Well everything is finished and uploaded and yay and woo. Downloads aren't online yet and will stay down until such time as an external mirror comes up so that we don't just run our server into the ground as has been done before.

Spent frigging ages tonight with Kizza trying to get his awesome windmill working in his map - turns out rotating movers is something that unreal just really hates. So instead, the windmill is static for this release. Boo, hiss, meh.

Looks as though I accidentally deleted a couple of these posts with a database backup, im pretty sure all they were was me saying 'fixed some bugs here now i will list them'. Nothing you really couldn't miss.

It's almost time, so here's some pictures to tide you over.

First up I did an intro animation for the game, that meant getting the logo in the game, in 3D. (The most difficult part was convincing Unreal into texturing it all right)
I'm pleased with the results.

In addition I have been working on my Duel (2D) map. It's a bit different from the other maps in mduel, and hopefully I'll bring out some more after launch.

Check out a work-in-progress screen.

You may proceed waiting with bated breath.

Today I've finished the character animations off. All that remained were the taunt animations, which I've done old-school mduel96 style. Now fingers crossed they stay done and we don't find things to fix.
I'm getting back to my islands map next and I've been learning about Matinee, I hope to do an intro animation before we launch. More news as it comes...

I've spent the last week completely reworking my original Weasle class and adapting the Monster class extension into the Weasle weapon. After completing both version I have decided to stick with my own implementation of the class.

By re-evaluating my Weasle class I was able to fix many of the problems (eg. occasionaly jumping in mid-air, running off a platform for no reason, not functioning properly in 2D gametype etc.). The Weasle also syncs properly between server and client machines. As all the major bugs with my original Weasle have been fixed, there was no reason to go with UT's Monster class version.

I also spent some time fixing a bug where the puck would occasionaly fall through smash platforms.

Time for my very first post in the dev journal. I'm Kieran (Kizza) and I'm working the character animation and now some maps too.

I've spent my few spare hours working on this map, working title MD2D-Islands. It's a Duel map played out on islands floating in the air.

Some screens for you!
The layout inside Maya.
A close up software render.

The rock texture is a stand in and the grass texture might change in the near future. Also the ropes aren't in, 'cause they're done in UED. There's more to come!

Also coming soon, an update that will hopefully say something along the lines of "I just finished every bit of animation in the game"

I've spent the last week on and off going over the last few things that needed to be done to get the core of the mod in a finished and working state.
Today Michael and I got together and combined our efforts, and touched up some of the more 'topional extra' things and stuck those in.

I've fixed all of the important bugs. That's right, all of them. Replication on spawn effects, rope slipping in 2D games, awful memory leaks that made the game progressively slow down and roll/crouch combo bugs are all a thing of the past.

The both of us then added in all the flair such as loading screens, gametype screenshots etc. The mod is done.

Oh, the other cool thing I added was an alternate skin system for the ropes which allows new designs to be added in very easily. At the moment we have standard brown rope, steel cable and vine variants. These are extremely easy to use from the point of view of the map editor.

Its been a while since my last update so i'll just give an overview of what I've been working on.

After playing mduel in multiplayer Pospi and I noticed some problems with how the weapons were functioning. The biggest problem was weapons not syncing on the server and client. An example of this was the puck which seemed to operate fine, but was in fact not where it seemed when playing on a client machine. After trying many different techinques we found that this problem seems to be corrected by extending the Actor class not the Projectile class for any weapon projectile.

I've been spending most of my time correcting the Weasle weapon which nows features 6 different behaviour states. On request from Pospi I've also started creating another Weasle weapon which extends from the Monster class already created with UT2004. I plan to implement both versions and compare how they run. I would preferably use my Weasle but if the Monster extention works better, I can't argue with results.

The map i've been working on has come along very well, and is about finished, although it needs some serious play testing so we can tweak the platforms and ropes.

In the process of working on the map i also designed some new meshes that we needed and got pospi to model them for me. They are all very straightforward fairly simple meshes being pieced together to create more complex interesting objects. You can see the best example of this in the new 'marshmallow tree' objects which are not only scenery and add to the marshmallow environment but can also be used as platforms. Today i also spent some time texturing these tree objects with a good amount of detail. Several other meshes still need to be textured and i'll be working on those over the next couple of days.

screenshot

You can see here the latest screenshot of the map, the marshmallow tree is made up of basically just spheres and hexagonal prisms.

