The Return of Beardie (Sort Of)

Dear Call to Battle community,

Hello everyone! I know it's been a while since you've seen me. Well, I guess this calls for an explanation. While the story of the last few years is addressed to long-time members(3+ years) who knew me as Beardielover, I'll also be talking about the future of Call to Battle in this article. So even if you're a newer member, stick around for some info about what's to come!

Foreword:

As many of you long-time members know, I left the community a few years ago following some drama. While it's not worth talking about as it happened years ago and I have forgiven those involved, I bring it up because I would like to apologize to those affected by it.

It was my first time experiencing such a situation, and looking back I realized if I had been wiser I could have done a lot on my end to lessen or even outright avoid the drama. I also should have been more quick to stop those in our own CtB community who were adding fire to the situation and hold them accountable. On the bright side, I learned a lot of valuable life lessons from everything that happened, and I know others did too.

How I've been involved in CtB

With that out of the way, let's jump into what happened after that. As many of you noticed, about 6 months or so after I left updates to CtB resumed. As some of you rightly guessed, I returned! At least, to some extent.

My initial return was not intended to be a return to development. I returned only to get the rest of the team going, as I knew they planned updates without me but I figured they were struggling to do so, because I saw there were no new updates.

At first I thought I was going to train a member of the staff team who volunteered, but that didn't work out. So instead I started coding some tools that would allow AngryLoyer to add his new content that without coding. I also coordinated releases of these updates with him. (Me uploading the mod files to the server and the websites it's posted on)

But after helping him with a few updates, I couldn't stop myself from finishing up some things I had been working on in the past, such as the squad system, teammate resupplying, XP overhaul, and plenty of other things I forgot. And from there, I got quite active on CtB from time to time, generally in spurts. I did not return to the discord community though, as I realized how much time that took away from both real life as well as actually working on CtB! I plan to mainly be active directly after updates are released, so that the time in between development time isn't lost. 

Our current development team

So yes, I have still been the lead developer. But don't misunderstand -  Richardo absolutely has been a real developer of CtB, and was a very active member of the development team as a programmer from 2020-2021. He made a good number of quality of life changes that made the overall experience feel more polished. He became very talented at programming, and I am very thankful for the features he added to CtB. In addition, he has kept the server running after the VPS performance failed, so he is one of the reasons CtB is still alive today.

Speaking of reasons CtB is still alive today - major shout out to AngryLoyer. There's no way CtB would still be around without him, no way I could have continued to make all of the models by myself, especially with his quality standards and attention to detail! When I was younger and had more time, I was doing nearly all of the models in addition to the coding, animations, textures, etc. As I got older, my time decreased, and it became harder and harder to do everything myself.

When he started modeling, I was shocked by his talent. Outside of a basic minecraft modeling program(which you could only make cube shapes, unlike mine), he had no prior modeling experience yet instantly was outputting high quality models, and quickly too! His first models matched the standards of CtB, and he soon surpassed the standards with even more detailed models.

The future

I know there was an incorrect announcement at first where it was said CtB will have one final update and then the server will be shut off. That announcement was already corrected shortly after. To add to that correction - we have no idea if the next update will be the last. I'd go as far as to say, it is probably not the last update. We'll see though. Either way, we hope to keep the server open for quite a while.

As you likely know, the "final" update that is being worked on is primarily just to get CtB in a final polished state. For example, upgrading all of the gun models to the current standard. But if all goes well and time allows, there are things I'd like to release in-between then, and maybe after too! There were some really cool projects that never got finished. And most of those projects won't take too much work to get into a "releasable" state, that is, good enough that it's better to release it than for people to never see it.

I don't want to say too much yet, but one of those many projects isn't actually WW2. It's not a very big project, but I'm sure many of you will find it interesting and enjoyable.

To all of those who have supported CtB and kept it alive - thank you so much! It is wonderful and amazing that CtB is still around.

Thanks again,

Beardie