What were the influences in the development of FF? (to the devs)

[o_the russian]

I realise that a great ammount of influence came from TFC for the original HL1... but it makes one wonder if you took a look at other developments in TF. While I have not seen mods of TFC for HL1, if you remember there were mods of TF for Quake 1, such as Mega-TF and Deadlode.

There is many-a-great-feature that can be ascribed to these mods... such as the Toaster , Airstrike and Jetpack from Mega-TF and the Energized armor and unique engineer-launched flying Drone of Deadlode. The reason I bring these up is because they added true versatility and none were over-powering. The teams who designed these features balanced them out and figured out what they could add to make TF better through ingenuity.

There are ofcourse others to consider, such as ETF and Q3TF... maybe even any influence from Q4F... there are plenty of valid credentials to scope out to see how these teams did certain things right and certain things wrong. Which is a whole other discussion, as to what the FF team could have possibly learned from past failures such as problems with class balance that were introduced when any of these mods first came out.

What I'm realy wondering is how much did you nit-pick at the history of TF to find innovation and motivation. Perhaps you have hidden some features that you took from the inspiration for us to figure out when the mod comes out... or the such.

[o_masterjeff]

I find Mega TF and Neo TF gameplay a little gimmicky. It is fun to pub on for a while, but thats about it for me. I am sure someone will mod FF to add these game modes as well.

[o_ekim]

• The Rocky Horror Show

• Paradise Lost

• Gazelles

• Caffeine

• Counter-Strike

[o_fooleycooley]

So far we've been concentrating on stuff which isn't too gimmicky and sits well with the base abilities of the class. We have an ideas & suggestions forum on our dev board where anyone can say "I have xxxx idea" and the ball generally rolls from there.

No doubt these ideas have their own influences but unless the person states them it's hard to know where they come from. I don't think there's ever been a session where we've just sat down and casually gone through every iteration of Fortress to comb out the bad and the good. We've all played TFC and a fair few have no doubt played others such as the original TF, Q3F, etc. and even a few sub-mods from there (such as NeoTF). So we all have a good grasp of what the mod's about, what works well and what doesn't work so well.

We've had many suggestions over a great deal of features, usually we debate the merits of each on the foum until we get some form of consensus and then the idea gets slotted into the game.

It's surprising how often we've brainstormed an idea and gone through the debate thoroughly only to see it crop up a few weeks later on the public forum (enough to think we have a leak! :O ). Mostly you guys go over the same ground but every now and then someone will come up with a unique angle on it...