Project 6014 demo 0.2

Has been released!  We have packages for Windows, MacOS and Linux available on the project website, which (to remind everyone) is at:

http://code.google.com/p/project6014/

The small print is that a) it was released almost a week ago, and b) I didn’t contribute much to this release. However I’m going to try to make it up by again publicising the project to my 2.4 loyal blog readers.

The major feature in this release is hi-res mode. This is amazing and reflects a huge amount of work, largely by Damon who drew most of the art, and by Jaakko who did the HD programming.  A lot of this material was donated from Damon’s parallel UQM-HD project, which seeks to renovate the original game with new graphics.

Ominous words from the Chmmr

We’ve also ported in the improvements that were made to The Ur-Quan Masters after we forked from it. There are a few player-visible changes here, but it’s mostly bug fixes and other code improvements. Benjamin did most of the merging. I wrote a little script (replay.py) to help with copying changes from the UQM repository to ours. I’ve been meaning to write a post about it…

Others have contributed a lot too, which I’m less directly aware of. We have two additional playable ships, the Baul and the Foonfoon. We’ve also seen parts of the larger story begin to manifest, with a new Shofixti conversation.  Several more conversations have voice acting now, too.

I suspect I haven’t played (ahem, I mean, tested) enough yet to discover all the new features.  What I particularly like so far are the small graphical improvements, like the rotating planets and orbiting space stations and moons.  Relatively small code changes but they make the solar system view come alive.

Approaching Earth and its starbase

There are a few bugs of course, but they all look fixable and within a few weeks at most there will be a 0.2.1 release. When we release a playable demo we intend that our generous testers will help us find the bugs; but we also need to reward them with a version where their discoveries have been addressed.  The one real mistake I think is calling it a Beta demo.  We are still a long way from the full game — though we have made massive strides in all major areas of the game: art, story, ships, sound, and gameplay — and I think there will be future Alpha releases in the future.

I’ll try to post a video of a typical play-through; typical for me at least.  Most of the other team members are far better pilots than me!  And the Lurg is a notoriously hard ship to beat at present…