Yo ho ho.

We did a playtest on push today (because defrag FINALLY mirrored it [but you can't rotate overlays wtf???]) and it was fun.

Yeah, Hi.

This went up on the myspace private photos last week:



Not all of these icons will be used in the game, but I think they're still kind of cool.
(Friends and family are telling me to sell T-shirts of them as a side business.)

Anyway, if you don't follow our forums, there's a myspace entitty for FF that you're welcome to become our friend.
http://myspace.com/fortressforever

Hey ho, just a quick update from me.

Things are going pretty good now, things seem to be falling into place. We had a pretty good playtest on Sunday with about 14 people playing. It was great fun!

Im currently moving to a flat with my gf this week and ive started my first big assigment for my 3d/animation course and everything is a bit hectic. Its fun and all to move into a new place, but the actual moving part isnt as fun.

Ive been going over and improving and redoing things when ive had the time to do so lately (in between moving and making new content ;) ).

The supernailgun and the supershotgun were the first two to go under the knife. The SNG got a complete overhaul and i retextured most of it. FC had improved/replaced some parts to make it look better in firstperson so i had to texture thoose anyway, and since i really hated how the SNG looked ingame the decision to just redo most of it was an easy one.
The supershotgun is the other weapon i really didnt like ingame so i tried my best to improve that one by touching up and adding/removing/improving parts of the textures where it was needed. I think they both look a lot better ingame now. There are a few more weapon textures that need some more umph before im prepared to call them done so i will continue this boring but very rewarding tweaking process as soon as im set up in my new flat this friday.

Other than that ive started finishing the engineer texture while spewok is working on getting the HWGuy done and hes almost there :)

I guess thats all i have time for now, ill post a longer and more informative dev journal as soon as im set up in the new flat. Tata!

Update - The new new new SDK update has fixed a few of these issues, so rejoice. Let's hope Valve can keep up with the fast turnaround and fix the other issues, cheers!

-- Original post follows:

Well, we're having a lot of fun with the latest SDK release. By fun, I mean.. not fun. Various things are broken, the linux server won't run properly and there's a lot of new errors. The tools situation isn't much better -- Hammer quits without saying anything every 3 minutes. It's literally died on me about 10 times in the last 10 minutes while I've been editing displacements. I want to punch something because a lot of us are putting in so much graft right now, but we're getting nowhere due to issues we cannot control. We're just going to have to sit tight and wait for Valve to update the SDK for certain issues.

I can't even tweak my lighting properly because the latest SDK update seems to have broken the lightmap code for texture lights -- the lights affect player models but not lightmapped surfaces.

On a positive, the new format of the SDK and the way it's run appears to be more logical, so once all of these issues are straightened out things, in general, will be better. Unfortunately there's still a heap of confusion as to who can run mods (CS:S owners, HL2:DM owners, HL2 Episode one owners etc.) so I still can't clarify this. It's guaranteed that HL2 owners will be able to run mods based on the SDK base, but there's still no word on the status of other source games.

A request to Valve: Document things in a straightforward way. There is a huge amount of confusion right now about the new SDK stuff and there's little in the way of pragmatic and plain-speak documentation saying "you set things up this way now and this is what it means; your mod can be played by people with x, y and z, but not w" . It's just been dumped on us with a few gleaned bits of knowledge.

Secondly, the wiki is a mess when it comes to bug reporting. Various SDK releases are being posted on the same page and all of the comments remain from the previous release. To report issues, you currently have to navigate to the currently known issues discussion page, which seems very odd to me. The discussion page for the SDK release is currently a mish-mash of old and new release discussion and it took me a few minutes to realise it wasn't current, especially because of the fact that there was HDR discussion and some new content tacked onto the end by users. This is the problem with wikis -- you need someone to take the lead and if they get it wrong well.. it's not good. A Valve-created, well signposted, separate, dated page for the new update and clearly labelled pages would help alleviate this situation.

