I am still planning on having a preview/unstable/development release as stated in the last post. It may be a week or two until I am ready. I haven’t worked on fixing up the game as much as I had hoped thus far, but it will be released.

I am planning on removing the Ninja Turtles from the game and replacing with other original anthropomorphic animal characters. Each character would be based on a different animal, such as turtle, rabbit, frog, rat, etc. I think it would be best for the game; it allows the characters to be more unique (different species with different abilities), may help game development (in almost five years I have not come up with an special ability for Michelangelo), and solve the main legality issue of the game (in my mind at least). Side note, the enemies in single player / co-op are planned to be robots.

The game will also likely be renamed again, though I have not come up with a new name yet. It will not be Something Arena this time. It will take time to plan and design all of the changes before I really get started on this, so the next major release (0.6) may still have Ninja Turtles. There will be more on this in a later post.

Changes since the last development status.

* Added missing announcer vocal sound effects. In CTF the announcer now give feedback for flag pickup, capture and return.

* Capturing a flag in CTF, or 1 flag CTF, now shows the capture message in the middle of the screen instead of just in the console notify area.

* Flag messages now have the team name in color (of the team), it looks nice.

* Moving “brushes” (the things the maps are made of) can now push other brushes (if they are set to pushable). While this isn’t that exciting, it should help the process of allowing players to push bushes, to reveal tunnels, doors, etc.

* TGA screenshot support has been replaced with PNG.

* Added PNG screenshot support. The game save additional information in the screenshot to help debugging and be more informative in general. It saves the location of the player’s location so if someone gives me the screenshot I know exactly where they were in the picture. Also saves the version, map, and playername which would be helpful at times.

* Changed Voice over IP to default to off. Users should enable if it they want to use it. I plan to add it to the menu. Currently changing “cl_voip” console variable requires restarting the game to take affect. I plan to fix that before adding it to the menu.

* Bots are somewhat better about shuriken usage. They do not constantly use them until gone done when they have no target anymore…

* Fixed two bugs? One did not currently effect the game, but the other one resulted in the game crashing.