Mk II is late

One week still remains until the end of the March, but I think we can officially declare that the Mk II will not make it before the 31th as initially planned, but rather early April.

The main reason for the delay is that we truly want to provide a great game experience for the second act, for which we are ending up producing more content than planned, and above all, to make a lot of QA to ensure missions are well balanced.

We are conscious that it surely will disappoint the people waiting with impatience for the continuation of the adventures of Marcel Gaston and we are truly sorry.

Aircraft rendering improvements

I’ve spent a little time to improve aircraft rendering, adding more dynamism to their lightning. I’ve added a mild back light with an environment map, it’s not breathtaking, but I think it adds something.

Here’s a bunch of screenshots to see how it looks in various situations.

One could observe that reflections are not uniform along the aircraft: as I’m using the specular mask texture to vary its intensity.

Tweaking difficulty

Missions from the second act are, as I said in the previous post, at least as long and harder than the first act ones. Tests have showed up that they are way too hard.Briefly, it would be Dark Souls, “aircraft edition”: one wrong step, one mistake and it’s game over.We are currently tweaking settings like the player strength, enemies maneuverability (not the number, there will be way more flying aircrafts than before), loaded weapons , etc…It takes time but we don’t want players to rage quit because an AI appearing from nowhere and shooting him before any reaction.

Challenge seeker players, please be at ease: t won’t be a fitness trail nonetheless! Our goal is just to make the death less random, so less frustrating.

TrackIR patch

Lastly, TrackIR support was improved with translation related fixes.

These fixes were supposed to be shipped with the Mk II but as it is delayed, a patch (with version number Mk Id) was submitted to desura today.