The status of HIPR

Well we promised some news to everyone and unfortunately the team was a little busy over the holidays and some of us are still getting back into things. We see the requests - "Whats going on?" "Are you guys alive or what?" and here is the answer:

Yes.

We are alive, not as active as we'd like to be but we are alive. First I'll give a brief rundown on where things stand with the mod and then I'll show off some nice screenshots of the maps we anticipate being released with the first HIPR beta. Yes that's correct, first HIPR beta - but don't get too excited.

Where are we now? Well in a nut shell I asked the team this very question - If releasing the mod is Point B and we as developers are at Point A how do we get from Point A to point B?

Pretty simple question, and I got a pretty simple answer - animation. I will go on record and the dev team can post their thoughts as well if I'm wrong but in my personal opinion with testing and watching what goes on there's a great chance no one outside of the dev team will ever play HIPR. As harsh as that sounds we are missing a key position on the team, one that is desperately needed to put the missing piece in the puzzle and get the mod in your hands. We have no animator. No one. We have people who can create some nice models, our coding dept is top notch and later in this post I'll show you that lack of content is definitely not the problem. No, the problem is we need weapons animated, player models animated, and a new GUI.

Steven_m64 as everyone knows is on the dev team, working with Mastermind. He's the one taking care of the GUI for us. Once that is in place we'll have a nice solid build ready to go - minus animations. What fun would HIPR be if the weapons don't reload? Not really fun. How much fun would it be to see a player go prone in first person but look like they are walking around the map on 2 feet? Not fun at all. Been there, done that.

I'm not saying we don't have some animations, I'm just saying right now, today, Sunday night January 27th, 2008 we don't have the proper animations in place to get this mod finished. I'm sure Steven will have the GUI finished soon, he's been working on it for a while and he's always the quiet one that in the end delivers the goods. What we can't control is "who can animate this stuff?".

So I'm going to leave the community with this request:

IF anyone outside the dev team would like to play HIPR please raise your hand. Now that your hand is raised do me a favor. Check with friends, friends of friends, Tina's step brother's uncle's neighbor. I don't care who, just check with whoever you know personally that has game developement talent in weapons and/or player animations and have them get in touch with me. The sooner we have someone on board that can make the weapons and players come to life to sooner each of you will be fragging away on croatia, or tuulo, or maybe even the new map airstrip.

But until then, don't expect anything new and exciting coming from the dev team about a release date. We just can't release what we have right now because it's not ready. As I stated above - new GUI, and animations are holding us back. Steve is taking care of the GUI, we need someone like you to bring home the bacon, we'll fry it up in a pan.

Now to reward you for reading everything I typed (ok you get the reward even if you skipped ahead to here) here are a few screenshots (some may have already been released) to wet everyone's appitite. There will be more updates coming later with some possible video footage. I updated my graphics drivers to the latest catalyst and now everything is dark and gloomy Otherwise I'd have more eye candy.

Enjoy:

pr_airstrip

pr_congo

pr_office

pr_tuulo

pr_croatia

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The status of HIPR

Posted by Negley97, Jan 27 2008, 10:02 PM