Happy January!! 2008 is here, and the ID team hopes that everyone had a safe, but fun holiday season. We are expecting 2008 to be our best year yet and we feel like we are starting it off right.
In this news post I'll be talking about some of the things we are working on in the next little while, some of which are long overdue and some of which will help propel us forward.
As Rad4Christ mentioned a couple of months ago, we moved to a new forum platform and site design. When we made the transition there were a few glitches, included in those glitches were our media area, as well as a few oddities we are experiencing within the forums.
1) So I'm excited to say we are making a very strong and immediate effort to correct issues and improve our user experience. If you have any suggestions for things to consider or changes you feel are important, please PM Rad4, myself or leave a note for discussion on the forums.
2) It's easy (being inside the project) to not see how things look from an external perspective. Over the holidays I had an opportunity to do just that, and I noticed a HUGE flaw. Currently we have bits of design scattered across the forum in a very hard to find format. So if someone was interested in learning more about our actual design concepts or specific game details (class information) there was no good way to do that. So with that in mind, I wanted to talk about a new feature that will be on our website in the next little while (hopefully within a week or two), the ID game WIKI. This Wiki will be a read-only Wiki at this time, but will contain all the game information in an easy to follow/read format. Included will be all the previously released information as well as other new information that we didn't feel warranted it's own news post. As we add new objects we'll make sure repeat visitors can find these additions easily and quickly.
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Ok, that talks a bit about the forum updates that will be forthcoming. Let's talk about the first real piece of technology released from the ID team.
Maps are the life blood of a mod, without good quality well tested maps, the most balanced game can suffer and be unable to recover.
We recognize this, and have come up with a strategy that we feel will encourage map development as well as allow solid communication between the development team and the mapping community.
The first stage of this is the Intelligent Design Tech Release v1. The purpose of this is to allow mappers to begin using our technology/design systems to create their own maps within the ID universe. Contained in this package will be:
1) Map Texture Sets
2) Ambient Sounds
3) Prop models
4) Mapper based entities (spawn entities, node entity etc)
5) Full explanation of Nano-Relay system
6) 2 Feral class movement techniques (scout and quick fighter) with full explanation of how they work
7) Guidelines to Feral heights
8) Mapper guidelines
This download will be publicly available for anyone to download. If you wanted to try out the Feral movement techniques, you could. However, the purpose is for the mappers in the community to begin creating the maps.
Part two : We will be asking mappers to share their development on the forums with all of us. As they build areas, we'll be monitoring and contacting those people who we feel have shown that they are capable of making a release-quality 'official' map.
Part three: These individuals will be brought (if they are interested) into a special area of the forums where they can discuss their needs and design concepts with the dev team and other mappers. We are also working on allowing these people to have access to updated mapper related content from the ID SVN (subversion, versioning software that allows us to update various parts of the mod and share them with the group from a central source).
We are working on putting together all the needed bits for this tech release and hope to have it out VERY soon. So keep an eye on the forums (www.idmod.net) as we'll be announcing there as soon as we can.
