The Price of Peace, June 6th 1944-June 6th 2004
Now it was the 29th Division's turn. The men in Company A had it worst. German artillery was falling near their boats with alarming frequency, but the enemy's fireworks had just begun.
A few bullets pinged sharply off the landing craft. At that moment, the Stonewallers knew that the beach would be hell. The Germans seemed to be taunting the Yanks, zeroing their machine guns on the boats as if they were test-firing on a range. Their deadly work would begin in earnest when the men of Company A disembarked and raced across the wide tidal flat. The last fifteen seconds in the boats were the worst fifteen seconds of the men's lives.
Only thirty more yards to the beach. Three and a half years of training had come to this. The men pondered glumly the irony of practicing for the invasion for so long only to be killed during their first seconds on Omaha Beach.
Some men shut their eyes and prayed; others cursed. A few joked half-heartedly about army life insurance. But most were too frightened and miserable to do or say anything at all. Anyway, there was no more time for words. With a jolt, the boats hit bottom and crunched forward on the sand. Then the ramps went down.
Beyond the Beachhead
Joseph Balkoski
60 years ago, June 6th, 1944, the Allied Expeditionary Force hit the beaches of Normandy in their continuing efforts to liberate Europe. It was important to the world of relative freedom as we know it on levels larger than we can even fathom, and the effort took the bravery and fortitude of thousands of men and women from the free nations.
Today, June 6th, 2004, with an eye towards the great sacrifice and heroism of that time, in our own form of tribute to the trials of the Second Great War, The Price of Peace design team would like to update everyone significantly on our progress, particularly of the last month, in our attempts to build our planned Realistic, Historically Accurate, Interesting, New, Different, Customisable, First Person Shooter. To that end, we would like to present you with the following list of accomplishments so far, and bring you somewhat up to date on our progress.
Today we will be starting a series (more or less) of technical demonstration videos, which will cover a wide variety of subjects from runthroughs of maps to weapon animation and integration movies to videos of various parts of anything we feel are significant enough to warrant special note. The first two of these are:
- A video of a runthrough of our map, Isigny Sur Mer (pop_isigny) at its current level of completion while our Lead Mapper, Disgruntled Goat, continues work and finalisation.
- Short video of our new LCVP in action courtesy our Lead Modeller, No1_sonuk who has worked for a long time to build and test the Mover scripting system.
Again, a series of tech demos will enlighten you further on these and other subjects as a little more time progresses.
More images of Omaha Beach, Dog Green Sector, Dog One Draw have been compiled by dime1622. This map has been steadily built by Th0rr and dime1622. Links directly to each image are listed below.
Next, additional images of Isigny have also been made available. Links directly to each image are listed below.
Further, we have several new models, including:
- LCVP Higgins Boat 1
- LCVP Higgins Boat 2
- LCVP Higgins boat 3D Viewmodel
- M1919A4 Browning .30 Caliber MG (tripod)
- M1919A6 Browning .30 Caliber MG (bipod)
- M1918A2 Browning Automatic Rifle
- M1903A4 Springfield Rifle with 2.5X scope
- Mauser K-98k Rifle with 4.0X scope
- Mauser K-98k Rifle with 4.0X scope 3D Viewmodel
All weapons are working in our internal builds, not necessarily fully functionally, but all have technical issues that prevent us from showing them to you at this point. Several of them await skins and animations, and the ones that are animated require some tweaking. Again, stay tuned for more "tech demos" for information on these.
We are also looking for a few more persons to fill our team. First, we are in need of a talented UVmapper/skinner. We have many models ready to go that need UVmapping so they can be skinned. Person must be able to UVmap but skinning is not a required skill. In addition, we are looking for an animator with Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory animating experience to deal with creating new animations and exporting them. For either position, please contact dime1622 on the forums, on MSN Messenger at erkoman22@cfu.net, or e-mail him at the aforementioned address.
Our coding team is also phenomenal. Great leaps and bounds have been made in the following areas:
- Our 6 Classes have gone in smoothly.
- Our entire weapons loadout is coded in and awaiting models and animations and inevitable troubleshooting, as well as a few weapon-specific features not to be mentioned yet. Two and a half (more or less) primary weapons have actually been added and animated in one fashion or other, but technical problems prevent their display here. Our Lead Coder, Fred, is currently working on extracting all weapon code from the game itself and building up a small scripting system to make it that much easier to add weapons, specify animations, and change statistics like rate of fire and damage.
- Our planned objective system is in the test map phase with bug fixes and full implementation to happen before we show it in action (watch for a tech demo, unless we skip right to showing it in Omaha Beach).
- Several small minor features have been made by our fun-loving coders who play around with this stuff constantly (phosphorous grenades, "shell-shock" effect, etc.).
- Our HUD development moves forward with 2 available mockups of the final version of one of our planned TWO HUDs, since we intend to cater to regular and competition players alike. The so called "fancy" HUD is displayed in two scenarios in Image 1 and Image 2 on our GUI images gallery. The little man in the far left corner is our favourite (he's YOU).
All in all: Moving forward!
Thanks for your continued interest,
The Price of Peace development team
Rapidfire Entertainment
