Well over the last several weeks LOTS has been going on. I'll try and explain everything and keep it as brief as possible.

"Realization"

Around 2 weeks ago our message boards gained a sudden influx of members from the Brain Bread forums (which will be from here on out known as BB). Several of them applied and were accepted to the team including _Civilian_Soldier_ and (4THIDUSA) SSG H. Civilian Soldier was working on a reskin of our Cop Zombie when he brought to my attention that he had seen it on the Brain Bread forums. This lead me to two possibilities. That either...

1.) MaXeR (the creator of the model) had ripped it off from elsewhere which I doubted.

This was impossible seeing as the model had been created last summer before BB's release and I had seen pictures throughout the whole of its creation. Not to mention MaXeR just wasn't the type of person that would rip something off.

or

2.) The model was leaked from our team FTP.

This second possibility became more definite when we began investigating just how bad the situation was. It turned out more than half of our object models were leaked and were being distributed by the individuals {MGS}Liquid Snake, Rusty, Memnon, and Omega 1.5. After doing some further research Incy247 was able to get {MGS}Liquid Snake to reveal who had given him our files. He referred us to Memnon who he informed us was an alias for a former Oraculus Studios Team Member named Temp.

We were given Memnon's IP addresses from the BB forums by the very cooperative administrative and moderation staff and cross-checked them with IP addresses recorded by posts by Temp.

They matched and corroborated Liquid Snake's story.

Temp was guilty of leaking our models. I'm sure you're all wondering why. I am too. He's been banned from our forums and Termin8tor is actively pursuing legal action as he owns our webspace.

"Assessment"

We began trying to do damage control to see if we couldn't curtail the further release of our models. Unfortunately, it seemed that these were not only being freely distributed across the BB forums, others had taken models from these freely distributed packs and were using them in their own works totally oblivious to their stolen nature. This multiplied the problem 10 fold. It was now apparent that there was no way to prevent the files from being spread further.

Anyways, we began discussing what to do about it in the Team Chat portion of our forums. It was obvious to all of us that we couldn't just continue on with production like nothing had happened. We couldn't risk staying in internal development until we had every aspect intended for a Beta and then having our boards spammed and our project badmouthed for stolen models that had actually been our own. The next option was to simply scrap all the leaked models and start over. I simply wasn't willing to do that and I'm sure many others weren't as well.

"Restoration"

I came up with the concept of a Plan B.

Plan B included a heavily intensified work regiment for the following 2 weeks with the end product being a large extension onto the Alpha 1.1 version we had been working toward that would be released publicly. That way the models would be out in the open anyway and the damage would be dropped to nearly zilch.

After a serious model leak/theft many projects die. I wonder if that's not what our attacker had had in mind. However, we were far enough along that releasable build was not totally unrealistic.

2 weeks later here we are...

"Presenting Public Alpha 1.1"

I've worked the team's finger bloody and now I present to you Public Alpha 1.1.

This includes...

Basic Gamemode
-Nail-gun boarding (Still glitchy)
-Player score
-Music
-3 complete maps. Optimized for playability
-RE_SUBURBIA
-RE_RPD (First Floor)
-RE_MALL

The zombies continue to evolve with such features as
-Biting
-Holding the player
-Headshots
-Attacking nail-gun placed boards (still glitchy)
-4 different types of zombies
-Feeding off of dead players

And probably many others that are just slipping my mind at the moment...

"Festivities"

We're planning on releasing following a party in IRC where several choice members of the Oraculus Studios Team will participate in a radio show. During breaks in the music we'll answer questions asked in the IRC room as well as releasing never before in game shots.

This should begin around 3:30 PM Central Time this Wednesday.

The IRC room and channel will be announced later this week.

A promotional video should also be coming later today.

This Wednesday, 3/16/05, Survival Horror gets a whole new medium!