Okay, this hasn't been the most active week in the history of TNM, but that's probably just because I'm comparing it to the last couple of weeks' storming progress. That doesn't mean nothing has happened at all though. Phasmatis has already finished one of the new weapons spawned by the grenade post last week (including the coding) and he is working on the last three. Some of them will probably need to be coded by That Guy.
ZeroPresence has made it through the usual first period of trying to understand what the Hell I want him to do after taking on a new level. The level he's working on now is going to be particularly big and complicated and very thoroughly scripted and riddled with exciting stuff, which means his period of experimentation by trial-and-error took about a week this time, usually it only takes a few days. The first few attempts he made are being reused in a later part of the map, where they will fit just fine, but he's working on the first part for now. With this, the latest incarnation, he managed to hit my "vision" (God, I hate that word!) spot on; I promise you it will be awesome.
That Guy has been working too, fixing up a couple of quirks with his own code and optimizing some other stuff. He also fixed one of the more serious bugs in the mod by pure accident. Currently, we have him working on a crouching state so we can make the NPC's hide for story purposes, but he's had very limited success so far. This week, he's gonna have some exams to deal with, so he's let us know we shouldn't expect to get much code out of him for a while.
Breadfan has seemed to go AWOL again, but I'm hoping he's just having connection problems or something like that, and that he'll be back to finish up our last skins before long. If not, I may have to get down on my knees and beg Ryan to come back to just do these last few skins for us. Ricemanu could do it too, but he's got plenty of stuff on his hands right now, he's working on signs and advertisements for the various buildings in Forum City, and I've also asked him to churn out a few building wall textures so our city won't look too much like the city maps from Deus Ex (remember how cool the city in the beginning of The Cassandra Project's demo was? That's because all the buildings had custom textures). Most recently, he's helped me spice up a new datavault image which serves no purpose in the mod but give you some background on some of the characters.
As for myself, besides producing the basis of the datavault image mentioned above, I've been adding some more in-depth explanations to certain important conversations, and I've been writing up the convos for some of the last levels. Everything except the last level seems to be good to go conversation-wise. I think I'll just deal with the last level when we get there. Chris the Cynic also offered to write some convos, but since everything is pretty much set in that department, I asked him for some text for random info devices and e-mails, and he sounded pretty happy to work on that, so we'll see how much we can get out of him.
Lastly, Leo is working on some level soundtracks now that our theme is finished, and hopefully Redd will finish his website (Reddrockstudio.com) soon, so he can proceed with the last DXI soundtrack and continue on to some of the most important tracks: The music for Forum City.