Got a suggestion from a fan today re. teleport effects which I have now implemented.

Basically, I've changed the effect so that on 2D maps, teleporting and spawning are both accompanied by a bright pink beam that shoots up from your player's head into the sky. This makes it much easier to locate your player, especially on fixed camera 2D maps where the view is zoomed out a long way.

This beam only shows up for the player who teleported, so it cannot be used as a position giveaway by other players.

I havent updated the journal for a while, so here is some indication of what i have been working on lately.

Recently we had a big working session where i finished off the main character texture and designed textures for the 2 alternate helmets of the classic characters from the original Marshmallow Duel. Or at least our interpretation of them. These can be seen in some of the more recent screen shots that have gone up lately. All these textures were then masked out properly to allow colour changing, and so now you can see all different colours of the 3 classic characters in the game, it looks much more interesting.

Lately i have been getting back to working on maps, which i still have a lot more work to do on by the release date.

Here are some sneak previews of the 2d map i am currently working on.

one

This one shows the new waterfall i've designed which looks much smoother and nicer than the chunkier one i had in one of the old maps. You can see here the design of this 2d map is set inside a big cavern.

two

Here is a small side room showing a better view of the shiny marshmallow now with specular. I think it looks a lot deadlier now that it resembles boiling hot sugar.

Michael and I got together again today to finish up the last of the bugs. All the weapons are 100% working now, although the weasel's AI still needs some tuning.

I also added in a credits page to the main menu. It's empty at the moment, but I'll get around to it.

Today was a big day for the mod in terms of publicity. I finished adding in some more animations, sounds and most importantly character models to the mod.

Now that all the characters we plan to create are implemented, it is time for us to pass the baton on to the community. The character creation tutorial has officially been started, being publicised at the following locations:

BeyondUnreal Forums
Atari Community
Planet Unreal
Beyond Unreal

Now I guess we can just sit back and wait for some awesome models to roll our way.

Spent the last few hours testing some multiplayer action and fixing up all the bugs it bought forward. Here's a list:

- Changed 'crouch' in menus to 'roll/crouch'
- Players colliding while rolling now bounce properly
- Air instability only happens with other players, or when hitting a wall with sufficient power and at the right angle
- View never gets stuck when rolling now
- Made pickups slower and easier to get
- Network clients can now pickup weapons after losing all their ammo on an old one
- HUD bug with icon not disappearing when weapon does fixed
- Rope velocity not replicating resulting in sliding for clients fixed
- Kills are now awarded when players push someone, they fall, then roll, then fall and die (FIDS)

Spent some time today playing with our first map and trying to make it more playable and less, well, crap.

It's moved on from a test map to something that I think we can be proud of and hopefully release along with the mod.

Also added in the full animation set for the shield. Bam.

Today's race for work manages to see me now almost finished with my work on the project. The only things remaining to do are maps, which Chris will be principally handling, and the code for the puck, weasel and bots which Michael will be doing. So I'm almost done.

I spent a long time adding in solid new features like pickup pictures to the game options screen and pickups to the level query string. So now players will be able to see what pickups are active before joining a match. Neat, eh?

I then spent an equally long time polishing the smaller details of the mod. I put in about half the sounds Liam has sent me, added in some more animations from Kieran.
Then there were other details like fixing the overexposed colouring on characters, fixing the shading on the net pickup, changing the falling and drowning death messages to read 'FIDS!' and stuff like that.

The other important thing I did was changed the mine to how we initially envisioned it. Now it doesn't go off straight away, instead it beeps loudly and uncloaks. The player is pretty much screwed after this, but it's funny to see. If they stand off the mine, it will explode and kill them then.

Today we worked from around 10 in the morning and I'm about ready to stop now.

For the first hours of the day we did a major go-over and bugfix on all our leftover network bugs. I personally fixed up the net animation and firing problems, weasel graphics and shield blocking of projectiles.

