We have a new and fresh forum. It now uses phpBB v3. Re-registration is necessary. The old forum will be available until the end of the month.

In the last months I took a break from bringing the mod forward because I needed time to think about the concept. I didn't want to make quick decisions that might turn out to be bad ones so I took my time. Now let me share my thoughts with you.

1. Engine
The hardest decision I made was to change the engine. Though "CryEngine 2" itself is very good technically, I was very disappointed with the documentation for programmers. I just checked again and there is still just one little page in the official Programmers Manual which explains how to compile the DLL. I am also not very happy with the mod support in general. When I compiled a custom DLL and setup the mod I was not able select it in-game because those things are hard-wired in the GUI. What concerned me the most, however, was when Crytek announced that they canceled the development of future patches a few months ago - just 6 months after the release, though there are flaws that should be fixed. It was a punch in the face of many community members, including me. I feel that the community suffered severely from that. I therefor decided to switch to the "Source Engine" from Valve. The community around Valve, Half-Life and its many mods is very big and vital. There is also a very good official source for documentation on any topic that is interesting for developers and many fan made tutorials around the net. I innitially chose CryEngine because it offered better graphics, physics and better support for big outdoor levels. While reconsidering those facts I saw that physics are actually not important for what Blood Moon wants to achieve. I also made a test map in the Sandbox editor with the dimensions i thought were perfect but I noticed that it was too big. So I learned that the outdoor capabilities of the Source Engine would suffice; especially after the engine update that came with the "Orange Box" games. The new engine version also supports dynamic lights in multiplayer mode. This was the only graphic feature that really pulled me towards the CryEngine back when I started the project, because I want Blood Moon to have creepy light effects in the dark levels.

2. Game pace
About the same time I noticed that the level size I originally planned was too big I saw the first videos of "Left 4 Dead". They have really fast zombies and I saw that it works very well. It gives more thrill to those players who have to fight them and of course it is much more fun to play a fast zombie than too crawl around the map and camp behind corners. So I decided that Blood Moon zombies will also be fast zombies. Another feature that is connected to game speed is the transformation ability of the vampires and werewolves. I wanted vampires to be able to become bats and werewolves to become 'pure' wolves. I figured that these forms would only be good for running away - which would just be boring for the other players - and for traveling big distances - which is no longer necessary as the maps will be rather small. So I consider that feature as canceled.

3. Soul touch
This is a new game mechanic and the new way of revenants creating renegades. It allows vampires, zombies and ghouls to transform defenseless enemies into revenants in an uniform way. It will work like this: Once an enemy enters the state of defenselessness the revenant presses a single key while beeing close to the enemy and looking into the direction of its body. As long as the key is pressed the player model of the revenant will reach out the arm that doesn't hold a weapon and a blue graphic effect appears that shows how "the soul of the defenseless enemy is sucked out of the body". While doing this the health points of the revenant slowly fill up. The explanation for that is that the vampire sucks blood, the zombie eats the brain and the ghould eats flesh. After a few seconds the procedure is completed. If the revenant player interrupts it he has to start from new. Once the procedure is completed the old player model of the victim dissolves into black smoke/ash. After the victim has selected its new class he will spawn in a random location in the revenant spawn area.

Hello community. We need your help. We are looking for gifted artists to assist us in making the vision of this mod come true. Please see our Join page for more information. Please use the contact form provided there.

Sidenote: I just noticed that nearly all links to the forum were broken. I apologize for that. The fault has been rectified.

One year ago the project was initiated. Happy birthday Blood Moon! Make a wish!

Todays news are not very good. "diesel1064" had to be removed from the team due to inactivity. Also "UK-Stryder" has left the team because of personal reasons. He has made many good contributions to the project and I am sad to see him leave. Of course this means that we are in need of new members, more than before. Vistit our "Join" page. The link can be found on the left.

Welcome to the new homepage of our project! I have spent the last few weeks recoding the complete web presence. The code is now much tidier thanks to the use of CSS. The layout also has changed. I hope you like it.

Together with patch 1.2 Crytek has released an update for the SDK which brought us the complete source code and a new section for coding in the official CryENGINE 2 Manual.

Again we have two pictures to show. Both are still early versions but I'd like to share them with all the to-be werewolfs, vampires etc. out there. The first one shows two drafts for the club. This weapon will be used to keep intrusive zombies at bay. The second one is a pair of knives which will be carried by fighters of the human fraction.

Yesterday I wrote a test and for the rest of the day I was loading up my batteries. Unfortunately that made me miss the most important event for our project so far. The Software Development Kit for Crysis has been released. That means that now we can really start to develop the mod and bring all the pieces together.

Not so good news have reached me two days ago. Our sound artist Braindrop has told me that he will not be able to continue his work for the project due to private reasons. That means we are looking for new reinforcements in that domain. If you are a skilled composer and/or sound effect designer and want to work in a mod project, here is your chance. For more information see our 'Join' page.

Today the waiting time is over. We have new things we want to share with you. The first image below shows the final concept art of the vampire class and completes the character concept art collection. The other image shows a brand new weapon. It is a combination of a mace and a smoke grenade that emits consecrated steam.

Happy new year to all of you! Lets hope it will be a good one. As you can see the old news have been removed from the start page so it can load faster. They can be found in the news archive. The link at the bottom right leads there.