It's a beautiful day here in England, the wonders of global warming. When it starts to heat up like this, you know the end of school is near, and soon all the devs will be free of uni work (including me). At the moment Defrag, Jiggles and I are all finishing our final years of uni, and so in about a months time I hope you can expect a surge of activity (unless we're all out sunbathing / celebrating).

Who is this new AfterShock guy anyway? I'm a new FF programmer, I started about a month ago and have made a fair amount of progress so far. I'm helping out to fix bugs and implement new features. I'm 23 and in my last year of Computer Science, in Sheffield, England. I've played clanned TFC for a while and mostly as engineer - in TFC's last dying stages I managed to crawl myself into the England TFC team.

Anyway, back to FF.

First let me give you my first impressions of the mod. FF is like TFC but without all the problems and with a load of cool new stuff. The biggest difference is the reduction in grenade radius. Its so cool to be able to run around maps without worrying about a grenade 10 miles away killing you. Then there's the soft cap on air movement, jumping after you land a fast conc will maintain some of your conc speed, which is ace. Concing is now client-side and with visual timers. Now you can play TFC with the sound off and your favourite heavy metal / psy-trance (whatever you want) playing, and still be able to conc. Concing on 300 ping is exactly the same as 10 ping. American and European scenes will suddenly not be so far apart. Now you have seperate visual timers for each grenade, so if you are juggling 3 concs at once, its easier to know what the hell is going on.

New class abilities!

Building Sgs and dispensers as engineer is like 100x easier, as is aiming/turning the SG. The HW's AC actually requires some skill to use properly, and when it gets going it really feels like you are holding a big powerful machine gun. The spy cloak is hilarious and I love it. Trying to time your feign just before a rocket lands, so your corpse flies up in the air while you sneak behind the soldier and knife him, stealing his disguise – absolutely priceless. (Most of the time they just notice you and kill you, but its worth it for the odd time you get it right). The pyro is an awesome class to play now, hes fast and the IC jump is worth using. Raining flaming skulls from the skies on snipers just feels like justice. Gas grenades no longer cause much damage, so no spies spamming 4 on a respawn killing everyone any more. In summary, theres a lot less spam and a lot more fun.

So what have I been working on?

When I first joined I was fixing little bugs to get the hang of the code. For example, caltrops and legshots were multiplying instead of adding, and there wasnt a speed cap for them, so 10 caltrops and you'd be crawling around. Now there is a lower cap of 40% so you'll never be capped slower than that. I changed the options menu around a bit, fixed some stuff in there and added some binds for 2-touch grenades. Nearer release the options menu will have a bit more of a go-through, and possibly include class config creation, etc. An interesting issue is just how much stuff to include in the options menu, should 'immediately build SG' be in the default options menu? Or should there be an 'Advanced' menu? What about 'disguise as enemy soldier'? We probably shouldnt include binds for every single class, friendly or enemy (would make the options menu rather big..) and we want new players being able to jump in and play as soon as possible, with the least number of bindings as possible!

I'm actually responsible for that horrible green HUD you might have noticed in the latest leaked videos (it has since been reverted back!), I was playing around with the idea of WoW style green - red coloured health. The HUD is actually one of the main things we want to get polished before release – icons need adding (ATM we just got numbers), team scores (possibly), but most of it is there.

My first big task has been the new scoring system. We're testing an implementation of what was discussed on the forums (http://forums.fortress-forever.com/showthread.php?t=8414), except a bit more complicated. It basically means you get points for capturing flags, sabotaging Sgs, healing teammates, radiotagging players, etc. Its been up to me to basically implement the entire thing, lol. This means setting up new messages between the client and server, changing the scoreboard columns, altering LUA scripts for capturing the flag, etc. Its a big job and its not all done yet, but we've come a fair way in a matter of weeks. Setting up points for all the little things that a player does, makes it easy to alter our statistics logging to do the same thing. Summaries of 'who killed the most Sgs', 'Who touched the flag the most' and 'Who healed the most health' suddenly become very easy to implement at the end of each game.

With all this new progress, a load of new beta testers, and uni finishing soon, things are looking pretty rosy for FF. If we can get the last remaining features (scoring system, HUD, options menu) finished in the next 1-2 months then I'd say we're in good shape for hard-core bug squashing, and then almost done! *cheer*