As you may have noticed, Ion Productions has gotten a bit of a facelift. The
website has been restructured and redesigned to allow for a more robust and
organized, clean layout, designed to showcase our projects and information in
an aesthetically pleasing, concise manner. A few new
(older unpublished) screenshots have been uploaded in the Media
section for Project Shadow.
Project Shadow has been moving along, slowly, but considering that it's
technically put on a small hiatus as the XM42 project is researched and
developed further, things are going just as planned. The Torque Game Engine:
Advanced has had a recent major update to its core engine function, which is
what Project Shadow is in the middle of being converted to. Quite a hefty
amount of critical code has been altered, making the process long and painful.
Nevertheless, porting is looking promising. Not to mention the massive amounts
of features the new version of the engine has been demonstrated with.
Speaking of new features, Gerhard Botha, a lead developer of a game
studio in South Africa has been working on implementing some of the most
amazing next-generation shaders and modelling wonders into TGEA.
You can check out his latest work on his blog, TGEA
Enhancements. Hopefully many or all of his additions will be
implemented into the engine sometime soon; GarageGames may
be considering utilizing his work in the stock game engine release, which
would be wonderful news to all Torque developers looking for a high quality
implementation of the latest shader technology with little overhead data
calculation.
But we have a lot on our plate at the moment porting the current code and
enhancements we've inserted in the engine to the latest version of TGEA.
However, once that is complete, things will move as smooth as ever. We've
recently acquired our primary player model from a fellow TGEA development team,
as this model is essentially exactly what we desired to have our main character
and his fellow teammates' appearance to be. It all works out. There's a few
kinks in the model, but those will be soon tweaked and fixed up to perfection,
all in good time. We've always stood by function before form. We get everything
working as expected, then focus in on the graphical artistic side of things.
Nonetheless, Project Shadow is looking spectacular, and will even more so once
ported to TGEA 1.07 and beyond.
As for the "undisclosed project," developmentally titled the XM42, a great
amount of progress has been made in the areas of research, first iteration
prototypical development and testing, secondary iteration parts list and
overall design validation, now awaiting a few bug fixes and tweaks in some
components and sizing. Soon the second iteration of the XM42 will be tested and
confirmed as functional, at which time the production housing will be
fabricated for its components and further tested in various conditions and
situations, along with a continuation of the internal confidential Project
Log. This entire amount if information may seem quite cryptic at the moment,
but, we assure you, it will all become clear soon enough.
