Alright guys - this is what's up:

For the past few months or so AOW2 development has basically stalled down as the engine reached critical mass. Fixing a bug caused five more, the palette change broke who knows how many translations to break, not to mention we never even made our mind what the palette should be. I've been on a hiatus for the better part of this year out of lack of interest because of these issues and I've had time to rethink my strategies regarding this.

What's obvious is that fixing up the current beta release to an usable and maintainable result is unfeasible. It just cannot happen - ACS and Zandronum's netcode cannot handle what I coded into the engine and the palette just won't do it either. We got too ambitious and paid a stiff price for that.

So I'm taking the only other option for keeping AOW2 alive and that is rolling back to r2539 and working off that. I'm delaying the menu plans, I'll obviously have to rewrite the thing and with more knowledge of what works and what doesn't I should be able to pull that off.

Regarding stuff like graphics and the like I'm backporting the good stuff from the beta release (weapon sprites, sounds, Oasis revamp, etc). Regarding the tortoise mech, I'm afraid that will have to wait until I have a new menu code up.

Perhaps the most breaking change is that I've ditched almost all texture resources, AOW will be using the texture pack I created for PFD (some cooperative project we are supposedly supposed to do at MXU), which I consider the best texture compilation I've done yet. I'm really proud of that work and I'm excited to exploit its full potential with AOW. The pack also comes with a palette and color map which contains a good set of color and is more loyal to the Doom palette so less stuff should be breaking.

I will retexture the maps - half of which are again removed, the bad maps were cleared out for a reason, though I kept stuff like 11 (Disk Defrag) and 12 (Hell March) and potentially the namesake map 03. I removed AOW21 though, one city map is enough.

I'm not sure when this new approach AOW will be ready for playtesting. Right now I want to merge in the good stuff from the old beta and migrate texturing to PFD (and let that be the last time I ever rename the entire texture set and change the palette!)

That's all for now. I will post more updates as things progress.

Glad to hear this announcement put forward.

Interesting. Nice to see that you have found a way forward. Where can I find the new texture pack ?

, with a few AOW ones

Now that's the spirit
I'm very impressed with your decision to continue work all the way from r2539 even after all the effort you put in the latest beta. That's very brave I would have surely ragequit'd after seeing that the engine isn't good enough to run something I've worked on for a long time.

Still, releasing v15 to the public has its benefits. I think the gameplay in v15 is a lot less frustrating, with a lot less stalemates, in comparison to r2539. I hope you'll keep those gameplay changes (except for the minigun :v).

All that's left to say is good luck and I'll be looking forward to your progress (not just me, other players too)!

Can the PFD resource be used for other projects? (Credits included ofc)

And I thought this site was going to go down...
Glad to see it's back up & this announcement is posted.

The two ones I linked should be the only ones used. Don't load skulltag_data.pk3!

If you need some additional textures, you can add them to your map no problem, just try to prefix them somehow, "K4*" maybe so that there won't be any clashes.

Also some progress on barrens (mind the pistol, it's through a skins/ wad):




Yeah I know I was supposed to just fix the maps but I got a little carried away as usual