Archived News from November 2003

November 25, 2003

-CannisRabidus

Yurified Cloning Vat   Yuri inspects his newly-revamped Cloning Vat, which features modern, superior components. In a single stroke, these design revisions have swept away the last vestiges of the outdated and inefficient Soviet technology.             Sadly the new design is no more resistant to damage than the old one was. Yuri is unmoved by the groveling and cries for mercy from the hapless engineers who were in charge of the project; their reward is to be fed into the grinder. In the current beta, I'm making some changes to the appearance of the "cloning gas" that's released when a Cloning Vat explodes. To support these changes, I spliced in the blue glass vat from MooMan65's excellent Soviet Cloning Vat (which is available from PixelOps) onto the standard game's Yuri vat. While editing the images I was struck by how "Soviet" the Yuri vat building looks, and I decided to fix that. The results can be seen above. While I was at it, I added a piston animation on the left side of the building for added visual interest.

November 13, 2003

-CannisRabidus

Work on the internal v1.63 beta has been completed, and as usual the rundown of what has been done so far can be found on the Development page. The main feature of this beta is the addition of the new German Beyond Revenge unit, the King Tiger Tank, which uses a shiny new voxel that I made especially for the occasion, as shown here: And here's a first draft of the unit description as it will probably appear on the Beyond Revenge page: German war planners determined their greatest need was not a new weapons system, but instead was for a tank which was survivable in intense battles. To fill this need they designed the King Tiger, the most sturdily constructed and well-armored tank ever built. A conventional tank gun was mounted, which fired a shell tuned towards destroying enemy structures. Its effectiveness versus other tanks is only average, meaning despite its great strength, it is still very possible for the King Tiger to be outtanked.   Germany's favorite son, Einstein, was once again called in to add whatever improvements he could to this latest addition to the German mechanized armor division. First he added a fusion-powered high-torque engine, capable of moving the massive tank without any sort of acceleration delay. Tapping off the innovative powerplant, Einstein was able to strengthen the tank even more by polarizing its armor plating. Lastly, to make the King Tiger effective against infantry, he mounted a small railgun on top, which can target enemies independently of the facing direction of the turret.   When backed by Tank Destroyers to help eliminate enemy armor, the King Tiger can boldly penetrate any enemy's stronghold and level it in short order. Again, here's a link to the Development page to see the rest of the changes to date. I plan to have one more beta, then go straight to v1.7, which will be a public release. To answer the question before it is asked: Sorry, I'm not going to commit myself to a release date... the only real answer is "when it's done".