Thought I'd post a little of what's going on since we built the first internal beta yesterday since more than a month ago. There's actually a ton of stuff going to be in the upcoming patch, and this in addition to the ToE/Squad recruitment features which by themselves alone mean a long long patch cycle.

We normally spend the first month of the year concentrating on bugs and long standing "minor" issues because once the year gets under way the pressure to produce continual content development means these things take a back seat to some degree, unless they are critical issues.

Here's the bulk of what went into that beta build (which broke just BTW, part of the joys of software development B) ... there will of course be a number of internal or closed beta patches before we're ready for release, or to reveal an open beta ... which is likely this cycle as the new features like ToEs are huge and extensive code revisions and probably demand a very wide testing sample.

So there was a lot of ground work from KFS1 that we need to pin ToEs to. There are a million code hooks and dependancies that ToEs break in the current game engine, and which need ground up recreation, which is why it is a slow slog to get from design into code that is already a functioning entity, rather than built from scratch. Think open heart surgery on a patient that still has to get up in the morning and catch the train to work, do his job, come home and play with the kids before doing it all over again the next day.

We also have an enormous amount of work being tasked to Granik, Animal, Martini and RickB to some degree, which centers around Jeager's complete rebuild of object rendering and mdl handling, the vaunted "performance" patch stuff. Basically what he has done breaks everything. All our game models look better but need to be reshaded, renormaled and rebuilt because they are all broken with the new object handling and memory allocation routines. this is not difficult as a task list to perform, but VERY time consuming. We can't say how fast it will get completed but we are getting it done as fast as can be managed given that each of those now tasked with that work are still doing all their other tasks set for this dev. cycle. Which is why things seem to be taking so long. They ARE taking so long!

KFS1 is also working hard on improved networking/host stability and consistancy issues, which should begin to show their benefits after this dev. cycle ... we hope for smoother gameplay and update sequences as a result but it's hard to quantify while it's still a work in progress. ToE's are keeping him very busy recoding how strat and supply and brigades and the map all communicate with respect to the host/client relationship that this is all built on, so it's a very insanely busy period here at CRS. Everyone here is affected by this to some degree, even if they appear not to be directly related to the develpoment of such features, they will find something indirectly affected that they will have to deal with as a result of the breadth of the changes that are required to make a change from what we have to what we want to get.

In addition to redoing all the things that Jeagers work demands of us at this point, Animal has been making progress on the 3 new aircraft variants, but again with his task list split between that and the other render redo work it's been slower than it would be if he was just new 3D models. He's just one guy, and like all of us is doing the work of several people. We chose to do the H.87b3 first as it represents the most work to create compared to the Bf109G-6/U4 and Hurricane IIb conversions.

Toto and Granik have been splitting their work amongst further work on infantry animation improvements and weapons rendering. Note that Granik also had to redo every terrain and gameworld mdl, in addition to Animal and Martini working with him on shading stuff, all a result of rebuilding required for Jeagers object handling changes.

This is what I mean by "insanely busy period" here at CRS right now. You have a good team working for you here, but they are only human. B]

Of course lot's of stuff got broken as a result of this amount of rebuilding, so that only makes for a much slower "new stuff" progress rate. We don't like extended or long development cycles, preferring to push content out a little faster, but there really isn't any other choice right now.

As far as equipment changes or fixes/improvements that fell out of the January "small stuff" focus, I got the the following stuff into beta for testing/evaluation and Q&A.

Well, it's been a very busy week, and we have another one waiting for us on Monday, so go have some fun and we'll see you on the Battlefield somewhere.