Thirdly, we (and this is not the royal we) would MUCH prefer a delayed release if it means things are ironed out to a better degree and there's some good documentation available from the get-go. The huge list of known issues tells a story; take these, for example:

Included cs_militia Map Does Not Load Properly (Since 8/4/2006)
The version of cs_militia that came with the SDK does not load properly and will be fixed in a patch release of the SDK. <- ten seconds to check if it loads

SDK Does Not Compile Under Linux (Since 8/4/2006)
The SDK was not properly tested under Linux before it was released. <- Ultra mega disaster! D:

SDK Shaders are Not Building Properly (Since 8/4/2006)
In the new SDK it is presently not possible to build the game_shader_generic_sample.vcproj or game_shader_generic_advanced.vcproj projects. <- again, another thing that should've really been obvious under testing.

So, while we're grateful for the update (and I mean it when I say thank you -- just people are more inclined to whine about the stuff that goes wrong and I'm no different) but the amount of oversights is large and it's basically ground our development to a halt in various quarters. Since steam forces us to shift over to the new stuff immediately, it's important that Valve tests this stuff more thoroughly. Part of the problem was probably down to the huge gap between SDK updates (it's over a year since we got a code update), so hopefully with the new SDK structure we will receive smaller frequent updates as opposed to infrequent and enormous updates. The latter is always likely to cause problems due to the sheer amount of stuff that is updated.

On FF development: Stuff, other than SDK woes, is going pretty well. We've not hit the planned first week of August date, but things are going well regardless. This SDK update would've definitely resulted in a delay anyway so it's not so bad. Lately:

• The assault cannon and AC behaviour is ingame and animated, complete with various material proxies and effects. We've got a few things up our sleeve for this and hopefully it will stop the HW from being a mindless point and click adventure. If it doesn't work, then we can revert it easily enough.
  
  
• FC has just implemented a proof of concept for the sentry gun on-damage glow and it looks great, so we're now extending that throughout the mod for flags etc.; this should be all done within a few days. The scale, bounding boxes, clipping and smoothness of the sentry guns is now also fixed thanks to fc. Hopefully the sentry gun scale issue will be put to bed for good as a result of this.
  
  
• The coders are doing their best to squash bugs that don't require running the linux server.
  
  
• The HUD (revision 3) is being implemented. fc, decs, beefy, mulch and mirv are all conspiring to make a stylish and unobtrusive HUD. Oh, and not to mention that it will work with LUA (so mappers can add their own icons, text and timers) and be eventually be customisable by the user. Optional visual gren and build timers are also included for your pleasure and for the hard of hearing TFers out there.
  
  
• The movement code is nearing endgame. All of the designed movement behaviour is now ingame and ready to be refined on playtesting.
  
  
• Bots are moving forward handily and DrEvil and his merry bunch of bot dudes, primarily geekfeststarter, are working on the training capabilities amongst other things. While we don't forsee the training scripts being done for the start of the beta, it will hopfully be ready for the second wave of the beta so we can test it out on new players :).
  
  
• We're getting the sniper effects just right. This means that you won't see the sniper's laser shining in your stupid face until you're about to cop a bullet between the mince pies. The sprite is being tweaked and the colour is now resembling the familiar, sharp red dot of impending DOOM.
  
  
• DK has been ploughing his way through the animation issues and is doing a superb job on sorting them out. We're down to a fraction of the animations being 'davinci' to the point where I can't remember when I last saw a missing animation (swimming excluded!).
  
  
• Rebo has tweaked the player model proportions and also re-jigged them to fix a few issues.
  
  
• I'm over encumbered and am having to drop the pies
  
  

We had planned to do a media release sometime during the last few days, but we don't have a working linux server to get more gameplay shots, and we have also got some existing media that is being used for something else, so we can't post it right now. We'll get a media release done soon, though. Sit tight and thanks for your patience, chaps.

Until next time.

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.