Hi Guys,

First i'd like to thank everyone for the overwhelmingly positive support. It really is a joy to work on this mod.

I'm entering the final weeks of university, so things have been getting a little tight on the spare time front - my last year dissertation project is due in on wednesday, then i have a few smaller projects after that but I'll be pretty much free to work on FF fulltime in about a week. On monday i handed in 2 projects, and then slept for 11 hours :D. Then I bought a double bass pedal for my drum kit! woohoo!

OK so, new FF stuff.

Since my last dev journal i've got my hands dirty in all sorts of things. We finally have all the death notice icons in (like the gazelle headbutt for suicide, and electrocution death) and they are pretty much all a standard size now. We have different colours for teamkills as you would expect.

The hud has been tweaked slightly, we have new health and armor icons on it, and we have a better animation system for when you get shot and low on health. (now it briefly flashes red when you get shot, and it flashes red constantly when you are low)

The new scoring system i was talking about in my last journal is now implemented along with a new scoreboard to match. Players are ranked due to their points rather than their frags. We've set up a lovely LUA system so mappers can award players points for all sorts of things (e.g. detpacking a grate, capturing a cz2 flag etc)

Bunny hopping is constantly being tested and nudged around. Since my last journal when we had 104-108% caps, we tried 110-115, then 112-117, and now we are trying 115-115. We have also messed with the pcfactor, which is the % of your speed you lose if you land above the cap. This is mostly to do with maintaining speed off a conc or a rocket jump - previously we had a 0.5 value, which meant your conc skim speed didnt last for long at all, and you had like 1 fast jump after a skim. Now we have a value of 0.65 which means you can conc skim and maintain a decent speed for about 2 jumps. This has introduced another movement skill which is hard (but very fun) to master- for example, you conc over the sd2 midmap and land on balcony. you are now travelling at about 400% speed - have you got the skill to turn and hop through the tiny balcony door maintaining your speed? Trying to maintain this speed for 1-2 jumps after a conc (especially in confined spaces e.g. inside a base) is extremely difficult, and will allow the very best players to show their skill in new ways.

This also means that classes will need to rely on propulsion rather than bunny hopping alone for maximum speed. e.g. a pyro IC jumps, hops then IC jumps again as he loses speed. It also means that players that are unable to bunny hop, can still maintain some advantage by simply landing in the direction they wish to travel, and pressing jump to maintain some speed - an easy first step into learning full fledged bunny hopping.

The sentry gun health has been boosted at 20% for all levels, it is much harder to kill now. There were suggestions of engineers being more useless in FF since the SG in TFC was a little easy to kill and dodge, and with FF base speed being faster, more people could get into the base to kill a SG faster. What we have decided on at the moment is to increase its health - this does two things: Firstly it stops engineers being frustrated by their gun going up and down all the time. Any engineers know how boring it is to simply go backwards and forwards to the resupply to rebuild their gun all the time - so instead we make the SG harder to kill, so your time invested is more worthwhile. Secondly it encourages players to try to out-maneuver the sentry gun, by concing past it, or circling it, or locking it so a teammate can get past un-noticed. To balance this effect, the FF SG does not have so much 'push' to its bullets - this means getting shot by a SG isn't so frustrating and it doesn't ruin all your movement plans so much.

The auto-rifle has been tweaked so it is now a unique useful weapon. Firstly it spits out bullets at a huge rate - about 5 seconds of firing and you are out of ammo (for your sniper rifle too, remember!), secondly it has a cone of fire so it can only be used close(ish) range. With these two limitations, we increased the damage of the bullets by a fair amount. This means the sniper has some (limited) form of close range protection, and you can also use it to finish off an enemy. It provides an awesome strategic position when you attempt to kill a sniper - fight too far away and his sniper rifle will kill you. Get in his face and he might unload an AR in you - so good players change their distance depending on which weapon he has out (the best players simply throw a grenade at his back while he is sniping someone else, of course! :D). This means if someone is camping you or your spawn as sniper, it's not as frustrating to try and kill them.

We are just introducing and testing a new burn system for the pyro, which Dospac came up with and is really cool. Basically, if you put someone on fire with 2 or all 3 burn weapons (flamethrower, incendiary cannon, napalm grenade), the amount of burn damage you receive is multiplied. This encourages pyros to try to use his entire arsenal on each enemy - bouncing the enemy up with the IC and moving close to light him with the flamethrower straight after. If you manage to light someone with all 3 weapons, then the multiplier really is rather significant - currently you lose about 150 health/armor from burn damage alone (enough to kill most players). Obviously it is rather hard to use all these 3 weapons, so a 3-weapon combo is rewarded as basically a fatality (although it takes 8 seconds for all the burn damage to have its impact, so you have to hide for 8 seconds and hope he doesn't get healed!). We have 3 burn-level status icons on the HUD now also, so as the enemy pyro lights you with more weapons, your burn level increases and gets more red - so you know if you are gonna die from burn damage and can unleash all your grenades before it happend. Soon we will have burn level death messages too hopefully, and i want to add a big girly scream to anyone who gets burn level 3 haha (Although i doubt this will get put in :P)

Thats about it from my side over the last 2 weeks. The others have been doing loads of other cool stuff which i should probably leave to them to mention.

Maybe the last thing to say is that there has been a resurgence in activity lately, (mulchman in particular has been doing a fantastic job), with DrEvil back and working on the new training system (we have these training scripts at the moment which are incredible, really professional.. I shouldnt say more until its finalised tho!) Eat and defrag are both around and doing stuff, DarkKnight is working on debugging the player animations, Jiggles has made a new napalm grenade and new radiotag icons, and even mirv has helped us out with a few of our major programming problems. Our last beta test had 21 people, we had >16 for 3 hours and after 5 hours there was still 8 people playing (the game is really fun!). Compared to a month ago when we had 10 testers and the test wouldnt last for more than an hour, this is great progress.