After a full 8 MONTHS of lying dormant, and lots of I'm pleased to announce that the Unofficial Expansion Pack you have heard so much (or recently, so little) about is going to grace you all with its first public release.
The latest version of the Expansion Pack (Build #499 - no word of a lie), hasn't seen any real development action since the 24th of December 2010, according to our SVN system. As Development and Project leader, quite frankly, i've had enough of it sitting in limbo and need some solid motivation to work on this project again. As much as I respect the long-term intentions of the rest of the Dev team, its taking too damn long. The sheduled public release has been stripped of all its non-neccesary parts into a single installation, which will contain most of the original planned features.
Previously, we planned to have our own installer which we could release updates via a cleverly linked up SVN system and launcher program, but with no progress on any such thing in 8 months (wayyy out of my capabilities), the Pre-Release currently uses a similar system to what you are all used to with mods such as G66 and QF, a .cfg file to launch it. This means that despite previous intentions, this release of the UEP is NOT designed to run alongside other mods for now. Modder_Data has been removed from this release to condense it, and because assets are subject to change in the not-too-distant future, I strongly recommend not trying to lift them into your current projects.
There will be bugs, there will be issues, there will be problems. We aren't going to find them all on their own, so this release has two purposes.
1 - To get some content out to the public, so you can finally have fun with it, and so it keeps your interest...
2 - For the players to report back as many bugs as they find, which will all be listed publicly and scheduled to be fixed.
As the Pre-Release Version becomes more and more tested, I will release Title-Updates, which will fix as many problems as possible. These changes will also be made to our internal SVN build of the project as we go, so that when we finally get around to releasing the final build with all its fancy installers and nik-naks, it will be ready. Consider this a public-beta, but with a large list of known bugs.
I'm setting the WORST-CASE SCENARIO release date two weeks from this post. I'm actually hoping to get it out much sooner than that, and once its ready i'll confirm a proper date. I've been working on this for the last few days, getting it integrated into the latest public patch. As always its a little tedious, but its getting close, so I feel now is the time to announce it. I'm not going to expose the full content list yet, because it may end up changing depending on the circumstances, but a good 90% of the content is planned to be in this build.
A lot of its sub-parts are incomplete, such as the warship variant which still needs a Scion counterpart etc. All I want you guys (the public) to do is download and play it to your hearts content, but try to report as many problems or issues as you can, and i can get on fixing them straight away.
See you in-game!
