Black Mesa May News: Holy fuck

[Tinbe]

Go check it out yourself
And here's some highlights I picked out - though you should still check out the full news article yourself.

Xen - Final Art/Polish

We are driving though each of the six maps, capping off the final tasks, and doing little bits of housekeeping to make the levels shine. We are also taking a hard look at the performance of each level to make sure the game runs as smooth as possible on the myriad of machines out there.

Gonarch - Final Art/Polish

We now have Gonarch arted and lit, with all the technical effects and animations implemented. All that’s left is to polish the animations and effects, and to make sure the player clipping is smooth throughout (as well as some water features). We are really proud of the many encounters, interactions, and fights with Gonarch throughout the chapter, and can’t wait to see how they play out there in the wild.

Interloper - Design Lock/Art

We’re design locking the chapter while also building out the art and lighting. ... We want to keep Interloper mostly under wraps, and the parts we do want to show off aren't quite ready for the spotlight. So instead, here is some art to give everyone a hint of what is in store for Interloper:

Old Concept for Interloper Exteriors By Eddie Hinestroza

Included this whole bit for clarification's sake.

This is how we plan to release in the coming months:

Technical Beta - This will be a couple of maps to test the latest engine, and test the performance of our maps. This will be public, but more or less of a stealth release for people who are interested in helping us test. This way we can test on a lot of machines quickly, and have time to implement any crucial feedback.

Open Beta - After we have implemented the feedback from the technical test, we will push the entire game to open beta. This will give us testing for the rest of the levels to again make sure the game releases as smooth as possible.

Release - Though we are expecting all the betas to run well, if you have been waiting for the full Black Mesa experience, this is what you want to wait for. Once we know the beta does not set people’s machines on fire, we will switch the full game over to the main Steam branch and announce its full release! After this, we will continue to monitor feedback and ideas from the community for Xen, and release periodic bug fixes and updates.

Discord

In addition to these staggered releases, we plan on launching a public discord to work in conjunction with our Steam forums. This will be a great place to chat, report bugs, and get mini updates from the team. We are not sure when we will be launching this, but it will probably be with one of the betas.

Thanks Again

Apologies for the silence over the last few months. We have been really diving into our work. Every once in a while we poke our heads up to see how far we have come, and how close we are to finishing this massive undertaking. We have more planned updates and fun stuff to show off on the way to the borderworld! Thanks!

Personally, I'm quite excited to see how Interloper will play out with this statement:

We want to keep Interloper mostly under wraps, and the parts we do want to show off aren't quite ready for the spotlight.

After all, it's the segment where you can actually dwell among non-hostile Vortigaunts.

 

[Tzula]

goodbye fps.

 

[Postal]

thought that was a no man's sky screenshot for a second then