Dev. Journal: squeek. (2014-10-17)
 

Uhh... hello?

So, what has happened in the last year? Well, unfortunately, not a whole lot.

When FF was first Greenlit, we thought it would be best (and also thought it was required of us) to upgrade FF to the latest version of the Source engine. We started work on that, but our enthusiasm faded fairly quickly; porting FF requires a lot of work, and our goal was to fix/improve things as we upgraded. You can gain some insight into what we wanted to do by visiting our never-made-public website about the upgrade. Note also that we'll be open sourcing this upgrade attempt, although it is still in the very early stages.

After development stalled on the port, we weren't really sure what to do. There were talks of waiting for the Source 2 engine or potentially moving to a different engine entirely, but that never really ended up going anywhere.

Since then, there's been a whole lot of nothing. I basically became a hermit and hid away from the forums/IRC/Steam/etc. I didn't think it was possible to release on Steam without doing some sort of engine upgrade, and 'ffded' was becoming a legitimate reality. It's very fortunate that Neotokyo has been able to pave the way with regards to releasing a Source SDK 2006 mod on Steam, as this period of inactivity may have just continued indefinitely without that knowledge (big thanks to KubeDawg for pointing out Neotokyo's Steam release).

On another note, I'm not quite certain what my future with Fortress Forever will entail. I've been working on this mod for 6 years now, and my enthusiasm has (clearly) been waning. However, I'm very curious to see what will come of the Steam release, and, who knows, maybe I'll get a second wind. There were a lot of experimental changes that we tried at one point or another in the closed beta that never made it into a release, and with the public beta that Steam distribution will allow us to run, it might be fun to revisit some of those ideas and get some more feedback on them.

That's about it. Just wanted to try to give everyone some info about what went on during this rather strange period of FF's development.

See this news post for some context if you happened to miss it.

10/10

:ff: ffnotded:thumbsup:

Now just give us the scout movement gun from FF Beta and all will be well. :mrgreen:

But could you go into detail how you managed to tweak the 2006 binary like Neotokyo? You seemed to clear that up in barely a week. Was it a really simple fix?

It's a matter of file structure. I really haven't looked into why Neotokyo's format works, but the differences to what we tried are:

• hl2.exe in the root folder; we had it in an 'sdk' folder (which worked for the 2013 SDK)
• steam_appid.txt with our appid inside in the root folder
• our appid in gameinfo.txt
• SDK files extracted from the Source SDK Base 2006 vpks into the root folder; we had them extracted into an 'sdk' folder (which worked for the 2013 SDK)

This allows us to run "hl2.exe -game FortressForever" and it just works.

ff_kickball release next dev journal?

10/10

Very surprised after we got greenlit that your contact/s did not advise how to proceed for steam compatibility.

Seems like a huge break down in communication with ff and most likely other mods that got greenlit also.

After it is on steam and on news of source2 sdk is available hopefully there will be a clear guide on file structure.

I agree, very little point in all the hassle to make it work on sdk2013 for very little gain in terms of graphics, but source2 engine if it is a great one would be a huge incentive for devs to jump on board and get excited about.

I just hope it takes advantage of 4/6 core cpu's and system ram, rather than forcing vram to do everything etc blah blah.

Anyways very good news indeed :thumbsup:

not yet anyways it lives another day! :mrgreen:

guys you should put this update on steam and moddb so people know the game isn't dead and is coming to steam.

You should check Steam and ModDB. :)

it didn't show up on the main page maybe it got pushed back by the time i checked :oops: and steam im lazy so i didn't check it. :mrgreen: