Well I hope you're all getting ready for a week of food drink turkey legs more food and another drink. Not to mention the weird uncle who smells funny and all that other family stuff.

It's a difficult time to manage in production because we always lose a few who have to travel interstate to put themselves at the mercy of their family ties. We don't have a big team even when they are all here. With a full plate of v1.25 big production tasks to complete, those of us left to keep the home fires burning feel a little lost in trying to keep the machine going through this Thanksgiving week.

Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea to give you a little update on how things are going as we work our way to v1.25 ... sorry in advance if it's a little hodge podge but Gophur who is Project Lead isn't here to put this together so I'm just stepping into the breach for a bit, and that means from an overview perspective I'm playing catch-up to some degree on some of this stuff that I haven't been directly involved with.

We had a pretty jinormous task list set for v1.25 ... while we were getting this underway in beta it became clear that without much in the way of resources left over to throw at something cool and "Christmas presenty" like we have in past years when times weren't quite so lean, something extra would definitely be cool to add if we could find something feasible.

Well, thanks to some fine analysis work done and presented to us in a very reasonable fashion by a couple of players, we found something. We examined the vehicle set (generally the AFV's but in reality all ground vehicles) and found some anomalies that in certain terrain conditions, were clearly not up to the standards we prefer to set for ourselves and the game.

150 man hours were stolen from the nights, weekends and other dark places we like to hide when escaping from work ... and a ground performance audit was done that focused on fixing these anomalies, largely to do with hill climbing and cross country performance. Road performance really hasn't changed at all; there were no real anomalies there.

So, in beta testing now are the results of this extra little bonus for v1.25 release. Four tanks that couldn't outclimb their own flatulence can now climb hills (PzKw.IVg, StuG.IIIg, S-35 and H-39) and all the tanks have improved in various ways that were not ideal with respect to how they should have performed. Trucks and armored cars and half tracks improved as well.

Other areas of current v1.25 beta development are:

KFS1 is still deep in his little British cave working on both OiC tools and the upcoming ToE stuff. He's done with a lot ofthe back-end OiC code (still some work to do though) and when he hands most of this off to Ramp to get the front-end and client UI stuff done, he'll start to focus more on his ToE work. By far the bulk of recoding the game is going to still be devoted to ToE's as the implications on the wider scope of all game systems is quite enormous.

Martini is working hard implementing the new render pipeline and what we can do to the current graphics engine to extract better FPS out of it. Speedtree 4.0 is now in, but incomplete, apart from what performance it MIGHT offer us (this is still an unknown) we now have normal mapping on trees and bushes which we didn't have before. We're trialling some alterations on the Speedtree X-bush replacements that should give us greater variety in how tall they are, and how continuous they are (or are not) in their cover. We hope to see some more open sightlines available as a result of this (still an unknown until next week) and less ability to sprint unseen along an uninterrupted maze of "bush tunnels" ... this should change up the battlefield dynamic a little and introduce more tension and "oops" to moving around in combat, with more interaction falling out as a result of movement on the battlefield.

First person weapons work continues with new animations as well as much better detail and art resolutions. Some new grenades (art) that are more historically accurate will be coming along with the new bouncing grenades that RickB is working on. It's pretty sweet. Granik is finalizing the new small town building group he started on for v1.25, and the art team is also fitting dust/scratch rendered optics for bino's and optical glass gunsights. They aren't greatly affected WRT ability to see, but they do look much more immersive than the previous ultra clear "computer game" variety we had before.

Ramp is also getting some UI work done to enable "join Brigade through the map" to be possible, a big favourite we're sure this will be ... and we are redoing the "top 100" score scripts to seperate the vehicle classes in a more useful and representitive manner. Scout cars won't be with tanks anymore, and we'll be adding both a "top armoured car" and "top tank destroyer" list to accompany the "top tanker" category. Some small changes will be done to better classify the vehicles too, the StuG.IIIb is not a tank detroyer (and will be a tank) and the PzKw.IVd will be moved from "heavy" to the medium class. The Laffly W15-TCC is a tank destroyer too.

Gophur mentioned the deploy function changes to the LMG's and ATR's last week, this of course will be a pretty sweet change up for the infantry guys. With respect to the new Lebel for the French infantry, the Mas36 will continue to be the regular infantry rifle, the Lebel is going to be used for the sniper and grenadier only, as the Mas.36 was not used in either of these roles, and the Lebel was used in both of them.

As things pan out during the coming weeks, we'll bring up anything else that seems appropriate to mention, or actually makes it onto the "yup we will see this" list for v1.25's release, which is barreling down on us like a runaway frieght train to some degree.

So we'll you on the Meuse, or anywhere else that a bullet is searching for that spot between your eyes. I'll be the one stripping a turkey leg like there's no tomorrow. I'm going to refill my canteen before I head out of the AB so you might be lucky if I start targetting that second one of you I see next to you.

__________________
Geof Rey Evans
Producer/CRS
Game Manager/WWIIOL-Battleground Europe
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh"
"Life sucks sometimes, being miserable NEVER makes it suck less"