In the intro news post I put up a week or so ago I mentioned a few things that I need to get done before the mod is done. I'm happy to report that I've made significant progress.
Two things I mentioned - the AI and in-game HUD, are much improved. I managed to copy GDI's HUD to all the sides and make a few minor edits so that it makes sense in the mod (removed the GDI logo, for example). Now it's a generic, modern, clean looking HUD that doesn't look out of place for any faction.
The AI, finally, "works." I use the term "works" very loosely, as right now it makes absolutely horrible tactical decisions due to all the new units. I was playtesting against the US side and the AI elected to engineer rush me, non-stop. Just constant waves of engineering blindly running to their doom. It would waste all its money on actual units in the first three minutes or so, and if I could defend against that it would choose it's cheapest unit (the engineer), order a ton of them to be called in, and run them straight at me. But it does work, which is extremely promising. Previously it would sit and do nothing, now I can start to edit it to make it halfway intelligent. You can actually play a reasonably competitive game against it.
I made a map. It's pretty terrible, but it is a big improvement over past maps I've made (which were basically just the same texture and few hills). You can actually see a little bit of the map I made in the more recent screenshots of the Leopard 3 and Firewall. It's fair I guess, but certainly could be far, far better. The European AI does correctly try to capture control points and push you off the map though, so that's good. The US AI, as was mentioned, tries the same thing, but fails miserably for now.
So what does all this mean? I would feel fairly comfortable releasing the mod as it is right now. Since I way, way beat my target date of July I'm going to polish it up and improve it for a little bit (fix the AI, make a couple maps, add some new sounds, maybe even give the sides some more units or if I'm feeling particularly adventurous add a new faction entirely), hopefully I'll put out some kind of release within a month or so, but I'd hate to give out a definite date and then miss it. I'll continue putting out screenshots and information about the units every few days, however.
