Hey, folks! Been a little while. No screenshots today, I'm afraid - just a report on where things are at.
So, after how much work ended up going into Forget About Freeman (considereably more than I was anticipating), a lot of September has been on the unproductive side. I've been pushing basically non-stop at BMSC since January with only some intermittent breaks, so it was about time to let myself recharge.
As such, there isn't really a whole lot to say about Lambda Core at the moment. We've been doing some poking around at it - taking notes, and I've been playing around with some ideas for sprucing things up - but we've yet to start digging into it full-time.
On top of that, I've also been informed about a numbeer of bugs and oversights in BMSC FAF that managed to slip past my radar in trying to get it done by the end of August. Some of them are relatively minor touch-ups, but the garage sequence at the end doesn't work as well as I'd hoped it would in practice. At some point, sooner than later, I'm going to dedicate some time to cleaning things up and getting FAF in working order - fixing bugs, cleaning up direction, some balancing adjustments, things like that.
Also, as we're getting close to the end of the Earthbound chapters, the amount of work I can do easily is starting to drop off. I still don't have much of an idea as to how I'm going to tackle Xen and onwards yet. In the worst-case scenario, I've got some ways I can try and work around some of the issues I'm going to run into, but given how finicky and cumbersome that approach would be, I haven't committed to it yet. As a result, we're also thinking of going back and polishing up the rest of the Earthbound chapters as well - once again, fixing up bugs and balancing issues, cleaning up some art and player direction, and things like that. A lot of these are likely to be relatively minor changes, but some of them may end up being more significant - we'll see sooner or later.
When it comes to Xen itself - while Xen and Gonarch's Lair should hopefully be relatively straightforward once I've figured out a way to edit them, Interloper is still a huge concern of mine. The latest update to Black Mesa that alleges to fix the Interloper A village crash doesn't actually solve the problem - from my testing, contrary to what CC's patch notes suggest, the crash is due to a bug of some kind that presents itself when Xortigaunts and Xontrollers are in close proximity, and not due to a deficiency in the map itself. I'm able to recreate the crash in a test map with as few as one Xort and one Xontroller at times.
So long as this bug's present, there's little I can do to fix the crash on Interloper A without scrapping the entire mind control Xort/Xontroller battle in the village, which I'd rather not have to resort to. Not using Xorts would be damning - I'd either have to find some hacky workaround to keep the PHD in Pacifism achievement functional, or remove all difficulty from it altogether (Xorts have a specific output that fires when they're kiilled by a player, which doesn't seem to exist for any other NPC).
All I can reasonably do at this point is wait and see if CC fixes this bug on their end - and given that they allegedly can't reproduce it, I don't exactly have high hopes, to be honest. Hopefully, now that there's been some acknowledgement that the issue doesn't seem to be map-specific, there's a chance of it getting fixed, but if not... well, we'll worry about that when and if the time comes.
For now, though - hopefully we'll have some screenshots of Lambda Core to share with you sometime soon. Thanks for sticking with us! ♥
Hey take all the time your team needs plus the longer you go with no media sometimes not all the time the better. Meaning we could get a lot of media or high quality media with the long wait.