Monthly Review - Nov.\Dec. 2005

[Wijitmaker]

My, these last few months of 2005 have disappeared in a flash. This year has been an amazing year in terms of progress. So much has been done, but so much remains. I can not tell you how much the support the fans of the game mean to the people working on the project. Thank you again for your ever present encouragement. Please continue to stand with us as we approach the finish line of this grand adventure. Here are two small thumbnails of newly released screenshots that we hope you enjoy. You'll find the screenshots in our album HERE.

[img center]http://www.wildfiregames.com/~art/screenshots/celtic-onslaught-thumb.jpg[/img center]

[img center]http://www.wildfiregames.com/~art/screenshots/celtic-onslaught-03-thumb.jpg[/img center]

Unfortunately, I'm unable to name one single member of the month for November, December. There has been a tremendous amount of work completed this month by a number of people and there just isn't a clear cut individual. This is a team effort after all, and that showed this month in a big way. Thank you all!

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Notable staff accomplishments for the month of November and December:

• Improved elevation painting in the random map generator
  
• Updated the Cantabrian Highlands random map with eyecandy and more complex terrain
  
• Several new trees
  
• Atlas: Terrain texture painting and blending
  
• Atlas: Entity placement
  
• Implemented auras. (allows us to implement resource collection specifications, hero morale, entity conversion, healing, and much much more!)
  
• Converted and updated entities (organization, formatting, attributes, and more) to an improved format
  
• Updated documentation for entities to reflect new format
  
• Fixed a number of gameplay bugs, such as button interaction problems, crashes when a building or tree was tasked to move, crashes when projectiles hit dead units, immortal units, corpses that you couldn't walk over, problems with animations on ranged units, and training UI functionality.
  
• Enhanced the entity order system to make it more flexible and moddable.
  
• Several new terrains
  
• New helmets
  
• Entity documentation
  
• Heal action (now obsolete - with the new entity order system... but hey it was an accomplishment!)
  
• NU splines (for cinematic camera)
  
• End of game hack
  
• Nine new ambience sounds for structures created by Avenue Audio
  
• Mocked up Ambiences example of how they will be used in game
  
• Atlas: Entity/actor placement, movement, rotation, etc
  
• Atlas: Toolbar
  
• Celtic Structures updated and tweaked
  
• Celtic Fortresses (2)
  
• Greek Special Buildings (2)
  
• Greek Siege Weapons (3)
  
• Greek Super Units (4)
  
• Greek Ships (3)
  
• Greek Heroes (5)
  
• Redid the female meshes (3) and animations (2)
  
• New animations (15+)
  
• Misc. UI artwork
  
• Six new history articles:
        Biography: Lucius Sejanus
        Battles: Battle of Milvian Bridge
        Biographies: Diocletian
        Biographies: Clovis
        Biographies: Trajan
        Biographies: Germanicus Caesar
  
• Transparency in the renderer was optimized
  
• Linux compatibility improved
  
• Render Stats updated
  
• Minor cleanup in patch rendering
  
• Optimization of line of sight (fog of war)
  
• Officially eliminated all .png files and replaced with .dds
  
• Improvements with .zip files
  
• Minimap updating optimization improved
  
• Atlas: Improved texture blending
  
• Sced (our old editor) has been replaced with Atlas (our new editor)
  
• Few fun camera modes added (lock, unit view)
  
• Profiler output to an text file
  

[CodeOptimist]

Great stuff!