Bascially the mod is almost done. Primary work on all the factions is done. Most of the artwork is done and the rest should be finished by tomorrow. The initial balance for the mod is being worked on right now and hopefully will be ready for testing by early next week. Skirmish AI is going to be worked on by Lauri as the mod is balanced and so hopefully that'll all work out and the mod will have AI. Some corners had to be cut in order to get the mod to this point so quickly. One corner involved some of the really cool features of the mod such as the nazgul triple mount which won't be completed now. Another was keeping the mod compatible with the campaign, which it no longer is (ie you cannot play the campaign with the mod and expect it to be balanced. It may even crash or have bugs. I don't know as I'm not testing it). However by giving these up it means that the initial release should be bug free and will come alot sooner than if I had taken the time to add in the special features (which could always be added in later I suppose).
I don't have any new screenshots at this time but I'm going to have the testers take screens of their favorite stuff whenever they get the mod and I'll upload those to the site and here in a screenshots thread for everyone to see.
There's alot of cool stuff for mordor that I guess I haven't posted about so I'll mention some of them briefly. I've made a new really low rez morgul castle that should run on any system with a video card (it runs fine on my old 32mb desktop but my laptop without a video card struggles with it). The new low resolution castle looks almost identical to the high rez one with the main differences being the low model details on the gate and walls as well as a slight change to the morgul glow on the low rez. All in all, it still looks amazing. And if your computer supports the higher quality castle then you can switch to high or ultra high graphics and you get it. The low rez is available on medium, low, and the settings in between. There's no other difference between graphics settings though (to my knowledge) other than EA stuff.
Other mordor stuff... sauron is in-game and working. He's not quite as fun as the balrog to play with but I think he's about equal in terms of strength or he will be after balancing. I finally got the armored troll with sword working and he's pretty cool. Grishnakh and the other heroes are all very cool looking. In fact, all the factions heroes are really cool and when they are together it definately feels like the movies and books with heroes everywhere.
What really amazes me though is how much of a difference the new leadership glows and the new artwork makes. It feels like a different game sometimes... just really really neat.
I'll also briefly mention here that I'm going off to school this saturday (8/16) and will be out of touch (away from internet) for that following week. After that I'll be on campus and will be spending as much time as I can with the mod team and testers trying to finish the mod. There will very likely be an assistant mod leader either joining the team (if I can find someone) or comming from the team itself who will be in charge of the daily balancing and such while I am away and possibly when I come back too. *If you are an experienced modder and are interested please PM me. Timeframe could be between 1 week and 4 depending on how long you'd be willing to help*
-GothmogtheOrc
