So we had another playtest on Saturday (8 Jul 2006). This one went quite a bit better (no server crashes! GJ FF programmers).

I think we had a total of 12-14 devs in the server for this playtest. Since 2fort and dustbowl are currently the most playable maps, those are the ones we played again. We also got out our DM suits and shared some hot, group, mulch DM action. Since the server didn't crash at all this time, we tried out just about all of the class features. Not surprisingly, we also observed and documented a few more bugs. No, we don't want to see bugs, but we're glad to find'm and fix'm sooner as opposed to later.

When things go so smoothly, it makes the deficiencies stand out even more (no matter how minor they might be). For example, there are a few missing sounds and player class animations; some classes have improper/unrefined skin colors; there are only generic death icons; and there are no crosshairs. We have our work cut out, but that we've done two fairly large scale playtests in the last two weeks is an accomplishment.

On another note, we've been organizing a few things for a media update (but no guarantees on a date for that, yet -- sorry, folks). The team really has been quite busy lately, but we're hoping to toss something out there soon.

Oh, and here's a little Red Meat-ized comic put together from some FF dev IRC channel comments. Clicky!

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.

Hey hey!

Just a brief update from me.

Since i took over the Art Lead position ive had enough to sink my hands into, from going through bugs and fixing things as well as getting a good overview of what's left and assigning things to work on to the other artists. Gotten quite alot of art assets done over the last weeks as well. Got most of the w_models in game and working now, waiting on some updated animations from DK and for FC to finish the last couple weapon models.

Omen just finished the umbrella model and uv yesterday, i skinned and put it in game today -- always fun to get things from model stages to in game and working in a day or so. Also finished skinning the AC/Minigun a few days ago. All grenades are finally in game and code/effects-coding and texture tweaking is all that's left to do on them now.

Things are quite good in the ff camp now. Safe to say that we have already gotten alot more out of this summer than what we did last year ;)
Server problems for sundays playtesting were really annoying, but except for that ff-life is good!

Oh yeah and an update for thoose who are interested:
Like i mentioned in my previous dev journal regarding my course, turns out that i was accepted into 3d design and animation after all. Bummer. Would have been nice to do a game design course but i guess i need to learn how to animate proper so it's all good really.
My start date (originally 15th june) was pushed back to mid august which means i can still work pretty much fulltime on ff! Horray..

Thats all for now i guess.

Like Mulchman mentioned, we had an intra-team playtest scheduled for today (Sunday, 2 Jul 2006). We got about 12 devs into the *nix server, capped a flag and... the FF server software crashed. :-( That was pretty disappointing. We tried playing on several maps (2fort, dustbowl, a 4-team dev ctf map), but the crashes kept coming. So, we didn't end up getting as much playtesting done as we'd hoped.

There is a happy ending to this story, though! It wasn't more than a couple of hours later that the FF coders figured out the problem and came up with a quick fix (much love to the FF coders). Pretty impressive stuff. Given the behavior of the server after the update, I'm betting the next playtest will go more smoothly. That we had to wait a little bit for a fix wasn't so bad, either. The group of us hopped into a dustbowl TFC server and llama'd it up for a bit while the server binaries were compiling. Good times!

We're at a point now where it makes sense for us to start holding these playtests more frequently. It's not that playtests weren't going on before; it's just that they weren't coordinated. Typically, dev X (that's my super secret nickname for Mulch) would say something like "Hey you *****es, I need some ****head in the server to verify that the ****ing sniper launch strength is ****ing normal again," and folks would cover their ears and hop in.

What did we notice from today? Well, we pretty much all agree that dustbowl freakin' rocks.
We also agree that the soldier rocket strength needs a little bit more unf (like for rocket jumping), and that the HWGuy is too damn easy to play right now. Easy enough to fix, though.

Everything is coming together. A few more animations here, a model there, and a few tweaks later... and we'll be in a happy place. The team has made some solid progress over the last month or so. Cheers!

Alright, so today (Sunday) was supposed to be a big playtest for us. We got the whole gang together just to find out the server wanted to crash... A LOT [on unix].

So instead, Mirv hauled ass and compiled the mod with some extra flags so we could run it through GDB and once that was done we spent the rest of the night waiting for it to crash again after fixing some null pointer issues.

Mirv's a genius. Tonight, as I was looking through an .mdump file he's like "I bet such and such was a NULL pointer" and lo and behold it was... he's magical. I've told him to post a Dev Journal detailing all that he's been messing with but I think he's shy.

Anyway, coding these days is mainly bug fixing. We're awaiting some animations and models but pretty much we're almost there. If only my other Dev Journal would get approved...
In other news, my right hand has been killing m lately - too much FF and right handed mouse using; carpal tunnel is killing me. I've started 'mousing' with my left hand but am still terrible and feel like it must feel to live in Scotland. Except without the rain. Yeah, <3.