I guess you have to be a Fileplanet/IGN subscriber to be part of the BETA...not sure if that costs money. I have a few hundred extra keys, and if you've e-mailed me in the past, I still have your e-mail and will contact you. I gave them 30,000 keys for the BETA but I don't know how hard it will be to grab them after it starts.
So anybody who has been following the game for a while and wants to get an easy in to the BETA, drop me a line 'dgreen _ at _ radioactive-software.com' with the word BETA in the title and your name, location(country), comp specs, etc...and I'll add you to the list.
I was supposed to be ready for BETA drop today. About a month ago I saw the trainwreck coming and got a much needed delay [of the trainwreck lol]. It's really an absurd amount of work.
I'll be hosting servers in London & Dallas [with my master server here in Raleigh] I suppose for the BETA...it's not hard to spend $1000s on server hosting. I have a nice chunk of change alloted for server rentals, but it is slightly more expensive than I originally thought.
If anyone knows of a good, or prefered [*cough* cheap] game server hosting company...post and let me know. I'm still shopping :-D
I have some 49-sample-per-pixel soft shadowing going on...looks niiiice still get 50FPS @ 1280x720...I somehow got shadow mapping working on my whole city using only two 1024x1024 textures, it's just cascaded shadow maps massaged to hell...it'll probably need an update later on...but it's a perfect base for some soft shadows. With that number of samples the shadows look so good. I've got a 8800GTS w/2GB RAM in my target high end system...and my goal is 50 FPS with everything enabled...which should be quite do-able.
The game is totally HDR-ified now...I'm still messing with the bloom values, etc...could play with those numbers forever.
Physics and multiplayer are my main focuses now.
Anyways just a quick update, I have a lot of work on my plate. Oh yea, I can't post screens, etc. 'til BETA...sooo that's why there aren't any :-p
Don't be suprised if my next journal entry has a link to the BETA signup...but I'll probably make a few entries before then :-)
- Danny
