Since our last progress report we've spent a lot of time making improvements and optimizations to the existing code. With the recent additions of lights and shadows, we have made a number of changes and improvements based on experiments we've made with the artists.

We've also been doing a fair amount of testing. A number of improvements are being made to our user interface. Most of these are minor changes (that seem to take a long time <g>), but since it's something that is more of a global issue, we wanted to spend the time to make it as good as possible.

Of course, we've added a lot of game code, puzzles, dialog, etc. One of the more recent additions was getting our rope climbing working. Connor can now use a rope and hook to climb a number of structures in the game. It's really cool!

Well, that's it for this report. Hopefully we'll be able to tell you that all of the worlds are up and running along with save/restore by our next report. Feel free to ask any questions on the message board. Till next month...

-- Mark Seibert, Mask of Eternity Producer

Wednesday, November 26, 1997

We've made some exciting progress this month. We've added colored lights and shadows to our worlds. It looks pretty cool to have Connor walk by a flaming torch and see the amber/orange/red light flicker on him. In addition, we've also added shadows for characters. The character shadows really look great, as they are truly shadows that are created by drawing the character outline on the ground or objects.

We've also made some good progress in Monster AI (Artificial Intelligence). We've been adding a number of routines to our monsters to make them smarter, work together, and also give some of them individual personalities.

The visuals for the opening movie have been completed. Over the next few weeks all of the music and sound effects will be added. You'll probably see this posted on the net shortly after Christmas.

Well, that's it for now. Feel free to stop by and drop us a note on the message board.

-- Mark Seibert, Mask of Eternity Producer