This wip is HOT!

After being so disappointed by Crime Life II's FPS burping, freezing and the "phantom tree and bush model appearing out of thin air" issues, I thought the game coder was getting ready to give up on the project. Suddenly, though, CLIii shows up and breathes new life into the possibility of GM doing a solid 3rd person free roaming game! I knew the FPS issues with CLII were more a coding issue than a GM issue, and CLIii proves it.

Loading time is fast, FPS holds solid and the main character midpoly is impressive! As you run along it is few and far between that you see any tiling texture repeats, meaning the world has a lot of distinctions from one place to another. Driving cars and motorcycles, and then blowing them up is kinda cool. When I went into an area with a bunch of people and shot my gun, they freaked out and ran in all different directions. That really made me feel like a menace!

Screen resolution (640x480) is too low, causing pixelizations for basically all renders. Also, the room speed (30) is too slow, causing the graphics to appear "stiff" when animating or moving. I have noticed seams in the ground and from a small distance the windows on the houses sorta flicker and even disappear (you must be drawing the texture of the wall behind the texture of the window.) There seems to be no source of lighting, so everything looks a little blocky and flat. When I get into a car I kept thinking my AIM must've loaded somehow, but, no, it is the sfx you put in for getting into cars (you lil trickster!) The ground is also very flat, too flat to say it is "the most realistic" versus the terrain in games like Ice Arena 3d. Collision events seem a little botched; the man kinda bounces off of walls when walking at an angle as opposed to smoothly walking along them. The vehicle collisions seem a little glitchy as well.

I really like how this game title has developed, have you ever thought about working directly with other advanced 3D GM coders? It could save you a lot of time on some of the work required next, like refining game physics to add jumping, swimming, better collision reactions and Z coding (hills and cliffs and other terrain physics.) You could then apply that saved time to AC3D, to make more houses, buildings, trees, vehicles, people and weapons. You can probably save time on developing a story line by downloading the 'walkthroughs' for games similar to what you are trying to create (look up "Driver 2" for the PSone, which is a GTA 3 clone that actually came out before GTA 3. You could get some cool missions that fewer people would recognize than copying missions from any of the GTA games themselves.) Hey, don't hate on recycling a story line from an old game, especially since this game is what they call a "free project." Just don't do that when you create 'Crime Life: Chicago' in 2010 since this one will be what they call "on the shelves."