And so it continues.
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 A few new (older unpublished) screenshots have been uploaded in the Media section for Project Shadow.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.
