Recently, we showed a video of our mission system working. It’s right here, if you want to watch it again or missed it.

Now by and large, everybody loved it. Everyone likes to see progress on screen. And of course, there was the usual range of other reactions, most of them expected. But there was a reaction we didn’t expect from it. “Why is the combat so slow?”

And the answer is because, that’s not our combat development.. We’ve actually got the game divided into a couple of parts at the moment, so they can be worked on more easily.

One of those parts is combat. That’s fancy, it’s flashy, and it has the AI in it. THIS represents what we’re actually developing for combat in Titan City. Also not finished, but looks a lot more like what you’d expect.

Chargen’s another part - we’ve made improvements to our sculpt since you last saw it - and broke a few things as well. Sometimes you take two steps forward, one step back. We’re working hard.

Another one is infrastructure. The mission system lives there, as does the patcher, the networking… oh, and the chat. Say hello, everyone!

The combat there is minimal, because all we care about is that the core functions are there and work - that you can target, hit, be hit, die and respawn. So long as those are there, we know we can integrate all the more complicated applications of it later. For this part, the infrastructure development, we’re more concerned about other behavior, like latency and the patcher fixing damaged builds, chat showing up in order, and other players seeing what you actually did, rather than a ghost. The animations are minimal too, for the same reasons: they’re being perfected elsewhere and will be merged later.

There are several reasons to do it this way. One is so we don’t have to worry about side effects from a simple change before we put them together. If they were being developed in one environment, systems would constantly be breaking each other as they were changed. At this early stage, that’s a lot of headaches and delays to no purpose. Better to get them reasonably functional on their own first. Interactions are a big source of bugs and complications in code, and trying to keep them interacting smoothly when they are still half built is pointless. Another reason is that it keeps the sizes of the projects small, for faster updates. And finally, you should know that Unreal makes taking projects apart and putting them together pretty easy - the whole reason this is possible to begin with.

We looking forward to welcoming you to the city.

Thanks to Team Prototype!

Discuss this update at: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/discuss-pieces-game