• A completely new scoring system. We still plan to use cash as an indication of how well you're doing, but the style involved in being rewarded will be greatly different. In effect, the more interesting set of stunts you do to kill your opponent, the more cash you get. Think Tony Hawk, except Chinese. Also, there are going to be new bonuses. Two of them will be "Vengeance," a bonus that you receive if you kill the player that killed you last, and "Dying Kill," a bonus you can get if you kill someone right before you bleed to death.
   
• The weapons will be different. Some weapons will be familiar, some will be new, but all the weapons will have brand new models. A few of the new ones include the Taurus M44, IMI Jericho 941 (Spike Spiegel's gun!), Mossberg 590 Short, and Makarov PM.
   
• Movement will be changed. Some of the older, less-useful stunts have been removed to make for a less complex system with cooler stunts. Dive-rolls will actually be fast and effective, and somersaults will look better. A slide has been added in case you need to go under a car or closing garage door and keep your forward momentum. Most if not all of the animations are being redone to allow for a more impressive visual style.
   
• An in-game MP3 player that can be manipulated with your keyboard or with the mouse, just like a normal MP3 player in Windows. This is much more exciting than I make it sound. Perhaps Nighthawk can help out with this, "The entire image is composited in to memory then, at my discretion, copied in to the graphic memory buffer of the VGUI's "Bitmap" class. It has a minor drawback in that I have to set the "Bitmap" object to be "dirty", and that causes it to be re-uploaded to the system at some processor cost, which means we can't do that too excessively. But, if it's in a bitmap, it can be in the VGUI." You read that correctly!
   
• Persistence. The thing you've heard about for a million years, but never get the chance to use. This will be an interesting technology that allows tracking of users across all servers via a central set of servers. Basically, this allows for keeping of statistics, bounties, and just about any database-keeping you might think of that relates to online gaming. Also, cheaters or undesirables can be flagged by main administrators, and if necessary, banned from playing The Opera. Of course, this shouldn't happen too frequently. This feature will not be seen in the patch for the simple reason that we want to get the patch out and work more on R2. Sorry, but it wouldn't do much good at the present for you, anyway.  R2 will have more use for it, trust us! In addition to that, the Opera Launcher and auto-updater are features that are left for R2, and they all kind of tie in to Persistence in some way or another (or just the fact that we'd like them to be more polished).
   
• New sounds will be used for the new movements, and weapons will overall feel more powerful. You will see a more comprehensive set of language used in the game, as well. Sounds really are a lot of work, and I hope the efforts of many team members don't go unnoticed.
   
• The game will have super-tweaked balance. With the aid of our testers, this will be an extremely fun version of The Opera that prevents "whoring," will yield really cool experiences and moments in gameplay, and the most accurate Hong Kong Blood Opera feel possible in a multiplayer realm.  Also, we'll have a few safeguards to make sure people are playing the way they're supposed to on a server. This isn't really a direct dictation of play style, but a removal of the things that make the game less fun to play (and watch). Camping will be deterred, in a word, and as mentioned above with the scoring system, repetition will cost against you (repeatedly diving forward isn't going to get you very much green).
   
• Lots of stuff that you'll just have to wait for to see!

Never fear, we are not abandoning a patch. With all the hubbub of the holidays, an internal build wasn't released for a few weeks, but other than that there has been nigh constant testing and fixing of problems. Actually, we just got a new patch this past week, and things are looking great! Some of the features listed above might actually make it into the patch, considering the varying rate at which certain work progresses. This patch is much closer than you can possibly imagine, and it includes some tasty new media in addition to the bugfixes. I'm really not the type to tease the fans, so believe me. If the patch isn't out "soon," then just use this simple phrase next time you see me: "hum` kah chan`!" Or "poq gai`," but the first one is more harsh. ::grin::

As I promised, here is a set of the latest media!

- Wang