This blog entry, if anyone ever reads it, is just a little back-story about my experimental project that I'll be releasing along with RMU 2.0; Pathogen. Pathogen just started as a simple experiment, taking the same system of Hope Afloat Remastered, and doing a lot of major edits to it. The original Hope Afloat was made with the same script system as Calvinchun's Resident Evil: Remake, but, when I first stumbled upon the engine, it was incredibly buggy, and was in a barely-working state, really. Anything you wanted to add that was contrary to what was in the demo was a huge task, or was completely disallowed by the script itself.

Essentially, it took about a year after Hope Afloat's first release, but I ended up re-writing the majority of the script in a hope to make it more efficient. I also had a lot of experimental projects, such as Apocalyptica, which was a very, very old project that was a Nazi Zombie attempt. By making this project I found out a lot about the scripts capabilities and flaws, some of which are completely un-fixable. I found that after you hit about 20 or so weapons, the coding in the common events for the ammunition completely breaks, which took a little to fix, along with that you can't have a zombie's event reset on the map and have it with more than 0 health without transferring to a separate map and back again.

Pathogen started in a similar manner to this, which was primarily experimenting with different things. Things, such as the HUD, which takes a few scripts to function properly, I experimented with redesigning them in Pathogen, in case I broke something in the code itself in Hope Afloat, which has happened before, and ended up with me losing a lot of my work. Pathogen was basically a copy of Hope Afloat so I could screw with the scripts without potentially losing work. It's also a testing ground and that, elements of the game which are properly working and efficient I can also apply to Hope Afloat.

One of the first things I did was change the HUD. With a lot of things in Hope Afloat that change the way the weapon behaves, the icons have gone from just guns to guns with different brands, different bullets, etc.. That's far too much to be put into a 32x32 icon, so making the HUD show the menu icon is a very good indicator of what weapon you are actually using.

The second thing, and primary part of the project, is making the weapons realistic. Lots of weapons in the system are reloaded practically instantly, along with their fire-rate, so. A pump action shotgun, for example, is reloaded instantly. A huge change that will be seen in Pathogen and Hope Afloat is weapon realism. This includes loading rounds and shells into shotguns and revolvers, but, remaining in true Resident Evil fashion, loading weapons in this manner requires you to stand still with the gun drawn. Rather than being an inconvenience, it requires the player to think more strategically, and is a reference to the old Resident Evil games.

There's a lot of planned things for Pathogen, and I really hope you guys will like it when I release it. Until then, take it easy guys.

~Tomo2000.