Like Mulchman mentioned, we had an intra-team playtest scheduled for today (Sunday, 2 Jul 2006). We got about 12 devs into the *nix server, capped a flag and... the FF server software crashed. :-( That was pretty disappointing. We tried playing on several maps (2fort, dustbowl, a 4-team dev ctf map), but the crashes kept coming. So, we didn't end up getting as much playtesting done as we'd hoped.

There is a happy ending to this story, though! It wasn't more than a couple of hours later that the FF coders figured out the problem and came up with a quick fix (much love to the FF coders). Pretty impressive stuff. Given the behavior of the server after the update, I'm betting the next playtest will go more smoothly. That we had to wait a little bit for a fix wasn't so bad, either. The group of us hopped into a dustbowl TFC server and llama'd it up for a bit while the server binaries were compiling. Good times!

We're at a point now where it makes sense for us to start holding these playtests more frequently. It's not that playtests weren't going on before; it's just that they weren't coordinated. Typically, dev X (that's my super secret nickname for Mulch) would say something like "Hey you *****es, I need some ****head in the server to verify that the ****ing sniper launch strength is ****ing normal again," and folks would cover their ears and hop in.

What did we notice from today? Well, we pretty much all agree that dustbowl freakin' rocks.
We also agree that the soldier rocket strength needs a little bit more unf (like for rocket jumping), and that the HWGuy is too damn easy to play right now. Easy enough to fix, though.

Everything is coming together. A few more animations here, a model there, and a few tweaks later... and we'll be in a happy place. The team has made some solid progress over the last month or so. Cheers!