Hi everyone,

As you may have heard, we have a very special announcement to make regarding the ongoing TAOC project.

This announcement has been a couple of months in the making and we hope is not going to be anti-climatic. First let me start by saying “Sorry, it’s not yet ready for release” as some may have been hoping for (including me!). The reason we wanted to make this into a big announcement was we felt the game had turned a HUGE corner in terms of development, graphics, performance and well, every facet really.

Let me begin by some way of an explanation about why this announcement came about and at this time. Myself and JK had been working very hard until July of this year, just plugging away. But I came to a very stark realisation (better late than never I guess) that the current ‘engine’ we were using was severely inhibiting our ability to do certain things such as the following:

- We could not achieve nice graphics

- Development time was being impacted by stupid processes and poor dev pipeline

- Engine performance was becoming unstable and unacceptable with long loading times.

- Much work was still to be done that we had no real plan for yet as the engine did not accommodate modules such as networking, input etc.

- The engine was never meant to be used for ‘next gen’ games, simple as that.

There are many more problems I wont list here, but suffice to say we felt it was ‘change or die’ time. We then proceeded to search the world for a better game engine that would best suit the needs of TAOC and our vision of where we wanted it to go. After much searching and trialling we decided upon the engine that would take TAOC to that next level and facilitate a faster completion.

So then we got to work migrating our current media and code over. This has taken a bit of time but we are ecstatic over the results to date. I wanted to list some of the major benefits we have achieved from this:

· Massive performance improvement – this means we can bump up the graphics and people can still get a lot out of their PC’s even if they are not ‘beasts’. In fact this engine is so highly optimized it’s just not funny. I’ve been blown away by the power of it. Loading time is a couple of seconds.

· Graphics – As has been our catch cry ‘TAOC was never about graphics’, the graphics to date have been ‘ok’ at best, with our main strengths being AI and physics and animations. We can now happily announce that graphics have been boosted to be much more in keeping with modern games. We were concerned enough that the old graphics were bad enough to detract from the immersion of the game, but this is no longer the case. The new engine allows us to make our existing models render much better, with seamless normal/bump mapping and superb lighting and dynamic shadowing.

· Granular graphics settings to turn on or off performance effects.

· Better physics – we can now have dynamic physics. What does this mean? Example: The stumps are set up so each component is a physics object – if you hit the left stump near the top for instance at a certain velocity with the ball the stumps will break apart realistically based on that exact collision spot (as seen in the video ) and the bails will fly as they should.

· Animation blending – we will be able to blend our animations so at last we will be able to have the batsman’s head turning to look at the ball, independent of which animation is playing at the time.

· 3D sound

· Networking built in – this is going to save me a lot of time and effort being able to use the built in API of the engine.

· Ridiculously efficient workflow – the new development pipeline allows me to accomplish the same thing in 1/10th of the time. I’m not exaggerating, it really is awesome. So I can now hold out hope of a much earlier release.

· Input – Gamepad / Controller support is now all integrated and can be user-customised with ease.

· I tested it on an old laptop (4 years old Dell with onboard gfx) and it ran not too bad on medium settings! On my Core2Duo it flies on MAX settings 16xAA full AF.

· Postprocessing effects supported such as Bloom, HDR etc though we are yet to implement it.

· Check out the grass and pitch

· Lighting – dynamic shadows rock. Makes realtime weather a cinch.

· GUI / Overlays – Now so much quicker to implement with a simple 2D dev pipeline. AbBh is doing some great work around this.

There’s many more I cant think of right now, but the reason this is a big announcement is because the game has turned a massive milestone. In a few weeks only myself and JK and our newest addition, AbBh have made some amazing advances. Expect some rapid progress from now as the full migration nears completion. JK is helping me with all of the animation implementation and with some scripting as well, whilst AbBh is helping with scripting menus and file input/output at the moment.

I never like to set target dates and stuff, but I have a definate aim in my sights for completion by end of this year – BETA testing to commence at the beginning of next year i.e. 01/01/10

I have uploaded a new video teaser, sorry is very short and is literally a ‘teaser’. There is a high qual and low qual version – I recommend you watch the HQ version if you can. The teaser is something I scripted in game, so what you see here is in fact the real deal. The only thing added afterwards was the sound – thanks to JK

LQ version – http://www.theartofcricket.net/videos/vidNEW-LQ.avi (~1.5MB)

HQ version – http://www.theartofcricket.net/videos/vidNEW-HQ.avi (~30MB)

Youtube Version – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXfEFOUFJp4

* You will need the Xvid codec to watch the vids

I have also added some new in game screens – none of these are renders. We hope you will enjoy and I look forward to a new era of TAOC development over the next several months. Expect frequent updates and media in the very near future. I don’t believe myself or JK have ever worked this solidly on the game or have been this excited and motivated. We are now very confident that TAOC will indeed be the best cricket game ever.

High Quality Pix:

TGA Format -http://www.theartofcricket.net/pix/Pix-TGA.rar

PNG Format – http://www.theartofcricket.net/pix/Pix-PNG.rar

PS: couple of other minor things of note…..we were halfway through the fielding in the old engine but were getting some real major performance issues and all sorts of dramas. This will all be solved now. Also i know the bail flies a bit far in the vid, but please ignore that…i wanted to add some oomph for the vid so gave it extra power hehe

* Oh, and the crowd has not yet been fixed! But we can now have a great crowd, which will be coming up very soon

Cheers,

LM