A long-dormant bug where players would be able to keep bouncing into each other has been significantly reduced and should now happen only very, very rarely. I also fixed up the lighting on characters so that their textures have more definition now.

Rolling is now fully implemented along with animations. I've also added 'stable' and 'unstable' midair animations so that players have a good visual cue for determining what will happen when they land (stable = land squarely, unstable = roll).

However, the major part of the night for me was implementing our HUD, which I am now quite pleased with. We've tried to keep it as clean as possible, and so it consists only of an indicator to show the currently active weapon. This is all 3D and spinny because I know it looks much cooler that way.

I've posted a shot of the HUD and a character in the midst of rolling, here.

Getting into the final stint of work on our first beta.

Tonight's effort was rolling. I believe I'm about finished with it now, pretty much all the subtleties of it are working perfectly which is just great. Animations aren't done yet but I can tell it's going to look awesome.

The player's avatar doesnt rotate when rolling, which makes things much like in MDuel1. I've also stopped it rotating when crouched for the same reason. Purely aesthetic but nice to look at.

One of the interesting problems that came up with rolling was the ability to get stuck really easily. Since you can't move when crouched and normally can't roll from a crouching position, it was easy to roll under low-hanging objects and get stuck. So of course now players can roll more than once if theyre unable to get up. This could make some interesting maps, as rolling is a slight bit faster than running.

I also added in another nice visual cue to show instability in the air. When you first jump you will look in control, but as soon as another object is bumped into the player starts looking a little spastic. This is a nice cue for knowing what is going to happen to you when you land, as an unstable player will roll upon landing.

The other problem rolling brought in was with the placeable weapons like mine and puck. Since these auto-crouch when fired, they would force the player to roll which wasn't what I was really after. This is fixed now.

Also fixed up some bugs in the 2D player classes and modified the jumping back to normal 'straight up and down' style because testers were finding it difficult.

With the semester drawing to a close, it's getting around to the time where we're going to have to start work on the mod again.

Allow me to be the first to break this long period of delay with some new models for the other heads of the original Marshmallow Duel characters:



We're also planning on starting our MDuel character creation competition very soon. I'm currently patching up the development tutorial and getting hold of all the resources I need to compile a dev kit. When it's ready, full details will be announced on the main page.

Over the last 48 or so hours I've spent my time getting the more difficult animations, like rope climbing and the net 'curled into a ball' animation, ingame.

Weapon animations for the gun, magnet firing loop, grenade throw, boomerang throw and catch, grapple throw and catch, and the placing animations for all placed weapons are working fine and attached to their respective weapons with no problems.

I also fixed some earlier problems with the blank weapon wrecking up some animations and the placeable weapons not forcing you to crouch (an oversight only really).

The rope animations are particularly cool as they are played depending on the speed of climbing. So climbing up very fast produces a faster animation that slow climbing and makes it generally look much nicer.

The net animation was particularly difficult to do as clients werent fond of playing the animation at all. I ended up replicating a variable for it and telling the clients explicitly whether they should be playing it or not.

I just finished the first version of my awesome system to allow weapons to control third person pawn animations.

By default, UT doesnt allow this sort of behaviour, so adding it in makes things much more fantastic in terms of the whole 3rd person experience.

Each weapon is free to replace as many or few of the default animations for the characters as needed. So for example, the shield may need to include new runcycles, crouching cycles etc to look nice. The animation system Ive done today allows this extremely easily by simply changing default properties on each weapon.

Ive put a new build online with Kieran's animations included and set to work with the respective weapons that they are meant for. The gun in particular looks extremely awesome.

The other major thing I did today was modify the rope code somewhat to give greater freedom with them. From now on, players will not touch ropes at all unless they tap their jump or crouch button whilst near them. This is particularly relevant in 2D where players getting knocked at ropes would catch them automatically before. Now some skill is required to not end up FIDs.

Other fixes today:
- Smash platforms now default to 60sec hidden instead of 20.
- Fixed array out of bounds in pickup spawner when game is played with no pickups active.

Fixed cameras are now completely working for the 2D gametype, and look just awesome. The process of adding them to maps if desired is extremely easy and intuitive for the mapper.

