A comment to the developers

I have been around since the beginning of time. I was one of the original developers on the original TeamFortress mod for Quake1, played through quakeworld, many many years ago. I was also to a much lesser degree involved with debugging TFC when it came out for steam.

Now this mod..

The entire development team deserves on hell of a pat on the back. I have been watching alot of the third party source mods coming out, and virtually all of them are lacking in one form or other, thus maintaining a small playerbase (even across the more famous third party source mods). Many of these newer fancy mods might have direct user control problems, other have gameplay fauxpaus that make people not want to play them, other bugs or numerous technical issues.

I always thought that TeamFortress was next to CS for addiction level: people always play CS and TFC, just how it always was.

But this mod, on the mere 2nd day of release, has hundreds of people playing, and it appears the numbers are climbing rapidly. The pure quality of the first major public release amazed me greatly. Yes there are issues, but at this point everything is just 'fixes' for unforseen bugs and whatnot. You guys did not give in to temptation and release a half-working crap mod (like almost all of the others did) and thusly did not taint your own playerbase with a buggy release. Hats off to good project management.

The maps are detailed; All aspects of the classes are implemented and function as intended, the UI system is complete and very functional with a effective and non-obtrusive HUD, complete with a decent and helpful 'hint message' system, which is not in-your-face annoying by default like some others.

I have read most of the other threads with complaints, and quite frankly, some people need to learn some respect. The amount of work your team has put into this mod is amazing. I expected for there to be some intentional features left out, for some bugs to be remaining that are very serious and intentionally left in for a 'beta' release, or for aspects of the classes not to function. That would have been totally acceptable for a source third party first release; but instead, this release is a good 98% complete as-is out of the box. As long as you have your video drivers in order and whatnot, this mod runs clean right off the bat. (tested on 3 systems now).

The fact this mod is so well done, and FREE, I think will gurantee it's popularity over TF2. Ive already heard a few things I dont like about it, and quite frankly, surprisingly to me and a small circle of my programming friends, Fortress Forever fills the gap quite nicely as far as I'm concerned.

As for other people: Bugs in a project this size are inevitable; You have no idea the dozens of thousand-line source files, massive nearly-unmanagable visual studio projects and other things that are involved just to get the core of a mod working, escpecially under source. Not to mention all the maps.. and the models.. and the sounds.. and recompiling a map 500 times over to make sure every detail is good to go. Ive been there, done that, and thank god, these people did it for us this time.

Enough hero worship, I just found it disheartening that so much negative feedback has been coming into the forums. What a shame. I think everyone who plays this mod should give these guys a donation asap.

-- Virinix --