For it's a jolly good mod etc.
January 6,2009
02:41:25 PM
So... today, TNM is 7 years old. And, you know... still in development.I think you might be justified in calling it vapourware now, but that's not a problem. That just means we'll have to do a bit of condensing, if you know what I'm saying.
We wanted to do something special for our 7 year birthday, but frankly we can't be arsed. This is less like a birthday and more like the anniversary of a conception, and it's a weird-ass kid that stays 7 years in the womb. Oh dear, that metaphor may have been a bit weirder than I would've liked. So anyway, we figure we should probably just keep our heads down and keep working on the mod.
Honestly, the worst thing is that we'll probably be releasing juuust too late to make it into the Mod of the Year awards. Hopefully people won't have forgotten about us by this time next year, but even then - I mean let's face it: It's gonna be a Half-Life 2 mod at first place again this year. Which is fine, that's the way the world works.
But if you still want to put in a vote for TNM for some reason, despite the fact we haven't actually released yet and the mod might be crap for all you know, there's a big ol' button on our ModDB profile.
Vote with your heart. No matter what you do, we love you. We have always loved you, and we will always love you. And we'll get this mod wrapped up and up for download in no time. Don't worry about it.
...and to all a good night!
December 24,2008
04:37:57 AM
Merry christmas. If you're European: Enjoy your presents tonight, and good luck with not getting any home-knitted socks this year. If you're American or British: HAH! Don't you wish you were European so you could open your presents tonight? If you're Dutch and you already got your presents for Sinterklaas: Shut up. Cheater.I know I usually produce some stupid little holiday-themed graphic for you, but this year I've had slightly more important graphical tasks to direct my attention towards, so instead I'll give you something you may actually find interesting: Some of the PR materials we've been working on lately.
We've actually brought five people in over the past few weeks to help us out with PR-related stuffs. Ricemanu has done the case inlay and the disc label for the DVD version of our mod and is now working on jewel case inlays and CD label for our soundtrack. My friend and colleague Kenneth has generously agreed to offer his professional website skills to design a new launch site for us which OiNutter will code up expertly once we finalize the design - you won't see it until about a week before release day though. Dave W of New Vision fame is putting the final touches on our DVD autorun menu, and good ol' Jimbo will be coding it up in a jiffy when it's done.
All in all, fairly exciting stuff for us. These are the final touches you rarely get to do for a hobby project, and the materials that'll really set us apart from the crowd. It should make a good impact when we send several magazines physical copies of the game. Anyway enough talk, here's the fruits of Rice's work so far, as it's the only material that's been completely finalized. The DVD case inlay:
And the DVD label:
Enjoy your holidays! And please do try not to blow yourselves up with fireworks.
"Eh, no ma'm, I'm insane."
December 11,2008
08:24:25 PM
No longer able to process exam studying, I've just counted tallied the voice acting files. It is clear to me now that we are fucking insane. With the voice acting just a few hundred (perhaps 600) lines away from being complete, here's where we stand:More than 10,500 lines of dialogue, measuring in at over TWELVE HOURS!
I just had to get that off my chest.
Props to you, actors and sound techs!
(And to myself and Jonas, for listening to all those lines so very many times.)
Always Avoid Actors
November 29,2008
04:27:22 PM
There are many benefits to recording dialogue audio for a game. It's great fun to watch your characters come to life, it's thrilling to hear somebody else interpret lines that you have written, and it really enhances the atmosphere and the sensory impression of the game.There's also a problem with it though: You have to work with actors. And actors are scary.
Behold:
This is Chris Zito as filmed by Marc Swint, another of our actors who kindly volunteered to direct Chris in the recording of a very large character. One of the things we've learned while developing TNM is that it's always good to have somebody direct the actors - even if the director doesn't have a lot of directing experience, it really help to have a second opinion in the room during the recording.
Hm... I think I better put some actual news here. Or at least a status update. Actually I think I'll just be lazy and paste some impressive numbers below:
First, a comparison. Deus Ex's conversation audio files take up a total of 182 MB. TNM's conversation audio files take up a total of 298 MB so far. Note that we use the same audio quality as ISA did, because higher quality audio tends to cause problems with the game.
