Welcome to another randomly timed update!
We have some good news, no bad news, and a competition to explain to you in the coming week.
I'll start off with the brief good news, you've seen all the videos – progressively getting better due to lighting issues etc, well. We finally have that all sorted, the lightmapping works perfectly, everything is great, we've however decided to scrap dynamic shadows for now. They'll come at a later date but for the alpha we'll have to cope with lightmapped only. This saves time, resources and me going mad over code.
Now that lighting and ambience is sorted, we need some guns, you've seen the ironsights and the guns with different hand models, well now is the time we fully get them working to kill zombies everywhere. We'll have some videos of them in action soon, we've just got a couple of things that need working on, for example, in the model the animation is for all the hands and gun however in the engine each arm and the gun are animated separately so we just need to do some tweaking on little bits. (I'm not sure why this happens, I've been informed it's something to do with the way DirectX handles things or something.)
We're also going to use raytracing for bullets :D to ensure the best zombie kills!
Once the guns are sorted we can release the AI hordes! Then, well that's when we hand it over to you lot to use and tell us how to break it so we can fix it. We'll be doing some tweaks between the AI release and handing it to you, such as checking the awards and such, but that's not difficult to do once everything else works.
Finally, the competition.
I'm not sure if I'm meant to say this yet but, I like this one.
When we release the alpha map, we have included many easter eggs. Some to games the team play, some to black and white lazy animals that only eat one type of food but can't even digest it. We then decided that with this we would launch a competition for the first 10 people to discover the entire amount of easer eggs (I need to count them.) will win a prize, which, most likely will be early beta access and be the first to get an award worth 75 points.
That last bit probably doesn't make sense, but we have a cunning plan for the awards points to use in the game! It adds a bit more of a personal feeling to it, so look out for more on that.
Anyways, I'll inform ya'll how to enter that competition when we are closer to release.
I've gotta run now, I'm meant to have been leaving 10 minutes ago o.O
~Foxx
