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News: Q&A 2 – the Engineer, resupplies, and some AvD lovin’.

Here’s this week’s Q&A, brought to you remarkably late on account of every dev is too damn busy to talk to me. As always, remember to hop over to the FF Q&A thread and ask more questions: http://www.fortress-forever.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16481

Question 1 (Rutabeggar):
What would you say are the most stark contrasts between 2.1 and the mods previous patches as in are there any new game breaking/making things being added such as the heavy becoming important again?

Answer 1 (Circuitous):

For starters, the HW is much more useful now. We are still working on some of the finer points of the class but overall it is better than the 2.0 HW. The Engineers will be able to resupply a bit easier. (This is expanded upon in Question 2.) The Pyros are slightly less spammy, and the flamethrower’s push has been notched up a bit. Snipers are more efficient than their 2.0 predecessors.

Question 2 (Agent Buckshot Moose):
What’s going on with the Engineer in 2.1?

Answer 2 (Circuitous):

This is an interesting list.

- Dispensers now start with ammo and armor, regenerate twice as much per tick, dispense twice as much per tick, and dispense faster than before.
- Carrying your Railgun regenerate rails.
- Railgun Charging is quite different,
— each charge level only takes 1 second and 1 rail,
— after fully charging, you can continue to hold it for up to 3 seconds,
— after 3 seconds, the Railgun overcharges. This costs an additional rail, but gives you 40 Cells. Great for SG spots that don’t have handy resupplies.
— overcharging in this way does not hurt you anymore.
- lastly, and this may not make it to patch time, we want dispensers to “pick up” any bags dropped nearby.

Question 3 (Gwarsbane):

Will there be more no build stuff put into all the official maps to stop people from building stuff in the spawn rooms and in doors? Will all the spawn areas in official maps that don’t have them get the no grenade code? Well and Aardvark come to mind as they seem to be the ones spammed the most.

Answer 3 (Circuitous)

They absolutely should, but it’s a matter of what we have access to now. All of the new maps, and any maps that are actively being worked on or reconstructed, have nobuilds and noannoyances where needed. We’ll see what we can do.

Question 4 (Gwarsbane)

Will spawn bags ever heal broken legs, medic infections, tracer tags, put out flames and stuff like that? That would help in most cases against people spamming the spawn room with spy gas, or a medic running in, or a scout concing the spawn room.

Answer 4 (Circuitous)

Will they ever? I think they should. Do they now? Not yet.

The good news is this should just be a Lua change – it’d be quite easy to do. Assuming no one finds a reason not to, this should be in the next patch.

Question 5 (Tsukasa)

Whats the status on all the AvD maps?

Answer 5 (Circuitous, squeek., Nezumi)

Dustbowl has been re-optimized, and now includes HDR and a slew of bugfixes.

squeek. is working on the updated version of cornfield. There are some minor changes to the map that should make gameplay a little more interesting: the cap triggers are now 1 unit above the cap point, and the defender’s spawn points are moved forward.

The AvD crowd will be glad to hear that they will be getting a brand new map in 2.1. Nezumi has an awesome new AvD map called anticitizen. It’s currently being playtested to death and it’s a lot of fun.

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July 28th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


News: Q&A Week 1 – The hard cap, map remakes, Orange Box, training, and the almighty Soldier.

Big ups to everyone who’s been posting questions.

In order to take this at a manageable pace, we’ll be answering (at least) 5 questions a week.

We’re starting off with some good ones we received early on. Look back next week for even more.

First up, we’ve got a question that’s been seeing a lot of debate on the forums…

Question 1 (Kubedawg):
Will the hard cap stay implemented as a feature if most people end up not liking it? If there is no hard cap, could you explain what changes are being made as far as movement goes for all classes in general?

Answer (Circuitous):
The hard cap is being applied as a fix to the issue of skimming (retaining speed from conc and weapon jumps) – in testing it has worked well, but if the overall opinion of it is decidedly bad once it’s released, then obviously we’ll look to make some changes to it.

There has been very little in the way of negative feedback to the hard cap [in the beta] so far, so we’ll see how that works out.

Question 2 (Nuk3m):
Will there be a release of more classic maps, like rock2, schtop, coming in 2.2?

Answer (Circuitous):
Yes, many are in the making and will be released in subsequent patches.

Question 3 (Drain Bamaged):
How’s the conversion to the Orange Box Engine going, what features are you going to use from it, besides motion blur?

Answer (trepid_jon):
Nothing has been done to the Orange Box version of FF since we finished the initial conversion and made the dev journal, but I think the main feature we’ll use is its particle system. Trails, impacts, events, maps, and so forth should receive quite a few visual improvements in terms of particle effects. It will be nice having Steam avatars in the scoreboard as well, but maybe we can integrate those avatars into other areas of FF, like the chat menu, “physically” in the world, during gameplay moments, and/or whatever else we can think of. We also think vgui videos can be utilized well in FF, allowing us to put videos in lots of menu places. More robust map overviews, for instance, as well as interesting concepts like like little picture-in-picture video hints, tutorials, and commentary.

Question 4 (Myersjr):
Will there be a training mode included in 2.1?? I have heard talk that there will be…

Answer (Squeek):
The base for the training mode has already been completed. Constant changes to the mod are holding us back from releasing it to a perticular patch. A few more additions need to be made before we are comfortable before releasing it. Expect it in 2.3 and hope for it in 2.2.

Question 5 (RocketRunner):
Are the rockets for the Soldiers RPG going to change in any way?

Answer (trepid_jon):
Radius has been decreased to compensate for the harder bhop cap, and now rockets also emit dynamic lighting

Any discusion on these answers can be posted below on this thread. All questions and concerns will be answered. Any additional questions should be asked here: http://www.fortress-forever.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16481

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July 19th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


‘Jazz In The Box’ is Coming Soon!

