Weekly Bulletin 16/1/2015 news

Welcome to 2015 guys and girls!

Over the Christmas period a lot of stuff went on a hiatus. I was in another city with family, and Morpher was in a whole different hemisphere. Our mapping department - Truefeel and Team Black - have also been quiet. Getting back into the rhythm of things will probably take a couple more weeks, but there is a little bit to show off.

Morpher's been away from his home computer for a while, so not much has progressed in terms of game-ready content. He's been tinkering with a few interesting things, like the potential for fully working minelayer logic, co-op missions, and a cool type of tiberium spreader: two things which (if they work) will make their way into future updates. Truefeel has been working on some prologue mission stuff which ties Firestorm and Tiberian Odyssey's timelines together and allows us to retcon a few things. Team Black is in a perpetual state of being about to start something, so maybe we'll see something from him one of these days.

And I've been doing the usual graphical deal. Nothing much to show in complete state yet, but I do have a bunch of rough work in progress which I'm going to show you, and at least one tangentially related thing.

First, cameos. These little guys are the unit, building, and superweapon icons which sit in the sidebar. TO has been around for a while and has managed to accumulate icons from TS, from an old mod called Recoil, from old TO, from newer TO, and in general has a lot of mismatched and totally unsuitable cameos. Since most of the units in the mod are now ready, it's easier to just go through and do the whole set at once.

Which is what I've been doing. I've started with the GDI cameos because they're slightly thinner than the Nod ones, and I've made a template.

(Harvester, APC, Disruptor, Ares, Hover MLRS, Hover Disruptor, Hover Tank, Enforcer Tank, Landing Craft, Core Guardian, and Cyborg)

To look good in any situation, every unit and building that could ever even potentially be built needs a GDI and a Nod cameo. That is a lot of units to touch up, but it's going remarkably well so far I think.

The other thing I've been doing is working on a few of the buildings which have been ignored so far. They've been ignored because there wasn't enough concept art, or they were potentially going to get cut, or I just didn't feel motivated to work on them. But they definitely have to be done, and here are a few of them. These are the biggest offenders:

(Nod Naval Yard, GDI Firestorm Generator, GDI Advanced Comms Center, and Nod Stealth Generator)

The Nod Naval Yard is obviously important, since it's one of the main production buildings. The Firestorm Generator is just easy to forget - it sits at the end of the tech tree and doesn't really grant you any new technologies or anything, so a lot of the time players just don't build it. The Comms Center is a reasonably new addition to the GDI buildlist. The Radar is the first 'gate' to new technologies, and for a while the Command Center was the second. The Adv. Comms was added in between the two so that GDI wouldn't be stuck on low tech in the midgame getting outranged and outrun by Nod. The Stealth Generator was just a case of ehhhhh, I don't feel like working on it right now.

The other thing I've been doing is only tangentially related to Tiberian Odyssey, but the link is pretty strong. I've been trying to learn a few more modeling and rigging techniques, and I've been applying these techniques to one of the units from Odyssey. GDI's superheavy Atlas. In the process of building it so far I've taught myself a lot about Splines and NURBS and heirarchies and rigging and plenty of other interesting things.

(you can click on it for larger version if you like)

I've just started on creating the turret. Like the Hover MLRS, which I created a ways back, this could potentially be used for CGI cinematics in the campaign. Of course I'm promising nothing right now, because there's a lot of mapping still to be done.

Here's a quick render of the turret as it is right now:

(you can click on it for larger version if you like)

And that's what we did over the Christmas break. See you next time!