Just an update to note that I'm making excellent progress on the sound effects front. All of the bus and mixing stuff is working brilliantly, and battles now sound... well, pretty darn epic in my opinion. The original game sure never sounded like this. I'm really pleased already with the wider array of other sound effects we're able to handle, like construction sound effects that are satisfying, and a notable pause/unpause sound effect, etc.
So why no release today?
Weelll... I want people's first impressions of this to really be of what I intend it to be like. Craig/Pepisolo did some amazing work with the sound effects for the various weapons, and only one of those (the most basic one) is even in use yet. Why? We only have one bullet type at the moment. There are 22 different types of defined munitions in the game at the moment, but they all look (and sound) the same. My goal is to fix both of those things at once, and knock some more big items off my list. Knock on wood, that should be possible tomorrow.
In an ideal world I'd also like to get the first couple of batches of voice acting lines in there (there's a couple of hundred lines or so which Craig helpfully split apart), as that will help to show how that's intended to work, too. But I don't want to spend so much time on that tomorrow that this winds up going yet another day before a release.
So if I'm not done with all the shots stuff by lunch tomorrow, then I'm going to skip the VO work and just move to release the rest. I'm not sure where Keith is right now with batch 7 of the ships, as to whether that will be tomorrow or Friday or early next week.