https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFvPXmRRAF8
Howdy Folks!
Preposterously tired Anton here. Totally just hit the brick wall of tired that tends to pop up after back-to-back trips. Between GDC a week ago and a trip to Valve’s offices this week I am simply flattened. I did however, manage to sneak in some work on a new Alpha for you folks in between, as I just to finally get these rifles re-implemented or it was going to drive me crazy.
A quick thing about the alpha: I have not gotten to do a bug-fixing pass since the last alpha, so pretty much all of the things that you folks have helpfully reported in the past week or so have not yet been fixed, but they have all been catalogued for work in this week. Just wanted to let you know :-)
In terms of the alpha content, the pistol stocks and barrel extenders are in the item spawner now, so carbine to your heart’s content! All of the Carbine, Assault Rifle and Battle Rifle class firearms should be available now again (finally). That class was just a monster to get through, both due to how many of them there are, and how samey they are functionally (making it easy to loose track of little things when going from one to the next).
It’s finally good to have that behind me though, as Update 52 has remained in alpha waaaaaay longer than I initially had intended (perhaps just to not understanding just how long it would take to rebuild all of this). Weirdly enough, the scene tweaks to audio should go much faster, so the progress in bringing the rest of the modes back online should go smoothly. I intend to do a bunch of little tweaks and fixes and additions as I go, so hopefully those little tangents shouldn’t pull me off track too much :-P
As for GDC, the whole thing was a sometimes stressful, but otherwise thoroughly enjoyable whirlwind. Lots of platform meetings, meeting other peeps from gamedev twitter for the first time, and demoing Sampler Platter to peeps (which went wonderfully). Got a lot of bits of feedback here and there that should allow us to make that a smoother experience as it morphs into the game’s introduction scene.
I got to try out a bunch of new hardware at GDC, including the Oculus Go, Santa Cruz, the Vive Focus, some other tracked objects, various folks input experiments and such. Though I personally stick mostly to the high end PC side of VR, it is heartening to see the Stand-alone concepts developing, and I think they’ll end up bringing a lot of folks into VR (especially on the low-computer literacy, or I-dont-own-a-pc side of things). I know a lot of devs working on content for that space, and the robustness of the medium as a whole is going to really rely on having a bunch of different price classes for buy in (even if I’m a jerk and only really care about doing the PC stuff myself).
The Valve trip was incredible and though I really can’t speak about pretty much anything I saw, the entire thing was really heartening. Seeing their commitment across both the software and hardware space, tackling both the ‘BIG’ problem spaces, and the little un-sexy api-level things that are going to be needed for the next 1/3/5 years, getting to see inside their thought process, as well as participate in a feedback process where it actually felt like those of us in the ‘trenches’ were actually being heard and considering was just… wonderful :-). They’re an odd bunch those Valve peoples, up in their giant money-printing machine, but damn are they cool. Plus I still really wanted to steal that TF2 turret that Weta made for them….
Anywho, that’s it for now. Let me know if you folks run into any issues with the latest alpha (which is live now). I’ll be continuing to pound away at getting sound into shape in this new setup, so we can get back to BIGGER things, like game-mode updates and such. Have so many things I want to do this year and its somehow already April….
Peace!
-Anton