Due to circumstances relating to the IP used, including effects, textures and models acquired from Relic's Homeworld 1 and 2, there will be no mod dump nor any sort of a "release".
What were you planning on doing come release then?
I highly doubt there will be any legal ramifications from releasing abandonware assets for non-profit with the understanding that they are in fact not made by the converters.
I don't have much of a personal stake in this, but I have the understanding that a lot of work was put into converting and tabling the assets into a workable state for the fs2 engine. It's a real pity to see all that work go to the dogs.
For the release part, please go find and read one of the two interviews we've made here. Should explain it nicely.
As for the time spent... not really. the biggest work was figuring out a viable conversion pipeline. having done pretty much all of the conversions myself, i can tell you that that is the one thing on which i spent the least amount of time.
i've spent more time debugging (and learning to read) our shaders, hunting down some bugs in the code with the E, writing up the initial team colors implementation, faffing around with our lua mainhall and trying to get tables balanced into something more decently playable. (and that was never worked out properly anyhow.)
I still stand by my decision as it also prevents anyone foolhardy to try and ressurect this mod. Unless someone exceptional shows up and shows me their work and amazes me, the files are not going out. And my wish is that this project ends, once and for all. No more ressurections, no more half-assed attempts.
I only wish I could've put more time into the project, especially since I've been pretty much absent in the past few years. However, I did enjoy the more active years of TAP and despite the project's closure, it was a quite a good and enjoyable learning experience. Like pecenipicek mentioned, I happened to make some graphical assets over the course of the project. I didn't have time (yet) to go trough all of them, but feel free to contact me or pece if you are interested in them.
I've backed up all the stuff from svn and from our FTP, so if you dont have the originals, if you want i can add them here, under whichever license you'd want
pecenipicek, it takes a lot of force and courage to lead a project like this and even more to come to this conclusion. I haven't been there to support you in the past few years, and I do feel guilty about it. However, if it can be of any comfort, you did a quite outstanding job keeping it up all this time. To the TAP team, best of luck to all of you and your future endeavors.
Thank you. You were one of the reasons why i took over in 2007. Talking with you inspired me, seeing your work on Tanis made me go "**** yeah, we can do this!".
DarkKnight's story and design documents were beautiful
Matththegeek is another person who i can thank for helping me get stuff properly rolling to something playable. Without his help converting models from HW2, i'd get nowhere. His modding expertise from the realm of HW2 was tons of help.
The E was a massive, massive help from the code side. He enabled so many glorious things that i dont know what can i even say to properly describe what his joining to the project did.
However, it was not enough.
Through all of our recruiting drives, i've been faced with lazy modellers, unreachable/nonexistent texture artists, moochers who just wanted to grab the files and the hard work behind them while screaming "DIS SO AWSUM!!!1111", lack of fredders with more experience than making a BoE mission and saying "TIZ AWSUM! TAKE ME IN! TAKE ME IN!" (with a few exceptions).
Over the years, real life took its toll, both on myself and on other people involved. I've changed. It's been glorious 5 years of trying to make it work. I've learned many, many things from scratch.
Yes, i've invested myself in this project heavily. But when you end up being the one holding all the threads together and trying to keep up with making new things to replace old things, it all becomes a bit too much.
And with some things coming up in real life for myself in real life, it was time to definitely call it a day. I've tried. I've done a lot of good things and a lot of bad things. I've drawn people to this mod and i drove them away. To some i was a bastard and an immature idiot at times.
Do i feel bad about not releasing anything? Of course. I feel horrible. But i also feel good. Its over. And to everyone involved, thank you so very much for sticking with me during the past 5 years and good luck with all your future endeavours.
