OMG.

WTF.

You guys, seriously, I'm not. Even. Joking. I'm on the dev team!
So I thought I'd write y'all a little dev jernal [sic].

I'm making maps. Actually, as some of you may know, I'm making a lot of maps. Some of them may now actually get finished. One of them, ff_tiger, did get finished recently. (Btw, if you're reading this and you're Arne 'Cynic' Lund, plz email me kthx). I think tiger will be included in version 2.1. I'm really excited about the opportunity to make an update without running into version conflicts, or having things like an _r1 version.

Cacti should also be done sometime soon too, now that I can get a little help from FF's modelers, scripters, and lua coders. I'm tingling with excitement (even now) at the thought of being able to work on a map as part of a team. There's always things that are probably very simple, but would take me so long to figure out on my own. Just a few very basic props, a little lua fixup, a line here or there added to sentences.txt so I can get some Ellen McLain in the map. Beta testing will be handy too.

Finally, there's Harbor. I've always been an advocate of new gameplay types, so I'd like to get this one released. It's kinda like hunted, except there are 2 VIPs and each has a team of bodyguards. There's no goal to escort your VIP to, and instead each team must try to kill the enemy VIP before they do the same to you. If a VIP kills the enemy VIP, then you team gets an extra large pile of points. Instead of being civilians, the VIPs can pick from any of the normal 9 classes. I'm imagining them being spy, and trying to stab their rival, or being a medic and concing to a rooftop to hide, or being a soldier and sitting behind a wall of defenders, and so on. The map takes place in a fairly realistic looking harbor area (although far less open than tiger), and there are 7 bases around the map. Each team randomly rotates to another base each time a VIP is killed, and some bases are much easier to defend than others. Pon is being awesome and writing the LUA for me, and for the first time ever I'm going to knock up the level with dev textures and playtest it that way, so I can rearrange it if necessary.

So, uh, that's the plan anyway. Remember everyone, don't press the carve button.

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!

I didn't have my dev journal password (my own incompetence!) so I haven't been able to write a dev journal in a while. This is js a brief update on how stuff is going (off the top of my head and in no particular order):

We say hello to Ginger Lord & Imbrifer (level design) and mervaka (sound dude).

SD2 & Push are done other than superficial things. Mervaka wanted some fancier soundscapes, so I updated the map so he could do his thang, which he did. Which was nice.

eat_this_it's_high_in_vitamin_c_and_therefore_good_for_you finished well and did a celebratory moonwalk. Badly. (the moonwalk, not the map [which is good, natch].)

I've been programming as well as mapping to help squash the bug count. The SDK is tough to get used to and there's a lot of code involved. Reams of it. Much more than I've ever had to handle. So far I've just limited myself to picking up relatively straightforward (but noticeable) bugs. Looking at this stuff just reinforces what a great job mirv & co have done over the years to design & implement all of this stuff in their spare time! HONK!

DrEvil made several improvements to the lua implementation and squashed a few big bugs. It's now much more flexible and we can do even more handy things with it. The lua is never going to please everyone, but I'm satisfied that you can do a lot of fancy things with it in a relatively straightforward way. Once it's fully documented and we prefab some of the more common stuff I think people will appreciate it a bit more.

DK has really kicked on with the animations and the final problems are now being solved (swim animations and things like that) thanks to DK & Jiggles. Things are looking really nice now. There's still a few things that will be tweaked post-release, but in general nearly all of the big/noticeable animation glitches & problems have been eliminated thanks to DK's hard work.

Omen completed the character LOD models. Everyone's framerates simultaneously jumped up in appreciation but then immediately fell over due to getting up too fast. Kenneth just grumbled in appreciation and then posted a youtube video that was too filthy to embed on a family website.

jon lost on Jeopardy (baby, oooh-oooh-oooh-oooh) and now exists in a fail-zone. Actually, he just got worked to death and then had to move apartments because Jesse failed him, but he's back and better than ever. Jesse apparently just got WoW, so I think murdering him his my only recourse.

PHISH ran around like a level-headed chicken who had everything in hand. CRASH! He updated things. BANG! He saved the beta test by reverting buggered-up .dlls! (it's a bit like saving the orphanage at Christmas, but more important and less twee.) WALLOP! He gathered detailed statistics on what's killing the server. Spy cloaking stood accused of strangling the server. The (shimmering) glove didn't fit and spy cloaking walked free from court, only to be successfully sued by Kyle in a civil action. Later, spy cloaking wrote a 'hypothetical' account of proceedings, titled "If I did kill the server, I would've choked the bitch." Surprisingly, it was later deemed to be in excellent taste and sold a boatload of copies.

Ukulele new wave. What?

I've just finished my last university hand-in, so now it's time for some serious FF action.

T E A M.

Figured I'd give an update since my replacement parts arrived...

http://trepid.net/ff/images/new_hotness-02.jpg

From 30 fps with the E6400 and 8600GTS to 100 fps with the E6600 and 8800GTS.

So uh...yeah, get those better parts (or higher/better) if you're thinking about upgrading.

Thanks to this upgrade, I can now play FF again without crashing. The whole reason I upgraded was because my computer started to die. I'd be playing FF and eventually (quickly), I'd lock up, run out of memory, or any number of other lame things. It made it real easy to work on FF. And by easy, I mean I wanted to strangle somebody. So before, I was struggling to work on FF while my job was taking up most of my time and my computer was turning into a worthless kid toucher. Now all I have to do is deal with the whole lack of much free time due to my job...thing.

I guess it wouldn't be right if I didn't leak a screenshot...



I don't think that area has been shown before. Jesse recently made that tunnel to replace some semi-lame room or something that used to be there. When he first told me about a tunnel being made, I was worried it might be just as lame as the room or even worse. But I think it looks pretty damn cool. Now all we have to do is add a vehicle and the whole escape area should be done.

Well, nevermind. We still have to do the tower/button stuff. See, the button you see in that screenshot won't be the button used to open the escape door. We may or may not keep that temporary button, but it definitely won't be used to open the escape door in either case. The plan is to have 1 tower on the right side of the door with a button, and the other button over there in or around that red building.

Annnnnywho...