The voice has spoken!

image source :

 http://www.blogcdn.com/news.bigdownload.com/media/2009/11/jason_hallnov11.jpg

August 02 2012, I felt a great disturbance in the Bloodo'sphere. A million voices cried out in tumultuous joy, then all fell silent as we went back to eating our cheezy puffs. Just after that, Jace Hall, CEO and founder of Monolith Productions popped up on the  Postmortem and posted this in a new thread:

 

Hello,

My name is Jason (Jace) Hall and some of you may know of me.

I have been contemplating the idea bringing Blood back and was wondering how people might feel about it or if they were interested in helping me to do it.

To be clear, I am thinking of bringing the ORIGINAL Blood game back as it was, with functionality alterations/enhancements that are similar but superior to ZDAEMON's. I would also make it work on all platforms, and not just PC. There are other things as well...

I have a very specific vision in mind for what I'd like to do, but before I go off and do it - I wanted to speak directly with the Blood community and see what the thoughts are.

My goal of course is for this all to be free, and all about gameplay and fun. You can rest assured that I have the resources to bring BLOOD back properly but like I said, I'm hoping to have the community participate in all this if it wants to so we can all do it together. This site is great and it would be great to see the Blood community grow!

What do you all think?

Jace

 

Jace Hall

 This set in motion a great deal of uncomfortable shuffling. Many questioned the identity of the poster. Some didn't know what to think. Eventually we all came around and the expected demands, questioning and offish fawning ensued. Eventually, Jace posted the following:

Hello all.

I did not expect such a tremendous response from my basic inquiry but it is good to see and has certainly encouraged me further as I evaluate this.

I've seen a lot of good ideas and wish list items, and it would be great if there was some way to create an ongoing master list that everyone can see and contribute to so that it can be available if I decide to really move forward on the idea.

I have reached out to all the necessary companies/rights holders to verify that previous conversations that I have had with them in the past are still valid and so I am waiting to hear back on the status of that before I can come to any final conclusion in the matter. At the moment, Gamescon is a bit of a distraction for them but after that I should be able to better engage and get to the bottom of things.

We shall see how this goes. Baby steps.
Jace

And this is how things stand as of now. There's little point in commenting, it's really best if you read through the whole thread at posty. Have fun and be polite.

Jace Hall's Blood port.

Cradle to Grave is in the deepest of deep freezes. Dimebog, one of C2G's chief dev's stated the following in a thread at the Postmortem:

" It was put on hold quite a while ago due to some technical issues. I personally wanted to wait and see what happens with BloodXL. Eventually work may be continued. Such a huge part of the work (the most difficult stuff) is done that you could say the project has even passed the point of no return. There is still a lot to be done though - especially in the field of content and such. There would be no point in releasing it without either a proper campaign or functional multiplayer and we don't have either of those."

So M210's BloodTC for Eduke32 and BloodXL are the main contenders, with some recent GzBlood+ activity being reported at the Zdoom forums.

DEATH WISH • Add-On for Blood: Final Mission Completed!

DEATH WISH • Add-On for Blood: Final Mission Completed!: "Final mission completed. No spoiler preview for this one — you'll have to see this for yourself. Now I just have to finish up the walkthroug..."


HaHa! A question mark for the screenie. What a Monolithian way to inform us of that last boss! Great work Bloatoid!

Hyper calls it quits.

1. Hypertension is no more. Corbin, lead developer for HT, has decided to suspend all work for now. A Blood recreation is out of the question although a future shooter with entirely new content is still a possibility . The situation is fluid, stay tuned.
   

Just what the internet needs- another dead blog.

