New Years summary news

Hello everyone!

Since New Years is closing in fast, we figured we’d round up the year with a summary of OBM this year; the events that have taken place, developers that have come and gone and progress made during the year.

The year of 2009 has been a great year for the project. We’ve made major strides compared to that of our previous year, 2008, which was OBMs first active period after its revival November 2007. After our Christmas media release in 2008, we didn’t post any news until April 2009. Many took this as a sign that the mod had died and gone into obscurity, but nothing could have been further from the truth. During that period we tidied up and took stock of our resources, reorganized the team in a way that allowed us to work more effectively, settled in on our new forum and recruited a lot of the developers who are still on the team to this date.

Among the developers who joined during this period were Ravage, Bono Estente and Skyms2663 who, together with our three original mappers with Lonefox at the helm completed the mapping department and for the first time in the mods history we had a dev. department that was actually full.
The effect this had was made somewhat apparent already in the April Media release where half the media update consisted of screenshots concerning level design.

The other half was mainly concept art, which brings me to the second dev department that had all its positions filled. Ballsopt and later Ferapod applied with their awesome concept work and together with Amanieu in lead they constitute our current concept art department.

In the modeling section we’ve been joined by Rolpa, Aran Anderson and Nugget, building our modeling team to four, with ChumChum being the only modeler still sticking with us from 2008, and a major stride was made in late November when Aran was made Lead Modeler, filling a gap in the organization that hadn’t been set since our old Lead in that department, Bugles, left. In addition we finally got a texture artist whose specialty is props and weapons, named Dopefish, making the process of getting things into the game a lot faster than original.

In programming we were graced with the presence of a good applicant (anyone working with mods KNOW how hard it is to come by Programmers), but he is currently on standby due to setting up a company of his own.

Two animators have joined our ranks, Arturo and ICEE, who’ll be giving the mod the life it needs and three new positions have been created as we’ve been joined by a skybox texture artist, SpockJedi, a compiler, Joker, and finally a Community Manager who’s been a longtime forumdweller turned dev, Ultama121.

The actual progress done through the year can be seen in the two media releases that we’ve done this year:

Opposing force 10 year Anniversary:
Moddb.com

April Media Release:
Moddb.com

Since our last media release we haven’t been idle either. We’ve been making major strides in all aspects of the mod, but in particular the pace has been picked up in modeling now that we have a better sense of organization and a range of jobs set that we didn’t have before. A new focus has been set in modeling, and that is to get the weapon models completed and into the hands of our animators so that they can be rigged and animated for some in-game action. Starting today, MODDB users will also be able to download our soundtrack from our MODDB profile.

With this in mind, we’re going to head into the new year with the intention of getting stuff in-game and start showing some actual in-game footage. We’re working to get all the weapons ready and working (which should enable some fun with all the testing required) and to show them in action. If things go according to plan we should also be able to show a trailer in the coming year.

I want to thank all the developers who are currently working on the project, the community for supporting us, and Podcast 17 for mentioning us in their show. We venture into a new year, and we’re going full steam ahead!

Happy New Year from the OBM team!