Blood Development Update - October '96

## BLOOD DEVELOPMENT - OCTOBER 1996

There will be no updates for the next two weeks. The reason for this is that 3D Realms' webmaster, Joe Siegler, is getting married and will be on his honeymoon.

#### Update: 10/21/96

A Mutant Space Virus From Hell struck many of us on the Blood Team at Monolith. We've muddled through, but progress has been slow as the mounds of snot-soaked tissue have grown. Alas, game developers are no more immune to the common cold than anyone else.

We're not sure what Jay did last week, but we know it mostly involved sleep, tissues and lozenges. We'll just call him Patient Zero from now on. Craig has been working on the lumber yard map, despite the fact that he is sick. Nick reworked some of the menu code for Kevin and started a massive bug-hunt session before being stricken with the nasty cold too. Kevin is digitizing the new player character, and remains unaffected by our local plague. He had time to create the new menu font and is reworking the interface to match Blood's Web Site at www.blood.com.

We've brought an additional programmer on to Blood. Daniel Leeks will help bust out the new creature AI as we finish up the game. The creature AI, flight and swimming physics are now top priority to get Blood out the door.

#### Update: 10/14/96

Craig and Jay spent most of the week playing and touching the shareware maps. Jay modified and finished up most of the Dark Carnival. The House of Horrors and the lumber mill are getting the most attention though, adding lots of stacked 3D areas. The Phantom Express was shortened by one car to make it tighter in BloodBath and single play.

We all got tired of the the player-as-cultist character, so Kevin is working on a new player character model. Those of you who intend to download the shareware version when it's released will just have to bite the bullet because this will probably add another half meg to the download size. The new character really rocks, so once the model is done and digitized we will post some pix just like we did for the Innocents.

More new net code programming, testing and debugging this week. Tweaked some sound code. Started adding all the new sounds for the enemies. For a while the rats sounded like cultists, which was hilarious hearing them yell at you in their death throes.

#### Update: 10/07/96

Jay put the finishing touches on E1M1, "Cradle to Grave," and launched into reworking Kevin's "Dark Carnival" map. In addition to the various and sometimes grisly attractions Kevin came up with, players can also look forward to a white-knuckled spin on Jay's Happy-Go-Pukey, one of those rickety carnival rides that pushes 5.8 Gs and reminds you why you thought that third corn dog was probably a bad idea.

Craig spent the week creating an as-yet-unnamed battle-damaged pirate ship level that will go in the registered version. While the ship has become a favorite new deathmatch level around Monolith, people are starting to get sick of Craig's seafaring terminology, as in "There's a shotgun on the fo'c's'le" or "Head aft to the poop deck and jump off to starboard." Jay has been threatening to add a plank and make him walk it.

Nick and Ken worked on all manner of network changes, cutting network and modem lag time to nothing. Playing network BloodBath beats the hell out of some other games we've played recently. We came up with a plan to implement TCP/IP networking, But More on That Some Other Time. We also got single player demo recording and playback working. Multiplayer recording works too, but needs some special tweaking for players dying, restarting, entering, and leaving.

In order to keep loading time to a minimum, only the current month's entries will be on this page.
You can get older months pages via this index.

1. December 1996
2. November 1996
3. October 1996
4. September 1996
5. August 1996
6. July 1996
7. June 1996