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.

So I upgraded my motherboard, processor, RAM, video card, and power supply recently...

ASUS P5N-E SLI
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 E6420 E6600
G.Skill 2GB DDR2 800
XFX 8600 GTS XXX EVGA 8800 GTS
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610

*BEGIN EDIT*

So thanks to some tips from some FF forum folk, I decided to exchange a couple of the parts for better parts without losing much money.

Apparently the E6420 came out in the past week or so, so I worked my magic on a newegg support whore to let me return my E6400 even though it's been a little more than 7 days. So now my CPU will have 4MB L2 cache instead of 2MB. I don't even know what other differences there are, but it's 6420 instead of 6400. The 6400 can go screw.

But then I realized the E6600 came down in price, so I ordered that instead. The E6420 can go screw.

I also decided to return my XFX 8600 GTS XXX for an EVGA 8800 GTS at only $30 more (after a $20 mail-in rebate). So I'll have 320MB of 320-bit memory instead of 256MB of 128-bit memory, slower core/memory speeds, and 90nm instead of 80nm. Some trade-offs, but OH WELL. It's an 8800 instead of 8600 for not much more, but apparently the performance is more than "not much more" and that's all I care about. The 8600 can go screw.

Anyways, onto the old babble about the old parts and the old FF and just sit down...

*END EDIT*

http://trepid.net/ff/images/new_hotness-01.jpg

That's with everything maxed and only getting 30 fps. Haha, while 30 fps is kind of disappointing, I guess it's expected with 16xQ AA and me skimping on the parts to save a few hundred dollars. I mean, why save money? That's just crazy talk. But uh...I still see jagged edges. What the hell, mang? I would think "16xQ" AA at 1600x900 would mean no jagged edges anywhere. Maybe I didn't set something right.

At any rate, FF can look and run faster than my old setup, which is nice. Only FF, though. No other games will run better. I think I may overclock my E6400. I read somewhere that even with the stock cooling, it can go from the default 2.13 GHz to over 3 GHz. I don't know if I want to go that high, though. I get scared sometimes.

I wish I had more time to mess with FF stuff like I used to. But noooo, I had to be selfish and get a job. I try to find time here and there, but it seems like I'm always trying to do something that requires a little more time than I can devote to it...and it seems like I try to do too many things at once instead of just focusing on one thing until that one thing is done. Like uh...I have some AC optimizations started but not complete, glow shell shader and implementation started but not complete, a dynamic lights "manager" started but not complete (including dlights on a lot more things, which is where the "manager" comes into play...which is mainly just an options menu for enabling/disabling dlights for players on fire, rockets, ICs, explosions, muzzle flashes, rails, and so on...dynamic lights are cool, and I want 3 or 4 of them...possibly a little bit more than that, Jim), and what was I babbling about?

Annnnywho, it'll be cool when my computer starts crashing. I like upgrading only to have bad parts.

crinkle crinkle

BORING SHIT but I thought I'd better write something
I've been really busy over the last few weeks, but I've been spending the odd hour or two on shutdown2. I've got a load of lighting bugs so I've been going around the map taking screenshots, then sitting with image viewer open & constantly moving to the next problem image, trying to fix it, moving to the next image, fix it... repeat ad nauseum.

Many of the lighting issues are caused by engine limitations and include:

1. Vertex lighting transitions on props. These are ugly but can be smoothed out with better placement and subdivision of meshes (or placing low intensity lights near the seams).

2. Displacement lighting errors. These are annoying as it can take many iterations to clear up the errors; it's tough to visualise what it'll look like without compiling the map. I usually just drop the lightmap scale and add some low intensity lights near the errors. It's no big deal for terrain, but for curved geometry it can take many iterations to fix.

3. Areas where func_details 'join' regular brush geometry. You'd think this would've been fixed by now (it's a compile tool issue) but no such luck. Basically, if a curve or other piece of func_detail geometry touches a regular brush and there's no split at the edge where they join, you get a really ugly seam. To fix it, you have to split all world brushes where the func detail intersects it. I've fixed most of these now.