Basically, all they need to do is position their viewport camera in the right place for where they want to view the map from ingame. Then it is a simple matter of placing a fixedCamera2D actor in the same place and rotation, and the code handles the rest.

One of the best features of this system is that the camera can be placed in any position or rotation, meaning that the mapper can choose to view their map from cool perspective views as well as straight on 2D.

I also had a big spree of fixing all the little bugs we had left over with different weapons. Here they are:

- puck doesnt bounce out of screen in 2D
- grapple dies if it hits a volume
- magnet fixed for client/server
- net works properly
- added acceleration dampner to pickupBases
- fixed projectile rotation for mine, hook, puck and net
- projectile meshes for boomerang and hook added
- parachut visibility problems fixed
- magnet fx now disappear if the pickup being pulled times out and dies
- Dunce Cap made, and fixed character head - position slightly to fit

I have spent most of today and all of tonight working in the unreal ed map editor. I think the only way to really learn the program well is experience, messing around in it and doing everything the wrong way a few times before getting a feel for it. Either this or doing a lot of reading before hand... and that doesnt sound as fun or frustrating.

I started out trying to make a 3d version of the marshmallow waterfall pit map design that i put up here ages ago. Finally i got the terrain working very easily, and i had a good control over what i was doing with that. I worked on creating some textures for the terrain, some of which i was kindof happy with but mostly it was a bit difficult trying to make pleasingly tiled textures. I also started making a marshmallow texture as i really wanted my own pink marshmallow at the bottom of the pit, as opposed to a premade texture from the engine. I didnt get far with this as i had a lot of trouble trying to create a physics volume to kill the character when he fell down the bottom. I also had a lot of trouble trying to make a working liquid (wobbling) texture. Eventually i caused a whole bunch of errors in the map, and at the time i thought it was ruined ( i think i can fix it now though) so i decided to start a very simple and straight forward map, a classic style 2d marshmallow duel map which we've always wanted.

It was a lot simpler but i still went through a bit of messing around. Eventually i figured out all the things i wanted with the marshmallow and made a nice texture with 2 layers of rotating marshmallow over a liquid area which bounces around just like real wobbly thick marshmallow. I also set the physics volume paramaters to kill the player when he falls in and also to float him around as if it was really marshmallow. So most of the time you fall into the marshmallow you float back on top, its pretty cool. There is a nice picture of mowbray falling in the drink in the ingame section of the images.

There were a few things that came up while trying to make the 2d/3d map which are kindof important. It is kindof tricky placing the platforms near enough to the rope that you can step onto it, but far enough that it doesnt get in the way when you are trying to climb past a platform. Hopefullythis will befixed when we have an actual climbing animation, or maybe we can rotate the player around onto the frontofthe rope, although that sounds dodgy and i dont really know anything about it. I think there were more things but i forget. The map needs some fixing up and polishing off but basically its a playable mduel classic map.

Oh yeah i really love the magnet, best weapon EVER. So cool. Can't wait to play with it in multiplayer.

Pospi and I got together again today for another coding session. The magnet is now working pretty sweet, which is great news cause its turning out to be one of the funner weapons to use. At the moment when you hold down the fire button it will pull all pickups towards you, that have a direct line of sight, within a radius. It will also pull any pickup towards you that you have aimed at regardless of range (to an extent). And best of all you can shoot any player and it will allow you to steal their weapon of them. Lots of fun and lots of practical uses for it. One of the harder aspects of the weapon was getting the pickup that you point to, to pull towards you. Instead of using a trace function, I decided to use a dot product function which allows me to compare two vectors and the angles they make with each other. From this you can determine if the pickup is on the line of your magnet shot or, more importantly, near this line. This then allows any pickup that lies within an extending cone to be pulled towards the magnet wielder. By simply changing the number by which the dot product is checked against to, you can make the cone wider or thinner.

