Hello everyone and happy new year! As usual, we wish the best for everyone, not only in this date.. but every single day. I hope you guys have enjoyed the
new year's gift. A hell of a gift, to be quite humble.
Anyway, 2013 was an excellent year for PPM in many ways:
-> We've been more active than in the previous years, specially by the end of the year.
-> We've covered
the latest Command & Conquer Free To Play on Gamescom,
with all travel expensespaid by EA, and... well... unfortunately,
the game was cancelled later, but
it wasn't our fault at all.
-> The technology behind PPM has advanced considerably. We have a much better
News Tracker, tracking the latest news in our projects and forums at the top of our site.
Our menus now have subsections, which allowed us to cover multiples games (non C&C ones) in our sites. We are also able to host huge download files without having our bandwidth obliterated by bots, allowing us to
save important files for modders from extinction and
distribute freeware games. The forums are also more stable (the recent error 503s are not related to PPM),
better, with more features for the users and for the admin as well. There was only one
downgrade in our technology where we were forced to drop support for comparison of files from different revisions in our SVN.
-> We have
expanded the coverage of the site into other games such as
OpenRA,
Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert 1,
Renegade,
Starcraft 1, Starcraft 2, Warcraft 3 and Fallout 3.
-> We had some major mod releases such as
The Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.12,
D-Day 3.7b patch,
Red Dawn 2013,
Crossfire 0.8,
Tiberian Sun Squared Open Beta.
-> A couple of mods have joined PPM such as
World Domination,
C&C: Mashup.
->
Ares has expanded the options of Yuri's Revenge mods tremendously and some of them can be attractive to Tiberian Sun modders as well, with many features related to Tiberium being supported in the
latest 0.5 version. The future for it is unclear, but I'd say that the Bounty logic seems to be a strong candidate for the next version.
-> Our modding tools have advanced.
OS SHP Builder can be safely used to mod Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1. Several tools to render
Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2,
Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Dawn were strongly updated.
TMP Shop became an important tool to expand the terrain types from TS and RA2. While
Voxel Section Editor III's progress was limited by few optimizations and new slow method to extract the texture atlas, its technique to convert voxel models into 3D models has been
published as a full paper in a high level international conference in
Arequipa, Peru.
And there were several contests, file submissions, tutorials and much more.
Anyway, while the recapitulation of the year in the paragraphs above looks interesting, let's look back to
our plans for 2013 and see what was really done:
->
Expand the site to cover non-C&C games: That objective has really advanced a lot in this year, although the approach was different. My original idea was the use of subportals. Maybe they will happen, but for now, we have just reorganized our menus.
->
Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: Unfortunately, we didn't have any practical advances with that in 2013. Most things lies in theories at the moment and the texture atlas extraction did not obtain the expected results yet. It should change in 2014.
->
News coverage on Tiberian Twilight, Generals 2 and Tiberium Alliances: Tiberian Twilight did not receive any news at all, although we now mirror a Mod SDK for it in our left menu. Tiberian Alliances was totally ignored and that will hardly change for 2014. Generals 2 is past, unfortunatelly, but we did a good coverage of it. If a new Command & Conquer game gets announced in 2014 or Generals 2 returns, we will be covering it here.
->
Motivate modders to play C&C games older than Tiberian Twilight: Once again, mission accomplished. Any doubts?
And, so, what about
2014?
->
Expand the site to become more popular with games beyond Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 scope: We are slowly adding content for other games here, but we are not getting many modders interested to discuss them in our community yet. We'll try to change this situation by adding more content and trying to approach communities from other games.
->
Progress with VXLSE III's 3D model export feature: This is our ultimate goal to become a significant community that modifies or develops 3D games. We have many voxel assets that would be very useful in newer games if we are able to convert them.
->
Attract more high quality mods: We need fresh blood and attractive content in this place. PPM is still an attractive place to have forums to advertise your projects and it still holds a community with skilled modders and artists to improve the quality of your project in the long term.
->
Improve methods to organize our content: The News Tracker is a nice way to organize the news that happens in this place, but there are other ways to organize the content that we may explore in 2014, such as using
hashtags.
->
Improve news coverage from other games and communites: Nowadays, we are covering news related to RTS Command & Conquer games and OpenRA, while we want this place to become a modding reference for every game. Although we have channels where everyone may post a news, such as our
Community News Forum, we shouldn't have to rely only on our community. We need to be more pro-active. Our plan to do that is to improve our techniques to import RSS feeds to our forums without simply posting a clone of the news from other sites. I don't know if we'll get that ready in 2014.
->
A new PPM Network Bar: We may eventually drop Revora's network bar and build our own, focusing on what do we have to offer here.
And that's it. I hope you enjoy PPM in this year and help it to become a better place. Stay tuned here and you'll certainly have a lot of fun.
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