And of course we're not entirely done putting dialogue audio into the game. But we're getting there. We just managed to put The Narcissus Entity into the game yesterday, a character with 142 lines. And both That Guy (168 lines) and King Kashue (roughly 350 lines) are being processed, with Evil Invasion's 280 lines in the process of being sliced. Here's our current voice acting status in only slightly misleading numbers:
NOT READY: 0 characters
READY: 13 characters
DISPATCHED: 25 characters
PENDING RERECORDING: 11 characters
PENDING SLICING: 2 characters
READY FOR PROCESSING: 3 characters
PROCESSED: 169 characters
Being somewhat misleading because several of these characters are actually different instances of the same character (overheard conversations between two generic soldiers) and as such are being recorded by the same voice actor as though they were a single character. But it should give you a pretty good impression of how much is left on the voice acting side.
As for the QA department... we don't talk about that anymore. Don't mention the war.
"I don't want to go on the cart!"
November 3,2008
02:09:07 PM
We're not dead, you paranoid, distrustful, pessimistic, disillusioned, codependent misanthropes! I mean... hello dear fans! Time for another news update!We expected we might raise some eyebrows by finally ditching our weekly update model to focus on the beta crunch, but could you guys please have a little faith? Game development is serious business, and we've even given you a release date now (hubris tastes great, you should try it). In fact as late as Saturday, I was discussing our CD artwork with Ricemanu. We still plan to release TNM on a CD as well as to download from this site. The CD will contain some bonus material that may or may not also be made available for download, but clearly we won't be making any money off of it so as not to violate anybody's copyright.
Lately, we've been neglecting our beta testing a little in favour of voice acting, but our testers are still awesome and we love them all. We seem to have hit a really good spread of testers in that some of them shot through the game in a matter of days (in fact Tranquilite managed to complete TNM twice in just a week) while others are just now finishing their first playthrough. Such diversity is perfect in that the fast testers will generally spot more obvious continuity bugs because they can complete the entire storyline several times in quick succession, whereas the really slow testers will be reporting more esoteric bugs and glitches. For example, Dr. Dumb Lunatic – doubtlessly one of the most thorough players in the community – has been deliberately breaking many different parts of the game by using the Speed Enhancement aug to jump to places where he's really not supposed to be. Thanks to his efforts, TNM is now considerably more jump-proof.
Voice acting is still probably our greatest Achilles heel, in that there is so much to do and we are entirely at the mercy of a very large group of people. It's mildly frustrating to depend so heavily on the personal schedules of so many volunteers, but that's what we get for being completely overambitious. All things considered, it's going remarkably well, not least thanks to the continuing generous help of a couple of industry pros. Mac of NYC Sound Design is recording one of our major characters with an actor on Thursday, and Jeremiah of the ever excellent T-Recs Studios recently sent us the lines for Phasmatis, our last remaining 200+ line character (238 lines recorded by Mat Nichols), and ZeroPresence (180 lines recorded by Keith Williams). I'm especially happy with Phas's lines because it's been ever so difficult to find an actor with an appropriate northern English accent.
Speaking of Jeremiah, you may recall that he personally recorded the 3500+ lines for our protagonist Trestkon in his studio in Hamburg under my direction. We think it's time to show you some of those lines, if nothing else then just so you'll actually believe that we're not gonna let the project just die overnight (I'm looking at you, DX3 forums!) Here's a video of the first conversation between Trestkon and the high priest of the Llama cult, Beefman. You may notice that Beefman has a rather... interesting idiolect which can make it difficult to take him seriously, but I assure you that getting on his bad side can have undesirable consequences (or highly desirable, if you're of a more violent inclination).
[Youtube Mirror]
Another, more interesting video will hit the interwebs next month. As part of their mod interview series, Noesis Interactive conducted an interview with Lawrence in mid-October. I was supposed to appear as well, but I chickened out at the last second and Larry did a solid job of covering all the important points so you won't really miss me. The interview will contain a fairly significant amount of gameplay footage, which will definitely tide you over until the release of TNM.
Now that you know what you have to look forward to, I'll end my rambling here. Consider it a sort of cliff-hanger! Oh, and to add a flair of controversy, I put it to you that TNM has better voice acting than Far Cry 2 and Oblivion combined! Discuss.