Well, what can I say. This blog has been dead for over a year and a half now. In all honesty I've been feeling a little glib about the future of this game for a good portion of 2010 and the first few months of this year. Things have changed for the better of late though, and there's way more news in the community than this quick post will deal with. To give a severely simplified recap:

There's a new kid on the block. It's called BloodXL and like a bat out of Blood heaven it's hit the cultic gamers' scene with a force equal to 5 burning TNT barrels. BloodXL is old news to be honest, nearly a year old and just months away from a beta release. The the team leader, luciusDXL plans to backwards engineer Blood for use on a modified Dark Forces engine called BloodXL. This team plans for a compatibility with the retail version so tight That you'll be able to run old user made blood mods created with mapedit. More on this one later. Here's a link

http://xlengine.com/

Cradle to grave, a Blood mod for Eduke32 had been on hiatus now for so long that I wasn't certain Dimebog and crew were going to continue. The team members are still fielding questions as recently as June so chances are they've got something in the works. We'll hear more from them soon hopefully.
First, the bummer news concerning Hyper.

Hypertension has gone without a proper level designer for quite some time. To make matters worse, the maps Fiend left us with are of a very high quality, so much so that 2 Doom mappers have been intimidated out of the job after joining. Right now we need a mapper at Boom level competence or greater who's into fairly detailed level design. If there are any contenders for Fiend's throne, please drop us a line.

Now for the good stuff.

We've added 2 new script coders to the team. These folks are doing highly specified tasks, one is focusing his efforts on cleaning and perfecting the RTS programming and will join the team formally if the code becomes stable enough. The second is a return coder Tyler Jessilynn, who specializes in COAL script. COAL is a LUA base script that can do a few things RTS can't so look for even more Blood like gaming in the future.
Finally, Corbin, the lead developer and creator of HT, has moved into C++ Doom source for HyperEDGE which is now a separate branch of the EDGE source port. His accompleshments thus far (with help from some old hands in ther Doom community) are:

MD3 model support .

GL fog

Split screen mode, a must for U console gamers out there. Here's a video of the new split screen feature

The war is over!

After close to a year of nearly non-stop combat, Kurt Fuhr, sole creator of the Blood2 Resurrection mod, has had his account deleted over at the Transfusion forums. I do not for the life of me understand how one human being could devote so much time and energy into smearing another modders work. I for one am glad this situation is finally at an end. An almost constant barrage of accusations has weathered every Bloodite's soul and patience alike.

I cannot speak knowledgeably of some of the other mods. They are either progressing silently or are on some form of hiatus. Hypertension however has quickly risen to become the jewel in the Blood modding community's crown. Corbin, along with a greatly reduced staff, has created one of the most promising mods for Blood in the last 12 years. It will be extremely multiplatform, supporting Dreamcast, PC, Linux, Mac, and now even the Sega x32 gaming platform. This is as close to having Blood's source code as we can hope to have folks. I only wish others within this community could get beyond personal issues and see the potential of what Hypertension is.
To paraphrase Kurt Fuhr;
"It didn't have to be this way."



In other news, Postmortem has gotten an a new web home.
http://forums.the-postmortem.com/

I make no pretense about my relations with the staff there. Still it is the most active Blood forum and with all animosities aside, there is a wonderful thread about the work of Kevin Kilstorm stickied up in the main Blood section. It is a "must see" as far as I'm concerned.

http://forums.the-postmortem.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1181

Oh, guess what? I'm slapping together another slovenly fanfic.
All of you fans of profound grammatical retardation (PGR disorder) will have a huge treat in store. It's stuck at 19,000 words for now. If I can get some time off, expect a release this February.

Happy new year to all, friends and foes alike.

Attack of the killer egos!

The turmoil hinted at in March is now the norm within the world of Bloodites. I cannot separate myself from what has happened. It's probably for the better that I write about the contortions I've been having to endure because of a controversy that could not be defused. I've been writing about Hypertension in most of my updates, posts and even an interview since January. I will continue to do so. While not a strict recreation of Blood, the Hypertension team has every right to do what they are doing. What engine they choose to use or the degree of faithfulness to the original game cannot be offered as valid excuses for attempting to sabotage someones mod.

I'm sad to report that just such actions have been committed by prominent members of the Blood community. I intend continued support for this mod as long as they try to make a game based on the Blood universe.


There, I needed to say all that. I've had my account at postmortem deleted over this issue (by my request) and the accusations of stealing ideas or game concepts is a baseless one as far as I'm concerned.