Hello, it’s next Thursday. Well it is while I'm writing it, but by the time this is approved it might not be.

I suppose I’ll write a bit about our play test again because they’re pretty interesting. We played 2fort and dustbowl again and a good time was had by all (presumably).

One thing that’s always quite fun in a play test is trying out new things that have been added to the game. On Saturday in our 13-player dustbowl game I spent most of it playing with the new spy sabotage skill, and (unlike many things initially) it worked pretty well right off the bat.

Still, the big bug crush marches on and gradually all the issues are being ironed out. Recently I added the client-side code for the Lua-controlled dynamic HUD, once this is integrated into Lua it should allow mappers to display their own timers, persistent messages or onscreen icons for their maps.

DrEvil has been doing plenty of work on his bots recently and has brought on 2 new people to help write all the bot scripts for the maps. Bot scripts?

For example, in openfire the script is responsible for marking the flag as unavailable until the lasers are taken down, or in cz2 each checkpoint is disabled for each team at certain times based on the cap status. The availability of detpack goals, capture points, flags, defense points, etc.. all are scriptable.

That’s what he says, and who am I to argue (they’re his bots). This is all good news anyway since this was one of the main areas left to sort in the mod.

Now the main thing is to get the entity system sorted. Mulchman has been doing a lot of work on it recently along with Olah. It’s gradually shaping up, now in it’s 3rd iteration I think. There’s plenty more that could be said about it but that’s something for another journal.

Alright well that’s almost it for this journal.

The spy sabotage! Ah yeah, as I was saying, this was a lot of fun in our play test. Before I go on, I should say that this is going to be subject to change (tweaking, removing altogether, depending on the game balance). So what’s the spy sabotage?

Go spy, disguise as the same team as an engineer and you are able to sabotage his buildables. Strut up to a sentry gun or a dispenser and point your crosshair at it while stationary. After about 3 seconds (there’s a handy on-screen timer) you’ve sabotaged it. Well done.

Sabotaged sentry guns have reduced accuracy and sabotaged dispensers will reduce the armour class of players who take dispensed ammo ammo from them. This lasts for 2 minutes before wearing off.

For those 2 minutes the spy also has a remote link to the buildable (accessible through the spy menu). He can use this to detonate the enemy dispenser or set the sentry gun to attack its own team for 10 seconds (after which it’s no longer sabotaged, even if there was still a minute left of its normal sabotage time).

This is a lot of fun. On dustbowl I went on a mission to sabotage as many sentry guns as possible. I don’t think the enemy team had got the memo about this feature since I’d regularly stroll up to an enemy sentry gun while their engineer just chilled out watching me (this was usually decs). A few seconds later the voice comms (we use Ventrilo for playtests) would be full of surprised voices asking what on earth decs was doing with all the teamkilling.

Good times.