GES Update 1/17/09 news

Hey Moddb!

We come bearing a little love after keeping our cards pretty close of late. Lets kick this off.

As always we cannot allow ourselves to give across a date just yet for this impending release even though many of us are so very excited, but to say it is near is not mistaken! If you've come across this modification recently as many always are, you may wonder how long it has been around. This update should fill you in on some points in our extensive history and more importantly things to come.

LOOKING BACK
It may interest you to know that GoldenEye: Source has just reached its 4 year milestone! Yes indeed, the first mod's public forums on Invisionfree software lists the original creation of that web portal somewhere in January 2005, our first webmaster joined on 14 Jan 2005. Here is a screen of that developer who is now an "inactive contributor"

expect some more fun history in next update

Three release builds have seen the light of day since our humble beginning. Our Alpha 1.0, the follow up Alpha 1.1, and Beta 1.0. What a long journey, this feels like the 3rd source engine we have been in development on. The artwork has always been stunning, now finally we are right where we wanted to be so badly, thanks to some major coding hustle and the amazing Orange Box engine.

A PROMISING DEVELOPMENT
Now, let's start with the things to come on our horizon ; since I'm sure you have been hungry for screenshots and progress reports in the void between September and now. Be hungry no more, this is just a sampling of the beta 3 progress and some screenshot love!

For starters, the D5K weapon just recently got a re-texture from a previous unseen textured version of the model by Baron, who is one of the project directors, and an experienced 3D Artist. This new texture is hot, and was the toil of 2 or 3 of our art department working together to polish it up ; By "polish" I actually mean dirty and scratch it up! Check it out.

Early development WIP

The first screen there was the very first showing of Framed, another "inactive contributor" who picked up the weapon to skin, and since turned it over to Baron and also Spider ; 2 of our lead Dev's who got it looking like the final stage of beta 3 D5k!

Beta 3 Media Render

In the very next media release we will show you this weapon in-game.

Weapons
Speaking of the weapons, we'd like to give you a round-up of the status of our weapons in code. For the longest time the team would handle weapon values loosely based off original values obtained through various websites ; then our coders would tweak them all around in a far too overdeveloped way. This lead to a constant state of change and every developer would feel differently about what guns should be powerful.

Since the Orange Box recode took place we stepped back and thought, forget all that, the original game already lays out clearly which guns are meant to be powerful! So we decided to get ViashinoCutthroat back into action of coding values and managing our weapon sets. He managed a very comprehensive way to obtain and input damage statistics (that are even more accurate than internet sources) into GE:S with the help of Killermonkey, to get our weapons to act exactly like goldeneye64! From there through many factors such as the differences in the way source handles hit boxes, they have been slightly tweaked from the reported play testing and Viashino's expert FPS opinions. Now, only the bear minimum of necessary balances to weapon sets in our game is the result. Here is the list of weapons that you will see in beta 3 ;

- slappers
- knife
- throwing knife
- pp7
- pp7 silenced
- dd44
- klobb
- cougar
- kf7
- zmg
- d5k
- dk5 silenced
- phantom
- ar33
- rcp-90
- sniper rifle
- golden gun
- pp7 silver
- pp7 gold
- mines (remote, proximity,timed)

What does this mean for you? Well, each of the original weapon sets will be in the beta 3 except "lasers" which we have lined up for beta 4.

STATE OF BETA 3
Currently we are in a phase we call "locked down" where all of our coders' implementations are included, and now is the process of extensive beta testing which has been beefed up lately with some new recruits from the community. Don't worry, if they let us down we will be seeking more help to test our mod after beta 3 is shipped. Who knows what the future will bring. This is us posing for you guys! on the runway.....posing...runway posing.. OK screenshot now ; no more bad joke.

oh no Killermonkey you showed yourself! Not so secret agent..

Once some final art is polished and we verify all of our bugs are squashed we can bring you further developments on a release date. Stay tuned because over the next weeks there will be many media releases and the starting of a massive screenshot "showcase", each small but content rich! It is a new year and a new start for us at GoldenEye: Source, we want to give our loyal community and the general modding scene a release that will rival commercial titles, and so far the insider feeling is we are on the cusp of that goal!

Website Move
This is the last thing to mention today, we will be moving webserver and domain on Sunday night U.S EST. The new domain will be Goldeneyesource.net

Why is this happening?
Well, our team as some of you might know has an unfortunate record of bad frontpage updating. Ever since the alpha period we havent quite gotten what we wanted from our host provider, its at times so frustrating. Longtime admin and former coder Scott, has so wonderfully given us years of faithful hosting through his workplace. At the same time also found it hard to give us access to update and we want to be able to do what we really want, which is give you fans and ourselves an awesome functioning site!

We hope not to inconvenience anyone with the move, this will be happening as said, tomorrow. The goldeneyesource.com forums will be put into maintenance mode and the data moved to the new domain server instantly. The downtime should only be 1-2 hours. If you go to our moddb page here you will see the new domain listed tomorrow! Additionally a redirect will be made on the .com forums so no one gets lost as to where we went. Bear with us through this we want to get all this done before the beta 3 period gets too close.

Next media : More screens, a beta 3 maps rundown, and more posing most likely!

Thanks for having faith in us guys, we promise this time we are painstakingly making sure it will be worth your patience :D

Sincerely,
Team GoldenEye: Source