Axel Project Janurary Update
It’s getting close to be almost 6 month’s since we have restarted work on The Axel Project with a nice clean slate of original code and it’s been quite a hectic month. Lots and lots of internal testing is going on, Saul is working on some cool stuff, Ben has had some fun debugging/playing the game online, Denis has CSS looking pretty tight, Logan is almost ready to present the E3 2003 maps, Sean I believe is still mapping the intro, and I have something in store later this month.
History
Quick history lesson for anybody who want’s to know wtf happened to BSE and the previous code base/media/crapola I did. We (pretty much Sean, Logan, and myself at the time), splintered off the original russian Dark Fire Team (fire64’s baby) for some pretty gay online drama, which I won’t bring up because it’s pretty dumb, and took along my crappy ol code and tried to turn it into something it wouldn’t end up being. Around this time, we barely had any real confidence that this would last and we all sorta went into hibernation-mode, myself only cranking out svn updates almost once a month.
Sometime in late June last year, I recieved an message on the old raynorpat.com forums from everybody’s favorite two programmer’s Saul and Denis, who were originally interested in the updated BSP code and the poor v37 model support I had hacked up with using AlienGrey’s code. I said hell yea, and after a week of debugging the existing code, Denis was fed up with it, threw it out, and we started anew, this time our codebase would be a hell of lot more stabler. Catching up to Team GabeN status still requires more work, especially on the media side of things, but we are all slowly getting to that point.
So, What’s New?
So, what exactly is new? Besides what Saul has already blogged about on the main blog, here’s some of my things that haven’t been checked into the svn repo just yet:
- Test bot framework
- Water shader fixes
- Fixes to vertexlitgeneric shader
- Cleanup of build scripts
- Cleanup of tier0’s security code
What’s Next?
What’s next, you say? Well, a beta test would be nice hehehe, but I’m not sure if the code is ready to be tested by outsiders, because of several things, media being one of them, distribution being another. Plus, we need to cut down on the amount of bugs being found each day ;) Heh, clogs up the Redmine bug tracker hahaha. Anyways, sometime after the beta, we’ll be updating with the main storyline and probably go for an episodic kind of release every 3-4 months maybe?, don’t qoute me on anything just yet, as this is definately still up in the air for now.
Hopefully, this year should bring us real close to getting up to par with Team GabeN and ultimately have something special that a fan of HL2 would love to play, to dig deeper into the storyline of the past.