we've had some connection/speed issues lately but I believe Crimson from n00bstories.com (our host) is looking into this. Apologies for the service disruptions. Also, we recently had our 20,000th thread posted on these most recent forums! Thanks for staying with us guys.

What's tall, metal, annoying as hell, and isn't the Tesla Coil? Why, the Gap Generator of course. Quick sidenote, Tesla's birthday anniversary was a couple days ago... but back on track, we've got some work on the new Gap Generator and its shroud effects thanks to TheBeerinator, Jonwil, and TruYuri. I believe we've already shown the horribly annoying new shadowing effects the Soviets get to enjoy, but the outer view of the disrupted area is now pretty impressive and I wish I had a video to show you because a still image doesn't do it too much justice.

The Generator itself has also been improved substantially, although some of the proportions are a little bit off right now and will be set correctly. Have a look!

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R34ch is kinda sorta back and modeling like a madman, popping out things left and right which is pretty cool since he's good at this stuff and is tackling little things we need to get done that'll add a bit of polish. For Gamma we wanted to redo all the base defenses, and he decided to redo the SAM site itself in addition to the actual missile you saw the other week. It will, of course, be all textured and animated at some point. I'm not sure if you noticed in the video the other blog, but they now fire their missiles in pairs.

R34ch has also been refining the new RPG, look for it next week. They're pretty fun soldiers to use although they are pretty poor when it comes to fighting off infantry. Amazingly, the Soviets can now field a competitive infantry rush during the early game, or actually put up a defense of their Ore Truck thanks in part to these new weapons.

I'm sure you've seen zunnie about, asking for volunteers to playtest his attempts at setting up some cooperative play maps. It's actually pretty impressive looking and quite the departure from the normal game style, but some of the gameplay concepts within the co-op maps may end up making their way into future counter-operative (ie, normal) maps too. Download the map over here if you have not already done so.

Arming the Troops Continued

Much like the other weapons we showed the prior week, the M16 is now rigged up and ready to rock with some work started on its animations. Possibly next week we can show off some video of the various animations; right now they're a little rough but show great promise.

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