Hi everyone! I hope your respective Septembers are going well. In this post, I’ll be going over some of the new things we’ve been working on.

First and foremost, I’d like to announce that we’ve slightly altered the release cycle. We will still make a release every single month, but instead of the first day, we will be using the first Sunday of each month. The reason for this is that we can use the weekend before the release to prepare everything, so it’s much more easier to organize things. Note that this does not give us extra time. On some months, we’ll have an extra week, and on other months, we’ll have one fewer week, balancing everything out. In any case, Alpha 8 will be released October 7th, which is apparently the 41st anniversary of Oman joining the United Nations. Oh man.

I know you’ve all been waiting a while for the human model to make it in-game, and believe me, I have too. Once we hit Alpha 8, that wait is over! The new human soldier comes complete with brand new animations, a whole new set of armor, and a thirst for the sweet, sweet credits that come with the whole-scale slaughter of vicious alien aggressors.

Another thing we’ve been working on is adding realistic water. In the screenshot below, you can see a demonstration of the refraction effect on two acid tubes and a trapper that have decided to take a swim on Citadel. Of course, the screenshot does not show this, but the water also displays motion. At the moment, we’re fixing some display artifact bugs, but in due time, we will have neat water effects for our maps. No more flat water!

We’re also working on introducing something called shadow mapping. This is a feature that mappers can use to add enhanced shadow effects to their maps, which you can see on the tyrant model below. Pay attention to the way the lighting reflects off certain parts of its surface. Shadows can also affect map surfaces, too. There are no light shaders involved, just a single light entity, and a -light phase is not used during map compilation.

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Stay tuned for more updates coming soon!