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*

I haven't written a dev journal in a while, so now is as good a time as any to post an update. I've been working hard on my final year at University and while things are going really well there, unfortunately something had to give and my FF work has suffered a little. Anyway to redress this balance, I've spent the last week working on shutdown 2 again. I felt the map had become a little stale and the juxtaposition of styles had created an uneasy clash. The only part of the map I was really happy with was the flag room and the rest was just nice looking curves. I was OK with this at one point, but then something struck me: This is a map about power. It features a monolithic fortress in lockdown courtesy of some generators and lasers. It's 2007 and I'm presiding over some curves and very little in the way of a coherent theme etc.

Anyway, long story short, I've rebuilt a lot of it and tried to make a much more involved theme. It's now mainly heavy concrete & rusted metal and power conduits run the length of the base. Beefy helped me out with a cool power texture and I'm pretty sure we can pull off a nice effect. The idea is fairly simple: You can see the power conduits all through the base and, when the lasers are in operation, the power visibly surges through the conduits. When the lasers are disabled, the power flow becomes significantly slower and duller, making it obvious what's going on. I always wanted to do something like this, but I'm not sure why I left it the way it was. Perhaps I was just too afraid of messing with what was, when I started working on it, entirely someone else's map. I had originally intended to leave it pretty much entirely the way kerm had left it and just optimise the hell out of it. However I slowly worked my way through it tweaking bits here and there adding new content that kerm wasn't able to use back when he was working on the map until... I realised I had changed so much that I may as well go through with the wholesale changes.

The upshot of this is that I've had a lot of fun working on the map in the last week, whereas the other changes have been more of a chore. The top ramp is now housing the power conduits, some ducts and it has a nice ambience to it. The lift is probably my favourite change because instead of being curvy room looking outside, it has a more run down feel to it, like a service elevator or something. Since defenders can no longer hold up the lift, I added a few bits and pieces to the top lift area to give defenders a few opportunities to place dispensers etc. The lift is no longer a shoebox where it is impossible to dodge or do anything but catch grenades. It's not a huge change (I added maybe 50% width to the hallway and a small overhang to the side of the lift top) but just enough to add some new gameplay elements and give people something new to learn / play with. If stopping defenders from holding the lift proves to be too great an offensive advantage, then I'll have to redress the balance somehow. I'd say that it was a necessary evil in the TFC version and helped keep the score in check.

Shutdown2 had some great gameplay and well-paced scoring for TFC (usually in the 50-100 range in a 8v8 4/4 clan match) so I'm eager to retain this. The respawns house vertical conduits next to the ammo & health aaaaand I'm still adding more and more stuff. I don't have the time or energy to totally overhaul everything, but I'm trying to spend my time where it will have the greatest impact. As with all TF maps, one of the greatest challenges is adding all of those cool stuff without impacting on the gameplay (particularly movement flow). Thus far I've managed to keep it smooth, but it does always limit/shape the aesthetics to a certain degree.

Jesse made a load of displacements for me so that I could reduce the BSP face count by removing func_details I was using for curves and using displacements instead. This has helped a great deal. Expect some new Shutdown2 pictures soon. Unless I get kidnapped.

"Now go home and get your f**kin' shine box."

I remember Phish was talking to some bitches about the textures in FF, and uhh yeah, they're awesome.

I wanted to do this a long time ago, and now I'ma try it again. I don't know if this'll get approved, but maybe it will. I also figured I had to watermark the stuff since it isn't my work, so, maybe they don't want that stuff out there where it can just be stolen, but then again maybe my watermarks suck and won't stop anything.

These are all resized down from their 512x512 size, and you gotta remember basically all of these also have normal maps, and use an envmap.

So many awesome asshole FF resources.


And then you gotta realize there's also yellow/green versions of the textures, and then there's several variations of each type of wall. This was just me randomly selecting some, ok, raaaaaaaaaaaandom.

There's also a crapload of "trims" in FF. Trims are good to have around, and there's lots of them. Your mom's trim smells like a coffin, though.

Wahey! Valve finally fixed the SVN resources issue! Praise be to Valve.

This means that when searching for a prop, texture, sound etc. resource we no longer have to pick through the 'ghost' SVN folder files which are not valid. It makes life easier. Simpler. Better. Fitter. Happier. More productive. Not like a decs. In a cage. Churning out weapon models. We love you, decs.

Hey, just thought I'd post a brief dev journal to show some of what I've been doing the last week. Since we don't have a concept artist doing concept sketches i usually just start by making a fast model of the weapon using the ideas i already have then develop it from there. This is supposed to show you briefly how that process goes. Thought some people might find it interesting :)

Below you will see the five different versions of the sniperrifle. It started out as the top one and the final one is the one at the bottom, the stuff on the side is just various clip ideas.
There where a few more versions of it that i cant find anymore but this is roughly how it went. I think the bottom (final) one is a huge improvement over the top one.


Closeup of the finished version:


It was uvmapped and textured around version 4, but once ingame i decided that it didn't work at all so i went back and remodeled the scope, using the scope from the first two versions as a base, then uvmapped and retextured that part as well as doing a lot of improvements on the texture. Below is a screengrab from max at the pose i ended up with, this image differs somewhat from the final model as it is using a colored specularity map to define specularity and since source does not support that we ended up using phong on it instead. Rendered with two omni lights, one from side (white) and one from the back and other side (orange).


The first pose differed a bit from this and the weapon was overall a bit too big so the pose along with the animations were redone.
After some tweaking of materials and shader settings this is what we ended up with ingame.


There are still things that could be improved, the hand pose being one of them, but since i'm still learning as an animator it was the best i could do at the time. If FC has time to work on FF again sometime in the future, maybe i can get some pointers from him.

So, i hope you enjoyed this semi brief introduction to how i created the sniper rifle. Let me know on the forums :) If you did, i might do another one.