I wanted to take a few moments to give you the info on the next ChaosUT2 Release, what we are going to Call PR3.5
First the bad stuff. It was rushed and had a contest deadline not been coming up today, we would have held this in a bit more to polish it. However there are some events that happened that I think you should know about. Lets go back to the 3rd Phase of the MSU contest, with our PR3.0 version. Right after we released it, we started to work on the bugs that we found. The game plan was to follow up PR3.0 with a small bug fix patch. Ideally we wanted to get the patch out with in a few weeks. However there just were some reasons why that did not happen. It turned out to take us 5 weeks to get the PR3.01 patch to you folks. Which means we lost 3 weeks out of our plan that was set aside to work on new stuff. Thus with the Phase4 Contest about 6 weeks away, we had to reduce the number of things we planned to work on. About 5 days after we start working on new stuff Epic contacts us about a possibility of Chaos being on the what was called Gold Edition CD, now call the ECE. We had been on the GOTYE of UT99 and with Id's Extremities CD so this was nothing new to us. And of course we could not say no
The only caveat is that Epic gave us a aggressive schedule with new content locked in only a few days time. And a target size of the mod which required us to trim out some of the existing content (ie not new stuff). Needless to say we had to cut out more stuff in order to hit the new deadline and size. Once we got the new stuff in we had a few weeks to work on polish and bug fixing which we did. However we could NOT add anything new. This lasted right up until we gave them the Final Build which will be used on the ECE. Now we had less than 2 weeks to get ready for the Phase4 MSU Contest. We spent it adding back in the the content we had to strip as well as doing a final few tweaks. So to sum it up it was an very trying time for us. Lots of deadlines to hit. And with summer being a time when people tend to take vacation tied in with a few Hurricane's, development of this version was the hardest one we have had in a long time. That being said we never got a chance to tweak the Hoverboard as much as we would have liked. It has come a long way. It has a some cool new effects, a player can use all of the functionality of the Chaos Weapons when riding it (Change Ammo, AWO, Use Melee's), the user can grapple while they ride it, both normal and alt fire of the weapon your hold works well, ect. But we still had few things to work out, like the HUD. Should it show a "Vehicle" HUD, or show a "normal" HUD. Or something in-between. And I had written a MUT to swap out vehicles like we do with weapons, however that did not work right. So for now its still an "Easter egg" but one that's more functional then before. And there are a few more things we would have liked to tweak more. Relic damage for one. Some felt the current damage/armor/regen/vengeance are too strong while others think they are ok and some think they are still a bit week. And there were a few bugs we simply did not get time to fix
Please let be clear on this. This IS NOT A BUGGY VERSION OF CHAOS. Just we normally would have fixed or tired to fix every bug we can or knew about. There were a few really minor ones that may not be comptly fixed and had it not been for a deadline we would have held this up for a week or two to ensure they are all dead.However there are some new things in PR3.5 You all know about the Relics. We have also added a TeamDM that supports medals and melee. We have a few new models for the Armor Shard and Shields. The proxies now get board when sitting in their ammo boxes, so expect them to jump around and mutter stuff. ChaosCTF got an overhaul to make it more functional complete (flag finder works better, flags dropped in pain zones are handled better, bots a bit more efficient, ect) as well as some new tweaks (a warm up mode). The WebAdmin, MapList Editor and MapVote now supports vCTF as well as CTF maps for the ChaosCTF game. The turret beacon that is shot out to mark where a new turret beams in now has health, so you can damage an enemies beacon preventing their turret from being beamed in. There are more tweaks to the game as well as many bugs that were fixed.
To wrap this long post up, PR3.5 will be out later today. Its a good build with lots of good stuff in it. Its not a prefect build and we plan to start right way with fixing any of the bugs that we/you find and tweaking it more as per your feedback.
YAY 
