Dear Friends of Steel Beasts Professional,

Substantial decisions have been made about the eSim Games team, and it is about time to inform the general public. While I don't like being self-referential, this is one of the few situations where it's our duty to keep you informed.

Some may remember that we were a bit overwhelmed with the positive response in the form of software customizations in the 2006...2009 period which basically forced us to drastically reduce our marketing and sales activity to work off the backlog of customization contracts. I mentioned on previous occasions that this was a "luxury problem" - but a problem nevertheless.

We found new programmers in the form of Lukas Friembichler from Austria in October 2010, and Christoph Keller in December 2010. In 2011 we further strengthened our team with Mikael Persson, responsible for the animations of our 3D character models, and David Collins for additional 3D modeling; I should also mention Tony Jesson for his work on 3D models. You'll see their wonderful work with the next PE release, and I'm sure you'll like it. This summer, Miro Torielli joined the team, and with J Schmidt the fifth programmer will soon be on board.

Ed Williams will continue to direct our efforts in quality assurance, work on sound effects, and do much of the important work for the integration of new vehicle models into the simulation. Raino Sommer too is of course still a member of the eSim Games team, working on his great 3D vehicle models as ever.

However, from January first Al Delaney will begin to reduce his involvement. He'll still be around for advice and eventually also some coding, but we agreed that Lukas will be the new lead programmer and that as far as all business decisions are concerned, eSim Games Germany will now carry the torch. For most practical issues, nothing will change for our customers. Copies of the Personal Edition will still be mailed out from California, the web shop will work the same.

But of course we wouldn't make this change if we wouldn't expect to be able to serve our customers better in the future.

Going from a single programmer to a group of four, from one 3D artist to four, and professionalizing quality assurance as well as establishing better team coordination - this is of course a massive change, and one of the reasons why we couldn't release last summer's planned mid stream update.

The upside: We have full confidence in Lukas' ability as the new leader for the programmer team. We can afford to have one programmer - Miro Torielli of Falcon BMS fame - to concentrate on the development of a new rendering engine. It's too early to whet your appetite with screenshots as they currently do not represent the end result. I could say something about our plans, but talk is cheap. When the time is right, there will be screenshots and videos to illustrate what to expect.

One more programmer - Christoph Keller - is in the role of developing fundamentally new technologies for us - a luxury that we couldn't afford in the past, so that's definitely a plus for all our customers once that his inventions have matured to the point that they are releaseworthy. In this case I'm talking about movement path optimizations to handle complex terrain much better - especially when obstacles like walls, narrow alleys, bridges, mine fields, and similar things are involved. I think that we can at least very much reduce a popular source of frustration here.

Mikael Persson is an animator who worked on the original Assassin's Creed, and who is now working on animating our 3D characters. I think we have assembled a good and robust team here that shows a lot of promise for future development, especially for the period beyond 2013. We'll be able to work on several customization contracts simultaneously where needed, and can invest in conceptual work to bring in new capabilities.

There's still a lot to do until next June when we will release the next SB Pro PE version, but I'm confident that we're in a better position than ever to introduce a number of new features to expand Steel Beasts' capabilities substantially:

Aside from the new rendering engine, we will make it possible pause a network session to allow people who dropped out of a session to re-join a session in progress (this will also work for late-comers). As a very welcome side-effect, we made it possible to save any mission in progress as a new scenario file.

SB Pro will no longer be a game of two parties, Red and Blue. Expect to see noncombatants in future scenarios as well as irregular fighters. Dismounted troops will navigate complex villages much better. There will be autonomously acting pedestrians to populate villages, and autonomous cars to drive from one area to another, thus creating patterns of life where villages in SB Pro were void of any population in the past. Scripting the population will be made much easier, without the need to define movement paths - we adapted the established principles in the user interface for this, of course.

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My one obstocal is the the learing curve for the planning in missions before you go into battle. I know that is necessary and also makes this more realistic, but would I ever get to the understanding of how to properly make a battle plan...(the only experience I have in battle tactics is from watching "The Rat Patrol" and "Hogans Heros"). However, I feel that eventually I will take the plunge...probalby in Jan or Feb of 2013.

These are easy to develop skills if you are working with others. For example the guys at UK Armour are (with no offense intended) mostly a bunch of noobs. A handful had been playing single player exclusively. When they started playing coops and H2H missions they gained alot of experience. The ones that had been playing in SP said that they gained more knowledge in a few months of multiplayer than they did while playing single player during the past years. This is because they have a few guys with them who have been playing since the software came out in 2006. After a mission they discuss how it went, what could go better and the newer guys ask questions. I am not saying that is how it has to be done, who you have to join, etc, but simply providing an example of the benefits of multiplayer in a thing like this. You gain the opportunity to derive experience from the "crusty old vets" of the software that you wouldn't need to obtain from first hand experience, or from figuring things out yourself.

For example the guys at UK Armour are (with no offense intended) mostly a bunch of noobs.