This bulletin is coming out a little bit early this week, because my semester is coming to an end and projects are piling up. Yay for higher education!
In any case, a few big tasks got tackled this week. Last week, I showed off the partial set of snow cliffs. The set isn't complete quite yet, but I did a bunch more of them. They still need a bit of a cleanup to match the cliff fronts better, but at this point it's fine tuning rather than outright replacing, and that makes it a lot easier. They also make it easier for me to transition into making the water and ice versions, both of which are much needed for the snow theatre.
It'll be even better when we have more than just snow tiles to work with.
I've been trying out the snow theatre, and am already nearly finished a map. It's not a great map, but it is helping me to highlight issues with the theatre as it stands. One of the most glaring issues was the lack of trees. We'd converted the pine set which was made for the temperate theatre, but it was looking pretty bad just directly converted for snow. Instead, I've rendered a new set of trees from the same source models as the temperate set. This means we can now add some further environment to snow maps.
Returning to the subject of terrain, over a year ago I resurrected work on an interior theatre. Crashking led the effort a long time ago, but didn't get much further than nailing down a colour scheme and producing a set of ground tiles. I've taken the project a little further than that, and this week I finally put together the cliff set. The cliff set has all the basic required pieces at this point, but lacks a few of the interesting edge-case ones, and lacks the various blends. it definitely needs a black-topped set, and I'm inclined to do a water set too. The use I foresee is almost exclusively campaign, hence their not being worked on nearly as much as a lot of skirmish necessary stuff. The aim is for a set which can portray large underground facilities.
Above is the 'standard' interior set. I'm already hard at work putting together the two other interior styles. The first is designed for maintenance tunnels and back areas which are not intended for frequent human use. The second will be clean, for use in laboratories, offices and whatnot. My intention at the moment is for the interior theatre to be used for underground science facility and nuclear silos and the like, so I'm not going too far beyond these three styles for the moment, but the 'basic' concrete and the laboratory sets will be easy to expand for further uses.
This is the maintenance tunnel tileset in progress. I intend for it to be a much more limited tileset, with only a fade-to-black top version and perhaps not even a water version. It will be worked on whenever I feel like it, since it's hardly a priority.
Maps are sort of a priority though. I've been working on Provinces, which I talked about in a previous update and is precipitously close to being completed. Morpher has made a map called DM: Gloom (3), which is a tiberium rich environment plagued by lifeforms.
And that's (most of) what we've been up to this week.
Good stuff, I really like the underground missions idea. Some of my favorite Nod missions in Twisted Insurrection were the underground ones, so I can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
Oh god those interior cliffs made me **** a little.
Also, it's real nice that you guys are doing some regular updates now.
Just wondering: why aren't you posting these on PPM?
I trialed the format in TO's staff forum, and got luke warm responses.
I'm still not sure I can make these a regular thing, so I'm trialing them here. ModDB is less specialised towards TS/RA2 so its easier to just throw updates out into the wild imo.
I don't want to call PPM's community toxic, because a lot of us are great and toxic seems like way too strong a word. But PPM does feel a lot higher pressure to me.
It's too small a community and the effects echo everywhere.
To be honest, I found it straight up Toxic. But there were a few decent people over there.
Keep up the updates over here, its nice to see this stuff and feedback is only ever a benefit to you.
Fair enough, was just wondering. At times I keep wondering why I have my mod hosted at PPM as nearly no-one there cares, especially cause it's a Generals mod which seems to be shunned over there.
Just try to keep development fun. if you derive enjoyment from posting updates, pick a place where it's the most enjoyable to post updates.
I think a lot of people try to take it all too seriously and get hung up on numbers of comments and numbers of followers and whatnot. I'd say that's the wrong metric by which to measure a hobby. I'd go with fun.
I used to think that was the place to go for mods, but I've seen more decent mods vanish there than I've seen great mods thrive, and that just will not do for an archivist like myself who borders on OCD in cases where peoples' creative works are at risk of being lost forever.
It's not that PPM is a particularly bad site, a lot of mods have been successful there and matured well, it was definitely a great place to begin a few years ago. I kind of feel back then the community was more active and positive, these days it feels a bit separated and harsh. It's still checked, with a semi active staff forum.
Just registered and I want to say thank you for the updates after a year of silence. I love tiberian sun and everything I have seen about this mod is amazing and I hope to one day play it. Know that the work you and your team do is very appreciated.