Man, how far we have come since 2010, and that old 1997 mod, huh? Anyways, besides acting like this project has been ongoing for 7 years to feel smug about it, let’s dive right into some questions you all might have about this 48th attempt at a beta mod! This post will go up on both Preliminary, and Shaft because this will have information on both mods.
What is Preliminary, and why?
Well, Preliminary is a beta mod (yes, another one) that aims to be as accurate as possible with the current knowledge we have on Half-Life's development. The idea is to recreate different builds, and feature major chapter changes, and other content from that era of development. What is currently being worked on is an E3 1998 era build with the 3 chapters featured in the videos from that event. After that, I'm not too sure what I'm going to do next, but I have some ideas. The main reason for working on this is to test the waters with this pre-release of the new Xash3d build, and to have something that can be released to everyone during this pause in development for Shaft.
Here is a small game play video of the offices with that terrible widescreen stretching the original e3 footage had for some reason:
What happened to Shaft?
It died... Nah, it's still going strong. A while back a new version of Xash3d (the thing I mentioned above) was announced, and it featured tons of fixes, and redone code to mimic GoldSrc that much more, and I knew it would be beneficial to Shaft to wait for its release. The new version is planned to release on December 13th of this year, so you should see development again in 2018.
Website, and other info!
While we are still on the subject of Shaft, we also had a website made for the mod. For a good while now... Yea, sorry for not making any official news here. The kind people at Half-Life Creations allowed us to get a website hosted, and now we have that! It mainly has an archive of all the media related to Shaft, and also a preview for a e-book about the history of the mod. So, go check all that out over HERE.
Conclusion.
Well, that's all I can think of at the moment. As always, thanks for supporting us, and the stupid time wasters we work on! I also want to thank the people who have assisted me over the years with all my dumb questions, and assistance on getting whatever I'm not capable of doing, done. I've only improved myself, and the content I make from the help of others like you! The last thing I will drop is a link to our Discord server for those who want to talk to us, see any recent news from us, or just hang out and play some games (yes, I know we should do more game nights with the fans.). Discord link is HERE. Anyways, thanks for reading!!