If you haven’t seen it already in your Steam events planner, then let’s use the magical ability to copy and paste to save some time:

This 4th July, we will be holding a special (and hopefully, recurring) event called ‘Jazz in the Box’ which is basically CP After Dark for Europeans (so it would be CP After Brunch for people of the US, right?). Come along and have some fun with some people you wouldn’t otherwise play with!

Check out ‘Keep or Kill?’ also. All the info is here in this lovely, shiny forum thread

The site is http://controlpointmaps.co.nr

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July 2nd, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


Yodellers and Rainstorms

There’s eight new maps up for testing on server 1 this evening. As the title implies, there’s some interesting themes around: a payload map with a vocal cart, ctf with constantly rising water, and more! Download them as you play tonight, or get there ahead of time from the thread. See you there!

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June 27th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


Dev. Journal: Pon

Hello. I’m Pon, a recent addition to the Dev team. I think they must have been desperate for Lua scripters, and I was better than nothing I guess :P

I figured I should do a journal, but I don’t really know what to write. I mean, Lua, and programming in general isn’t that interesting to most people. But, meh. I could say a few words about myself, my experience, and so forth, but I’d prefer people keep reading and not fall asleep :)

Maybe next journal.

So, inane rambling over, we come to the meat of all journals, and the only bit 99% of people reading this will care about – some info on what I’ve been working on:

Epicenter fixes – The three captures per round system has been fixed, and there will also be HUD icons to indicate the aforementioned captures. Should make it a lot easier to understand whats going on, hopefully.

ff_harbor – As Nezumi mentioned in his jernal, I’m working on the base Lua for that. Not much more to say other than what Nezumi already mentioned, aside from it’ll hopefully be good gameplay, as well as a good looking map (which Nezumi’s always are).

I’m also making another base Lua for a new map by one of the Devs. Can’t really say much at this stage I guess, but I’m sure it’ll have a positive impact on FF when it’s ready.

Aside from that official FF work, it seems I’ve become a mapper’s bitch of late, with Ihmhi and =AS=zE both pestering me night and day to make their maps work properly :P . Still, their maps should be worth it. At least in terms of the Lua :)

Also, I have a few concepts of my own that I’m planning to start on. Quadflag (posted in the official concepts thread) is one I’ve started on, and hope to finish a concept map soon. I’ll also likely create a concept map for =AS=zE’s Last Team Standing lua, seeing as his port of Agoraz was withdrawn. For both I’ll release the source .vmf alongside, so that people can both make a decent map from it, and hopefully learn a little bit about Lua as well.

And thats it. Hope you managed to stay awake :)

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June 25th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


CPAD Map Lineup: June 20th

I was a little bit more proactive this week. All the odd maps to try out tonight are up, and with an external download link! In the future, you might even be seeing this before Friday. We’ll be playing maps based on suggestions over the last week, and things that I found in the dusty corners of the download server. Also on the menu will be the featured maps, and the updated ctf_well. You can download each map for tonight individually here. Details about the map lineup for tonight can be found over there, along with a list of potential future candidates. Keep the suggestions coming in, and I’ll keep getting this stuff up on the server.

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June 20th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


TEAM FORTRESS 2 PYRO UPDATE WEEK

TEAM FORTRESS 2 PYRO UPDATE WEEK

Free Weekend Begins Friday on Steam

June 16, 2008 – Valve, creators of award-winning games and leading technologies, today announced a set of new releases for Team Fortress 2, the title named Multiplayer Game of the Year by PC Gamer and Gamespy.com.
The main event of the week is the Pyro Update, which will be made available this Thursday and contains three unlockable new weapons for the Pyro plus 35 new achievements. In addition, two user-created maps are included to highlight the great work being done in the community and distribute those works to all TF2 players..
Meanwhile as folks wait for the Pyro Update to be released, the latest in the “Meet the Team” video shorts, “Meet the Sniper,” will be made available tomorrow (Tuesday, June 17) at 11 am PDT along with a web site dedicated to the Pyro update.
Finally, to give everyone a chance to try the new weapons and community maps, Valve will hold another Team Fortress 2 Free Weekend via Steam, a leading online platform for the delivery and management of PC games. The Free Weekend is scheduled to begin this Friday at 11 am PDT.
For more information, please visit www.steamgames.com

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June 16th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


Friday Night: New Maps!

Friday night has always been the best of the CP after dark evenings. Not only does it run the latest, but it’s your best chance to catch people in game: hosts, admins, your dominator target… anything can happen! To add on to all that madness, Friday night is now also going to feature map testing. I’ll be pulling new maps off of fpsbanana to take for a whirl, anything that I think would be somewhat fun. To avoid my terrible taste in maps, give me suggestions here: projects of your own you want tested, maps you noticed that look pretty cool, whatever. Link me to them, and I’ll get them on the list.

Yesterday was also a blast. Thanks to everyone who stuck around, we tested our way through no less than 16 maps. Half of them were good, half of them were awful; you’ll certainly be seeing more of the good ones in regular votes!

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June 14th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


Episode 33 – Dominator

Yay! Spencer is back! Much talk on new maps played and some talk on Conan. And a bunch of CP updates as well as Valve updates! Here’s just a few more tidbits you can expect:

Download – Episode 33 (88:18)

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June 4th, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments


Episode 27 – Turbine

This week, the boys of Control Point take you through one of the older maps out there, Turbine. Through the vents and describing strategies, hints, tips and tricks for each of the classes on this beloved map.

Here’s just a few more tidbits you can expect:

Download – Episode 27 (108:58)

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April 23rd, 2008Team Fortress NewsRead More >No Comments