I remember Phish was talking to some bitches about the textures in FF, and uhh yeah, they're awesome. I wanted to do this a long time ago, and now I'ma try it again. I don't know if this'll get approved, but maybe it will. I also figured I had to watermark the stuff since it isn't my work, so, maybe they don't want that stuff out there where it can just be stolen, but then again maybe my watermarks suck and won't stop anything. These are all resized down from their 512x512 size, and you gotta remember basically all of these also have normal maps, and use an envmap. So many awesome asshole FF resources. And then you gotta realize there's also yellow/green versions of the textures, and then there's several variations of each type of wall. This was just me randomly selecting some, ok, raaaaaaaaaaaandom. There's also a crapload of "trims" in FF. Trims are good to have around, and there's lots of them. Your mom's trim smells like a coffin, though.

Bless the stars, 'cuz our snapshots are beta than ever! It's monday, MONDAY, Monday and due to popular demand we've added a new "Beta Snapshots" section to our media page. Here are a few examples of what the FF beta testers have seen: Expect to see more soon. The scenes aren't polished and they're definitely works in progress, but who cares? That's inebetably what betas are for. Stay tuned and ta ta for now!

Hey, just thought I'd post a brief dev journal to show some of what I've been doing the last week. Since we don't have a concept artist doing concept sketches i usually just start by making a fast model of the weapon using the ideas i already have then develop it from there. This is supposed to show you briefly how that process goes. Thought some people might find it interesting :) Below you will see the five different versions of the sniperrifle. It started out as the top one and the final one is the one at the bottom, the stuff on the side is just various clip ideas. There where a few more versions of it that i cant find anymore but this is roughly how it went. I think the bottom (final) one is a huge improvement over the top one. Closeup of the finished version: It was uvmapped and textured around version 4, but once ingame i decided that it didn't work at all so i went back and remodeled the scope, using the scope from the first two versions as a base, then uvmapped and retextured that part as well as doing a lot of improvements on the texture. Below is a screengrab from max at the pose i ended up with, this image differs somewhat from the final model as it is using a colored specularity map to define specularity and since source does not support that we ended up using phong on it instead. Rendered with two omni lights, one from side (white) and one from the back and other side (orange). The first pose differed a bit from this and the weapon was overall a bit too big so the pose along with the animations were redone. After some tweaking of materials and shader settings this is what we ended up with ingame. There are still things that could be improved, the hand pose being one of them, but since i'm still learning as an animator it was the best i could do at the time. If FC has time to work on FF again sometime in the future, maybe i can get some pointers from him. So, i hope you enjoyed this semi brief introduction to how i created the sniper rifle. Let me know on the forums :) If you did, i might do another one.

First off, I want to apologize to all you folks who frequently visit the Fortress Forever site. You're the FF blood and guts right now, and you mean a lot to FF's future success. Unfortunately as some of you had noticed, the main site and forums had been down for the last week or so (end of Feb - early Mar). Some might appreciate an explanation, so here goes: our host machine experienced a data corruption problem that initially destroyed most of the site and the behind-the-scenes database. Thankfully, almost all of the site content and database have been recovered; however, the key words here are "almost all." So how might you have been affected? Well, we're sad to inform you that our entire forum user profile collection (5,000+ records) has been lost. Although we seem to have recovered all of the threads and posts (and who posted the posts), we've lost all e-mail addresses and profiles that correspond to the user names. In order to let users grab their old names again, we've changed all the "recovered" user names to begin with the prefix "o_" (for old user name). That way you can see who made the post, but you won't be prevented from registering under your original forum name. The hidden and sad bottom line here is that yes, you'll have to re-register on the FF forums. We are pretty disappointed by this whole bit and we're sorry for the inconvenience it's caused some of you. It's hit us hard, too, and we've taken steps to make sure that this doesn't happen again (moving host machines, better and more redundant back-up system, etc.). Thanks for your patience, and we hope you'll enjoy fragging away on FF soon! The host migration process might have still a few more bumps on the way, so please bear with us as we finish crossing our Is and dotting our Ts. Some folks have put in a lot of hard work to make this transition as smooth as possible, so a huge thanks goes out to them.

