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[Sean [Baron]]

Character development seems to be the topic of conversation over the last couple updates, and that's not just because I like to talk about them, being that it is my area of development, but rather because there is a large scale development effort going into them at this current state in development and so the topic at hand even within closed doors is the same thing.

A couple updates ago we showed of a few of our characters, more specifically Mishkin and Alec Trevelyan (006), and we threw out the idea that we were going to make two versions of Alec Trevelyan. First and foremost the version you saw 2 weeks ago was the 006 model, which was when he was still with MI6 and was still a good guy. Now we also have the Alec Trevelyan (Janus) model, which is after he was burned in an explosion 10 years prior and is now an arch enemy of James Bond. The team thought it would be a great chance to add another character to the large selection of characters in goldeneye, even if it's only one. It's a nice little touch that will give people the chance to either pick 006, and be on the MI6 team (you can't be 006 and be on Janus), or be Alec Trevelyan and be on Janus. We actually threw around the idea to make both neutral characters, and so whomever picks one or the other would go to the specific team and nobody else could pick the opposite character for the opposite team. The reason for this is so that you don't find yourself shooting at yourself just because someone on the other team has either Alec Trevelyan (Janus) or 006. This hasn't been decided on, so it's still up in the air, but for right now you can pick him on both teams even if someone else already picked him for the other team. -- We'd love to hear what you have to say on this topic.



When spider first started to work on the high polygon sculpt for Alec Trevelyan, he stated right away that he really wanted to emphasize the scarring on his face, more so then you saw in the movie -- We quickly agreed. When your dealing with scaring of the human face, especially since in a movie your dealing with human anatomy, you can only go so far before it no longer looks natural. With CGI, or in our case game models, you have a lot more freedom in how exactly you want something to look. Spider studied a lot of actual burn victims, and worked on a few different scars for Trevelyan before we settled on this one which came out wonderful. We really wanted you to be able to tell the difference between both Alec Trevelyan (Janus) and 006 (MI6). Reason for that is so people don't get confused and you end up shooting at your own teammate, and things like that.



Mishkin is another character that we really wanted to spend some time on, not only because he is one of my more favorite characters but because we felt we needed to take a little more time on our characters. Previously our artists would get a model done and that was it, there was no real criticism, simply because the lack of experience as to what a person should actually be looking for when dealing with criticism. That's all different of course, now we have a lot more character artists who are very talented and more importunely they know how to give criticism and receive it as well, which is very helpful. Konrad did a wonderful job in capturing the feel of Mishkin, and I think the render shows that. Just a side note, Konrad has begun working on the Mayday model, which is turning out very well. Hopefully if everything goes well, we'll have a render for you next update.

Now, onto a matter that has been really getting under my skin as of late, and that would be the people who continue to try and make up stories about how the mod is going downhill, or theories as to why we haven't made a release recently, and on an on. Either I'm completely blind, or they are all simply untrue. -- The mod is nowhere near even remotely going downhill, in fact development progress is at a higher level then it has been in sometime. As for why we haven't released a simple patch to fix the problems with BETA, that' because early on after the release we had lost a few programmers, either because they didn't have the time to put forth their full effort to program, or they were let go for other reasons, and so for a while we were stuck without a programmer who could the fix problems. Once we got that all sorted, I made the decision that it would be pointless to release a patch now, and I would rather just wait and fix the problems, and move forward in development and release a patch at a later time. -- And that's what we are doing now.