Ah well, you might have recognized the recent slowdown in development and events... and practially everything ;-). To be more precise, this mod has been dead since about two years (and walking dead for years already then). But that doesn't mean I will stop doing things with it! Haha, nooo, I can still feed it to the monkeys!
So since about a year I'm occupied with that, feeding the core game logic costed about half a year. Afterwards it was time for the scenic content and just these days I had a break through in that area :-). Here you can see the results of it:
So what is that you may ask? Well, that is the
JMonkey engine! And the most important thing was to read the HalfLife map files into the format of that engine. For that, I needed to do some old school math and it took a while.
So what's in it for you? If you are an old times player and fan of Rival Species then you will possibly recognize that this is the first line of defense in the map called Fortress. You can also see that its latest rendition is far from complete:
- The textures are only the color of their first pixel
- The view distance is too short
- There is no skybox
- There are no lights
- There are no transparancy effects
- There are no map models
All that will keep me busy for a while, but why is it worth it? On the IRC channel of our only remaining clan Ordo Xenos, old time player Razielk received an answer to that question:
<]OX[Razielk> so what are the benefits of this new engine?
<Bahl> the benefits are for once that it is being updated
<Bahl> which means it keeps up with recent developments
<Bahl> the HL1 engine is static...
<Bahl> the second thing is, I can modify or read whatever bit of code of it that I need
<Bahl> the third is, it is in Java which has better tools freely available and more software technology to use in combination
<Bahl> that's roughly it ^^
