Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

I've been listening to the band Tally Hall a lot this year and was finally able to make it to one of their shows last night. They rocked the high school! (lawl--the outdoor concert was rained out, so they moved to the local schoolatorium.) Yeah, so, if you're one of those people who like clever original music (think: Ween, Oingo Boingo, TMBG, early Barenaked Ladies, Queen ) you really need to check these guys out.
http://www.tallyhall.com

Anyway... onto something you care about:
Things are feeling very exciting with FF over the past couple of weeks. Decs got promoted to art lead, and frankly, it's been one of the best things to happen to FF in a long time. There's a more buckled-down feel going on, and the inertia of development seems to have picked up--which is awesome... because we want to play the game just as badly as you guys do.

Sure we run around on rough dev maps with unfinished weapons and models, but that's only about as satisfying as going fishing without any bait or tackle.

Bugs are still being found and worked out at a good clip. Mulch has been really at the top of his game busting ass getting things done. Omen's been knocking down every prop model request in about a 24hour turnaround period, so things are going just great.

There's still a lot of work needed before we get to a point even the most anxious of you would be satisfied, so don't think we're just sitting on a finished game and that we're nit-picking over pointless details. We will be nit-picking the hell out of the game during the playtest cycle, but truly, we're working as fast as we can to get this thing into your hands.

So hang in there and go get some sun while its so nice outside... we'll still be hunched over in our dark cavernous labs doing the dirty work forya.

So I'm one of the newest additions to the dev team and I'd figured I do one of these journal gimmicks to tell you guys what I'm doing.

I started work on monkey about two weeks ago. Although Chemical Burn had some stuff done on it already, I started from scratch with the exception a guideline of the original to use as a base for the dimensions. The great thing about monkey is that it's almost perfectly balanced in its TFC form--maybe leaning slightly more to the defensive side--but balanced nonetheless. With that said, the dimensions will be nearly identical to the TFC version of monkey, aside from problematic issues that were in the original (for example, I'm thinking of redesigning the T area to make the walls less annoying and less "sticky"). Another reason I say "nearly" is that it appears the original monkey was designed in with a grid size of 8 units. I personally use 16 (although I know Defrag lives by 32--let's pretend he doesn't read this), so in turn the dimensions of various things will be either 8 units longer or 8 units shorter, depending on what I decide fits a particular area better. But, really, 8 units will make an unnoticable difference. Of course, saying all this doesn't mean I'm making an exact replica of the original--no, not at all. There's more curves and sourcification in general, but the lengths/widths/heights from brush to brush are basically the same.

I've been trying to work together a theme for the map. A lot of other people on the team were pushing for a jungle/aztec/mayan theme, but going all out on that would take quite a long time as many resources would need to be made. Right now it's sort of molding to a "fortress style bases in a tropical and jungle environment" theme. To expand on this, we've got some nice blue, tropical water made, and the water room (next to the flagroom) is planned to have a fairly decent sized waterfall coming down from the ceiling. It's still in its early phases, though, so the theme is subject to go through a blender and whatnot.

As for the actual progress I've made so far, the flagroom is tightening up quite a bit, so I've moved on to the water room to draw out the theme a bit more. I made some initial progress on the T and lower hallway (by the lower respawn), but I didn't really like how it turned out, so those will be worked on later.

Hopefully I'll have some of it media-ready by the time of the next update.

Oh God! Earthquake! Earthquake!... Wait, that's the sound of 32 different grenades, pipe bombs, rpg's and concs in the once known TFC Openfire_lowgrens... But after being played on relentlessly in some of the top clan matches in TFC history… it started to break, and crumble from the devastating destruction. Floors cracked, ceiling broken through and what was an indestructible fort, started to lose its will stay intact.


Well that's the story behind the new theme in Openfire. After reading all the comments on the new media release I saw some serious concerns for the wellbeing of Openfire's game play. And from the looks of just a pic and not an ingame point of view I would be too. A lot of people seem to be mainly concerned with pit and all the clutter in it. There are indeed different elevations of floor with in the pit, but a good demoman will quickly learn how to tame his pipe bombs into going to the intended area -- it just escalates the gameplay even more. And to make up for this difficult defense strategy I have placed walkways around the pillars to ensure that defense within the main arena is balanced. As for the rubble and broken floor pieces, carefully placed clip brushes insure consistent and smooth flowing movement with in the pit. So don't worry all you concers out there… you can still what you need to do, but just watch out for what might be placed on those pillars. Oh and don’t forget about the lazers.


As for you wanting to know about the progress of Openfire, its coming along nicely, still very WIP though. Currently it is in a dormant stage, though, as I am moving into a new place and need to find a job to pay for rent. So until I get those two things settled, Openfire will be right back on its way to maybe being finished by… August or so? Be sure to check for progress in the coming media releases. If there are any more concerns, questions or comments I can be reached at bkeehn at gmail.com


- Crackerjack

Hi.

Recently fixed a bug that's been around for a while. On our SGs & respawn turret there's always been a problem that when the model rotated in a "negative direction" when it got to the -180 becoming 180 threshold the model would sort of glitch - like it would jump to a position of "0" then back to where it should be.

Turns out it was an interpolation problem and I ended up changing LoopingLerp & LoopingLerp_Hermite in cl_dll\lerp_functions.h.

Yeah, if you're interested about the specifics pm me. But um, happy 6/9/2006.