Developer Journals

Developer Journal: squeek.

Posted 11 months ago Team Lead / Project Manager
I wrote a blog post about the technical details of movement on downward slopes:

Source vs GoldSrc Movement: Downward Slopes

Here’s a snippet:
The slope-related movement physics in the GoldSrc (Half-Life 1) engine and the Source (Half-Life 2) engine are fairly similar. However, there is one caveat around moving down slopes: in the GoldSrc engine you will bounce down slopes somewhat often, while in the Source engine you will smoothly move down almost any slope unless you collide with them while moving extremely quickly.

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Developer Journal: squeek.

Posted 4 years ago Team Lead / Project Manager
I wrote a blog post about the technical details of rampsliding:

Rampsliding Is a Quake Engine Quirk in the Same Way That Bunnyhopping Is

Here’s a snippet:
The obvious assumption would be that [rampsliding] is an intentional feature that uses things like the slope of the surface and the player’s velocity to determine when a player is rampsliding, but that is not the case. In fact, in the same way that bunnyhopping was likely an unintentional quirk of the ‘air acceleration’ code, rampsliding was likely an unintentional quirk of the ‘categorize position’ code.

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Developer Journal: squeek.

Posted 9 years ago Team Lead / Project Manager
Uhh... hello?

So, what has happened in the last year? Well, unfortunately, not a whole lot.

When FF was first Greenlit, we thought it would be best (and also thought it was required of us) to upgrade FF to the latest version of the Source engine. We started work on that, but our enthusiasm faded fairly quickly; porting FF requires a lot of work, and our goal was to fix/improve things as we upgraded. You can gain some insight into what we wanted to do by visiting our never-made-public website about the upgrade. Note also that we'll be open sourcing this upgrade attempt, although it is still in the very early stages.

After development stalled on the port, we weren't really sure what to do. There were talks of waiting for the Source 2 engine or potentially moving to a different engine entirely, but that never really ended up going anywhere.

Since then, there's been a whole lot of nothing. I basically became a hermit and hid away from the forums/IRC/Steam/etc. I didn't think it was possible to release on Steam without doing some sort of engine upgrade, and 'ffded' was becoming a legitimate reality. It's very fortunate that Neotokyo has been able to pave the way with regards to releasing a Source SDK 2006 mod on Steam, as this period of inactivity may have just continued indefinitely without that knowledge (big thanks to KubeDawg for pointing out Neotokyo's Steam release).

On another note, I'm not quite certain what my future with Fortress Forever will entail. I've been working on this mod for 6 years now, and my enthusiasm has (clearly) been waning. However, I'm very curious to see what will come of the Steam release, and, who knows, maybe I'll get a second wind. There were a lot of experimental changes that we tried at one point or another in the closed beta that never made it into a release, and with the public beta that Steam distribution will allow us to run, it might be fun to revisit some of those ideas and get some more feedback on them.

That's about it. Just wanted to try to give everyone some info about what went on during this rather strange period of FF's development.
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Developer Journal: squeek.

Posted 1 decade ago Team Lead / Project Manager
As discussed in a recent dev journal, a client-only bugfix patch (version 2.46.1) has been released using our new auto-updater. You should be prompted to update next time you load the game. Let me know if you have any trouble using it.

Here is the changelog (which can also be found on our changelogs page):
Bug Fixes
  • Fixed a bug that made the team menu disappear if you joined a server and toggled the scoreboard while still looking at the MOTD
  • Fixed cloak screen effect being drawn while in a slowfield instead of while cloaked
  • Reverted cl_ragdolltime fix because it caused unexcepted problems; removed the cl_ragdolltime cvar temporarily
  • Fixed first-person spectator view going insane if the player you're spectating dies while concussed

Also, for anyone that needs or just prefers it, here is an .exe installer for 2.46.1 (to patch from 2.46 to 2.46.1):
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Developer Journal: squeek.

Posted 1 decade ago Team Lead / Project Manager
Just wanted to write a quick little journal about some bugs found in 2.46 and what we plan to do about them. These are all client-side changes and therefore we are planning to release a client-only hotfix (2.46.1) using our newly implemented auto-updater as soon as we get all the bugs squashed.

  • Bug: If you join a server and toggle the scoreboard before closing the MOTD, the team menu doesn't show up when you close the MOTD.
    Status: Fixed

  • Bug: While in a slowfield, the cloak screen effect gets incorrectly applied. While cloaked, the cloak screen effect is not applied.
    Status: Fixed

  • Bug: While first-person spectating someone that dies while concussed, your view goes absolutely insane in between them dying and them respawning.
    Status: Working on a fix

In addition, the fixed cl_ragdolltime cvar has caused a few new bugs (CL_CopyExistingEntity errors and "cl_ragdolltime 0" spawning floating player models in the center of the map). Unfortunately, the fix for the CL_CopyExistingEntity errors is rather involved and will require some fairly significant changes in how ragdolls are handled. Therefore, we will rollback the cl_ragdolltime "fix" that was put in 2.46 (and temporarily remove the cvar since it will no longer work) and work on a more robust fix for the next patch.

If you are aware of any other bugs in 2.46, let us know.
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