Weekly Bulletin 12/09/2014 news

Welcome to the first of what I hope to be a continuing series. Each week I intend to show to the public the assets I, and perhaps the rest of the active staff, have worked on over the past week.

I tackled something which has been on the metaphorical docket for a long time. It's been low on the list, but as I've been mapping a bit lately I've been noticing the limits of the rural structures. It so happened that I felt like expanding the existing rural civie set, so that is what I have done. I intend to add a few more to round out the set, but for the most part I've accomplished what was intended. We now have some further large (2x2) rural buildings and some south-west facing buildings. I had never noticed the deficiency in the regular TS rural set, this lack of SW facing buildings, but hopefully the two of them below begin to rectify it.
Shown below are Neal's Safehouse, Mara's Place, a Maxi-Shack, a Maxi-Shack Deluxe, and J's Hydroponics.

A while ago Morpher converted the snow-only buildings for temperate. He removed the snow and adapted them for the temperate palette. These edits were pretty solid, especially on the smaller buildings, but the larger buildings had a lot of issues in their damage frames. I have cleaned them up further, and will doubtless continue at some point. Mostly I've removed more of the snow and the contours along the bottom which were covered with snow drifts. As you can see, they can still use a bit more cleanup.

I've also been working on a set of buildings modeled after some of the CBD buildings in my hometown. Most of them have since been demolished, but I remember them as being big grey slab structures with no clear windows or doors. In my childhood they were covered in graffiti and incredibly run down. These shps are far from finished, and their damage frames are still rudimentary, but I'm reasonably happy with them.

I also wrapped up work on my most recent map - Core Overload. I would hope to get some online testing done for balance, since the map is only generally symmetrical and I want to keep the starting positions as analogous as possible. The map is centred around a crater, with at its centre a well defended Cabal base.

Speaking of maps, I've also spent some time on another multiplayer map. At the moment it's called "The Provinces". Like Core Overload it is a 4 player map, this one taking place around a rundown civilian centre. At the outskirts of the slum are capturable Construction Nodes, and a couple of GDI checkpoints.

It's a small, subtle thing, but one of the other things I've been playing with is the underlying palette available to the game. I have for a while wanted to change the blue shades used in a lot of our capturable and civilian GDI structures and vehicles. I feel that the scheme I've come to is a little bit smoother than the default.

And that is what I did this week.