Yes, we are still alive. But people have lives outside the mod and those take priority. The last several months in particular have seen everyone have to focus on other, frankly more important, things. Plus the current module is at a stage where there is not much art left to do, mostly it's scripting. That's something we are both short on manpower for and something that doesn't make for much in the way of thrilling update material.

Concerning time-frames, it's the same now as it has always been: it's done when it's done. How long ago Module 1 came out isn't really relevant. That was more or less just 2 levels with a handful of encounters, dialogues and quests. Module 2 is over 100 levels, with myriad encounters, dialogues and quests. The difference in scope in terms of development effort is an order of magnitude or more. It's a big job, and it's going to take time. A full time professional development studio with 100+ people working on a title might take years to create a title (Bioware was working on Origins for 5+ years). It should be unsurprising then that a mod bigger in scope than many current AAA games is going to take a while for a handful of people working on it in their spare time.

As far as help goes, we are always open to new blood, as we have mentioned plenty of times in the past. The problem is a lot of people say they are interested, but few prove to have the stamina required in practice. Which is fair enough - you do have to be slightly crazy to commit years of your life to something with little in the way of recompense besides personal satisfaction.

Regarding the mention of Kickstarter, we've said repeatedly that is not a project that will ever be receiving funding/donations of any sort. That sort of thing is a quick path to a cease & desist, so please refrain from further discussion of the subject.

This was done in a test module rather than the main development module (to avoid breaking things), so there were only the base 3 DA classes, no custom classes. If you have played Module 1, you know there were some custom classes. Module 2 will be no different.

As to YouTube comments, it's just less hassle to have them turned off.

Thanks for the offer but we can't accept donations.

Not sure yet what form the quips may take in the final version. But yeah, it will pretty much be one of their existing BG2 combat/selection barks for any short-term testing. Possibly later on we may comb through conversation dialogue to pick out something more appropriate. I can think of a few possibilities for Edwin at least that warrants that.

Any race-related stuff won't affect the release. It's something that may be implemented if the mechanics get sorted, but it's not a priority at this stage. It's not a sure bet by any means.

As to the party picker, yes, characters will each have animations and a quip, just like in vanilla Origins. We'll probably reuse some/all of those existing party animations, just because they were purposely made for the party picker, whereas using other, regular, animations gives variable results. We'll try and mix it up a bit though and keep things in theme with the characters. Hopefully we may have a video of it in action for the next update, time permitting. It's kind of a slow process testing, as you can't do it in the toolset - you have to load up the game every time to see a change.

Yep, that's Korgan and Mazzy together, sharing a drink.

At the moment we are stuck using the Dwarf race for Mazzy and Jan, but there may be a possibility of making a scaled down set of models more suitable for Halflings and Gnomes. We just need to find a way to expedite the process. I don't fancy the prospect of manually scaling every clothes/armour/body model in the game, twice (once for males, once for females).

It works the same as the vanilla party picker. When you mouse-over a party member, they are highlighted and their name & class show up. Hopefully we'll show a video of it in action in the near future.

The picture has been updated with the full party. The positions had to be changed to fit everyone onscreen together because of limitations with the engine's fixed camera, so it's somewhat more crowded than was originally intended. Things may change in the release version.

Note that although Valygar, Mazzy, and Cernd are shown here, they won't appear in Module 2 due to them being located outside Athkatla.

I should add as well that these are all placeholder party members at the moment. New module 2 NPCs haven't been finalised yet. We'll post a new pic of the full crew once we manage to squeeze them all into the same screen.

No, the towel is still hanging on the rack, in the same place it has always been. There have just been a few factors in the last month or so that have conspired to dry up the updates. BB's habit of contracting any and all communicable diseases (for God's sake man, eat some vegetables!), various team member's commitments to work and other projects, migrating the project server, plus a focus on less easily presentable toolset content like scripting/quests/plots/etc.

Work on the project will continue, updates for the next little while may just be sporadic or fairly low on content.

There's no release date. It's done when it's done. When it's ready to go, we'll make a public announcement.

Having just run it, I would say that if we must use average framerate as a metric then a more useful output would be on a per-scene basis at least, rather than overall. Of course even better would be some sort of graph comparing framerate to relevant on-screen info such as number of polys, texture number/size, techniques in use, etc. I imagine something like this could only be generated from the CSVs the pro version outputs.

I noticed a couple of hits during the rain segments, but it was otherwise generally pretty good. It would be interesting to know what exactly was going on at the point of the framerate drop.

You might be waiting a while for the end of the project. Presumably there are still another 3 or 4 modules to come after this one.