Apparently it's time for me to write my yearly dev journal.

Every time I write one of these, I make a resolution to continue on updating regularly about exciting FF related stuff. But then I never get round to it, only to be persuaded into writing another one a year later.

I'll try not to leave it so long this time.

Anyway, so what's been happening at FF towers? You've probably already heard about the play testing debacle, it was a bit embarrassing but a few hours later than planned the 7 of us who remained were playing FF 2fort. We did get plenty out of the evening in the end – we found a new crash bug (in recently-added Lua system code), we set up the server again with the Linux debugger and had a productive hour or so playing 2fort.

Some of you might be quite surprised that it’s been this long before we had the server running with a debugger, but until recently there have not been any crash issues at all with it. Before we changed server host (sometime last year) we used the debugger quite a bit to catch a number of server crashes but there just hasn’t been the same need up until now.

With pretty much all the main features now in, FF plays like a proper game and is going to be plenty of fun to put through its paces over the next few weeks. Most of the coding now is limited to bug fixing, adding small things that are missing (e.g. spy weapon disguising, which I think voogru is about to finish adding) and changing things as a result of play testing (e.g. we’re overhauling the incendiary cannon right now to try out some new ideas).

The only big thing that is missing is the training system. This depends on the bots and they are still WIP. Hopefully some headway should be made on this soon though.

So, some insight into some of the more interesting things that I’ve been up to this last 2 weeks:

• Implemented a new incendiary cannon to try out some of the ideas discussed on the forums. It’s an improvement over the “just a slower rocket that set things alight” style of the old IC.

• Heavily tweaked the explosion code in the last few days, so now rocket, grenade and pipe jumping all work properly and the correct damage is given out for each explosion.

• Tweaking the hit detection for the flamethrower and fixing a bug where it could get stuck on even though you’d changed weapons or died, which looked a bit silly.

• Wrote a new railgun. This new one is a lot of fun to play with (had an entertaining 1v1 against Defrag using it) and it’ll be interesting to see how it copes throughout gameplay balance testing.

• Added automatic class configs, map configs, cvars to spawn with a particular weapon. Added code to call some new weapon animations.

• Fixed a whole load of bugs, a few of the more interesting ones are: head-banging sentry guns, crowbars that would hit people behind you, various server crashes, the spectators-shooting-guns exploit, getting stuck when walking on grenades, gas grenade lagging out everybody on the server.

Anyway that will do for now, meet me here next Thursday and I'll try to have something new written.