There will be no new updates to Fallout Tactica until the 13th of June due to the fact that I will be out of town until then. Look for the debut of the Black Company clan and many other new areas for you to explore coming online during that week. Things are changing and changing fast.

If you stop by and have any comments or idea's you wish to share, send them to me by e-mail. I will answer as soon as I get back.

Thanks to each of you who have stopped by, e-mailed me and made the first two weeks of this Fallout Tactics site, fun and exciting.

-Moonbiter, Lord of Nothing

I think these have already been covered but they are good questions so are worth re-itereating;

1. It will be possible to create a squad and move it between encounters in multiplayer. We currently don't think we can have character progression in multi-player but it is something we have thought about. Our main concern is hacking characters and balancing the stats of the different Squads.

2. Character creation is identical to the original Fallout, even down to the layout of the screen and the PIP boy characters! We have one or two new traits and skills but they fit perfectly into the existing system. As with the original Fallout there will be a pool of characters to choose from and you will be able to save a character and reload it for use in a multiplayer game.

3. We currently have mock ups for most of the GUI's and we could release screen shots of these. However they arn't properly finished and look pretty much like the original Fallout ones anyway.

4. The only member of the original Fallout Team directly involved is Chris Taylor - who was the game designer for Fallout 1. He is working in a consultancy role on this project and his experience and ideas are proving invaluable. He is also helping to make sure that we stay true to the original Fallout ideals! We also have access to a huge amount of source material from the original Fallout even down to source code so we are able to exactly duplicate the exisiting combat system and character stats system.

5. I don't think there will be a public beta test as such but we will be releasing pre-release demos of the game ,both single and multiplayer level to the press, and I hope these will provide us with a chance to get some last minute feed back for tweaking game play. And no I don't have the dates for these but we hope it will be later this year!

6. We are now into the final stages of development.

Currently;

Drawing Engine is about ~90% (just optimising now)

Multi-player is about ~80% (we demonstrated this at E3)

Combat ~80% (again this just needs tweaking)

AI ~50% (lots to do here but the hard stuff like path finding is in. The rest is all designed on paper and ready to go in!)

Mission design 100% in rough and about 50% detailed

Level design ~50%(again lots to do here but we have a very good set of in house tools developed which make the tile placement really easy)

Level Art - ~80% of our tiles are rendered ready to be built into levels - currently we have over 10,000 rendered tiles ready to go in.

Character Graphical Design ~80% (we are getting to the pointer where only critters and miscelaneous charcters are left to be done)

Animation of characters ~60% (this is a real pain as we have lots of animations and they take ages to render even on dual P500 it is an overnight job to render a handful of characters animations. But we have plenty of time in our schedule to do this.

I'll try to keep everyone posted of progress but currently we are on schedule to go into beta later this year.

Regards,

Tony Oakden

Maximum Multiplayer size
Chris Taylor - Interplay 
36 characters maximum in a multiplayer game.
Up to six players with six characters each.
Up to 18 players with two characters each.
That's the plan. May change.
pax,
-Chris "I'm changing" Taylor

As the game progresses you get to choose from a wider selection of weapons and characters. Also we have some special missions where extra constraints will be placed on what equipment you can take, for example in one mission you have to travel as quickly as possible to a destination and are hence limited, by weight, as to what equipment you can take.

In multiplayer it will be up to the host to decide what level of characters and what equipment they have access to.

regards,

Tony O.

Yep, you'll see most of the original chemicals plus some new flavors to try. Since we're in a different region of the continent, some recently developed drugs haven't traveled there yet, and some new drugs have been cooked up by the locals.

Plus there's always the Brotherhood-sanctioned stimulants . . .

]ed[

Will There Be Multiple Death Animations for each type of Death? From Chris Taylor - Interplay and Ed Orman - MicroForte

Not really. Too many different animations lead to too much artist and rendering time, please they fill up the CD-ROM really darn fast, increase minimum specs and making loading times go up.

pax,
-Chris "Evil! Evil!" Taylor

That said, we are having individual animations per character - each character has its own flaming death, disintegration death, riddled with bullets death, all lovingly animated and rendered . . . there's no sharing between them. But like Chris says, this does chew up space pretty quickly, so there's only one flaming death per character [in eight directions].

]ed[

On Sniping
From  Ed Orman - MicroForte

"will you be able to climb up on the roof of a one story building and snipe from there"

Hell yes! You'll be able to climb to the top of a six story building, and as long as you can see a target [perception, LOS], you'll be able to fire at them. Don't expect to see too many six story buildings, tho.

"will you be able to add attachments to a gun that improve it's accuracy"

There will be a [limited] weapons upgrade system, on a per weapon basis, that will improve various attributes of each weapon. You'll carry those weapons and their improvements with you from mission to mission.

]ed[

Q: Will the "Fallout Guy" be in Tactics?
A: It wouldn't be Fallout without him.

Chris on 2d v/s 3d for Tactics:
Fallout Tactics is a 2D sprite/tile based game with the same POV as Fallout 1/2. We do have elevations, and objects within the game are tracked in pseudo-3D (allowing us to drop grenades down on people, fire from the top of a building over some terrain and so on...)

For the sake of argument, however, we could have done the game in true 3D using polygons and textures. 3D cards are getting to point where you can almost do in 3D what you can do in 2D in terms of detail and complexity of the models _plus_ gain the ability to rotate the camera to view behind buildings and so on.

However, I'm very happy with the decision to remain 2D for FT. It is the right choice for the game currently.

pax,
-Chris