Chris Levels Up
June 7,2008
04:45:47 AM
Ahem. May I have the word please.I'm not much of a speaker... so it's good most communication here is written. Throughout the years we've worked on TNM, we've all experienced some pretty cool things, and obviously also a lot of not so cool things. Today, I am about 2 weeks late in congratulating our last remaining level designer, Chris Potts, on his marriage on the 25th of May. Chris has been absent for about a month and none of us had any idea why, but a few days ago he dropped back online to let us know that he is now a married man!
Obviously that's one of the cooler things we've collectively experienced. So please everybody stand up in front of your computer monitors and let's hear three cheers for Chris and his exceptionally lucky wife. And here's to finishing TNM before they have a kid too!
The Voices Compel You
June 1,2008
07:57:42 AM
I believe you are long overdue for another news release, and to compensate for the long wait, I'll throw in four new screenshots, free of charge. The benefit of no longer sticking to a weekly schedule is that I won't have to go into detail to fill out the post - in fact I couldn't even if I wanted because so much has happened since the last post that it could fill a whole book.The Big Bug Hunt of 2008
As you might expect, however, it's mainly been about voice acting and bug hunting. I'll start with the latter, because there's not much to say: It's going pretty well. Jim and Kale have both reached the next to final mission on their playthroughs and are about to finish their respective games, after which we'll eradicate the final bugs they find, tweak a few more features, and then release our beta. Most of the bugs they and Erluk find are small and quick fixes, but a few pretty epic things have cropped up. Most have been fixed, and the rest won't last until the beta. There will be no mercy.
Those who are signed up for the beta can tentatively expect the Beta 1.0.0 build to arrive some time in July.
I'm Hearing Voices
Voice acting is an indescribably huge undertaking. I've mentioned this before, but it cannot be overstated. Nick has programmed a parser that can get line counts and word counts out of our conversation files, and a complete count reveals that we've recorded just over 50% of all our lines. Currently, 5891 lines remain to be recorded (that's five thousand lines), 3562 of which belong to Trestkon - our protagonist.
The only reason we can even hope to ever finish this work is because of Jeremiah Costello, Creative Director of T-Recs Studios. Jeremiah, who is a professional voice actor, has graciously recorded a couple of parts for us, including the 312-line part of Scara B. King, the implementation of which was finished a couple of days ago. Jeremiah has not only offered to also record the 241-line part of Phasmatis, but also offered us the services of volunteer voice actors that he knows. Needless to say, we are extremely grateful.
Another big step forward in the voice acting came last weekend when Grub returned with a vengeance to work his way through about a dozen characters (including a couple of fairly major parts) in two days of non-stop audio processing. This was a big leap forward for our entire voice acting department, which now also counts dialogue editors Stephan, Brian, and Seishiro17 in addition to Grub and Spaic. With Gelo, Larry, and I now focusing primarily on voice acting, it wouldn't be exaggeration to say we've escalated the voice acting process.
Look at the size of that thing!
I really don't like to brag (actually that's a lie), but I don't think I'm taking too great a risk if I say TNM is likely to be the largest game modification in the world. Maybe not in terms of weight - although we expect to pass the 1 GB mark pretty soon, mods for more modern games where single models can take up as much disk space as a whole map in DX can probably easily beat us in that area - but simply in terms of content, at least if you count the voice acting. 13,000 lines of fully voice-acted conversations is really insane no matter how you look at it, in fact we have it directly from Sheldon Pacotti that it's approximately twice as big as the script of Deus Ex itself.
And speaking of Sheldon, he's agreed to have a small cameo in TNM. He's writing and recording a couple of lines for a character we'll place in one of our maps as an homage to the work he did on Deus Ex. Being the lead writer of one of the best written games in history, he certainly deserves it.
Did Somebody Shout Video?
Now that I've tantalized you with fantastic numbers, I think it's in order that I demonstrate the general quality of our voice acting as well, so here is a ca. 4½ minute montage of different lines of voice acting. Chosen more for their availability in-game than specifically for their quality, together they should give you a pretty good idea of what's in store for you.
Note: If Veoh is inexplicably not available in your country, we always mirror our videos on YouTube, and you should be able to watch it here instead. Feel free to also leave us a comment over there if you like : )
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.
