The book is almost done at my end apart from reviewing the second drafts and peer review. If you're not aware its called "GROME 3.1 Terrain Modelling for Ogre3D, UDK and Unity". Despite the title it's more of a short guide on using GROME with notes on how to export terrains to Unity and other game engines. Squashing it down to 150 pages is challenging. Ideally 200 pages would cover all functions and allow for more in-depth exporting processes, but it's a fixed number of pages. Time moves on, one project is winding down and now we're into September, as promised it's time to take a look at the Combat-Helo project and give everyone who's still following this blog some news on what's going to happen....probably.
Because I'm working full time for a medical software company, combat-helo will only see after-hours work when I resume development. As a result the road-map has to be adjusted accordingly, there simply isn't the man-hours required to complete the existing one, to this end I've broken it down into more reasonable phased releases. This was always the intention however I've reduced the scope of the releases.
One of the ideas David and I toyed with is a spin-off helicopter game for the action market featuring Maximum-Overkill'esq game-play but retaining some of the avionic toys we have in our Apache implementation. The advantage of doing this was getting some credibility, to say we've released something (even if it is not much more than a fancy demo with 'splosions). Some people just want to see some of the stuff we've been doing first hand. Frankly it's not the game I want to make but it's one we could build on. Once that is in the wild we would continue development on the full-spec game in stages. The action-game would have been targeted for Steam and Origin stores with some brain dead title and trailer. However someone already beat us to the brain dead trailer part.
Valve's Greenlight project has deflated my enthusiasm for this plan, regardless I'm committed to seeing it through. But then I'm less than thrilled with how long Combat-Helo has taken; going from a full-time project to part-time, to no-time, now hedging back to part-time. My will focus will be on getting it ready as a cockpit demo with basic game-play and releasing it as a re-branded game. Once this has escaped I will work on finishing the rest of the features. To make it formal here's an announcement.
Work on Combat-Helo resumes on Sept 29th.
The road-map for game releases is looking like this...
- Phase 1 - Cockpit demo and shooter
- Phase 2 - Multi-player update and fixes
- Phase 3 - Editor
- Phase 4 - Gunnery Trainer
- Phase 5 - Overseas campaigns
- Phase 6 - Addon aircraft (CH-47)
