Well, this will be the last blog update from within the team before 1.7 is publicly released. We can now let you know that the release will be in days, not weeks. We had intended to have the release out today, however our quality standards being what they are we have been testing in public, clanmatch and offline bugtesting to ensure nothing nasty or gameplay affecting slips through. As a result of issues with one of the new maps (oh, didn't we mention that we might have another unannounced map?) we will take a few days more to sign off on the patch.

However, OBJ-Blink, by Antilop, IS finished, bugfree, looks great and plays even better. Those players who have been with the mod for a while will probably know Blink as being just about the best 3rd party map that there has been for TOC and Antilop's constant improvement work has seen the map reach much deserved official status.

Code wise and gameplay wise it's stable, so no chance of anything nasty appearing there. We have been working very hard in the closing weeks of the patch to get that oldschool TO movement feeling better and help from our beta team has really helped to get that (big thanks to Erik and Jame in particular for their sterling work in recent weeks).

We have also included 2 new playermodels, for terrorists we have included the street terrorist and on SF is Ganjaman's incredible Heavy model, showing off what has to be the most impressive playermodel skin I've ever seen in a UT2004 mod. We have included new taunt animations which you can bind with voice commands for tactical use or to just plain show off.

To finish up on the media front, I always think that TO:C never gets the attention it deserves from video media, so here's a quick clip taken during a recent internal testing session. It shows off the improved effects, uber detail playershadows and improved playermodel lighting that have come with 1.7 as well as some stunningly bad aiming, this clip isn't to show that we are the greatest players in the world, just that the game looks cool in action.

Download Movie !
Movie Mirror !

We will let you know as close as we can to release day, right now we are closing things down in all areas for release but we're not quite ready to pack it up and let you have it. I'm really looking forward to release and can't wait to see it on the servers.