First of all, disregarding any unseen misfortunes, Ulterior Warzone will be ready within 3 months from now. This has been a long time coming, a very long time, but as I've said before it is an EPIC game, possibly one of the biggest on the DS. The final full version will resemble something much like a "SCUMM talkie" game, many 100s of MBs, with full spoken dialog, cinematics and a lot of extras that all add up. The biggest commercial game on the DS can't be any bigger than 256MB, so this will likely end up exceeding that. 3 months from now, we will have done all we could do behind-the-scenes and, one way or another, everyone will be able to play it, in whatever form it may be. I don't want to talk too much about progress because I've talked about that elsewhere, just now I am putting my own deadline on the project. What I really want to mention is that the "morality features" are almost all fully in place. I don't give a FUCK what people think, the moral conditions in the game are SO important, the game will test much more than just how good you are at playing games, playing RTS games or even how intelligent you are. The game will now force moral decisions upon you too, it will test your beliefs, political and social views. So, this isn't just "some game", we've been working on it so long and hard now to make it what it really needs to be, and story that will force the player to ask questions about themselves, hopefully. I think it's all a winning combination, as we always knew it would be. Just didn't know it would be such a long and lonely road.
The next announcement comes in the form of a new engine. Over the last few months (infact about a year or so) we've been looking through new engines to use, and we believe we've found a good one although not just yet ready to say what it is. It's not perfect, no reasonably affordable game engine is, but it's great and exactly what we need for what we want to do with it, we believe. When you find an engine to develop a game with, there's no 1 engine that everyone will say "that's the one!", because it's like anything in this crazy world - if you try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one. Nothing more true than with game engines, and we've learned that first-hand. We've picked an engine many may say is not appropriate, or even not good, for whatever reason, but we trust our judgment enough now, our instincts, to go ahead with it, because without modesty I can say, we really have been through a SHITLOAD of different engines, searching for a good one. We believe we've found it. What this means is, our days of "modding" are truly over, and we are moving away from idTech altogether. We will always love that technology and the team behind it, always will thank id Software for our modding days, but the term "total conversion" no longer has any meaning, because there's nothing there to "totally convert" anymore, and we don't need that anymore. Experience alone has brought us this far and we're determined to prove we're right. We're not modders, we are game developers. Game developers can turn nothing into something and don't need a game already there to just give a facelift to. Not to disrespect modders or "total converters" but we move away from that as of now. Chaos Circuits is no longer for idTech3 and Shadowing Hate no longer for idTech4, although both are still very much our plans. They deserve their own engines.
http://www.violationentertainment.com/t ... 101116.jpg
http://www.violationentertainment.com/t ... 101216.jpg
These are what I call "infinitely detailed" in-game models. This means, they could very well look like this in-game, if you had a powerful enough computer, but they come in various different versions with different amounts and types of details. Anything from low-LOD 90s standard, up to stuff that is really still classed as not "real-time standard", meaning it's expected to bring any game engine to an agonising halt and moreso for use in renders, and everything else in between is all ready to go. I will go right into the technical side of things later for those interested, but this basically means we'll never really fall behind again, we are aiming SO FAR ahead now than we ever did before, it's crazy. We've always aimed ahead knowing if we use today's standards, it will definitely be yesterday's standards tomorrow. We want to aim a few days ahead, at least.
Of course production time of 3D and 2D has increased, it's technically ALL 3D now, but it hasn't increased to such an extreme degree that it's impossible or even impractical, it's really just some extra tasks and extra love, but the pay-off, as hopefully you will see and agree, is worth it. No more being able to count triangulation around the edges, this stuff can be up to and into the millions regarding both polycount and texels. They will keep. 
Finally, I'd also like to say that Violation Entertainment will not be conforming or toning-down, it will follow its true and original ideas and convictions even more closely and faithfully, more now and into the future than ever before. This will also become more evident on the website and forum here and things pick up into next year. It doesn't necessarily mean all violence and horror, but sometimes that is the inevitable consequence of meaningful change, revolution, and that's really what we're all about.
Happy holidays, peoples.
