We're going to do monthly progress reports from now on. You post what you've been doing for the past month and what you intend to do next month. After a few days, when all the posts are in, the thread is moved to News, and everyone can comment. Make the post as short or long as you want; if you have any pictures to spruce them up, please add those as well. I might also put them on the frontpage; it would be really good, to leave the impression of recent activity to visitors, but it takes a lot of time. (anyone want to help me with that?)
For the past month I've been working on getting the Empires client running on linux. That involved a lot of playing from the debugger, which makes it lagg heavily on my end, so I get shot to pieces. But it's also real nice that I can `tail -f console.log` on the second screen while playing, to get a full-screen white on black log of the game's events and chats. =D So far, it works on Debian 9 and Ubuntu 12.04, but crashes when anyone recycles a wall - that's because of inconsistent casing in the filenames, which windows ignores, and I'm trying to root out all the mentions of files in the wrong casing. Then I start the game up again and try to find another place that goes wrong. A seperate issue I need to solve, and I hope to spend most of my time on in August, is to make the commander view work on linux; for some reason you often can't rotate the camera, which makes it impossible to command. In the process, I'll hopefully understand enough about the system to also enable the comm view to go through colliders - a bug that's high on my list, since it makes some maps a real pain to command on. I'm also working on a system (and documentation) to allow anyone to create their own version of the balancing scripts, and also to view the exact diff between any versions we've released since 8/25/2010. When we open source the balancing scripts, people will be able to fork the repository, make changes, and then request for the dev team to publish their scripts to a steam branch, so that testing will be easier for your scriptsets.
See Tank Destroyer thread https://forums.empiresmod.com/index.php?threads/concept-nf-tank-destroyer.20217/page-8#post-530220 Is that good enough, or do you want a paragraph too?
I've been expanding Streets of Fire slowly, adding bits and pieces in as inspiration strikes me. I've added a few things to slaughtered and in August hope to have a new version out that addresses some gripes. I've also got a Bootybay style map I've sporadically worked on, that may or may not come to fruition in August: Trying to do some models on the side as well, though more as practice than usable content.
Not that much on my end, just starting to learn coding for UE4 and helping with advice in 3D here and there.
I've been working on making new HUD textures and a new ammo bar which is far more user friendly. Not much will be changed in the next patch and it will be full of bugs, but over the next few patches, with code support, I hope to overhaul the entire GUI and make it more user friendly and give it a modern take. This will involve constant making and remaking, especially with the HUD, so people will have to bare with me and put up with any bugs. This patch will have one where the max ammo per clip is shown when not necessary, which will be fixed the patch afterwards. For further detail people can look into the threads in the Art section.
Well, here it is. It's still in-progress and these aren't from the latest version. But it should give a general idea. I'm currently adding more detail to the street level, skybox and beaches. I'll probably also add more billboards and signs. And lot's of "dynamic" moving features and sounds to make the map feel lively. EDIT: The concept is a small open urban comm map, with refineries in the middle to encourage combat in the interesting areas, and enough space between the buildings for a vehicle factory + barracks. The beaches will be lined with small platforms, rocks and other props to still make them accessible to infantry. While the middle will feature craters, car props and other features for infantry to hide in and behind.
I hope this helps enough to inform the community what devs are doing, without costing me a lot of extra time.
this does help! and as a append, since i dont have any dev access but i give changes to people who do: i am working on a version of escort where the gate timer starts from when you spawn, rather than from map load, to help give northern faction time to build defenses. also looking into the number of times the vf can be destroyed