Meanwhile in Russia news

TL; DR

Here is a link to repainted original Half-Life textures. Not all, only used by me. But if you will be inspired enough - use it to create your own halflife.wad, for example.

For others, who can into long words or still have an interest to project:

I want to say thank you for still waiting. We have a lot of messups, and the main one, my personal one, is time. But, oddly enough, since the last release, world progress has stepped far ahead, and I now have some completely wild things like neural networks and autoriggers at my disposal. Let's see if it's just toys, or if there will be some sense. The main tools - the engine and the editor - are already on the way. By the way, a few words about the engine: almost every time someone ask me why Xash and not Unity or Unreal Engine. I will answer the question with a question - do you remember that once in the noughties there was such a phenomenon as Russian developers? If yes, then this is the answer to "why Xash". If not, then I hope there will be something to surprise you, in a good sense of the word. And to be honest, this hope alone keeps everything going.

At the moment, there is a well-developed plot - controversial and provocative from the point of view of solutions - but it will be all the more interesting to roll it out for everyone to see. I can only say about him that there will be almost no politics in him, and all references will be mainly to the things of our past everyday life. This is done not because I'm afraid of censorship (in Steam basically, but I still have to live to see it), but simply because I don't want to drag this rotten garbage into the MIR and giving a second life to it. Those who are upset by this can watch our news. The rest, I hope, will enjoy the story and gameplay.

Actually, about the gameplay. It was originally planned as a shooter with RPG elements. This is how it is planned now, but here's the thing - I have a whole city at my disposal. More precisely, two. And of course, my hands itch to make it possible to ride not only on public transport. And it is this desire, let's say, that is especially dangerous. The engine in the current version allows for large spaces, a high multicount, and the expected scripting system will give room for any tricks. With dynamic lighting, daily cycles will become possible. Simply put, technical resources now allow, if not everything, then a lot. The last resource remains - human. The development of big worlds is a matter for big companies, and there can be no exception here due to physics. What I can do: separate locations, with detailed content, which will be connected by a plot. What I can't do: an open world, although technically and content-wise everything points to this potential opportunity. A car, as a mode of transport, requires large locations. There is a solution here - overpasses, where there is just enough space. The same can be said about railways with the difference that in our case they are either ground or underground. It's boring to ride underground all the time, so if it comes to that, we'll ride along the orange branch, the longest on the electric train scheme. I would also like to fill the locations with mini-games, but taking into account what has already been said, the work front turns out to be huge. So much so that most likely I will have to expand the team, and, of course, what we have now is not enough for this. That is, what you have already played. Therefore, I hope that the new release, after all the updates, will serve as a flag that people will want to stand under. And, of course, commercial rails - because two types of exploiters require work for free: managers and the state. I don't want to see either of them, especially in my own team.

Now about commerce. A reasonable question is - how can you legally sell what is stealed? Easy! Just recreate it from scratch. This principle works in industry, it also works in the digital world. The Half-Life textures that were used earlier were redrawn by me two years ago - that is, reproduced from scratch, as proof of which there are sources in the .psd The same goes for modified third-party textures and models - they were all recreated anew. The textures from Paranoia - which is the first - generously allowed me to BuZZer personally, for which I thank him very much. Its textures, in fact, are what the developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. did as a whole team, and in the same way without them it is impossible to make a map about Russia or any other post-Soviet country. Therefore, to move away from using paranoia.wad is advisable only in the case of a massive upscale, which is still questionable. Actually, third-party textures and music were the only cornerstone that prevented sending the world into free market swimming. The new version can be considered a descent from the stocks. And of course, where the sea is, there are pirates, so you can always download from torrents without SMS, registration, and, of course, cracks, because there are no protections planned for the game. Let all these angry copyright movements will be exist only in the distribution platforms, and developers and players live in peace.

At the end of this wall of text, I want to attach a screenshot of Uncle Mike - the developer of Xash - with a test of the engine for polygons. The video card he had was a GeForce GTX 650, so draw conclusions. What is characteristic is that this map was also made two years ago, but the engine build on the screenshot is fresh.