First Post of 2014

Welcome To 2014

If you joined us in 2013, you will be familiar with the format and aim of these blog posts, which is to cover the behind-the-scenes activities of the development of the FPS Creator Reloaded product. The pace in 2013 was a little intense with daily posts and lots of engine back-end stuff happening.

For 2014, I plan to start a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) post which will attempt to provide more coherent update of the main improvements and advances to Reloaded, and less on the daily waffle that a coder like me might go through. For perspective on this aspect, you can read through all 250 posts from 2013 to get an idea of a day in the life ;)  This time I will be aiming to summarize the juicy gossip that directly relates to the Reloaded features, fixes, tweaks and changes that will happen as the project moves forward.

Another Welcome

I would also like to welcome the many pledgers who joined us recently, enabling us to charge into 2014 with great momentum, and the sole goal of making Reloaded awesome.  We are also enjoying some great exposure and success in the Steam world too, so more news on that as it happens!

Back To Basics

The time for fun additions is now over, and starting Thursday I begin work in earnest to address the continuing saga of performance and memory usage. These two aspects still needs a good deal of effort before we plunge into other features such as AI, UI and FX.  My current graphics card is doing something very strange with the screen, making it flicker as though a magnet was being passed over it periodically. It's not half putting me off!  I have another 'lesser' card on standby which should solve this strangeness, and at the same time allow me to optimize for an even lower benchmark.  

I also want to make a detailed record of every asset's affect on the overall video and system memory footprint of the editing and test game processes. Utterly boring stuff I know, but once we crack it, we can pretty much leave it to service the engine thereafter and embark on more exciting developments without worrying to look back every five minutes.

Signing Off

I have a meeting planned soon to show off the cool extras I added in my leisure time to Reloaded over the festive holidays, including better melee AI, better physics reactions and decal effects.  From this meeting, it might be decided to release this as an update so you can check it out, so I will report on that when the time comes.

For now, thanks for your continued readershipness, and I hope my blog posts in 2014 are more informative and concise, more relevant and less protracted. Of course, I will continue to furnish you with screenshots of worthy stature as they occur, and maybe I will start making small videos for you as well. With the recent additions, screenshots are not really portraying some of the effects added.

Let me close by saying that I hope you had a great Christmas, and my hope is that we will all have a very productive and exciting new year.  Let's bring it!