Developer Journal: Schtoofa
Posted 2 decades ago Team Lead / Project Manager
Woah, what's this?
So, I figured I'd spend some time letting you all know what's been going on lately with the FF team.
Many of our team members had been super busy during the holidays, enjoying family and friends and all that good non-FF stuff; others were moving; and another nearly went blind after being hit in the eye with a bungee cord (I swear I'm not making this up!). Within the last several weeks, though, we've been pushing full steam ahead.
I'll touch on a few areas of FF development, starting with programming.
Bravo to mirv and his FF programmers over the last month. Although their efforts don't show up in media updates, they have been busy coding and bugfixing like crazy. For example, some little things have been worked on like making it cost 130 cells for an Engineer to build his sentry gun, adjusting concussion grenade strength, and limiting the Demoman to have a trap of 8 pipes, etc. Internally we utilize a super-convenient bug reporting and tracking tool that helps us communicate and track fixes. In summary, I can tell you that approximately 100 bugs have been resolved over the last month. Seriously, the FF coders kick ass.
Bug reporting efforts within the team have increased dramatically over the last month, also. Dospac and MrBeefy have been reporting the largest percentage of bugs lately, and the FF coders have been fixing those bugs promptly. We're all doing our best to play the internal alpha frequently, whether it be on our own by ourselves, with eachother in a server, or against bots... which leads me to DrEvil's efforts!
I know some of you are afraid of "bots & FF," but they really will be a good thing. DrEvil has started integrating his bots into FF and the results have been great so far. Whether they're used for testing purposes or just plain to have fun DMing, these bots are looking to be very promising. I can't wait to see what DrEvil will pull off.
rebo and his art team have been busy, too, although obviously you haven't seen their efforts on the site. More weapon & prop models have been created & skinned, animations have been flowing in, and more and more skinned models have [hardly] magically appeared in game. Although it's frustrating to those who follow closely and anxiously await the next media update, we've been placing emphasis on integrating everything together (as opposed to making flashy renders & selecting glamorous screenshots for our web site). We'll give away some tasty morsels when we have time, but I assure you that the art team has been super busy and their efforts are coming together nicely.
On the sound front, Ghroth continues to add more and refine more. Soulescape has been rather busy lately, unfortunately, but hopefully he'll contribute more soon.
FriedBunny has been silently taking requests from folks to make site updates and the like. Some of those updates you might see; many you won't! Either way, we're glad we have our fuzzy bunny.
Map design work has been progressing forward, too, but Hammer problems were really slowing us down. Now that things seem to be functioning as normal once again, we are "back in business."
In addition to his map work, Defrag has spent a lot of time working on FF documentation. Although not the funnest job, these efforts have helped us (and will help you all later!) immeasurably.
As for me, I've been just trying to keep things moving forward. I've been working on outlining and diagramming processes (like detailed bug reporting, bug assigning & handling, etc.) to streamline our work.
All in all, (especially since none of us are being paid!) the FF dev team members work extremely well together. It's been a good (but slower than hoped) experience so far, but things are looking solid right now. Although I haven't mentioned each individual team member, they've all been spending time contributing when they can. Hopefully FF will come together even faster in the near future.
View all developer journals So, I figured I'd spend some time letting you all know what's been going on lately with the FF team.
Many of our team members had been super busy during the holidays, enjoying family and friends and all that good non-FF stuff; others were moving; and another nearly went blind after being hit in the eye with a bungee cord (I swear I'm not making this up!). Within the last several weeks, though, we've been pushing full steam ahead.
I'll touch on a few areas of FF development, starting with programming.
Bravo to mirv and his FF programmers over the last month. Although their efforts don't show up in media updates, they have been busy coding and bugfixing like crazy. For example, some little things have been worked on like making it cost 130 cells for an Engineer to build his sentry gun, adjusting concussion grenade strength, and limiting the Demoman to have a trap of 8 pipes, etc. Internally we utilize a super-convenient bug reporting and tracking tool that helps us communicate and track fixes. In summary, I can tell you that approximately 100 bugs have been resolved over the last month. Seriously, the FF coders kick ass.
Bug reporting efforts within the team have increased dramatically over the last month, also. Dospac and MrBeefy have been reporting the largest percentage of bugs lately, and the FF coders have been fixing those bugs promptly. We're all doing our best to play the internal alpha frequently, whether it be on our own by ourselves, with eachother in a server, or against bots... which leads me to DrEvil's efforts!
I know some of you are afraid of "bots & FF," but they really will be a good thing. DrEvil has started integrating his bots into FF and the results have been great so far. Whether they're used for testing purposes or just plain to have fun DMing, these bots are looking to be very promising. I can't wait to see what DrEvil will pull off.
rebo and his art team have been busy, too, although obviously you haven't seen their efforts on the site. More weapon & prop models have been created & skinned, animations have been flowing in, and more and more skinned models have [hardly] magically appeared in game. Although it's frustrating to those who follow closely and anxiously await the next media update, we've been placing emphasis on integrating everything together (as opposed to making flashy renders & selecting glamorous screenshots for our web site). We'll give away some tasty morsels when we have time, but I assure you that the art team has been super busy and their efforts are coming together nicely.
On the sound front, Ghroth continues to add more and refine more. Soulescape has been rather busy lately, unfortunately, but hopefully he'll contribute more soon.
FriedBunny has been silently taking requests from folks to make site updates and the like. Some of those updates you might see; many you won't! Either way, we're glad we have our fuzzy bunny.
Map design work has been progressing forward, too, but Hammer problems were really slowing us down. Now that things seem to be functioning as normal once again, we are "back in business."
In addition to his map work, Defrag has spent a lot of time working on FF documentation. Although not the funnest job, these efforts have helped us (and will help you all later!) immeasurably.
As for me, I've been just trying to keep things moving forward. I've been working on outlining and diagramming processes (like detailed bug reporting, bug assigning & handling, etc.) to streamline our work.
All in all, (especially since none of us are being paid!) the FF dev team members work extremely well together. It's been a good (but slower than hoped) experience so far, but things are looking solid right now. Although I haven't mentioned each individual team member, they've all been spending time contributing when they can. Hopefully FF will come together even faster in the near future.