I've also been fixing niggling bugs such as clipping. I've removed all of the pillars from the ramp room as I just wasn't happy with the way it flowed. It meant I had to add loads of clip brushes and the pillars just didn't look 'right' anyway. Instead, I've added some embedded light fittings to fit in with the new theme and it's looking better. Other stuff I've been working on includes making the pit darker and more scary :) -- I've also removed the pillars from the plank route and, again, it looks cleaner & better than before. I'm basically just trying to tackle all of the issues I can before I have to create the second base once more because, once I do that, I have to do a time consuming search & replace on all textures & entities, change prop skins, make sure I don't duplicate certain entities, repair all of the broken overlays and so on. If I have to make more big changes in future, I basically have to delete one base, make the changes and then clone the base and go through all of this work again. It's not fun. I can't wait to make non-symmetrical maps again as the work flow is less frustrating when making significant changes.

As for screenshots... uh soon. I promise.

Beta News
In other news, the beta test was really good last week and this week; we had 20+ people all vying for places on the server and actually ended up caning the server a lot which is a touch worrying. Something in the server code is bogging down the performance, so the programmers will have to look into this as a priority. The mod seems to run fine with 16-18 people, but as soon as we went over 20, things started grinding to a halt.

Jesse News
Jesse uninstalled Battlefield 2. I don't believe him, though.

Oh no, he's got yer shoes; he's gonnae throw them on the roof!. I think I'm going to put a pair of doc martens on every single roof in FF.

This is the most boring dev journal I'll ever write. The last bit saved it. God bless you, INTERNET.

Made some small changes to the site, mostly to the media section. Ain't finished yet so there are probably a few broken things (though none that I know of), if you find any of 'em please drop me a line in IRC or a PM on the forums.

Watch that scene in Fight Club again where the guy's that own the building where they meet for fight club show up. That shit is really funny. The way Brad Pitt is laughing, and the smartass comments he makes, it's a lesson in life. If you're ever getting the shit beat out of you, just start laughing like a psycho, and your problems go away.

You know what's cool? When you go to get your oil changed at Wal-Mart, and they tell you they can't because of the "massive" leak. They have to use the word "massive", which makes you realize how great the rest of your day is gong to be. Then you go to Goodyear to get your shit looked at, and they tell you they can get to your car in about 2 hours, and then 5 hours later, which is 2 hours after they close, you're still waiting for them to finish your god damn car.

What a waste of a Saturday.

So, we brought on some beta testers from the forums, which was cool. Well, I thought it was going to be cool until I realized that one of them was arguing with me about FF shit, and he hadn't even played it. He was trying to justify himself, against me, and he hadn't even played FF. If he actually had a good point, and was arguing with informed information, that'd be one thing, but the stupid twat hadn't even played FF and he was trying to defend his position. Smart. People need to realize when their baby is going to grow up to be a failure, and just strangle it in the crib, but this guy's parents failed.

Aside from that, I think it's going to be awesome. This one guy posted some pictures he took with his ass destroying computer, and holy shitballs the pictures look good. The pictures he took look better than any shit ever by any person ever involved with klanope. I just want him to take pictures all the time cause the shit looks so god damn good on his shit.

The point is, playing with these new queers reminds me of the nights of finding bugs with Patty and Paul2, or waiting for the server to crash every 3 minutes when we had more than a handful of us trying to play. This was also back when our "default" map was some fucking abortion of a test/dev map.

There were lots of really cool bugs, but I think the coolest bug ever was how the velocity of another player would be transferred to you if you stood on their head.

e.g. Player A gets on Player B's head, if Player B moves, that movement was given to Player A. Player A would be forced in that direction, and it was really god damn retarded. Player A could get on Player B's head, and as long as Player B didn't move, Player A was fine. It was just when Player B moved, that Player B's movement would be transferred to Player A, too.

You could fix it by standing on someone else's head, and then getting off their head without that other player moving.

It was... uhh, it was a normal bug.

So yeah, oil leaks are fucking great.

Editieidtd
Oh yeah, Gavin reminded me that this bug persisted through f*cking everything. Once you got this movement f*cking forced upon you, you couldn't stop it by...

• Killing yourself
• Changing teams
• Changing class
• Reconnecting to the server
• F*cking anything

Unless you wanted to restart FF, the only way to f*cking end the suffering was to stand on someone's head, and then get off of their head without that person moving. This bug... this bug f*cking was around for a while, too. It was the most unnormal shit ever to exist anywhere.