Weekly Bulletin 19/09/2014 news

This has been a slow week for asset creation, so there aren't too many renders and screenshots to show off. I started work on extending the snow structure set, part of a larger effort to complete the snow theatre. These buildings are inspired by arctic and antarctic research bases, and I hope to build a complete set of them. Aesthetically, I like that they blend the apocalyptic sturdiness with implications of scientific instrumentation.

Shown above are the "Crew Quarters" and "Fuel Storage". Future structures on the docket are misc generic buildings, a liquids silo, and a drilling rig.

The snow theatre as a whole is undergoing some development. At the moment I'm working on the cliffs, a few of which still do not have art. We've had a partial set of cliffs for years, but a lot of the back tiles were never created. This is an ongoing process, but it's starting to look a bit better.

This is just a quick shot from the map editor, but it shows the extent of the issue - the blue snow theatre of TS still remains in these 7 tiles. These are some of the last unedited TS tiles existing in TO, and will soon be replaced with much better assets. Once these cliffs are all ingame, I'll make the water and the ice versions. After the snow cliffs are done, the urban assets such as pavement additions and pavement cliffs will be the next to be converted for the snow theatre. This will allow for us to finally have some snow theatre content, something which has been missing for a long time!

The largest piece of news in the past week of development is that Morpher and I got some online testing done. TO uses the CNCNet client, something neither of us had particular experience with. It is also a vast, sprawling codebase with thousands upon thousands of assets. We were a little bit worried about stability and errors. We avoided them entirely, and played a couple of uninterrupted games. It was terrific.

The first game took place on Covalence, an asymmetrical four player map with capturable goodies in the centre. Morpher and I played as allies against two AIs. I played Nod, he played GDI. The AI's destroyed me nearly immediately and I spent the remainder of the game building artillery to aid Morpher, who was cooped up in his own base facing the AI. Eventually he got bored and my last War Factory got destroyed, so we threw in the towel.

It was good fun even without the satisfaction of having a base. The next game was more adversarial, on a map which Morpher has spent a bunch of time reworking. The Last Forest is a semi-symmetrical two player map, and was cut from Tiberian Odyssey a long time ago because it was too small for current monitor resolutions. Morpher expanded the map to a more playable size and fixed a lot of issues with it. The original player starts have been replaced with capturable construction nodes, allowing for some interesting base creeping. Both of us played Nod.

In Tiberian Odyssey, the Nod Stealth Tank can deploy into a stealth generator. The cloaking radius isn't as large as the less mobile equivalent, but it can hide a few units. I hid dozens of artillery in the forest outside of Morpher's base, slowly tightening the noose. He rallied well, using his EMP cannon to immobilise my units so that his Tick Tanks could deal with the artillery. While moderately successful, he was never able to deal with them all, and my stealth tanks frequently escaped to set up their sneaky little artillery nests again. Finally, I attacked with Devils Tongues, destroying his Construction Yard and crippling him for the remaining few minutes of the game. After a few attempts at breaking out, the last remnants of Morpher's base went down.

It was a lot of fun. In fact, I had so much fun being sneaky that I entirely forgot to screenshot any of the action. That's why these shots are mostly trees.

And that is what I did this week.