Don't Mind the Vortex
April 6,2008
02:56:54 PM
If you've noticed a certain lack of real news activity on the front page here lately (in case you havent realized yet, the name change was an April fools), I ask you to please also notice that this post and the post preceding it both contain video material from the mod. Wouldn't want you to just focus on the bad things in life! In fact after last month's post with the Nosferatu video, we decided it's actually pretty silly to keep writing weekly news posts when there's very little newsworthy material going on anymore. As we get ever closer to completion, news will whittle down to two subjects:- We're still fixing bugs and it's going great.
- We're still recording dialogue, and... it's going great!
We were already starting to sound like a broken record, repeating the same "news" over and over again. It's time to try something new. So from now on, we're off the regular posting schedule. We're far past the point when you might start to worry we'll close the mod if we skip a news post, anyway. From now on we're posting when something significant happens, and our posts will contain actual interesting media such as new screenshots, soundbytes, or of course the fan-favourite: Videos.
Speaking of videos
Have another one:
That's one of the more ludicrous new weapons we've implemented the Vortex Grenades. Allow me to share its description with you:
"As far as you can tell from the packaging, this is a highly experimental and morally ambiguous weapon that manipulates dark matter to create a swirling vortex around a tiny black hole, sucking in anything that isn't nailed to the floor and crushing it into a fine paste. Although it doesn't come with safety instructions, it's probably a safe bet that you should stand well clear of the detonation spot."
Needless to say, this isn't a weapon you'll come across very frequently. In fact if you play on the hardest item difficulty, you'll encounter a total of one (1) vortex grenade in the whole game, and I'm not telling you where. As you can plainly see from the video, it's really a rather effective but somewhat dangerous weapon, and it does tend to destroy pretty much anything except plot-critical items, so we recommend you learn from the video and try not to repeat the mistake made therein.
The alpha and the omega
Of course the real news today is that the Alpha 2.0.0 build of The Nameless Mod has been finished and released for internal testing. This is the first alpha build we've released without any of us (*cough* me *cough*) having to sit up until 4 am on a weekday frantically getting everything together and up on the FTP for Trestkon to put into the installer, and this is largely thanks to our (in the relative time scale of TNM quite new) SVN repository where the whole build is now located for easy downloading. To the core of the development team, the new alpha is nothing but a symbolic milestone, a sort of snapshot of our current progress and a reminder that "remember that build we started planning November 8th 2005? It's actually done now!"
But it does serve a more important purpose: It's a major update for our Quality Assurance team. Aside from the 10 or so of us who contribute to TNM on a daily basis, we have a small group of people signed up to help us find and report every bug from the minor nuisance to the major gamestopping critical error, and with Alpha 2, we can be sure they're all on the same page as us. And here's what's on the page:
TNM is "content complete"
You may remember a year or so ago, we pronounced on this very page that TNM was "feature complete", meaning we would add no further features to the design. That didn't mean we had no content left to add, however, as the design called for several things that hadn't been implemented yet but were quite critical to the product. For example, all our cinematics. This and much more is now all finished and implemented the secret bonus ending cutscene was completed this week, meaning there are only two major milestones left before release: The beta build where we shoot the mod out to a much larger group of volunteers, and the voice acting milestone when all dialogue has been recorded, processed, and implemented.
We'll keep you updated as we hit major and minor milestones but not weekly. For once, I will not see you next week. I'll see you when we have something important to report again. Until then, feel free to visit our forums when the withdrawal gets to you. We're thinking about starting a recovery support group.
Shameless Plug
April 4,2008
08:50:14 AM
My university group is doing a survey of World of Warcraft players for our media sociology class. It's mostly a demographic thing, so no really difficult questions. Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to fill out, so by all means, if you are playing World of Warcraft or even if you just have played World of Warcraft, please take a moment to fill it out so we can get the data we need. Clearly it's all anonymous.World of Warcraft survey.
And if you know anybody else who plays or has played it, it would be great if you would let them know about the survey as well. Preferably we need around 1000 participants, so we really need to get the word out :)
Here's a shorter link if you happen to need one: http://snipurl.com/wow-survey.
