I'm back from Japan (which was excellent), so expect various updates that have been long overdue. We've had new developers join the team and the media has been piling up...

I've been working on getting the entity stuff worked out. I'm fairly proud of what I've done so far, so I figure it's worth sharing. It's pretty amazing what can be done already, and when it's finished it looks like it will be very powerful. What I like about it is that it makes creating complicated stuff a lot easier, but still have a lot of the power that TFC has with its entity system. Especially nice is that fact that simple maps will be *very* easy to create. With this, it's as simple as putting a few entities in your map and naming them properly and bam it works. Can I say bam? I guess I'm not Emeril, but that's how excited I am about it :). I can't go into details on how it works yet, but prepare to be amazed when we come out with more information about it as we near launch.

This last week I created the ff_item_flag entity for use, which will be similar to the item_tfgoal entity in TFC. I already know what you are going to say, so I will say it for you. "But wait, it's called ff_item_flag! What if I don't want to use it as a flag?" And I will be nice and answer that too. The answer is that is just what I called it. It still has all the power to do custom stuff like you did with item_tfgoals; however, I named it that because in most cases that's what it's used for. It may be changed to something else before we release the mod though. After I work out a few of the bugs with it, it will be ready to go :)

Also, I've got the spawns working so that players now spawn in their right areas of the map. It hasn't really been a problem if players spawn next to each other or not since some of the maps are single sides (as they are in development still), but it will be an issue when we start playtesting these maps to make sure they play as good as or better than their original counterparts.

Speaking of the mapping, I've spent a little time running through the development maps, and wow they are impressive so far. I'm sure you can tell that already from the pictures that have been released to the web site so far, though. You may be impatient for seeing new stuff, but when you do you will be amazed as I am at it, I'm sure.

Anyways, back to the spawn stuff. Basically a neat thing with the spawns is that it makes it incredibly easy to do complicated spawning sets too. For example if you wanted to allow red snipers and blue pyros to spawn in a particular area of the map for whatever reason, it's a lot easier to do in this system compared to how it is in TFC. Also, I created an avanti-style map where you switch spawns in roughly 20-30 minutes. Keep in mind that this was while debugging a crash I inadvertantly put in the thing *and* debugging all the code that I added. Let's just say it's a lot easier than finding the "On banana fire orange #" property in that long list of entity properties and doing some messy things with 200 entities that you stick in a box somewhere.

Anyways, I'm tired now, so I'm going to go to sleep.. at 7am. Wow I guess I pulled an all-nighter. :)

It's true what Defrag said -- Jon really did fall down a waterfall. You'd think that'd be a hard thing to do, too. I mean, I had previously thought the only way to fall down a waterfall was to be in a boat with some other people and someone else has to say, "What's that sound?" and that's when the camera zooms out to reveal the fall of death. Well, it's either that or you're a cartoon character.

No no, Jon proved me wrong. You can be walkin' beside a river, fall in, lose the camera you were holdin', and just hang out for a while in the water.

Anyway, FF stuff for me has been kinda slow. Today was the last day of class, barrin' the final tomorrow, for this Discrete Mathematics class. Holy hell that class sucked. I mean, I've taken some tough classes before, but this was way the hell out in left field.

So, anyway, Jon and I continue to tweak hunted and try to make strides with cz2. We've also been kinda workin' on this new castle-esque A/D map. We don't know if it's actually going to be an A/D map in the end; cause, it may end up bein' a T/L, J/O, or 6/9 map.

I mean, between the two of us, you'd think we'd produce twice as many maps, but oh man.. that's not really happenin'. I can't explain it. I want to map constantly, but I always have all this other stuff I have to take care of, and by the time I even get around to opening Hammer it's 2am. I dunno about Jon, though, he's real busy fallin' down waterfalls and stuff like that.

Foantaire-Fey, what?

As well as drinking and barbecuing on my holiday July 4th weekend, I ended up running 10.4 miles [that's like 16.7371776 KM] in 1:24:55 [1 hour, 24 minutes, 55 seconds]. While it's certainly not newsworthy FF material, I still feel damn proud of it.

I ran 7.2 miles today in 56:56. It felt terrific. No really, it's one of the best runs I've ever had.