Howard Day has come up with something that should look familiar to 3DO gamers -- the Drayman from Super Wing Commander! Since Pioneer will feature both the original Drayman design and the one from SWC, Howard is thinking of naming this one "Diligent" after the alternate tanker-Drayman from Secret Missions 2. These two sets of three pictures show the progression from Howard's initial model to what is pretty much the finished design.
Earlier this year, the original Drayman was voted favorite transport to escort. See the poll setup here and the final tallies here.
Howard isn't the only one making progress on WC Pioneer. Joel VanEenwyk is handling more of the coding aspects, and he's been hard at work these last few weeks. These types of updates are hard to see and often not directly applicable to the player, but they do help tremendously with development behind the scenes. Here's Joel with some details.
I've been fixing a few bugs and trying to get the tool-chain finished up. Good tools are a huge deal for me. I want to be sure that it is easy to update all assets. Not only that, I want all important aspects of the game to be updateable realtime while playing the game. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to tweak a game through a tedious chain of either text editing or recompiling. It may take longer to get a good pipeline, but I'd rather spend the time to get it done right instead of spending long hours fixing the mess later.
It has been going quite smoothly these last few weeks. I've been working a lot on data management so that we can have better live updating. I have been testing the new tools on my test case (a simple Tetris game). It is working really well. There are still some tweaks I need to make before it works perfectly, but it is now very easy to update game constants in realtime which then updates the corresponding data/option files automatically.
With this mechanism in place, we can tweak almost every aspect of the game while playing the game. There is no tie-in to our source control system (Subversion), but it's easy enough to simply submit the changes manually once you are done tweaking them. Right now it's all done in-game, but perhaps at some point it would be beneficial to have a connection to the editor so that it doesn't take up space in the game.
So the plan is to work on this a bit more to get it working perfectly and then coordinate with Howie to make sure the pipeline works well in the test case. Once we are thoroughly happy with it, we can start getting the gameplay ironed out for Pioneer. I'm taking it slow with the data side for Pioneer, because once we decide on a pipeline, I want to be able to stick with it and not have to make major changes which would result in major content changes.
Anyways, you can rest assured that progress is being made. :)
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