Naming the Mod
April 1,2008
03:05:58 PM
Alright, after years of putting it off, we've finally decided to name the mod. As you might have guessed "The Nameless Mod" was always sort of a placeholder and was never meant to be a permanent title. But coming up with a good, unique name is a lot harder than you'd think and we always ended up putting it off. But no longer! About a week ago we convened a team-wide meeting to come up with a name.Things weren't as straight-forward as I'd have liked, with everyone insisting on their own pet name. Some people wanted to go with a flashy name, something that would be an eyegrabber to anybody who heard it. Others wanted a more descriptive title, a few words that would sum up the player's experience with the mod. Others thought that we should have a title that should appeal to our core fanbase. Anyways, Jonas and I are sick of presiding over the endless squabbles that have been breaking out over this issue and so we agreed to leave the choice up to you, our fans. We've compiled a list of the top ten titles and we've set up a poll to let you vote.
And so without further ado, the choices are:
Trestkon's Daring Adventures in Forum City Land
Akimbo Murder Death Squadron
The Jonas Resume Project
Needlessly Excessive Complexity
The Meta Mod: The Meta Mod
Trestkon's Radish Adventure
A Crate Adventure
Furrie Fun-time
The Named Mod
Spoiler! (we're not sure about that one, people might not read "The Spolier Forum")
The Series of Tubes
You can vote on this forum thread.
Jonas whipped together two rough logos that you can find here and here.
Wanted: Sound Engineers
March 21,2008
04:49:53 PM
Hey guys. As many of you know, we've been working with Brand X Audio for the processing (noise reduction, fx, etc.) of our voice acting. However, they've recently become rather too busy with paying projects to devote the required time to TNM. In fact, they're heading down to California to work with Lucas Arts on some stuff (not sure if they'd want me announcing it, but it's suitably awesome). Of course, we wish them the best of luck with all their endeavours!
HOWEVER
That leaves us stranded with reams of voice acting files that need processing. Therefore, we're seeking a couple of competent, experienced individuals to help us out in this department. Past experience with something like this is pretty much a requirement, as speed and quality of work are key.
If you think you might be up to the task, please shoot us an email and let us know!
Ghoughphtheightteeau
March 16,2008
04:52:32 PM
My mastermind plan of taking another week to accumulate news has paid off splendidly. The first week of the past fortnight went by without much to report (just the same old testing, fixing, and voice acting), but then things heated up a little, and with the easter holidays coming up this week, there's room to follow up on our recent progress.This week, we've chosen to forego the usual POTW update in favour of a little video. Frankly we're quite tired of people still criticizing the audio and acting quality of the lines in our second trailer. We listened to your critique the first time around, and we've redoubled our efforts. Hopefully today's video will make it redundantly clear that our work in the VA department has improved, and you guys can stop telling us to get our act together. Deal? Here it is then, the first fully voiced and implemented conversation in The Nameless Mod:
Please excuse the video artifacts, the encoding we used kinda sucks. You get the idea. Anyway, let's move on: Phasmatis makes another fine entrance into today's news as he finally hit on the perfect art style for the datavault maps for our last mission. Having succeeded in every conceivable way with the first map, I quickly cracked the whip and had him churn out a matching set. They are very shiny. His TNM schedule is quite light these days, mostly made up of minor tweaks before the next alpha.
In Nick's absense, Shane has stepped in to fill out the programming void, though time zone differences make it hard for him to quite make up for Nick. Shane has started knocking some of the oldest bugs off the tracker, and I am most happy to test his work.
As I may have mentioned, Gelo has been reading through our conversation files, touching them up and checking for consistency before we send off the last and biggest parts to be recorded. As he finished this demanding task just before the weekend, Larry exported all the lines for King Kashue and Scara B. King to his handy pseudo-script format and sent them off to the actors. To give you a sense of how important these two characters the leaders of our two major factions are, I can tell you that Scara has 294 lines. The respective voice actors certainly have their work cut out for them.
Since I am not in the habit of letting my own work go unmentioned, I'd also like to say that I finished one half of the significant balancing work today as I got done with the item balance in the third section of our game. This section comprises 19 maps, 4 of which are only visited in the WC storyline and 4 of which are only visited in the PDX storyline. Add the four different difficulty settings for items to that equation, and you'll see why it's such a big job to balance everything out.
Thassit! Hope you enjoy the video. Feel free to sound off in the comments about it, but note that it's not getting any better, guys. We're pretty happy with it ourselves. Check back next week for another exciting update.
