The UEAW Dev's Blog - Issue #1: 4th July, AD 2009 feature - Ultimate Empire at War Mod for Star Wars: Empire At War

Good afternoon* UEAW fans!

I've been meaning to get this started for a few weeks now; and finally it's here; a 'blog' as it were, though I didn't intend to originally use the phrase, about the development of UEAW. Yes, we like to operate in virtual secrecy, and don't worry, I fully intend to continue working likewise, but I think it'd be good to show you a few little peeks and give a few hints on a regular basis, especially since I've been shouting at a lot of people recently! Circumstances allowing, I'll hopefully be giving you a cryptic release every fortnight.

So, what are we working on? Well, I'm not going to tell you ;) - naw, I'll give you a little insight into just a couple of the things that are going on.

Firstly, we are, of course, making Ultimate Empire at War; and 'Ultimate' does apply to all aspects of the game - you'll have seen Evilbob's latest mapping sneak-peak on our moddb profile, no doubt (shame on you, if you haven't); and the gameplay and coded content itself, of course, in all its depth and breadth is constantly under development, but graphics are included in the plan; you wonder why it takes us so long? Have you seen just all of the renders from a few years back posted in our gallery? The highest quality ones aren't even public, but we released promotional shots of some of the newly skinned models recently; the Saboath, an Orbital Perimeter station, the Aurek and - of course - the revered Venator. Rest assured that even vanilla models and skins will not be left untouched.

In the appreciation that the Venator is simply incomplete without her turrets, we also set about making sure that they will be in the game, moving around happily like venator turrets should, in the highest quality possible; and so her turrets were made, with great attention to detail:

Well, that's a nice turret, team, I hear you say, but what about the game itself? Well, staff are back on duty after the busy days of early summer, and coding and its associated work is already going strong. To make the game Ultimate, it requires re-building from the bottom up, which undoubtedly means much clerical work and code re-organising. My latest and on-going piece of work, I shall reveal for the amusement value, is a spreadsheet listing all of the vanilla/pre-existing projectiles in our code; before we even think about re-making them, which is going to happen. I think I'm somewhere roughly around entry #160 now, and I haven't even got on to filling in their details right now:

(By the way, no matter how hard you try to enlarge that image, you won't be able to discover any secrets about our under-development code from it. I promise  :angel)

On a final note, we may well be fiddling with the layout of the GUI, but Prototype unfortunately won't let me put the menu's 'resume game' button over the top of 'quit game' so that the latter becomes inaccessible :(. Though somewhat a nuisance, I felt that it could genuinely increase the number of hours people ran UEAW for, but he seemed to think that it'd be a false representation of how great UEAW is, or something like that, I don't know  ;D.

Until next time, thanks for reading! Leave me some feedback, should I bother continuing :P

LTCC
Head of Coding, Jack-of-Most-Trades
*(I won't apologise for those who read at different times from that of this being released and those in different time zones)