Ok boys and girls, it's time for a quick word about current (v1.29) production tasks. We're hard at it as usual, and since this is such a large development cycle with the Chinese (client/host localization) requirements creating a huge amount of work we otherwise wouldn't be involved in (translating everything and creating that client compliancy is enormous just by itself!) but things are humming along, if humming means tearing your hair out. 8]

Other art goings on include new bridges and buildings, with the emphasis on getting rid of the crackerbox 2D buildings that remain in the game world and replacing them with the newer 3D style incorporating alleyways and doorways and little parks like you saw with recent building upgrades. We should have some screenshots of this work soon, possibly next week.

Another part of "art" but actually more code orientated really, is the rebuild required of all our colliders to match the new object loading routines that we are doing to improve FPS performance, mostly loading issues that create pauses and freezes while new art is piped to your GPU and rendered in game for you. We don't know the extent of any performance improvement as solid numbers or anything because this work  is still very much not completed.

Work continues also on the new training/tutorial aspects of the "newbie experience" that doing the China deal gave us the opportunity to finally greenlight for development. Domestic (meaning non China) players will benefit greatly from this new development and it should go a long way to helping increase the retention of new players no matter what part of the world they come from. That means more good things for your game.

The Bf109E-1 has been flying around in beta and scoring kills, it really handles nicely and is getting a lot of praise. The new Spitfire Mk.Ia will follow it into action in beta this week we expect.

Documentation tasks for the v1.29 release in China are also swallowing a huge amount of time but it remains a nessesary task no matter how not fun it is. Everyone I've ever met seems to hate doing documentation but whatyougonnado ? You do the work is what you do ! Another aspect of documentation that IS fun is gathering material for the WiKi pages. We will be adding a lot of stuff to the WiKi over the coming next few months. A large part of what I will be adding will be weapons and vehicles performance data so you won't have to go to other sources to try and estimate what our vehicles and weapons will do in game. You'll be able to source that directly from the Battleground Europe WiKi.

As usual with a development cycle, particularly a long one like this one is, there will be a raft of bug fixes and "little stuff" that may have waited a long time for attention, and gets dumped in with the mix while we wait on. For example, something somebody else is doing before another person can do his bit on that part of the task list. So some less critical things that might otherwise have "bugged" you for ages will finally be fixed for you. That doesn't mean EVERYTHING you might want to finally be fixed, but every bit we can cram in there while working on the bigger picture items, and it all counts towards a better game in the end.

We also made a few decisions for future stuff which I'm sure you want to know all about, but as they must wait until v1.30 (after v1.29 ships out) before their earliest implementation development we're going to wait until v1.29 is done before we talk about those things.

As a closing reminder, v1.29 is an enormous list of development tasks, and is going to take us a while longer to complete, I only mention this as I am sure there are those out there that think it must be nearing completion by now. Well it's nearer than it was last week but there is still some ways to go yet.

Keep on killing in the spree world dudes! (apologies to Neil Young -Ed)