Posts Tagged ‘mods’

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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Filed under Team Fortress News : Comments (0) : Jul 28th, 2008

Dev. Journal: trepid_jon

You're craz-you're crazy, man. You're crazy! I like you...but you're crazy.

Last week, I started converting FF's source code to the Orange Box code. It was an insane task, to say the least. First of all, nobody else wanted to do it. I mean, everyone wants FF to use the latest version of Source, but nobody wanted to do this psychotic conversion that Valve has forced on all the old mods. Granted, a mod would have an easy integration if it didn't modify any base files, using nothing but brand new files specifically created for that particular mod. FF's not like that, though. Yeah, FF's code uses a lot of unique files, but we also did a lot of base modifications. Luckily most of those modifications were commented well, and now even more of that is better commented and separated from the base stuff.

1 week, thousands of differing files, and hundreds of compile errors later, FF can now be played with the Orange Box engine. OOOoooOOOhhh!!! There are quite a few bugs to work out, however, so 2.1 won't be using this code unless we fix all the major bugs within a couple weeks.

After getting past the initial problems of FF crashing immediately upon startup, during map load, and lots of other similar spots, I finally got into the game...but I couldn't pick a team or class, and therefore couldn't spawn. I could go into thirdperson, though...


Wow, right? That's so Orange Box.

The first thing I noticed was this...THING...on the left. Said something about "Server" blah blah, like I cared. I later confirmed it's the chat window. Well, part of it. It's this little spot/coffin where all the received chat messages go to hang out forever. It's basically the worst thing imaginable.

Anyways, I couldn't move or look around in firstperson, but I could look around in thirdperson (as a side note, Valve greatly improved thirdperson mode with a moving camera that has collision, among other cool things). So once I could move the camera around, the next thing I noticed was that awesome Orange Box motion blur effect...


This is called a town. It's where everyone hates you and makes fun of you.

The problem with picking a team and class had to do with the way the new code handles console commands. FF has a special way of making some console commands, and most of the console commands use this special method (team, class, +gren1, dispenser, cloak, etc...pretty much everything you do in FF that's directly related to FF). Long story short, I fixed that crap and some other crap dealing with different crap and was then able to look, run, shoot, and do all that other minor stuff FF needs to be considered a game.


WARNING: if you don't like motion blur, you'll hate every single one of these screenshots, because I was literally shaking the mouse to make all of them blurry, haha...



In the Orange Box engine, your flashlight casts dynamic shadows off objects.
(including yourself when you're in thirdperson)



In 2.1, hunted's dirt hole is a vent (finally).


Blur slideshow, WOOH!


Apparently the flamethrower's particles aren't drawing.
Just another reason to revamp FF's effects using the new particle system.
It will be so nice.




More blurry 2.1 hunted.


Some blurry 2.1 cz2 as well.



I don't know if redux wants this seen yet, but it's blurry...so nobody's really seeing it.


2.1 has swim animations, y'all!

So by having FF use the Orange Box engine, we get motion blur.

The other new things like vgui videos, the new version of Hammer (lighting preview, what?), the new particle system, the material and commentary editors, steam avatars, and so forth...all of them mean nothing in comparison to the greatness that is motion blur.

r.

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Filed under Team Fortress News : Comments (0) : Jun 29th, 2008

Episode 31 - Big Bad Wolf

Big Bad WolfBig Bad Wolf? Not really. We’ve gotten to a point where our TF2 map discussions are swiftly becoming roadkill on the highway of gaming.

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

Download - Episode 31 (90:25)

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Filed under Team Fortress News : Comments (0) : May 21st, 2008

Episode 25 - Modcast

Because of some issues with the Ooberservers agreement, the mods take over this podcast. But don’t be surprised if your 4 lovable hosts make an appearance on today’s show. Ok, but seriously. This week we had an issue where the first 1/2 of the podcast was destroyed somehow during the recording (remember how I said, ALWAYS make a backup — well we didn’t)

Anyways, we still have the Listener Contributions section, so instead of not airing this one or holding off till we could re-record, we felt we should go ahead and put it out there, so without further ado, Episode 25:

Here just a few more tidbits you can expect:

Download - Episode 25 (62:00)

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Filed under Team Fortress News : Comments (0) : Apr 9th, 2008