The other weapon that I worked on today was the weasel. The weasel is a unique weapon in that it evalutes it situation and then decides what to do. This process is very similar to how bots work and as such it has given me a great chance to practise the fundamental skills on something slightly simpler than bots. It is so far choosing to be very rewarding. I have implemented 3 states for the weasel. The first state 'Evaluate' allows the weasel to search its local space and detect if there are any potential targets avaliable. If there are it moves into a state called 'Attacking', otherwise it moves into 'Roaming'. In the attacking state the weasel moves at its target periodicly checking the distance between itself and its target to see if it should call off the attack. It also checks to see if there are any closer targets it could attack. In the 'Roaming' state the weasel picks a random destination and moves there, pausing occasionaly. Once it reaches its destination it then goes back into the 'Evalute' state.

So far the weasel works basically. There are some problems with its movement such as its naviagtion around walls etc. I will look into these soons.

In the ingame images section you can see some nice pictures of the new magnet weapon, which I am starting to think is the coolest addition we have made to mduel.

The functionality of the magnet was mostly done by Michael, but to summarise, it basically draws in a pickup you are pointing it at or steals one from another player. The trick is that it also draws in all the pickups around the player very slowly, so you have to be careful not to draw in something nasty.

The magnet FX and weapon attachment were both completed by myself and I am very happy with the way they are both looking. I also spent a lot of time creating effects for the pickups to play when being pulled by the magnet which look really cool, especially since they are scaled by the magnet's influence over them.

Pickup bases have been modified to decelerate when over their maximum speed - this prevents the magnet from filling the level with pickups whizzing to fast to catch.

I fixed up various bugs with the map entities, basically the pickup spawners no longer have issues with rotation and also face in the proper direction.

If you are pushed by someone and then touch a rope, they will no longer get the credit for killing you if you fall from said rope into the marshmallows without touching the ground first.

Oh! I also did some work on the net and managed to get it working pretty well. It holds players in place until they are pushed and works perfectly if they are on the ground. If hit in the air, there are still some client/server issues to work out - the player will keep moving serverside but freeze on the clients, which is of course not very good.

Ok so we got together to work all weekend. Again i was just working largely on textures, i started work on the main character texture which can be seen in pospi's previous post. This isnt finished yet but its well on it's way. It's looking very detailed so far, and its actually taking up a fair bit of time. But we want the main character texture to look good, and detailed, becuase its going to be seen quite a bit. There will be also multiple helmet models and textures to chose from. (on yeah in pospi's post the parts that are textured are kindof washed out by the lighting so you cant see it too well. And there are no specular masks or anything yet either)

Other pickups are also on the way to being textured, more of which i'm going to work on today.

I'm also starting to focus on map editing, which i need to do a fair bit of by next week. I've started playing with terrain again for my crater map, which i've been wanting to do for ages.

This was a bit of an afterthought so I'm just going to make another post.

I just this minute made a long-overdue update to the website that allows team members to add comments to the images they post which will show up to outside visitors when they view each image.

Hopefully now we can have a bit more explanation on each shot that really gives the full impact.

Ok so my contribution over the last 48 hours was mainly the new character model with a classic style.
I was working again in a very polygonal and geometric style, using Chris' early concept sketches. The final model is ingame now, although the textures are not yet completed. The shot shown here is using a rough texture to give the basic idea.



This model will of course be colour configurable later on.

I also redid the UV maps for the weasel since Chris was having a lot of trouble with the old ones. There was all sorts of horrible overlapping seams etc present, I think I must have been in a hurry when I did it the first time around.

As for weapon stuff, the shield is all coded and works pretty well. There's still odd bugs where projectiles clip through occaisonally, but I hope to have that fixed soon. I'm pretty proud of my netcode for the shield as it works as a separate entity from the player, but has no movement jitter on clients as normally happens with that sort of thing.

I delved into getting all the finished pickup models ingame and wrote some nifty attachment code to handle unique things like the parachute's attachment to the players chest (instead of hands as is the norm). The grenade, mine, puck, net, shield and parachute are all now graphically final and feature the correct models. The gun also has an attachment now but still needs a firing animation.

So that's basically what I've got done on the weekend. There are still quite a few outstanding bugs with those weapons which I hope to squash pretty soon. After that I can get optional fixed cameras working for the 2D game mode and focus on more low-level stuff like getting pickups to appear in the level info string so that anyone joining a game can see what's included.

