I've had lots of fun playing DX lately... made it past NYC for the first time in 4 years (yeah, I've been busy modding it), it was like a redemption. Hong Kong is the best map ever. Steve Powers, in the extremely unlikely event that you read this, will you PLEASE marry me!? Uh, anyway, I'm afraid TNM can't really provide a city map as inspiringly excellent as Hong Kong, but then I doubt any game will ever give you any map as intricate and perfect as that. This time through, I noticed the large amount of overheard conversations and hurried off to write a few more overheards for TNM. I hope they'll make you laugh as much as Pointman did after reading them.
But enough about me! That Guy and Phasmatis have BOTH updated their packages since last week. That means the TNM and TNMItems packages. TNM hadn't been updated for about a month, so it contained more changes and fixes than I can recount here. By the way, remember that crouching state I told you That Guy was working on last week? Well, he had some real problems with it and he was just about to give up when he realized that the character he was testing it on didn't have the crouching animation he was attempting to evoke. Heheh. Anyway, now it works, so expect to see certain characters hide in TNM. The TNMItems update brought some really good stuff with it too, namely about 4-5 new weapons of the grenade and mine type and of course the fire blade we showed off in the last POTW. And believe you me, no "w00t" is loud enough to do justice to the quality of these new weapons. On that note, the Models progress bar has been removed! All Phas has left to do now is tweak some stuff and then he can just lean back and pop in with the occasional extra decoration model whenever he feels like it. Doesn't that make you all warm and fuzzy inside?
Since we "hired" Pointman, the voice acting department seems to have picked up again. He's been testing a few conversations that I'd labelled "presumably finished" and sending them off to the relevant voice actors if he found no bugs in them. It's both sort of a relief and an annoyance to me that we're voicing now, because when he sends off a character's conversations, those convos are locked to me - I can't add anything to them because they're already being recorded. Of course that means that I'll definitely know they're finished and I can put them out of my mind, which is a relief, but it also removes my freedom to improve upon them, add more checks and choices, and maybe use them to implement any changes we make during the testing of the mod, which is annoying. But that's life, I guess.
Bob, Midashand, and ZeroPresence are of course still working on their respective maps. As a fix to a balance problem that's been annoying me for a long time (the fact that the WorldCorp players got it REALLY easy compared to PDX-aligned players in the last part of the game), I invented another mission for the WC storyline in mission 22, which will require an additional map. Luckily, it doesn't have to be a very big map, and it'll mostly be a complete ripoff of an original DX mission - a fact that I'm planning to use as an excuse for plenty of self-irony. The map has been assigned to ZeroPresence as he likes to work on more than one map at a time. Midas has been showing us how his map is progressing, and it's looking just as majestic and monumental as the Goat Templae™ should. Bob, on the other hand, has been taking advantage of his brother's absense to play games on his PC, so he's had a bit of a downtime, heheh. We're counting on more progress from him once his brother returns to occupy his computer himself.
Hm, what else...? Oh yes, I've coded up two new colour schemes for the HUD and the menus of TNM with a little help from That Guy. One will be the TNM default scheme and uses the colours from Ricemanu's TNM splash screen, the other is a WorldCorp scheme for WC-aligned players who want total immergence, and it is of course yellow and orange like WorldCorp's logo. I hope you'll be happy with them, but if not, you will of course still have access to the old colour schemes from DX.
I think that's all for this week. I'll be playing Deus Ex if you need me!
