A little FedCon summary and status update news - Star Wars: The New Era mod for Half-Life 2

This has been posted as a broader report on our own website already, but since we've been asked by many ModDB readers, here's a little update for you.
As you could read before, we have successfully presented our mod at FedCon, which really was a shining SciFi event this year. Not only with the humongous list of star guests from various shows, but also with its 6.000 visitors and among them a whole bunch of the 501st legion, the biggest Star Wars costume group in the world. They did not only show up with a large amount of Imperial Officers and Stormtroopers, but also with a large Wampa and a 3 meters long AT-AT, which both caught a lot of attention.

So, the convention definately started with the right atmosphere for us and thanks to our sponsor Shuttle and the organizers from FedCon, we had a room of our own, where we could allow people to play the mod in modes of 6vs6 players. The modes we've presented at the convention were Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, both modes which will be included in the first release of the mod. Although these modes weren't entirely completed at the time of FedCon, people could easily get started playing with these modes, the learning curve turned out to be very low. Which is a good thing: These quite "open" modes will grant casual players to start playing without having to read through any documentation, while the more tactical modes like Team Assault will be a challenge for the more professional players.
While the guest star programme was pretty extensive, there were always people playing in our room. An advantage was clearly that we were placed at the opposite side of the photo session room, where visitors could have photos taken of themselves together with Michael Shanks, Kevin Sorbo and various others.

During the convention, we also organized a little tournament for those who enjoyed more competative gameplay. The winner received a large format TNE poster along with a lanyard and he will appear as a Sith Lord in the game.

To sum up some of the impressions of FedCon, we have created a three-minute long video with scenes taken from our LAN room during open play and the tournaments. Since many of you have been asking: In fact, we had done some ingame shooting to show you a new gameplay trailer which shows actual game mechanics and combat scenes. Unfortunately however, our member responsible for cutting the videos had suddenly dropped out and with the tremendous workload to organize the FedCon booth, there was no chance for us to get that trailer done. I hope you enjoy the FedCon video nontheless, since it'll also show you some ingame action - even though it's just filmed from the screens.

• Video stream at ModDB
• 720p High Definition stream at Vimeo

So, how comes it's not released yet?

During the convention and play tests of our new beta team, we discovered a glitch in the weapon system of the Source Engine that caused tremendous trouble. If you know the engine, you might be aware that all projectile weapons except for RPG and crossbow use zero-time projectiles. Now, that is one thing we definately didn't want for our mod, since it should look and feel like the movies, were you can see the blaster bolts travel at a slower pace. We first approached that issue by deriving our weapon code from the RPG to realize realtime projectiles.
During the playtests however, it turned out that no one managed to hit an opponent at close range. So what was the reason for that? After detailed investigations, we found out that any physical projectile in Source pauses in mid-air for a moment after it is spawned from the weapon. Barely noticeable, but enough to miss a moving target by exactly that delay.
Since we couldn't fix that delay, we decided to give the weapon system in TNE an entirely different approach after the convention: A batch simulation code for projectiles that would not rely on physical entities, but still allow for realtime bullets. It took us a while to get this implemented and working, but the first playtest results are very satisfying.

Unfortunately, that delay shifted us right into the exams time and most of our team is currently busy writing exams at university and otherwise. Since these are the final exams for some of us, we hope you understand that we need to focus on our education first and come back to the mod afterwards.
Once we're through, we will polish the current build and will release it together with the new weapon system as a public beta.
We're sorry for the delay, but we hope to provide a much better gaming experience to you with the new weapon system :)