Greetings Fortress Fans! I am delighted to say that I (AfterShock) have taken over the project lead position, following in the footsteps of Schtoofa and Phish.

Having enjoyed the relative quiet that followed the mod's release, I am now back hungering for more fortress action. Here's some of the stuff we will be focusing on in the next month or two:

• Squashing more bugs. Jiggles has already started fixing some nice major ones, DrEvil and Mulchman are still going strong.
  
• Increasing bunny hop cap back to 108%. Upwards trimping looked at.
  
• Grenade throw speed slightly higher.
  
• More community-facing interaction. We're going to keep you up to date on the latest goings on, and ideas being kicked around. I want to include the community in dev decisions as much as possible. I'll be frequenting IRC, the forums, and servers.
  
• Updated website. Much of the site is out of date and will be updated.
  
• Improved visuals: to make models easier to see, including SGs, grenades, player models etc. Possibility of removing motion blurs, improving conc visuals etc as options.
  
• Continued innovation. There is still much to improve on - Watch out for Dev I+S threads over the next few weeks. To give you a taster of what we'll be discussing over the next few weeks:
  
  
  
  • Scout - replacement for radar
    
  • Sniper - Enabling him to work inside the base, not just in the mid-map.
    
  • Soldier - Nail grenade changes / combo's with weapons
    
  • Demoman - Improving blue grenade launcher
    
  • Pyro - Reaching burn 3 without napalm nades
    
  • Spy - Improving backstabs, the gas grenade, sabotage user-friendliness
  
  
• Helping new players. The manual and training videos are almost complete.
  
• Official servers to provide a base for the community (passworded clan server), a place to learn how to play (help the newbies server) and possibly others such as funmaps, skill servers etc. We'll need a fair amount of admins for this.
  
• End of game stats / awards
  
• Increasing FPS and decreasing loading times
  
• Patch 2.0 with all the changes synchronised with a big PR campaign, advertising on Steam.
  
• Recruitment: We'll need a few more guys to help fill out the dev team, not only for development but for PR, leagues, website updating and more. I'll post more on the positions available when they come up.
  
• New maps: We want to finish 2fort of course, but also schtop and openfire converts. Funmaps and skillmaps are also needed. If you're interested in doing any of these, get in touch.
  

I'll be leading by example, coding/writing as much as I can, whilst listening and keeping up to date as to what the community wants.

See you on the forums & servers!

AfterShock