Just a quick headsup after a longer period of silence to show you guys that "Phase 2" is still alive. I've posted a new video of the current build :



As you may noticed I redid the whole user interface again, as the "old" design didn't prove to be as smooth and user-friendly as I wanted it to be, so heavy-harted I threw it away and did a new UI from scratch. But the good thing is that I also redid the UI for the mainmenu, battlefield and endgame, so that the UI now feels and looks like it's made from one piece, giving it a "noble" look throughout the whole game.

Other than that a lot of things happened behind the scenes, especially when it comes to performance. The UI was performing pretty bad and shifted the performance limitateion to the CPU, so that even a new graphics card didn't change the FPS much. So I spent several weeks optimizing it (caching texture IDs and vertex arrays, display lists, optimized hit tests, etc.) which made up at least 200% better performance depending on the scenario.

There is still much to do (especially in terms of content), but it's steadily growing towards at least a beta release. Can't say when due to the fact that real-life is taking a lot of time, and I often prefer to relax from it in front of my PS3 instead of hacking lines of code into Delphi. But it's moving along and looking great, so hopefully I'll have a beta ready for early 2012!