I haven't written a dev journal in a while, so now is as good a time as any to post an update. I've been working hard on my final year at University and while things are going really well there, unfortunately something had to give and my FF work has suffered a little. Anyway to redress this balance, I've spent the last week working on shutdown 2 again. I felt the map had become a little stale and the juxtaposition of styles had created an uneasy clash. The only part of the map I was really happy with was the flag room and the rest was just nice looking curves. I was OK with this at one point, but then something struck me: This is a map about power. It features a monolithic fortress in lockdown courtesy of some generators and lasers. It's 2007 and I'm presiding over some curves and very little in the way of a coherent theme etc. Anyway, long story short, I've rebuilt a lot of it and tried to make a much more involved theme. It's now mainly heavy concrete & rusted metal and power conduits run the length of the base. Beefy helped me out with a cool power texture and I'm pretty sure we can pull off a nice effect. The idea is fairly simple: You can see the power conduits all through the base and, when the lasers are in operation, the power visibly surges through the conduits. When the lasers are disabled, the power flow becomes significantly slower and duller, making it obvious what's going on. I always wanted to do something like this, but I'm not sure why I left it the way it was. Perhaps I was just too afraid of messing with what was, when I started working on it, entirely someone else's map. I had originally intended to leave it pretty much entirely the way kerm had left it and just optimise the hell out of it. However I slowly worked my way through it tweaking bits here and there adding new content that kerm wasn't able to use back when he was working on the map until... I realised I had changed so much that I may as well go through with the wholesale changes. The upshot of this is that I've had a lot of fun working on the map in the last week, whereas the other changes have been more of a chore. The top ramp is now housing the power conduits, some ducts and it has a nice ambience to it. The lift is probably my favourite change because instead of being curvy room looking outside, it has a more run down feel to it, like a service elevator or something. Since defenders can no longer hold up the lift, I added a few bits and pieces to the top lift area to give defenders a few opportunities to place dispensers etc. The lift is no longer a shoebox where it is impossible to dodge or do anything but catch grenades. It's not a huge change (I added maybe 50% width to the hallway and a small overhang to the side of the lift top) but just enough to add some new gameplay elements and give people something new to learn / play with. If stopping defenders from holding the lift proves to be too great an offensive advantage, then I'll have to redress the balance somehow. I'd say that it was a necessary evil in the TFC version and helped keep the score in check. Shutdown2 had some great gameplay and well-paced scoring for TFC (usually in the 50-100 range in a 8v8 4/4 clan match) so I'm eager to retain this. The respawns house vertical conduits next to the ammo & health aaaaand I'm still adding more and more stuff. I don't have the time or energy to totally overhaul everything, but I'm trying to spend my time where it will have the greatest impact. As with all TF maps, one of the greatest challenges is adding all of those cool stuff without impacting on the gameplay (particularly movement flow). Thus far I've managed to keep it smooth, but it does always limit/shape the aesthetics to a certain degree. Jesse made a load of displacements for me so that I could reduce the BSP face count by removing func_details I was using for curves and using displacements instead. This has helped a great deal. Expect some new Shutdown2 pictures soon. Unless I get kidnapped. "Now go home and get your f**kin' shine box."

Wahey! Valve finally fixed the SVN resources issue! Praise be to Valve. This means that when searching for a prop, texture, sound etc. resource we no longer have to pick through the 'ghost' SVN folder files which are not valid. It makes life easier. Simpler. Better. Fitter. Happier. More productive. Not like a decs. In a cage. Churning out weapon models. We love you, decs.

Sorry we didn't release Fortress Forever in 2006... but we won't let you down in 2007! What can I say? Lately we've been busy with things that aren't Fortress Forever. We're still working on it and I'm optimistic that we'll get back into the swing of things now that the holidays are over. Between now and the mysterious FF release date, we'll try to give you more updates to show folks what FF is all about. For starters, here are some screen shots that Mervaka (one of the FF beta testers) snapped for us. His spam-happy fingers took nearly 400 snapshots in less than half an hour, but he was kind enough to sift through and collect some of his best for you all to see: (many additional in-game snapshots appear on our media page) Recently BritishTang, our Sound Guy Extraordinaire, buckled under pressure and released an in game audio clip he recorded. If you're interested, check it out by clicking on one of the Sound Mirrors below: Sound Mirror 1 | Sound Mirror 2 | Sound Mirror 3 Jiggles has been a Fortress Forever beta tester for a while now, and he just recently joined the dev. team to put his coding skills to work. Thank him dearly, for he took the initiative to put together a "rough" Fortress Forever game play footage video. It's not polished (compared to MrBeefy's FF Dustbowl Valley video), but it does the job! Check it out: Video download links: Youtube | Mirror 1 | Mirror 2 | Mirror 3 | Mirror 4 (teamfortress2.de) Hope you enjoy what you see so far!

Random cz2 screenshot? So moving on, they're gonna cancel Latin. Back in July, hunted had its first playtest. Since then, we've playtested hunted lots of times just like all the other maps. Here are some random screenshots from yesterday's playtest... The screenshots are widescreen because I recently got a BenQ 20" widescreen LCD monitor. It's nice havin' an LCD monitor with a high native resolution like 1680x1050. I still have my old 17" 4:3 LCD monitor as well so I can extend my desktop every now and then, which is really useful when I want a reference picture or two up while I'm mapping. Speakin' of that July dev journal, I guess I should update you on the portal idea. I had forgotten about that idea until I looked at that dev journal just now, which should give you a hint about what happened to the portal. Might have been cool, but we're just going with a more normal escape area. So yeah, just lettin' you know in case you were wonderin' about the whole escape portal thing. *EDIT* So Jesse convinced me to put these others up that I had taken out earlier... I took them out because the first one really shows the empty road which shouldn't and won't be empty in the end, the second one shows the missing tower in the escape area that should and will be there in the end, and the third one just seemed a bit too random even though I like the look of that room. But then Jesse let me know how I showed even more random and stupid screenshots in that July dev journal. So I put them back in. Skadaaaaaap! O&A XM 202

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 its 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 hasnt 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. were 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 Ive been up to this last 2 weeks: Implemented a new incendiary cannon to try out some of the ideas discussed on the forums. Its 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 youd 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 itll 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.

Yep, we're getting closer. We've finished a few more playtests, and we have more to come in the near future. All of our servers are now up and running again. Woohoo! So, it's Saturday. As you know, the FF devs don't do anything except work on FF. Since everyone was so freakin' bored, we figured, "Hey, why not show some more media?" Huh, not a bad idea. Here you go. P.S. the FF media page has a few more pieces waiting for you.