For those that have been following project, you've seen its had some long delays between progress. Every time I started working on the project I lost motivation or got distracted. Life happens of course. What's more is that when I did get into development I kept hitting the same roadblocks whether they be technical, lack of skill, or how the project's scope seemed to confine me to a goal that I more and more found to be impractical and perhaps even harmful to the project as a whole.
The original scope of the project was to make a near 1:1 remake of the original N64 game's multiplayer but with online functionality. Over time I backpedaled and allowed textures to be larger and bake things that would normally be handled by vertex colors. After that I backpedaled further with environment lighting being per pixel instead of vertex, followed by realizing that sound FX and fonts were commercial and both cost a lot and had licensing that even if I bought them would be hard to add to an open source project like this. I then greenlit the idea that new content could be added that the original didn't have.
The final nail in the coffin was when I tried to animate the weasel character for Heist again and came across the same topology issues that made animating without glitches difficult. The original game had glitches with animation too since they mostly used the same animation sets on a diverse cast of characters, but frankly I wasn't ready to make shape keys to manually correct glitches like that for each character. Once I realized I had already betrayed the initial premise of the project as well as kept hitting roadblocks with animation, I decided to re-evaluate things.
The small community that's grown around this project has pitched various ideas as to what it should be. This could be new content, a graphics style, gameplay changes, etc. While a fair few just wanted the original game but with online multiplayer, I could see that at least people were flexible with major aspects of it. After thinking it over I determined that so long as the designs and core gameplay of the original were intact, and that new content or settings were clearly marked and easily separated for online matches, that I could reasonably do so without betraying the portion of the community wanting a more rigid take on the original. I've went over the main changes in the project's summary on this website, but feel free to check out the sub-reddit post regarding it or ask me on Discord if you still have questions.
This article is mainly to announce to those that stumble across this project that any videos or screenshots out there prior to the date of this post is obsolete. Assets are being remade, the engine and my tools are being updated, and the scope and direction of the project has changed. With effort on my part, support and feedback from the community, and a hint of luck, I feel this will be for the better of the project and therefore the community surrounding it.
