Heretic II: Progress Report
12-March-2000: Final progress update by Hans-Joerg Frieden
CURRENT STATUS OF THE HERETIC II PROJECT
We are currently putting finishing touches to the port, and if everything goes OK, Heretic II should be available by the end of this month, or beginning of April latest. We expect to go "gold" this week.
* Note by the webmaster: Heretic 2 has not yet been released at the time of writing, contrary to announcements on some websites!
Installer
The installer has been written, the only problem right now is space considerations, since we intend to put the in-game video sequences onto the CD uncompressed (they take up about 100 Megabytes, and play reasonably fast even from a 4X CD-Rom drive). The installer, as well as the icons, take advantage of OS 3.5 if present.
In-game bugs
The last remaining bugs are currently being ironed out. Most where caused by the rather complicated save/load process, which was very difficult to re-model. One of the team already finished the game now (the only good point about debugging - you get to play your game too :-)
The game can now be played in just 64 Megabytes (which we consider a good improvement from the original 100 Megabytes footprint). The hardware renderer requires a bit more memory, but can be played with slightly reduced texture size. The visual quality loss is virtually undiscernable.
The Heretic Fortress
The freeware addon "The Heretic Fortress" by Wankeroo has been brought up to comply with version 4.0 of the Windows original. The work has been exclusively done by Steffen H�user (in his spare time!), and he did an excellent job too... Currently it is being updated to 4.5.
What is left...
Currently, we're working on finishing the CD. There are quite a lot of things which have to be taken care of, like proper documentation, mastering of the CD, and other such things. The amount of work involved has also delayed our OpenSource release of the MiniGL library, which should have been out already (and will be shortly, promise!).
We're just now in Quality Assurance at Activision, and after that at Ravensoft. They received a test machine from us for this purpose, and we're sure they won't take too much longer for this.
Preordering still available
You can still pre-order Heretic II from Titan Computer for a limited time now at DEM 89. Don't miss this opportunity!
We have decided to make Heretic II Amiga a two-CD set. But we won't tell you what is on the second CD...
Hyperion at St. Louis
If you are going to the St. Louis show, make sure to stop at our booth and see Heretic II demo'ed extensively there!
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