Well I’ve been working steadily on ps_derailed over the holidays getting it up to visual standard for RC1 release. Most of the updates involves some new and redone brushwork, a fairly major retexture, and a handfull of skybox props made by me and Schmung from the FAS team. Schmung is responsible for the awesome crane model.

e crane which really looks nice as it hangs over the map in a skybox.

I havent had time to map much lately because of school but the nice thing about being away from a map for so long is your mind keeps subconciously working on it. I had no lack of ideas for this map.

The progressive spawns are completely redone and are moved a bit further away from the center cap point. There is now about 200% more upper level sniper and support spots. There has been a lot of re-texturing to give it a more industrial and unified feel. The texture theme before was a little all over the place. HDR exposure is reduced and the lighing is getting there, it still needs some more incremental changes though.

The shots here show off the redone areas and sniper points over the 3rd cap point. Note that the 3rd cap point goes into the garage and is now much more heavily fortified, it should be easier to defend despite the increase of sniper points focused on it.

Crossfire has had a few issues relating to holding flags. Before there was a flag that was fairly difficult to defend because it had roughly 270 degrees of overwatches focused on it.

I’ve moved that flag into a nearby warehouse and opened up a few more paths towards this warehouse. It should be much easier to defend now.

I will probably be doing another update for “the ghetto” flag to make it easier to defend.

I’ve also added a sewer system under the park area, hopefully this will make it easier for blue to hold as well as make it easier for red to cap.

Here’s a map I’m working on for FAS. It attempts to do an outdoor forest scene in Source which is a little rough.

I learned the value of modulation blend textures from this map, the quality increase from using them on your terrain blends is huge. The tree model is about my 4th attempt at doing an evergreen, I’m still not entirely happy with it but it’s improving every time which is good.

It became apparent this map had some serious bottlenecking issues so I completely redid the red side of the map opening the path to the main area from one tight route to 4 routes. Blues side was also opened up considerably.

This map was also changed from 5 flags to 3 flags. I really look forward to playing the new version.

Well we’ve been playing ps_crossfire and it is maturing as a map but it was suffering from a set of narrow hallways that had a lack of identity and gameplay value. I went through the map and tried to turn these narrow hallways into rooms, when I could find a way I would try to find some way to attach it to a main route. An example would be turning a long stretch of hallway into a garage so that there can be some width and crossover to the main route.

Hopefully these changes will make it so that new players will be able to learn the map much faster.

Fixing up Ps_Sand for FAS. Got rid of the CSS content and replaced with some replacement models I made. I decided it’s time sand got a decent HDR skybox, that’s added to the todo list.

pix!

Grunt, a longtime fixture in the world of Firearms and Firearms|Source has a blog where he really digs into our forum posts and news updates and finds little nuggets of information.

He’s very meticulous, I’d be lying if I said there wasnt a few time where I’ve learned about a new development in FAS from him and not from the internal team forums

Anyways check out his blog here if you want to know some of the latest information on FAS.

http://fasreport.blogspot.com/

Over the development of Firearms|Source quality control has gone up exponentially. If I were to count every map that was ever made for the first release of FAS it would be probably be between 20 and 30 maps. The reality of the situation is we have about 8 really really polished maps. Many maps died in the process that had good gameplay but didn’t stack up visually. My remake of ps_river is one of those maps.

Dont worry though, there should be a supplmentary mappack shortly after the release of FAS that will include this map among other classic remakes that didnt make it into the official build. I will have more news on that in the future.

in the meantime here’s some screenshots:

Firearms|Source took a while to begin mainly because no one started until permission to use the name was given. That didn’t stop some of us from making other modern weapons mods that may or may not have been inspired from Firearms|Halflife.

Around 2003 I joined a mod called Jungle Mist:

I believe the the mod was started by Mazor of Firearms|Halflife & Venom Game Labs & Ganj, one of the sound designers from Firearms|Halflife. The game was pretty much fully playable but we never released and moved onto the Source engine. At that point people went their various ways and the content made for Jungle Mist was eventually merged into Incursion for Source (which was then once again merged into Firearms|Source).

Around 2004-05 Jungle Mist was combined into Incursion:

I actually can’t remember for the life of me who founded Incursion but I joined and we made progress on weapons and maps but lacked a coder, I eventually took over as lead and did some coding. My coding skills were rusty though and I didn’t manage to do much outside of getting new player models running in game, weapons running in-game, and some very basic gameplay that was so inherited I feel wrong for saying any of it was my doing . I was working off a base code developed by Anders, a FAS OTF regular.

Finally around 2006 I heard Firearms|Source had begun development with the very talented coder artist combo of Issa and Maggie. They were a bit limited on the art and Incursion had a fair amount of art and artists but no code so we initiated a merge.

Now 3 years later Firearms|Source is almost ready for release. I cant wait to do the “it’s been a long ride” post.