New era system

Hi!

Today I want to tell you about an era system I have mentioned before. While writing a plot to a campaign I have decided that I will group enemies by "era" they will appear. This, of course, will be properly explained during the campaign, but as I said in my previous post, it will allow me to create more enemy models and classify them somehow. Moreover, enemies from different eras might have weaknesses to certain weapons types what will make proper weapon selection during the campaign more important. So let me now introduce some eras for you.

The enemy types starts from modern-like tanks based on today armoured vehicles like russian BMP or well-known Abrams tank. This era will be the least crazy and it will be the first, that player will encounter in campaign.

The next era is focused around tanks and vehicles from Second World War. We can meet here tanks like german Tiger, a copule of russian vehicles (KV and T-70 already exist, T-34 is planned) and of course american Sherman tank (sooner or later).

While travelling through campaign we will be able to encounter next era - vehicles here will be very steampunk (you can challenge now steam superheavy tank form this "time). I have already created next representative of this era - heavy steam tank, but I still need to find some nice nicknames for this vehicles.

There will be at least two more eras, but for now I won't tell you anything more, you will be able to read something new about them on The Tanks wiki page.. ;-)

What am I focusing my work now? Well, last month was a struggle with reworking some older parts of code. I have been working on a copule of, lets just say, test projects and I have learnt a lot from them, so I used this knowledge to improve some of The Tanks scripts. And when I started to rewriting some scripts, I was not able to stop it, because they made some parts of the game not working at all. But now everything is patched up as it should be and game is actually ready for a new release - yes, game is going to be updated this month. I have been testing the game a lot this week - with this new crosshair feature it is a real fun.

But before new release happends, I want to finish a copule of models: as you can see above, there is a lot of raw, untextured space on the screenshots. I want to change it before the next release. I also want to introduce new, fifth player weapon - something like tank destroyer gun with limited rotation, but armed with piercing bullets.

So stay tuned, because a lot of things may happen here this autnum!