Well, when I'm not busy with real life stuff, I've been busy partying with my good pal Fred. Things get lonely with just us so we've been looking for more people to play with us. But that's the brunt of it. In fact, the only thing that's
not written about the next act's story is a tidbit that I can release to the public.
I'm sure you guys don't want to read our notes on it. We've dabbled a bit in some effects work, but as I said most of the work is simply FREDing everything. (without more freders, that'll still take a bit of time
)
And while I'm at it I'll talk some more about Exposition since GB brings it up. I tried talking about it on IRC a week or two ago, but some people got in some kind of huge argument and everyone stopped paying attention. Arguably the biggest selling point of Exposition was that it featured entirely new ships and focused on a previously unexplored topic of GTA history. But that was a while ago. FSO and FSU moves pretty quickly on its own, projects notwithstanding, and simply put the combination of a changing engine and aging resources don't lend itself well to aging. We could've sat around waiting for modelers and artists to work on things, and for a while we did. Then we stopped. The story and game play were something else. While largely intact, we could have torn it apart and restructured it into something that it wasn't and what the original team didn't intend it to be, all while in the midst of making sure the mod itself still worked with more modern FSO builds.
The 158th is more of a campaign paradigm rather than a mod unto itself. Each act is essentially an independent work, a record of what one particular squadron has experienced throughout a good chunk of history of the GTA and GTVA. But rach act has an overarching story that binds them together, loosely at first but it becomes
much more apparent as the player progresses through the acts, eventually the latter parts will focus
only on that story, and how the 158th plays a role in it's... "solution," if you could really call it that.
Once we finish that arc, we'll come back to fix up Exposition in earnest and add new acts ad nauseum until people lose interest (at most loosely related to the story arc referred to above), or there just isn't any more time to tell people that the 158th squadron is doing cool stuff. Whichever comes first.
Anyway, hope that helped. I'm sure there are more questions, does anyone want to ask them?