it's finally stable. stable enough as the previous alpha port, anyway. not all the specials work effects-wise, but i'm working on that.
i've been working on allot of minor things that total up to the 'big picture'. the hardest roadblock is how brushmodels are created/spawned in q3 bsp's and the extents of triggers. Also collision detection in q3map2 is different then stock. It'd be pointless to explain in detail here. Anyone who's worked with the compilers and engines can understand the differences.
Basically its why the alpha server has had examples, some testers even reported specifics that I knew were going to happen... that maps like zero have odd things happen. It's hard to summarize but i have pics in my temp dir with what's going on.
wffusion is now has an ipv6 port. not that it matters since only major carriers have it, but the fact that it can work with ipv6 servers is kinda cool. the only reason i did it was i was thinking of how to add bans; if it's ipv6 it crashed. but I can honestly say its the first game that I know of that has that support. that's the only reason i did it.
anyway, new pre-alpha up soon. When? I don't know, just soon. I need to get it up to test, there's only so much that me and the bots can do in the test environment. I could release it now for testing and I want to, its just that there are still some things that are left for cgame (compass, kami, some effects). So if you read this far that means that there's really not much left!
The AI is what I do now when I'm stumped on something, what I call "slack time" for the mind. I had the .aas file interpreter working fine, even to the point where I could create one in the same manner that the q3bspc does. However they would be incompatible with q3, and using the q3 ones would be useless as the Id bspc is only good for small deathmatch-style bot maps. WF is class based with tons of weapons and special abilities that are different for each class, so the programming for the AI took a while to 'best optimize' rather then slap it all together. Can't use a neon when you need a humvee. AI programmers who look at the source will be proud.
The "marine", "engineer", and "cyborg" work as my base (i have all bots starting on defense), the rest aren't coded but those were what I considered the toughest to start with. the ai is almost as big as the actual game, but its ready to be segregated and ported into a seperate module/binary. its that close to a client, seperate from the actual game server process.
There is allot of 'behind the scenes' debates going on. I can't help but thank the wf dev memebers who are still active, constantly keeping me within the course of the project. This is really a fusion of wf and wfa but it was started to present wf within an wfa media environment. during the project development i've been noted to stray from that path, and they've kept me within check. But for my own sanity, I've done allot of 'additional' programming, probably more then what was neccessary.
I've added alt-fire. Alt-fire can be turned off from the server. As anyone who's familiar with q2wf, the whole shebang can be configured from a database front-end application in a 'roll-your-own' modification, where the admin can choose everything from weapon speed/damage, player skins/models, class configurations, and map entities. Well alt-fire is my 'whim' of programming that can be switched on if people want it. It will be on for testing.
Basically allot of alt fire weapons will be wfa-like weapon changes, or tests for improvements in weapon functionality. This basically does double the weapon limit to 80 weapons in theory, however they are only variants that people are already familar with. (First time readers who look at that number should really look at what Weapons Factory actually is founded on.) I'm not talking much differences, Sentry Killers that don't home in on sentries, the hyperblaster which switches back to the original q2 style, rockets that home in (same as setting homing cmd), grenade launchers that turn into mortar launchers... so q2wf players need not panic.
I have the sourceforge site all ready. I haven't been posting news much because I only have a little free time to work on the project, but its progressing at a pace where no matter what, even if it were released at this posting, it'd meet or exceed the original expectations.