Yesterday Chris, Pospi and I all met together again to work on mduel. And what a good day it was. On my part I managed to finish off the Net weapon, although it seems to be causing troubles on the client side, something that'll we will need to look into deeper. I also finished off implementing the Grenade which wasn't too difficult as it was based heavily on UT original implementation of the weapon.

The weapon that was most difficult to implement was the Puck, although it was the most satisfying. The major problem with the puck is that we wanted it to fall when it was in the air, and slide when its on the ground. As simple as this sounds Epic Games didn't seem to provide a physics model for that. This meant that we had to switch between the 'falling' and 'projectile' physics states which was where a majority of the problems lay. Once we got our head around it (and a large sum of vector maths) it all seems to work fine. In offline mode at least. When we tried it on a client side the puck appeared to be doing some strange and interesting things. Something too look into next.

All in all though it was a successful day.

So it seems that the nasty big memory leak bug we were having was due to my stupid respawn effect.

It used to rip shaders off your body and place them in materialSequences to gradually eliminate seemingly random chunks of texture - an effect that looked a bit like a pixel wipe. But it wasn't very good.

So basically I got rid of that whole bunch of uselessness and instead made a much cooler deres effect. This one uses some very nice vector maths and coordinate translation to detach all staticMesh body parts from your body in the exact same place as they were before being detached. It then spawns some cool red particles all over the body parts and disappears them. I'll probably end up changing the effect again at some point, but the main feature this style has is that it doesn't hog memory and wreck up the game.

For maybe the first time since we started this project, I'm sitting around feeling like there's nothing much for me to be doing. All the big bugs have been squashed and all the weapons I was responsible for are implemented and working perfectly reasonably.

I might get into an attempt at randomly generating levels later on but it seems like too much of a big thing to work on at the moment. I suppose I could start making character models, but I hate modelling a lot these days.

Screenshots have been piling up a bit over the last few days, so here's some pretty pics of the hook and respawn effects in action..



Oh, I also went ahead and imported all my models into the game, ready for the textures they will be getting tomorrow. I animated the weasel nicely but the lightwave->unreal exporter I'm using didn't like it so he just wiggles in a silly way at the moment. Looks hilarious. Might even keep it in.

Well still working away at textures

my main accomplishment of today is the shield texture, which is all but completed (have some work to do on the back face.

The areas where the metal is exposed from the paint peeling back (or being hit by swords or someting, as the texture kindof suggests, not that there are any sword weapons in mduel ) are going to be shiny, while the paint surface is matte.

This texture is more detailed that a lot of the others becuase it is going to be used ingame as an actual sheild, andn ot just displayed as a pickup in a floating purple thing.

Anyway it is kindof a homage to the original marshmallow duel as it uses the typical purple neutral colour, and it also has a golden emblem of the highest prommotion level helmet. (which is also going to be shiny).

This texture i think says a lot about the atmosphere and universe of the game we are creating.

I had another day of implementing weapons and getting all their FX as close to completion as I can without having access to finished staticMesh objects.

The boomerang was patched up a bit and now works in 2D gamemodes, allowing you to throw it up and down as well as out in front of you.

The grappling hook is finished as well and looks really good. It has a wavy rope that arcs out behind it until it hits something, after which the rope becomes taught and you are dragged towards it.

The 'chut is also finished and working fine. It doesn't look like anything yet though since the parachute itself isnt textured ingame yet.

I also went over the code for the destroyable platforms and changed it a bit to facilitate platforms interaction with projectile weaponry. Weapons such as the mine and grappling hook are much more realistic now as they actually land on the platforms, and fall down from them if they are destroyed.

Yesterday Pospi and I got together again for one of our scheduled days of programming. Things seemed to go really well and we got a lot of things done. The boot is now fully implemented into the game and we are both happy with it. The mine has also been implemented and is working well. When you stand on it it throws you a good distance in the air which is great and when you lay a mine you even crouch as with the classic Marshmallow Duel. There were some problems with the crouching initially but we pushed on and things seem to be working now.

