Dev Update 8/09/05
Tour of Duty development has been the almost exclusive focus of our programming resources for the past few months. Recent ToD development has caused HiTech to rethink some design issues with the existing graphics engine in an effort to get more detail into the game without a performance hit. He came up with some new optimizations and a restructure of the shape library to achieve a very significant improvement to graphics performance. It's been undergoing successful in-house testing and it's exciting enough to us that we've moved it up to a priority item. It's an unexpected detour for us but we've decided to pursue this development and get it released at the earliest possible time. Our plan now is to finish the implementation of this and get it released as a test version to insure that we don't have any problems with the multitude of hardware and software configurations in use. Once we are satisfied with the test, this will be released as version 2.05. Because of the accelerated schedule we are pushing for this, we don't anticipate that 2.05 will contain any other development aside from minor fixes.
What we had originally planned for 2.05, albeit not this early, was reworked Spitfires and Messerschmitt 109's. That work is ongoing but will now be released in Version 2.06 because of the early release of 2.05. We will be changing and adding to the variant lineups of both the Spits and 109s.
We are currently working on a ToD section for our website and plan to have that launched by the end of the week. It will provide an overview and description of ToD. A new ToD forum on the message boards will soon follow for further discussion about ToD.
