Quick Kyle (And Derek) Update

So it's been an annoyingly long time since my last update, and I've been meaning to post another one for a good minute.

More Organizing

A little while back I finally finished all the scanning and processing of that photographic archive we recently acquired. Unfortunately I pulled a Kyle and snowballed. I have been wanting for some time to take the material we have and organize it in a much better way. Not the more granular object archive we've been working on (and which we experienced a bit of a hitch over as well), but the actual source material.

I've tried multiple times over the years to organize it, but something would always come up and I'd have to stop. Now there's more stuff than ever to get in order. So for the last few weeks I've been getting our references in order. It's no easy task, either! I've had to go through hundreds and hundreds of folders and sort things into other folders, then sift those into yet more folders.

All in all there are some 33,000+ files needing organized. Among those are many duplicates that need to be culled, mainly lower quality versions of images. I'm still very deep in this process, but I think it takes priority over everything else - If we want to get things done quicker in the long run, we need to be able to actually FIND what we need to do the work, and make sure others joining our team and use it, too. This organization of the source material will also help build the object archive more quickly.

I don't know how much longer it'll be - hopefully not too much longer - but after years of failing to get it done, I have to do this. And I'm pretty much the only one with the time and ability to do it.

"Rebuilding Titanic" Series

I almost forgot to mention! As you may have seen, I was posting what is essentially the "story of THG" in parts, intended to stretch from the early days of amateur Titanic projects to the present day of THG and even the future. It's supposed to focus primarily on the process of recreating the ship, but will also cover the project more generally.

That's been on pause for a few weeks, in part because I've been busy elsewhere, but mainly because I had reached out to one of the former ORM crew from the Lost in the Darkness days for more info about that early project and had been waiting for that. Now that I have what I need, I can get back to posting more of the THG story, so look out for that soon.

Demo 401

Speaking of things taking a long time, I do believe we're very near the light at the end of the tunnel. It's been over a year now since the 2.0 version of Demo 401 was released, and I know that's caused concern about the time this update's taken.

In addition to numerous bug fixes, Derek has been very thoroughly trying to optimize things as best he can on the backend of the demo. There have been many lighting bakes, rebakes, and more rebakes. And all the while Derek's also been working on getting the base of Project 401 ready, cleaning up the massive messes I left him with when I shoved Megademo together some years ago.

And in classic THG style, there have been many setbacks - Multiple engine updates necessitating further fixes and outright halting work for weeks while others brought engine plugins up-to-date, various issues that would lead to lighting having to be rebuilt, the busy season for Derek over December, and a whole month or so recently when Derek's new CPU AND brand new monitor decided to just quit working. Sometimes it feels like these things only happen to us.

Despite all that, I have it on good authority that we are getting close, so I've bugged Derek for a little update to give you all...

Demo 401 Update from Derek

"Hello Everyone! Derek here,

It's been a while since I've given any update. Although a lot of work has been going on behind the scenes, it is mostly not visual, so I haven't had much to share.

That being said, the work on Demo401 V2.1 is still ongoing, and we are getting really close. The last few weeks have primarily been spent working on fixes for the issue of lightmap pop-in. That has been resolved as of a couple days ago, and another QA build has gone out and the solution has been tested to be working well.

We've gone through a number of Q/A cycles which have identified a number of issues which have subsequently been fixed. There are a few more issues that have been tricky to diagnose and work is still ongoing. Overall, things are in a good state right now, with only some minor bug fixes yet to complete.

On another note, Some excellent progress has been made on the programming side for P401 over the past few months. Myself, Andy, and Tyler have been hard at work implementing James' vision for the gameplay. We can't wait to show it off more in the future."

More to Come

Aside from all that, a certain person on our team who shares a name with a certain Titanic film character has been a busy bee. We might have something to share on that soon, VERY soon, sooner than you think. So stay tuned for further updates on here and other other pages!