For the past several months, developer Little Orbit has been working on an engine upgrade to the multiplayer shooter APB Reloaded as part of its much-referenced 2.1 update, which now has a version number of 2.2. The game’s upgrade has gone through a number of beta tests of this new engine, but there has otherwise not been any hard date for the release, with only postings from Little Orbit CEO Matt Scott to primarily keep fans in the know.
This brings us to his latest posting, which comes after a month of general radio silence from him. Scott attributes this to the ongoing arduous work of converting data files from the 1.20 version to 2.2, which has run into no end of problems by all accounts.
“I’ll admit, the last 4 weeks have been a slog. We’ve hit very nuanced issues surrounding exactly how to load the new 1.20 data we were trying to preserve. These issues crash our conversion process. Each time, we spend nearly a day converting packages to 2.2, hit a crash, go back to the 1.20 code, step thought side by side, find the problem, work out how to fix it, and then re-run the lengthy conversion till it crashes again.”
With that said, there was a recent breakthrough that saw the Social district of the game map load in without any major problems, though the devs did run into a new problem related to how levels are loaded at runtime. The plan is to address this issue first, and then convert the Financial district, convert the rest of the maps, and after a few more engine-related upgrades, bring in a small group of community testers.
“I know this has been a long process, but no one has attempted this new direction before. It’s uncharted territory,” Scott writes. “As I have stated before, the original team at Reloaded felt it was impossible to port the game this way. But today we saw our first big sign of progress.”
