Disappointingly, I’ve not yet got out another playable release yet. The main reason for this is that in switching to 3D I’ve made a whole new set of problems for myself.

If we take a look at the last demo, we had four helicopters working in a split-screen environment, able to pick up friendly soldiers with rope ladders and drop them off at a friendly landing point. As soon as we switch to 3D, there’s the immediate problem of what we make the environment out of. Then there’s finding legally usable 3D models to replace the sprites we currently have, and then animating those models. And finally there’s the issue of those oh-so-simple-in-2D rope ladders. There aren’t many 3D models of ladders around, to be honest, so I finally decided to just use a rope. A length of 3D rope with a small physics simulation attached.

So that’s the current version. I’m currently working on making that rope a little nicer to look at, and also having it pulled up into the helicopter when not in use. And then we’ll finally be at exactly the same point we were last week. It’s an awful lot of effort just to tread water, isn’t it?