I've been continuing to work on the grenades; however, I have switched from worrying about cool visuals right next to gameplay and mechanics, to not worrying about visuals right now and just worrying about gameplay and mechanics. Don't be alarmed though, this does not mean that the visual effects won't be nice looking when everything is working correctly. ;)

Also, I have started to play with a couple ideas concerning how to implement a grenade timer and status icon that won't be lagged as much as the current one in TFC. Hopefully, I can get it to work quite well, and lag will hardly be an issue when it comes to accurate grenade timing. :)

I've moved from the team & class menus to overhauling the buildable objects. But, since Ghroth has made actual class descriptions and such, I've noticed that the VGUI HTML window loads the pages way too slow and that'll have to be changed to something better later on (Ghroth's pages will still be used, though - thanks G!).

As for the buildable objects, they've been totally overhauled. The "CanBuild" stuff is so much more efficient. We're also trying out a couple of new ideas with them and seeing how they pan out. I've also started plugging in some values from TFC into the sg & dispenser - things like ammo amounts and such.

Also, I'd like to thank mirv, rebo, and Defrag.

It's been a really good week so far.

As of late I have been helping Mulchman with the class menus.

It's been about a week since my last journal... I'm still working on the class menu & team menu - mainly adding in support for localization and different languages. One tip I'd like to give people so they don't waste as much time as I did - save your <modname>_<language>.txt files in unicode! If it's just plain ascii, your tokens won't work in game and you'll waste a lot of time doing stupid stuff to figure out why! Or, if you're a better reader than me, you would have gotten that out of the VGUI 2 SDK Documents. It's mentioned very briefly once (and I obviously read right over it) towards the end - "Language resource files are encoded as Unicode."

Anyway, hopefully later this week I'll be past the team & class menus and doing something else.

Since I have neglected my journal lately, I think its about time for an update.

I am continuing work on the grenade system, implementing the different grenade types, etc. Since I don't like creating sub-par work, I am working hard on the most appropriate, yet cool looking visual effects possible for the grenades. It just doesn't make sense to have bland visual effects with everything the Source engine is capable of. Do not worry though -- the visual effects will not be overboard, as we do not want to hinder gameplay just to make things look pretty. I think you will all be pleased with how the grenades look, especially if your video card supports shaders. :D

Oh, did I mention particles are cool?