I may as well drop a quick update on the goings on at FF towers. I'd post it on the front page, but I don't think it's a good idea to bump the file links down the page just yet.

Firstly, I want to extend a huge thank you to Kyle (PHISH) for taking charge of the good ship FF and sacrificing his sleep for a week. I reckon the poor chap was probably out on his feet for the last couple of days, but he contributed in so many areas and made the release happen despite the rather testing circumstances. Also, thanks to all of the devs who have been around and working really hard, the dedicated members of the beta testing team and also to the forum moderators. Finally, thanks to all you guys who downloaded the mod and hosted servers & files.

We had a slight mishap with the linux dedicated server where a tester identified a crashing problem, but it turned out to be entirely unrelated to FF. The dedicated server does have a few warnings here and there, but it's proven to be very stable on release. We've had guys running servers that have been rock solid from release time right up 'til this moment. That's a great feeling! There are a few server crash problems out there, but they are very minor; more on that later.

The response has been overwhelmingly positive; while we were proud of our work, there is always a slight sense of trepidation regarding what the response will be like; in this case, our fears were unfounded! In short, I think we have a solid base to build on. Over 350 servers appeared over 36 hours immediately following the release, and we've had a consistent 900-1600 people playing every time I check the stats. The devs have had a blast jumping onto servers and playing with everyone.

Now, I'll quickly move on to the problems we'll be looking to remedy with a patch. There is no official date set (what with us being awesome with release dates, how about September 2035?) but you can expect it ... soon. For the first patch or two, our focus will be on fixing client crashes & the most visible / annoying bugs. You can expect constantly support in the future and gameplay balancing & tweaking etc. but right now, we're only concerned with patching the bigger bugs. You can see a known bug list here. There are more that we know about, and we'll keep adding them to that list until we have a better bug reporting mechanism in place.

Client crashing
There have been numerous reports of clients crashing. Now, a lot of people have been looking forward to FF for a long time and, sometimes, this is the first game they've played in ages. We're finding that quite a few of the crashes are either hardware problems (PC not used to the stresses of modern games / overheating etc.), driver based (changing drivers fixes the problem) or source based (PC crashes in identical circumstances when attempting to play other source mods or games). Also, there was an update to the Source SDK base (which is what the mod runs with) on the night of release, so that also complicated matters slightly. Please bear these factors in mind if you crash; it may not be a FF specific problem.

However, there definitely are FF-specific crashes mixed in and we're looking to solve these very shortly. If you have a crash and feel it is likely FF-specific, then please feel free to drop by our forums and read the stickied threads. If these do not help you resolve the issue, then please leave your .mdmp files for us to debug. You can find this thread (with instructions) here. These files act as a black box flight recorder and help us to zone in on problem areas.

Scores & notices breaking
Sometimes on a server, the scoreboard & kill notices will simply stop updating and displaying respectively. This did happen during our beta testing, but it was so infrequent that it was difficult to reproduce & solve. Unfortunately, when we released it seems to have started cropping up with a lot more frequency. We'll be looking to sort this out as soon as possible.

Death slant
This one is a known issue and is fairly well known to us. Unfortunately we didn't manage to fix it before we released the mod. If it happens to you, you have two options. One: Kill yourself (not in real life, I may add). Two: Get Creative.

We should hopefully have a fix for this coming very soon. We have a decent idea of how to fix it thanks to DrEvil.

Voice icons
For some reason unknown to us, the voice icons have disappeared. I've got no idea what happened as they worked in beta right up to the release. We're working on getting these back (so you can figure out who is singing "Go West" to the rest of the server and then applaud their amazing talents).

Server crashing
There are some infrequent server crashes out there (I've got 5 .mdmp files sitting here where the server has crashed in the same place) so we'll be working on fixing those. I should stress that these crashes are very infrequent for the majority of server operators and that I've yet to hear players complaining about server crash issues.

I'll round this off by saying thanks again. There's more to come from the dev team. Also, community geezers, get mapping & customising FF!