We had a chance to check in on the progress of the nearly complete team-based shooter Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising at E3 2004. The game was originally scheduled to ship at the beginning of next week, but the team decided to take an extra few weeks to add an additional layer of polish or two. This includes new visual effects, like a heat trail added to firing rockets (in addition to the already implemented particle smoke trails on discharged rockets), and physical modeling of vehicles rocking back and forth as they sustain heavy fire. The NovaLogic team has also added a number of other visual effects, including alpha blending on grass and other vegetation to make the environments more believable, animation blending on character models, and animated hand signals that characters will give when issuing move, fire, and hold orders.
The game otherwise seems like a very solid multiplayer shooter at this point. The game has been in extensive beta testing for some months from a sizable contingent of beta testers, and it has proven to be extremely stable, even in multiplayer matches with as many as 226 players online in a single game. Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising is scheduled to ship in June.
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