On Tuesday, all the core members of Marshmallow Duel met at uni and spent some good solid time working on mduel. One of the great things about working at uni is that we each have a computer to work on, which means we can run some multiplayer sessions of the game allowing us to evaluate how it runs. Things went really well and although nothing huge was implemented, many small bugs were discovered and corrected. Many of the bugs encountered were to do with certain aspects of the game appearing different depending if you were running it from the server computer or from a client. Things such as weapon effects appearing only on the server or only on the client were a common problem and proved difficult to fix. But we got there :)

The session was also great in that it gave us the oppertunity to discuss where mduel was at right now and what we would aim to have presented for the next assessment. The general feel is that everyone is very happy with how it is progressing and looking forward to where we will be taken it over the next few months.

Michael and I had a big coding session today, working at getting a more stable codebase for the pickups down and then making lots more of them.

The boot is now ingame and works really well - it gives a speed increase when equipped and makes huge jumps when fired.
The 1000V also features a speed increase, much less noticeable than the boot however. This is simply to make it harder to evade, as there are really no edges to make things difficult in a 3D environment.

Pickups have been modified to die out at random intervals, a very important element as when playing with skulls, TNT or anything else undesireable, the map just ends up filling with them if they don't die out after a bit. There is a game option to scale the average lifetime of pickups as well.

The boomerang is ingame and I am extremely happy with the way it is working right now. You have a certain degree of control over it when in the air, so you can steer it towards your opponent. It then returns to you if it has hit a wall or player.

The warp dynamically builds a list of all possible bot navigation points in the level and uses those as spawn targets, so it can never spawn you in stupid places unless the mapmaker things it would be funny to do so.

The mine is also looking pretty great. This was mostly Michael's work but I had a little to do with it at the end. You even crouch when placing it.
Having the mine done is fantastic, as it lays the foundation for how all the other projectile based pickups will work, such as grenade, puck and even weasel.

Well everything is starting to come together well on the mod, although there are a lot of things i hope we still have time to get done by the prototype due date. Well that i hope to get done at least. I have been spending a lot of time working on textures, and i am really happy with the overall style that has been coming out, as it is much like what i had intended in my head originally.

I havent been posting very much because i've been quite busy, but i've gotten the following textures completed (or nearly completed) recently.



Here is the skull, which looks suitably creepy. It is going to have self illumination glow on the eyes so that it looks scary in the dark too.



Parachute, not quite finished, is going to have the nice finishing touch of a little translucency so that it looks kindof threadbare in the mid sectiosn where all the air pressure would be. This sortof extra little thing i hope adds a lot to giving the overall impression of the marshmallow duel universe (most of which is implied and not explained much at all) which is a kindof desolate and worn out environment. When we talked to duncan gill, the original creator, he said what he first had in mind when creating the game was that post apocolyptic feeling. And then all the zany things kindof piled on top of that original thought, from the look of it.



Here is the grenade, which you can see with its specular reflection mask on (its not actually reflecting cos this image isnt ingame.) The white sectiosn where it looks like paint has chipped off will be shiny, to show that.. paint has chipped off. And the scratches on the metal will be shiny too, on top of the rust. Again all that worn out kindof tone to it.



This is quite straight forward lightning, but will have a bright self illumination and possibly specular reflection depending how it looks in game. I also have a panning animation which i'd like to test out to see how it looks on this.



Here is the magnet, hopefully a good example of the black outlined style i'm trying to do. Again there is more rust and scratches, which are also becoming a bit of a motif on these power ups. And the paint chips too like on the grenade. Now that i think of it, paint chips on a grenade are a bad sign that someone isnt treating a bomb too carefully hey. Anywa y thats irrelevant.



Here is the mine.. which i'm still kindof revising. There is a specular mask which i didnt show here because i'm not quite happy with it yet, i have to play around with it and see it in game.



And here is a good modern interpretation of the classic popup spawner. I like the geometry which pospi came up with, nice solid and simple, and very much like the original popup spawner shape in the old game. I'm really happy with the effect of the metal here and cant wait to see it functioning in game.



And here is another texture that i'm very ahppy with, one for the default explodable platforms which pospi designed.

and so that is all the latest textures, lots more work to do and a lot more textures coming soon.

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