28 Months Later June 2008 Update

[Jey]

We have had an exciting couple of months at Death by Design. So we are very pleased to tell you more about one of our biggest additions which we mentioned last update.

Singleplayer

Last update we announced to you that we are going to be doing a single player story for the mod, well now we would like to tell you a bit more about what makes our single player quite different from all the other games out there. We have discussed before how each large game update will be a new campaign. The campaigns are made up of a overall story mixed in with stories from other survivors the player encounters throughout the main gameplay. We call this approach Survival Stories. The basic premise of this approach is that it allows us to give is you a great “zombie” game quickly but also continually without most of the strains normally associated with making a large mod game in one whole shot. You will start off fighting for your survival in the prospect of finding a nearby refugee camp, this you'll find though is your interactive story board. You can wander around the refugee camp and talk with other survivors. All while you wait for a good time to head back out in hopes of getting ahead of the infection. Maybe there is somewhere better secured and prepared for the infection. You'll find the survivors will tell you of the horror they went through before they ended up in the camp, even to the point that it feels so hauntingly real, that your actually in their shoes reliving those hellish moments.

With this in mind you can imagine how wild our level designers are going. Meaning their levels can be based at any time within the 28 months since the beginning of the infection. Some levels will be as the infection hits an area for the first time, others will be much later.

The 28 Months Later team has been hard at work in trying to bring this total conversion mod to life.  In order to do this we needed custom models and lots of them. This means a motivated yet skilled team of modelers needed to step up and a special thanks to the modellers for doing so.  We have had people like D.Goeck and Sideshowbob come in from other teams and contribute exceptionally, working along side our already existing 28 Months Later modelers.

I'm sure by now your itching to see some pictures, so I will start by showing you some of the level design thats been going on.

Levels

The following are taken from Amsterdamned. Duruk has been working very hard on this, with the help of D.Goeck, F.Stephan, Vintovka and Jey on the props.




Models

What game would be complete without an AK47? Here is another fine example of Falco's modelling.


Frogfish has been working hard on some vehicles for us. Here's a model of a cab, though we should mention this wont feature untill the second campaign.


We express our endless gratitude to Cryrecon who have joined forces with us now. D.Goeck has been furiously modelling props for use in both mods. Here you can see a good selection of his fantastic work:


As mentioned before, Sideshowbob who resides heavily on the crymod forums, has been doing some aditional work for Death by Design. Dont expect to be going round over powering the infected in the stryker all the time though, we're not going to make it that easy for you




These folowing pictures are a work in progress shot of the Barret Rec7 made by Jey. Please note this is the high polly mesh and it has not been textured yet:



Textures

Vintovka has been doing wonders for us in all art departments, but seeing as we premoted him to "lead texture artist", I thought it would be be fitting to show you what he does best. All the textures in this picture Vintovka created from scratch, including all the special maps:


Community

Recently we have been trying to help out the modding community for Crysis by contributing to the tutorials scene. For example, our lead animation Mephisto03 has been adding references and tutorials to the CryWiki (found here), forming the majority of the animation guides on the Crymod based site. In addition, our lead modeller fstephan has been working on creating an easy to follow video tutorial for the community regarding the texturing workflow for 3D Studio Max. Here is a sneak peek at the hut that he'll take you through texturing:


Music

Finally as we're not giving you any videos this time we thought we would share with you a taster of the sound track that is being composed and produced by TVM. This piece will feature in the hospital level, note all the apropriate hospital sounds used throught the song to add to the atmoshpere of the level. http://www.deathbydesign.net/downloads/28ml/pictures/update2/MS_test_07.mp3

So that now brings us to the end of this update, we hope that you are still as excited as we are about this mod. In the next large update we will be showing you are custom infected models in game, fully animated, with our dissmemberment system in place.

[ToonarmY]

Very nice work.

maybe we will see more if  fyreNL wasnt blowing people up on company of heroes 

that was a random little encounter

[As Terror Rises]

Looks Great  Keep Up The Good Work 

[Hawiio]

do this game com out on XBOX 360?

[Jey]

We have no plans for a console version at the moment.

[zraza]

lol, a console version

[Jey]

lol, a console version

Its quite possible. Ive been working on a console game at work, (as I am sure you all know crytek are doing console games too now). I was plesently suprised how nice it is working on the xbox360. But like i said, not now.

[fstephan]

I believe total modifications will become more and more possible for console. This as already been accomplished by both cod and unreal. It will be interesting to see in the next year what is possible.

[zraza]

But for a simple mod team it all seams a bit complicated on console. Making a game/engine from scratch would be easier on console than pc because you wouldn't have to accommodate for a range of hardware but modding seems easier to organize on pc than console, especially if your mod team is scattered all across the world.

[Mephisto03]

But for a simple mod team it all seams a bit complicated on console. Making a game/engine from scratch would be easier on console than pc because you wouldn't have to accommodate for a range of hardware but modding seems easier to organize on pc than console, especially if your mod team is scattered all across the world.

Actually it would probably just as easy to make one for pc as it would for console if someone could. The problem lies with advanced features. When you start using advanced rendering techniques and compiling you have to be careful about older systems. When your a amateur, you probably won't run into this problem as it takes years and millions of dollars to create a nextgen engine. Most likely a self made engine would be basic and using certain features that have already been easily accesable to the majority of older comps, and vastly every "nextgen" comp.