Intelligence Bulletin Vol 1 * No 10 news

A new stable build with a lot of bugfixes is now online, and we’ll start inviting Alpha-players again next week. The plan is from now on to send out 200 invitations each Tuesday unless major bugs prevents us from doing so. And in a few months we hope to be able to increase the invitation-numbers significantly.

We had a major breakthrough in the development of the Campaign (the strategy part of H&G) – we managed to start a war, and win a war on our internal developer-server. It may not sound like a major thing, but it really is. For the first time we have an actual working gameloop – at least on our developer-server. We hope to be able to re-activate the Campaign on the stable server very soon, and are looking forward to see how “real players” will handle it.

Developer Blogs This Week

Recording Sounds for the Bicycle

By Reto.Draebesmoelf

“A bicycle has appeared on our internal test level. You can ride it and go from one place to another faster than you can run. To create the sounds for the bicycle I decided to leave the studio and go on a field trip to record the sound. I used my wife’s grand mother’s bicycle which is old and rattling (and has no gears) and is similar in style with the in-game bicycle.” Read More

Heroes & Generals on Wikipedia

By Reto.KenSolo

“We’re finally on Wikipedia. Should anyone of you out there be interested in expanding our entry, please do so!” Read More

Team Debriefing

Design

Reto.RedBjarne, Game Director
“- XSI plugin for auto-LOD generation
- Building gfx updates
- Monster project planning..
- Too many meetings…”

Reto.Fleck, Level Designer
“As the rest of the graphic guys I’m fixing bugs – since we hired our Lead Tester, thanks! Besides that did I finalize the Skirmish Mission – read more in my next blog.”

Reto.Robotron3000, Community Manager & Game Designer
“After suffering from either ‘the plague’ or ‘a sore throat’ for almost a week, I am back at the front line dugout. Spying across the battlefield for tweaks and balancing. “

Artists

Reto.Hr.Wille, 3D Artist
“Fall clean-up. All vehicle set-ups have gone through complete overhaul and are now ready for the next vehicle iteration.”

Reto.Mato, Lead Character Artist
“This week I made in-game uniform parts and fixing meshes for better animation skinning.”

Reto.Owleater, Character Artist
“MIA“

Reto.Colding, Lead Animator
“This week I have cut open the Rig and skinning templates – in order to up the skinning quality on sleeves, collars and in general.”

Reto.Dave, Environment/Props/Concept Artist
“Fixing missing textures, and putting a bit o love into Medium French Village level ”

Coders & QA

Reto.Goonstah, Programmer and Technical Lead
“- A lot of production planning.
- Some updates to the registration- and account management website.
- Various bugfixes.”

Reto.Chrestangen, Flash Programmer
“I have worked on a starting ‘win criteria’ in the Campaign. Showing the capitals, showing a game over message when the capital is taken. I have also worked on showing battles beeing fought on the map and loss of troops.”

Reto.Placebo, Code connoisseur
“* Worked on reconnecting the actiongame and the strategygame – resources are now transfered to the actionserver – vice versely the actionserver now updates the warserver the status of resources
* Autospawned missions now uses generated resources from the strategygame instead of default resources – this makes the autospawned missions more close to the finished product.
* Continued work on supplynodes.”

Reto.Hal9k, Render Programmer
“MIA“

Reto.Ogssan, Gameplay Programmer
“This week has mainly consisted of tweaking our Assault gamemode and improve the communication of the rules to the players. Besides which i have also done a few bugfixes in relation to the new stable release.”

Reto.Leto, Gameplay Programmer
“MIA“

Reto.Murphy, Senior Programmer
“MIA“

Reto.Injection, Senior Programmer
“- PhysX 3.1 migration.
- Linux download file fixes.
- Bug fixing.”

Reto.Splixxen, Lead Tester
“This week I’ve been testing collision and gameplay on one of the new maps.
Along with that I’ve been looking into different Feedback/Bug Reporting Systems, which should make it fast and easy for the players to submit an issue and get feedback from us.”

Sound

Reto.Draebesmoelf, Lead Sound Designer
“I have been editing the recorded sounds for the bicycle and also setting them up in FMOD. The sounds are now playing when you ride the bicycle. I have also written a blog about the recording session: ‘Recording Sounds for the Bicycle’. Then I have created sound effects for the arm-handgrenade-animations which I hope will get in the game next week.”

Reto.Lord, Audio Programmer
“- Bicycle tweak.
- Started vivox work again – now cancelled for launch, but will be added post-launch.
- Started work on mission list (flash-client). The mission list needs to be able to handle a greater number of entries, sorted by ping times, mission types a.s.o.”

Management & IT

Reto.Topo, CEO
“Many different smaller tasks this week. Worked on the budget, but most prominently, is the hiring of two new colleagues, both programmers.”

Reto.Hansi, IT Admin
“I’m researching hosting solutions in Germany and have also set up DNS check in our monitoring tool (nagios).”

Reto.KenSolo, PR & Marketing Coordinator
“I’ve continued my AdWords experiement in order to get more experience with it and hopefully learn some more. Besides I managed to get a Heroes & Generals article on Wikipedia approved and I’ve also worked with Reto.Topo on pricing and our marketing/PR plan. And as a final touch I’ve started the process of getting H&G ESRB and PEGI rated.”

NOTICE

The Intelligence Bulletin is designed primarily for the use of the members of the Heroes & Generals community. It is a vehicle for the dissemination to them of the latest information received from Reto-Moto Intelligence sources about the development of Heroes & Generals. Readers are invited to comment on the use that they are making of the Intelligence Bulletin and to forward suggestions for future issues.

Reto-Moto Intelligence Division,

Developer Department