Not much this month either, in terms of public appreciable progress.
The team is still working hard on concept art and model sheets for the main characters. We're still working on their style, which is some kind of mix between the 1993 comics, the SNES game, and some originality. It's some pretty neat stuff.
On the technical side, we're working on a solution for making StarFox like maps.
As you may know the source engine has a rather limited max map size, since coordinates (vec_t) are stored as 32bits float .
So far we're using a combination of various methods. We've reduced the arwing model to 1/10th of it's original size, and slowed it down.
They weren't very successful on their own, but combining them together took us closer to our objective.
If needed, I might try the delicate task of changing the size of the vec_t to allow for longer map boundaries, but many have failed before trying to do this, so I won't rely on this alternative too much.
Another method that shows promises, is to have several "tunnel" with a teleport brush at the end, teleporting to the next tunnel. Hammer and VBSP aren't very cooperatives though. For some reasons, solids farther away than ~16 000 units from the center are automatically invalid, and vbsp crashes.
Hopefully we've got the vbsp map compiler sources, but I still need to figure out how Binary Space Partitions work.
There's also another solution which I really don't like... Using a simple 3d skybox around the Arwing and moving obstacles and enemies toward the Arwing while it stays stationnary. They've used this technique in other starfox games before. But it means that instead of moving only a few entities at a time, we'd have to move tons of them at the same time, and lighting via VRAD would be completely useless and inaccurate for moving stuff, so would VVIS. So that's really my last choice.
On another note, flyingmongoose, our manager had to leave the team, at least for now. So we're looking for someone to replace him, someone that can handle the organizational part of the team, and probably provide some leadership.
That pretty much sums it all. We'll have probably some stuff to show you guys before next month.
