News - January 2004

25th January '04
January Update II - New skins, map previews, the Grumman Wildcat takes to the skies and new Work-In-Progress pictures!
As always things progress fast here at BG42 and the team are in full swing at the minute.

Gurki has been on a skinning mission to improve some of our vehicle skins and add new options for some of our aircraft :

 

Ju87 Stuka
Hungarian
FW190
Snow Camo
King Tiger
Jagdpanther
StuG III
Eastern Front

Next up is news of four maps in different stages of development.

Waxx, author of The Swamp, is busy testing his latest creation Berlin Streets. Set in the ravaged streets of the German capital this promises close-quarter battles with an abundance hiding places to launch assaults from.
Huskerpat is also busy mapping. He is working on a D-day paradrop into Normandy with the working title of Day of Days.
Preview pictures of these two maps can be seen here.
Not to be outdone Loki is busy on a dedicated Naval map for all the salty sea-dogs dogs out there, YAR!, while the ever present Gurki is taking to the skies with what promises to a very special map indeed!

Jammer, Suhren and Gurki have conspired to build code and skin the Grumman Wildcat for the best Naval aviators of the USN. They've put together two variants, the F4F-3 armed with 4xMGs + 2 bombs and the F4F-4 with 6xMGs. This little gem pits its might against the sweet handling Japanese Zero. Here are a series of great shots :

 

Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat
   
F4F-3
Grumman F4F-4 Wildcat
   
F4F-4
  
 

Finally I'm very happy to update the Work-In-Progress pages for the second time this month with the latest in equipment being built for the BG42 inventory. Take a look at our latest WIP pictures.

Vimeous

 

12th January '04
January Update - Work-In-Progress, PC Gamer magazine & Battlefield 1942 Patch 1.6
Welcome to 2004! We hope you all had a great holiday but it's back to business and an update on some of the progress the BG42 team have made.

  • First of all it's a while since we showed some of our work-in-progress so visit here for some an idea of the models we've been working on.
  • Yet more creative mayhem as last weekend some of the team got together for a filming session so look for yet more movie madness in the future.
  • Skinning is getting back on the move and as a first example here's a fully revised and reworked Matilda II desert skin:

Do you live in the UK? BattleGroup42 has made a brief appearance in the January edition of PC Gamer! Many thanks go to Mark Sutherns for being very complimentary and hope he and the readers of PC Gamer enjoy the mod as much as we do!

EA have recently announced patch 1.6 for Battlefield 1942. Most important for followers of BattleGroup42 is this part of the latest community update released on the 9th Jan. :

"We've tested most of the mods with the 1.6 patch and a few are not working correctly. The mods which are problematic include:

  • Interstate '42
  • Galactic Conquest
  • Eve of Destruction
  • Battlegroup 42

We will be releasing a debug executable with the 1.6 patch. This debug will log assertion errors, allowing modders to determine what's causing problems in their mod as well as optimize it for best performance."

The full community update can be found here.

Clearly we will be looking closely at the code to determine exactly how much work is needed. BG42 1.0 will not be ready for release when the 1.6 patch first appears so we will assess what is needed before announcing how we will update our users.
Rest assured we will work as swiftly as possible to rectify the situation!

So there you have it the BG42 team is hard at work once again. The assault on 2004 begins!

Vimeous