This is my first dev journal and its long overdue. Im beavering on 2 maps at the moment, ff_well and ff_crossover.

ff_well
Zouave was working on ff_well previously but we decided to move him onto just AvD maps and so I took over well. He had a completed layout and I have been using it but changing some parts. I have kept the general theme of his map - heavy industrial and I am keen for the water in the map to have a source. I am playing with the idea of having huge dams that the water flows down from, meaning waterfalls will be needed. There is no implementation for falling water in HL2 so I am experimenting with some methods that are will appear realistic.

Still in its infancy but the last few days I've nailed the style and so its time for some real progress. As some of you may have noticed, I like to push mapping techniques as far as I can and come up with new ways to make things that people perviously said were impossible. Displacements are a huge improvement from HL1 meaning mappers can make curved areas and I like to use them for this purpose. Its cheap in engine terms aswell so there aren't the same drawbacks that forced mappers to build on the grid for HL1.

There is a thread discussing some points of well here if anyone would like to contribute.

ff_crossover
This is in the tweaking stages now. Im putting a few of the team's new textures in replacing some others so the map is a bit more colourful. Maybe we can show updated screenshots of this soon.

Okay, time for more answers to your questions.

First up, FootLong asks, "Have the Soldier or Medic gained any sort of new abilities/weapons? Specifics will definitely be a bonus!"

FootLong, our changes to the Soldier and Medic in Fortress Forever are mostly small tweaks. While neither class gains or loses any significant abilities, medics should be able to use the super nail gun much more effectively in combat vs other players than they could in TFC due to tweaks in the nail projectile's mechanics. Specifically, the hitbox for the nails will be slightly larger, making the weapon easier to use vs moving targets. The netcode in TFC also made projectile paths display incorrectly to the player, depending on the players' latency. Fixing this will also improve super nail gun (and all other the projectile based weapons') usability in Fortress Forever.

Small tweaks have also been made to how infections spread among players. Our respawn entity that prevents things like grenades from exploding and buildable objects being constructed will also prevent infections from being spread while in the area. Infection on other players will also be visible to teamates, not just audible.

Soldier will feel very similar to TFC, with the only proposed change pending testing is to slightly increase rocket speed. The player hitbox to rocket projectile size ratio will also be somewhere between TFC and Q3, so rocket airshots will be a bit easier to accomplish.

We've been very adamant about keeping things like rocket jumping and rocket skimming intact from TFC. Overall we feel TFC's soldier and medic were very well developed. As the 2 most played classes from organized TFC, we've very much kept to the formula with these two.

Aftershock asked if wall strafing be included. YES. Moving faster without making noise, at least with footsteps off, is good. Yet another way no footsteps add to strategy.. I'm still trying to convince the EU team members. Heh heh.

Frostbyte wonders if bhop will be in FF like it is in TFC, and if it is worth learning right now. Another YES. Learn to air control, how you jump is secondary. Air control is perhaps the deepest and most enjoyable skill in the Quake and HL games.

To wrap this up, a few from Circuitous. Regarding medic calls, we hope to make them more context sensitive at the very least. There will only be one set of calls for all the classes, at least initially. This is an area that could see additional features and a better implementation in an update post-release, however.

Spies will change disguises without much jazz, at least initially. We're not putting art and coding resources into fancying up the peripheral features until the main elements are up to our standards. Things like the conc effect, weapon effects, etc will all look cool and be playable first. Other elements will likely wait until after our first public release.

On the gameplay front, Spy will be much more effective. Greatly improved stealth capabilities will be most noticable for those farmiliar with the spy. Players will also be able to choose what weapon they appear to be carrying when disguised, from the selection of weapons belonging to the disguised class. Additionally, spies will have a method of approximating the speed of the class they are disguised as without the need for scripting. This won't be an exact speed match for all classes, the idea is to add a little more depth to spy recognition. Disguising as the heavy classes is a bit silly if you move at spy speed all the time.

And lastly, the Civ had better be Mulchman. I will fight this to the bitter end! Actually, I've been as vocal as I can about making the workload easier for us by using content from HL2 and other various available sources. Apparantly our custom skeleton makes using Breen a bit tricky though. MULCH IT IS!!

Keep the questions coming! If I didn't answer one you asked here, there is always hope in a future update. There were some questions not quite ready for a proper answer yet. And as always we love to hear the community's thoughts on everything we're doing for you. Thread here for questionage:

http://forums.fortress-forever.com/viewtopic.php?t=124

Hey, long time no see. This time I won't go on and on about soccer like last time as I know you guys don't really give a shit what happens in the norwegian soccer community. ;)

As far as development goes I feel I've been quite productive latley and that's not about to change. I plan to do my best to push on and try to get all of the weapons, items and other models I'm supposed to skin out of the way as soon as possible. My, as well as everyone else's, priority now is to get stuff working ingame.

After spending a good deal of time on the rpg skin (which you guys will see soon), I made a few temporary flag skins and then started tackling the sentryguns. It's been really rewarding and exciting to see that stuff come together in game. I have a feeling that media updates will start to become quite exciting for our followers in the not so distant future. ;)

Well I guess thats all i have to say so far, short and sweet (atleast I hope so this time around :p).

- Decs

Heya everybody.

I'm the newest member of the team and as you can see from my job description I'll be working along with MrBeefy on the map textures for the mod. We have already produced a good amount of textures but there's still a lot for us to do in converting old tfc wads piece by piece.

Me oh my. I've not really been mapping much of late; Hammer is still crashing regularly and I'm hoping valve will fix it in the forthcoming SDK update. It's slated to arrive very soon, but soon isn't soon enough!

In the meantime I've been helping with the running-the-mod side of things a little more than usual, investigating different modeling packages (as Max is making me reach breaking point with its extreme fickleness) and posting on the public forums a little more as I'd been neglecting them a little. I've come to the conclusion that Max is a great modeling tool but likes to have a million things that can go wrong, Maya is more logical but rather clunky when poly modeling and Wings3d is... so simple that it makes you feel weird using it, but looks like it has a lot of cool features. I guess I might as well stick with max even though I hate it at times.

I've also reached the momentous conclusion that Valve's idea of developer documentation is very disappointing. Relying on the community to fill the sizeable blanks in complicated and potentially expansive documentation is just.. well, it just doesn't cut it for me. A lot of the wiki stuff is based on people just dicking about with SDK tools and working out how to do things themselves; the upshot is that what is listed in the wiki isn't necessarily straight from the horse's mouth. It's more like the horse went to the toilet, then some dude came along and picked through the remains and tried to figure out what the horse ate. Wait, what? In fact, the horse might not even be a horse -- it could be a giraffe. Ultimately, things are more frustrating than they ideally should be.

All I have to say is THANK GOD for Cannonfodda's studiocompiler, as it makes things so much easier when managing prop creation.

I've got Uni courseworks due on the 9th and 16th of December, then another in early January, so I'll have to manage my time better than usual in the coming weeks. I just want valve to fix the bloody hammer crash bug so I can get back to mapping regularly :/

"I'd hate to be a giraffe with a sore throat."