City17 Not being Broke

Okay so void everything in the last post made, most of the new sdk has fixed our issues, aside us also hacking around with Visual Studio. Be ready for some awesome updates (hopefully) in the future. That depends on how this new thing we are adding in wants to agree with us. So far, we aren’t winning.

City17’s slowdown

It’s been slow, very slow. Or really, busier on the tf2 side of things. Me and Happy have been trying to finsih up factory as fast as we can, but that doesn’t mean work isn’t ongoing on City17. We’ve, however, ran into a few roadblocks.

• VS2008, is totally broken with the newest SDK beta. Hence stopping us from fixing our now broken code (again) because of valve.
• 2010 works, though we are in the process of getting that all ported over. Yay for having to do double the work.
• HDR seems to be broken, we honestly have no idea why.
• Depth Buffer breaks in custom compiled shader dlls, so no sunshafts.

These are pretty much not large issues.

No sun shafts is seriously troubling though. We were hoping to achieve that via shaders, but it is beyond repair. Thanks again Valve.

Hoping anyways that 2010 doesn’t explode in our faces, we should fix most of what became broken in our code, and continue what we were previously doing: Optimizing said Code.

Even if the code is broken, the mod actually isn’t, I’ve reverted myself back to the default HL2EP2 dlls to continue mapping. And mapping I have been doing. A post above this will detail all.

Now there’s too much Not Dry here…

Earlier last month we talked about Pl_ravine. A payload map that was on a giant cliffside, great in theory, maybe not so good in gameplay due to the FaN, and Airblast.

Either way we’re going back on the drawing board on that one, something I’ve been trying to revise myself is creating not just another Alpine, or Desert map. In fact we have two Non Desert or Alpine maps in the works, today I’m going to unveil one.

ctf_submerged

A ctf map, (pending actual gameplay type) that takes place far below the Ocean Surface, more like the bottom of the Ocean Floor. Red and Blue fight in an indoor type area, with vistas of the ocean surrounding the underwater Lab.

Sadly there aren’t any Sharks with lasers, but it’s plausable. No screen as of yet, but look out for this map being tested more than what we had with factory. We plan to eventually release subsequent betas of if all goes well In ‘Us Breaking the Source Engine‘ land.

IT’S OVER 9000!

We’ve reached past Ten Thousand Downloads across our 3 Portal maps.

Sure that’s 3, but not packaged individually, otherwise I wouldn’t be making that much of a commotion. Is ten thousand small? Maybe to some, but how large of a room would you need to fill it with Ten thousand People? Maybe close to a baseball stadium.

Thanks for the love guys, we hope to keep making things you all love. Also yes there will be more Portal maps, I promise. Not soon, but after we get done with factory and more of city17! How many more? Hopefully truck loads.

A little dry here….

We just had a factory playtest tonight (as of writing), though it didn’t go so well. It might help to read all of the below whilst listening to the Speed Racer theme song.

Let’s just say things we’re broken beyond what anyone could even fix. After a much heated debate, and some demonstrations via Demoman Stickies, we’ve decided to turn factory into a Gravelpit like map.

Oh noes!

Gabe N:

The guys in charge of TF2 have done a great job, and with these product updates aimed at individual classes, it gives us the chance to only further enrich the experience. Using the Steam platform, we can offer all these updates for free, and continually work to make more and more free updates in the future. However I really, really hate cp_gravelpit.

Is this a good idea? Was it a good idea when we thought of it? Is it still a good idea now that you know that we made the decision in only ten seconds, and ruled it as the best choice? Yes, yes it is. Here’s why:

• It’s still named Factory, though we are still not sure of what it really makes.
• Factory will be a backwards gravelpit type map, where instead of capping A and B, then C, you now capture A first, then either B or C in your choice of order. And if that wasn’t the longest continuing sentence you’ve ever seen, here comes another: The dynamic Tunnel stays put, changing the balance of things, what used to be a gravelpit map now turns into probably one of the greatest attack and Defend map ever made know to man, and the future of human kind itself.
• It will also have a completely different way of delivering Red to both the final control points, so it avoids all that LETS DEFEND B GUISE, A IS WASTE OF TIMEZ.
• Plus, it won’t be such a large map anymore that the Source engine can barely handle.

Hopefully we can get some screens of all the new stuff, much of the lighting and some of the detail has changed from the previous version. It now actually has moving clouds too!

Portal Maps Re-Released!

Took us an extra week, but it was worth it wasn’t it? Well we think it was anyways :/.

You can grab the map pack from this Download Link.

Obviously We we’re kidding

April Fool’s, but we’re going to keep the Smoothie Video up, we still like Smoothies. A lot.

Making a Smoothie

We’ve Changed our Minds

From here on out, we’ll be making smoothie’s instead of mod’s or games. Why? Well Smoothie’s are delicious, plus we we’re getting bored with make Games.

Too much work for very little pay-off. We think endulging ourselves with Smoothies would be way better. So welcome to the Center of Smoothie Heaven. 

Enjoy your stay!

pl_ravine & Portal updates?

Yup it’s another TF2 map. What happened to Factory you ask?

Well we’ve been working on that too. The main issue with Factory is it’s gameplay and sheer size. It’s been difficult really nailing it down just right, and after some consideration, we may just make the middle Capture point in that map an Arena stage.

Though the map isn’t dead, we’ll still be pciking at it now and then when we aren’t busy with City17. Instead pl_ravine will be it’s incarnation. 

We’ve been working on this map now (secrectly) for over 3 weeks. We’ll get to more of that eventually though.

Lastly, our Portal maps is something we said we would actually finish updating with some needed fixes. That should actually be done sometime this week, or next week. Expect some minor fixes for it, and some other minor improvements, though no new gameplay sadly.