The last few weeks have been fairly hectic but we're making good progress. Publicly announcing the date we had in mind for the beta has acted as a good incentive for grinding out this niggly details that it's so easy to file under "I'll do it tomorrow". In my case, this has been sorting out shutdown2. Unfortunately kerm's RL has taken over too much for him to continue with us, and although aesthetically very good, the map had some problems that needed attention before the bases could be flipped; basically, the map exceeds several of the HL2 engine limits. I've spent the best part of a week on this now, which is significantly longer than I had planned for, but in the process I've made a lot of optimisations and also worked in some of the newer FF content that kerm did not have at his disposal back when large portions of the map were created. I have retained kerm's style, so it's not like I'm putting my own stamp on the map, merely extending some of the things he'd done and generally tidying things up. See my last dev journal to see the sort of stuff this process entails. Anyway, since I started I've reduced the .vmf size by 3 megs without actually cutting out much content.

In general terms, FF is going along nicely but of course, there are problems we're addressing and issues that aren't going as smoothly as we'd like... but that's par for the course. The coolest thing is that the new flamethrower model is now ingame, as are the tranq, assault cannon and railgun models. The list of "to do" is becoming shorter and shorter. The sooner it hits "zero" the better!

Get oot yer bed, ye fat gypsy.