OK, every in-development project at Banshee that has been publicly announced, and our latest ideas...
Project: XI
Terrascape migrated to patch 4 reasonably well but i've taken the decision to re-write the entire engine from fresh (using a lot of copy/paste admittedly) to fully optimise the engine. The new version, XII, will feature a new technological concept based upon the supermarket model - in that once you get something working, duplicate it.
The unique features of the Terrascape series of engines that have unleashed the power of large scale mapping under DB are now being written at every tier of the engine level, it's highly optimised non-redundant code system should allow for an estimated 1,000,000 terrain objects on the map.
I will personally be happy to see 500,000 terrain objects, but to be honest I don't think these numbers are the absolute capacity yet. Until i've got this engine in place, i'm merely guessing. Just expect it to be BIG, and picture the BIG in a very large font, bold, underlined, and stretched slightly larger.
Project Serial: ARMGDN
Well ESB (released as Episode V: Battle for Hoth) is a murmour in my RAM chips now and so Banshee Studios had a board meating tonight at our usual venue, this time it was Nicks turn to drive so I didn't have to worry about my alcohol intake - this meens it was a long meating - although the journey there in an open topped sports car was not so much cool as freezing.
We've started work on project ARMGDN. This is a project being developed to make maximum use out of the new DBPro optimised version of Terrascape currently under development.
ARMGDN is a strategy and combat vehicle simulator. Though we are keaping exact details on this one close to our chest at the moment because it will be a while in development and because of the effort involved in making this we really do want to avoid giving the technical and inspirational ideas out on this project this time.
Project: NFP
Also in the works is doing something with that Fairy model I made currently on my avatar, NFP incidentally stands for Naked Female Pixie (well now you know why we use a serial system for our projects
). NFP will also use the Terrascape system but unlike ARMGDN with it's 1000 poly units, NFP is using 10,000 poly characters and putting no more than 2 onscreen at a time (there may be some small 5,000 poly creatures in the final design for multiple oppononent combat).
NFP is a role playing game and the first Banshee game planned to feature full motion video scenes. It mixes a linear plot in an open environment so you can do things out of order, but you may end up doing more than you need too if you wander too far off the plot or get stuck and have to search for the next clue.
The storyboard is not yet in place, the characters are being modelled first (unusually) because character modelling is still new to us and we aren't sure what we can achieve in terms of our own (in this case my) skill.
Also the technical issue of such high polygon models remains to be explored under Terrascape and from our point of view in DBPro too, we normally work to very low polygon limits. Perhaps nothing will come of this diversionary project, but it could be our next big release.
Project: Deathbowl (Ready for release as: Hyperbowl)
Hyperbowl has been entered to the competition but is not available for download yet (still waiting for web site bandwidth to drop a bit more). The game is not as complete as we wanted and we're confident it will not achieve a prize winning place in the competition.
However we both agreed that the game fell far short of our own expectations therefor we WILL be re-writting this remake. When we do so (certainly after ARMGDN) we are most likely going to rewrite our Amiga-era remake 'Deathbowl' which features teamplay, player deaths and is everything this game should have been - but of course only a 2D Amiga game.
Rest assured as the buck stops here, we're not happy with Hyperbowl and we will be putting it right.
This is as far as we got because it was my night to buy the beer...
Projects: Others; Dead; Miscellaneous
No further news or decisions on SCC (Space Corps Classic) at this time, although I have some ideas i'll be running past Nick at a future time. Galaxies is still on hold for the time being and I have long since aborted DN (Dragons Nest) as an experiment into .bsp that was best left un-attempted.
Pneumatic Dryll, Outrageous epic cleric of EQ/Xev
God made the world in 7 days, but we're still waiting for the patch.
