As you may have noticed, Underhive development has basically halted. This is due to a variety of factors, including but not limited to some important "team" members abandoning their positions before the tasks were complete. Because Half-Life is on it's final legs, we have had an impossible task of trying to find replacements for those people. Half-Life's popularity is on a downward spiral, and by the time we were to fill the roles needed and finish up this mod, there would be no one left to download it.
We have weighed the pros and cons of a variety of new engines, including Q3, Torque(Tribes2), and UT2K3. We have decided to go with the Torque engine. Although not as fresh and flashy as UT2K3, it provides us with a few benefits that is unavailable with those other engines.
What is so good about Torque? The list of reasons is huge, but here are the three tide-turning reasons:
1) Cheesegrater, our coder, has experience with it, and has the full source to work with. Choosing a different engine would also mean looking for a new coder.
2) Since licensing is extremely inexpensive, we will be able to release Underhive as a stand alone game, rather than making it a mod. This allows us to reach an even greater audience. Because of its release as a stand-alone, we will most likely release demo/beta releases before the final 1.0 version.
3) Torque is an Open source project (among the licensees) so it is constantly updated with new features, and problems are corrected quickly.
Thus we are now moving forward with a plan to revamp and improve Underhive to be much better than it would have been.
I'm looking forward to the improvements. I hope you will stick with us and spread the word. :)
