Totem Arts Staff NodSaibot Posted August 28 Totem Arts Staff Share Posted August 28 Welcome Back, Commander! Welcome back to another Firestorm update and happy late birthday to Tiberian Sun! It's been quite some time since our last official update, barring small updates on our Discord server. In this update, we'd like to share a bit of what we've been working on and give a general idea of what we've already finished and what we have left. This roadmap is not exhaustive or conclusive, by any stretch. It is simply serving as a general overview of where we are at. We test almost every weekend and are happy with where the game is headed. Thank you for reading, and enjoy! Objective Secured Firestorm has made tremendous progress from it's first inception, it has changed names a couple times, gone through large shakeups of the core mode, and survived unit and economy reworks. We've received great reception from testers about this mode and we are very confident with how the game plays out currently. Alongside the main objective, uplink progress, there are secondary objectives that spawn around each map to influence the tides of the battle. The rewards can vary from eco boosts, unique weapons or vehicles, upgrades and more! The battlefield is defined not only by the objectives and buildings occupying it, but also the units spread across it. While we are still tweaking some of the infantry loadouts, there are a multitude of different weapons, tools and deployables at your disposal to influence the fight in your favour. Vehicles have multi-purpose roles in each match, contributing unique abilities or features to your team. At this point, most of the vehicles are only receiving small changes, and their role has been sorted. What is the fight without your squad by your side? Firestorm features a squad system, enabling you to coordinate easier with your teammates and to unlock access to unique abilities by ranking up. Squad abilities vary from supply drops to superweapon strikes that can clear out an entire outpost. Playing with your squad is rewarded by gaining squad experience quicker. We weren't fully happy with all the unit designs and have gone back over a few of them. Since debuting, the Tick Tank, Attack Buggy, Attack Cycle and Jumpjet Trooper have received visual redesigns. View the new designs at the bottom of this post. Our main soundtrack is composed of just over 50 tracks and is comprised of originals and remixes alike. We are still creating accompanying tracks for the game, with the main ones completed. If you want to see all the tracks we've released, you can see them all here. For a long period of time, the game had consistent issues with crashing. We are happy to share that it has been addressed and we are at an acceptable level of stability. More about this later. Objective Pending We currently have 7 maps in our weekly testing rotation, and are working on several more! There is also work being done to tie in specific locations from the Tiberian Sun story into our maps, such as the Phoenix base and the crash site in Arizona. Almost weekly, we have new assets being brought into the game. Whether that's a finished weapon model, new building asset or map props. Alongside new models, we are also updating animations and other minor details for each weapon. We are constantly looking for ways to improve the visual fidelity of the game, you can find an example of that below as well. Below the redesign showcases, there are a few animated images demonstrating the dynamic lights on vehicles. One of the areas receiving a lot of development currently and until release is the HUD/UI. The HUD is vital for conveying critical information to the player. We are working on recreating the main menu and settings menu, alongside completely re-implementing the UI nearly from scratch. While we maintained the same design, we had to switch entirely from the Flash Scaleform framework to the native UI framework of UDK. We had long thought that the Flash HUD was the cause for many crashes, and as it turns out we were right. This undertaking is no small task, and is still on-going. It has taken several months and hundreds of hours to get the game in a stable state and get all the elements of the HUD in the new framework. The native framework also allows us to optimize the HUD better and have more control over it. In the realm of sound, we are also actively working on several things. As revealed in our update from a year ago, we were able to work with the original voice actor for the GDI EVA, to create a version of our own. We are currently working on the Nod announcer, CABAL. While we don't have anything to share from that yet, we are excited for what we have in store. Minor changes to aid in audio clarity are also being made, such as tweaking volume levels or helping distinguish different sounds from another. Last and not certainly least on our list, we have been improving player experience and have many things to yet upgrade before the release of the game. Many bugs remain to be fixed and many quality of life changes are on our to-do list. Conclusion Thank you to everyone for your continued patience and support over the years of development. We know that we haven't shared much since our last release, and that's something that we aren't 100% happy with. We'll have more to share in the coming months and we look forward to hearing back from you guys on this post. The project is anything but dead, despite how it may seem from the public's perspective. If you have PR experience or any other skill you think would be helpful and want to volunteer, please apply here. If you'd like to apply as a tester, you can find the form here. Below you can find the redesigned units and a first look at some goodies. Buggy Spoiler Tick Tank Spoiler Attack Cycle Spoiler Jumpjet Trooper Spoiler Construction Yard Spoiler FS_Conyard_Turntable_01.mp4 Nod War Factory Spoiler NodWarFactory_Turntable_01.mp4 GDI War Factory Spoiler FS_GDI_WarFactory_TurnTable.mp4 Dynamic Vehicle Lights Spoiler Hover MRLS headlights, taillights and booster lights Attack Buggy with and without dynamic lights 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dagama Posted August 28 Share Posted August 28 (edited) Project clearly dead but ok... Some parts of it are probably alive Edited August 28 by Dagama 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Totem Arts Staff roweboat Posted August 29 Totem Arts Staff Share Posted August 29 It is most certainly all alive =D 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atomsk Posted August 29 Share Posted August 29 18 hours ago, Dagama said: Project clearly dead but ok... Some parts of it are probably alive You can sign up to become a tester. You'll see that the devs are announcing regular test-rounds. It's alive and well! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Granger72 Posted August 30 Share Posted August 30 That Nod buggy looks awesome! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MattHunX Posted August 31 Share Posted August 31 (edited) That BUGGY is MINE! (Enlarge my profile pic to see the personalized caption of Meine Wassermelone kitty. Edited August 31 by MattHunX 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vaccess Posted September 3 Share Posted September 3 Cool, but it would have been more cool if they added more movement to the characters, like climbing on top of an object, e.g., a rock, a box, etc., and lying on the ground. That will add more dynamic to the game and make it more fun. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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