In an open letter to the community, Twilight War's Vice President of Development Kingsley Montgomery discusses the status of development, answers forum questions, and reveals future plans. It's really a must-read, and it's only available here!February 18, 2005

Development of Twilight War has made it passed another big hurdle. We now have a prototype zone that successfully demonstrates our ability to create a large area. This, in turn, has allowed us to get a good feel for how the overall game graphics will look as we start populating the zone, while also demonstrating some of the basic weapon-fire techniques we will be using, such as recoil and skill-modified accuracy.

Now we move to working on our network architecture, while the art team continues to crank out and refine characters and landscapes. The single-player prototype will be reworked to be more in line with the production process we are just now getting comfortable with (that thanks to some extent from the guys at Valve). The reworked area will be part of the much more detailed multi-player prototype that we should have by mid-year. Once that is complete, we hope to enter full game production.

Though we still have a long road to travel, the team can now show off some things, like early development screen shots, which should be going up on the web site concurrently with this letter. I have time to discuss a few interesting elements that have been popping up on the forums lately.

Some people have been wondering about the world size and whether or not the world will be seamless or zoned. We don’t want to give too much detail away yet. I can say that the world size will be large enough to require exploration with vehicles or mounts. One of the things we are trying to promote is exploration, and so teleporters or transporters of any kind will not be in the game (though there may be other, less instant, quick means of transport). The figure used for the world size before of 1,000 km2 of virtual 3D world space remains our design goal. The world will be segmented into “zones” of varying size, scattered across the North American west. That leaves a lot of room for us to expand post-launch. Some zones will be very large, and others will be very small (a few city blocks). The smaller zones allow us to increase detail for adventurers on foot, and will be used for things like cities, missions, underground areas, and the like. How all of the zones are interconnected will be revealed later in the development cycle.

There are other routes we could have tried, including a totally seamless world, but we did not want to create large under-populated areas that rarely get used. As with all of the online games, there is also the risk of too many players coming together in one small area, which would cause lag under any architecture. While this is more acceptable with traditional stat-based online RPGs, we wanted to minimize the effect because of Twilight War’s first-person combat system. Instancing of zones within a world server will be used to create “copies” of mission zones as needed, but we are trying to avoid instancing larger zones, because, while this does help load distribution, it also destroys a large portion of persistence and uniformity.

Someone else asked about animated movies. There will be an introductory animated video when you start the game, which will explain the basics of the storyline. There will also be the background stories published to the Twilight War website over the coming months which will slowly give everyone a larger view of the world, events, and the creatures that inhabit it.

That is it for now. Please look around the site for the new screenshots (with more coming in later weeks), new Developer Diary entries, and the continuing story of Erebus in the fiction section. Meanwhile, we will keep slaving away...

Kingsley Montgomery
VP Development