While I sort out what I'm going to be doing for the version-controlled future of Eternal X Omega, I figure I may as well at least get what's been sitting on my HD since 2009 out to the public and finalize it as v1.1 as I was trying to do four years ago before life buried me in too much shit to even think about games.
Available now at eternal.bungie.org is Eternal X v1.1 beta 4, which is whatever I had sitting around on my HD as of late 2009 plus any improvements I might have made in the interim plus anything anyone else has contributed in that time frame, plus a few minor enhancements I've recently made while finally playing through all that to make sure that you can at least get from beginning to end.
Since I haven't really been on top of things, I can't give a complete change list, but some things that jumped out to me as newish on my play-through or are recent enough that I remember doing them:
- There's a new floating HUD, with graphics of my design and scripting by Hopper. I think it's pretty awesome.
- The textures are improved.
- The landscape textures are now taller, to accommodate the increased vertical viewing angle Aleph One's new Shader renderer.
- Lots of miscellaneous graphics (like the main screen interface and theme) are improved.
- Terminals new use the RIGHT tag for PICT sections and make use of the STATIC section for some interesting purposes.
- I can't really speak to what differences there may be in the maps from 1.1b3 since it's been forever since I played it, though there seem to be some changes made to improve the flow of the prologue level, so I imagine there are probably lots of minor things like that throughout. I think chapter 5 may be a bit different from how it was before too.
For those who never played any of the 1.1 betas, the big changes from the 1.0.x releases are:
- Chapter 3's maps are largely rearranged, with one entirely replaced, and the story between the success and failure branches is changed somewhat to match (or rather the maps changes to match the story).
- There are new music tracks from a new artist.
- Lots of minor improvements all over, too many to keep track of.
I'd appreciate it if anyone could play through this and let me know if there are any show-stopper bugs that should keep me from calling this v1.1 final and taking v1.0.3 down for good. If I don't hear anything like that back in a week or two, I will probably give it another, more thorough play-through myself and call it a day. I'm open to suggestions for people who think I should push back or move up that schedule or proceed differently in any other way, too.
For the future, I am looking to get this up on some kind of version control system along with all of its source files (merge folder for the maps, original PSDs for the textures, etc), so I will no longer be a bottleneck in the release process. It's not looking hopeful as far as solutions for that go, however, so I may end up just putting the map merge folder by itself up on GitHub, though that will still leave me as a bottleneck for getting a merged map into the actual release, not to mention any other improvements anyone wants to make to the rest of the project. (Like poor Hopper's work being stuck in limbo for all these years). I welcome suggestions on this front as well.
I still have someone working on finalizing the new weapons (he keeps forgetting, and I've been too busy to ride him about them), and I'm hoping to recreate all of the textures in even higher resolution (and with other improvements along the way), together with glow and bump maps, to fully modernize them for the new Shader renderer, but I can't make many promises on that front as it depends on the workload at my paying job and other major life factors. But things are looking up on that front, so hopefully no more four-year delays to look forward to :)
