Hi everyone. Had one of these dev journal thingos for awhile now; been a bit preoccupied lately though and it's taken me awhile to get around to it (or indeed, anything else this past week or so).

I also didn't really want to mention much until after the GL render was up for all of you to gawp at, in case I stole my own thunder. Or something.

At any rate it's there now, and it's already featuring in-game!... Albeit in a totally unanimated and untextured state so you're unlikely to see it any time soon (although I am informed decs is doing a damn good job skinning it). All I personally have left to do with it is put in those wonderful animations that'll tie it all together, and a couple of other neat touches. 'Fixing' a model to look good in first-person is a surprisingly tricky task, but for anyone wondering the method isn't lost on me. Although you won't be seeing any of the GL stock in first-person (since it's all off-screen), the bits that are there are looking pretty damn hot. I've already decided to nickname this thing 'the beast', as it ain't no glorified pea-shooter -- that's for certain.

Also, for any folks looking at the render and wondering: yes, you will manually load in each of those rounds into it before flicking it shut with a nice satisfying 'click' sound. Hopefully anyway. Such features are left mostly in the realm of the programmers, and their dark majiks are largely foreign to me.

The animations, though, are being left alone for now due to a couple of reasons, and my work's shifted focus towards modelling the soldier's best friend (no, not a grenade...). We're talkin' ol' Rockets o' Fury. Modelling a rocket launcher is proving a bit tricky so far, simply because it's surprisingly difficult to make [what is essentially] a tube look interesting; however, a few ideas and tweaks are getting thrown around and I'm sure we'll have something to show for it fairly soon.

Once I've got that nice 'n' sorted I'll provide all you kind folks with a bit more insight into the modelling process, particularly for the first-person weapons (which is, as you have no doubt already guessed, what I'm mostly concerned with).

Working with the FF team so far has been pretty fantastic - everyone's got a lot of heart for this mod and an equal amount of skill and ability to match it.

But now, I must get back to polishing my tube.

Sayonara - FLCL