The interesting convention facts first: The 17th FedCon seemed to resist any economic depression we're suffering from. There were more people than ever before - over 5000 - meeting at the Maritim Hotel Bonn in Germany. Having invited guest stars from the popular Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Eureka and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles among others, FedCon started with a promising line-up.
Talking about guest stars: I was happy to meet Summer Glau, the talented actress who has become popular through her role as River Tam in Joss Whedon's scifi western "Firefly". She just recently continued her career with the leading role of the female Terminator Cameron in the TV series Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Despite all rumors, she explained that the decision about the renewal or cancelation of the series will be made by FOX on May 18th. FOX is currently reviewing various pilots and wether they'll keep T:SCC will depend on how much they like the new pilots. With still some hope left, she explained that if the series will be continued, the entire team hopes to shoot more scenes in the future setting in the third season.
This could turn out as an interesting opportunity for our mod Terminator Apocalypse. More future settings mean more potential maps for the mod that line up with what you've seen on TV. In addition to the upcoming Terminator Salvation movie, that is - which will show us the most extensive vision of the world after Skynet took over.

Our Indie game Andromeda: The Darkest Night also received some interesting input. Conventions like these are what makes the world appear so small. At the booth of propworx, the company that sells all the original BSG props, I met Thomas Parham who explained to me that two of his friends were previously staff writers for Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: Zack Stentz and Ashley Miller. Ironically enough, both of them are now co-producers of the previously mentioned T:SCC series. What turned out to be interesting was the fact that no one from the previous production staff knows what happened to the intellectual properties. Fireworks and Tribune Entertainment both got washed away by financial problems and the head company Tribune - one of the largest media companies in the world - has just recently undergone filing. Although this makes no concrete difference for us right now, potential expansions into a commercial product seem out of reach without a clear ownership. Imagine something like that would happen to big franchises like Star Wars!

Speaking of which: It was a pleasure to meet all the folks from the 501st again with their great Stormtrooper and Clonetrooper outfits. Those guys are clearly the most amazing costume group around the world. While they already belong to the 'inventory' of FedCon, there was one very special and extremely funny situation that I would like to share with all of you Star Wars fans out there! As every year, FedCon featured a costume contest. During the break in which the jury makes their decision on the winners, there's usually some special act on stage and this year, it was the amazing Saarlac Survivors Band.
Ever imagined creatures from the Star Wars universe performing on stage together as a band to well-known pop and rock songs with Darth Maul being the lead? Me neither. Here are some impressions from their hilarious stage performance:


Fun aside: Despite Invision Games not hosting a booth this year, I ran into quite a few people who recognized me from the previous year and asked about the status of Star Wars: The New Era, our Source mod. As most of you know, our initial plan was to release last year, right after FedCon. So, what lead to this immense delay? In short: Technology.
The long explanation is that our playtests at FedCon revealed a rather critical issue with the weapon system. With all those perfectionists on our team, our goal was to provide realtime blaster bolts as opposed to the default zero-time bullets used in the Source Engine. However, it turned out that players couldn't quite hit what they aimed at. After weeks of investigation, we discovered the cause for this: All projectiles would stop in mid-air after being spawned for a brief percentage of a second. Enough time however to make the players miss - especially on strafing runs.

What followed was a quite depressing search for a solution. Our head coder EmielRegis tried various different options to bypass this problem, but all playtests ended with a disappointment. So in the end, we decided to throw one year of research and attempts into the trash and go back to zero-time projectiles. To suit our scifi setting better, we connected VALVe's particle system to create good-looking plasma bolts of all kinds while giving it a performance boost due to the system's multi-core support.
The good news: Finally, the playtests worked out fine. The bad news: VALVe's favourite activity in breaking modules of the SDK just had to hit the particle system at that time, which did throw us back two further months.

Despite all of our bad luck, the entire situation also had a positive aspect. With various new and very talented level designers who joined in the meanwhile, we'll be able to ship the first release with several additional maps for both, TDM and CTF mode. While the pesky weapon system caused us to push back several other little bugfixes, we feel that we're finally approaching the finish line. In the upcoming weeks, we hope to show you some new material you've never seen before!

Slash - May 12, 2009 Sounds like this years FedCon was really cool. Thanks for the update and I look forward to seeing more of this great looking mod soon!

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