LATEST NEWS

po-news FragTastic MediaBlitz ~ By DuckSauce
February 25, 2009, 03:26:27 AM by Nauz
Hello watchers,

Here's what this newspost+media blitz has in store for you:

- Screenshots of the new maps
- Screenshots of the stopwatch grenade and the stopwatch grenade pickup
- Another gameplay video
- News on development

So let's get started!


New maps:

There are 2 new maps since the last newspost and another map(fo_complex) has been updated, after being left in an old state with dev textures for several weeks/months by Alt' who took over the map from Draken, who is now no longer on the dev team but is still gonna be part of the tester team.

First up the 2 new maps:

fo_zone_two by Soulfather:
   


fo_beach by Alt':


fo_complex by Draken and Alt':




Stopwatch grenade:

The stopwatch grenade model has been finished for a while but not yet been shown here on moddb, it's simple but effective!
The pickup for it has been recently finished, each pickup gives 2 stopwatch grenades.

Screenshot:

There have also been some rumors circulating that the stopwatch will have an alternate functionality that allows it to teleport the user to the place thrown and if it hits a player it will swap the players with each other. This could be great for placing an enemy right next to a grenade.



Closed Beta Gameplay video:

During a recent beta test I recorded the fragging on a variety of the maps, resulting in this mostly uneditted video of the gameplay and the HUD, which is mostly the same as HL2 except for an icon near the ammo counter showing you which weapon you got(will likely also show the actual name in the future as well) and lowered transparency of the hud, the stamina bar always shows and doesn't have text on it, so it's much smaller.

But enough blabbering check out the video yourself here:




Development progress and decisions:

The development of FragOut has been going fairly well and is becoming more and more stable with a growing amount of features, but... after a lead dev to lead dev discussion between me(DuckSauce) and Soulfather(lead dev of the mod Kreedz and also level designer for FragOut) I came to the conclussion that the development of FragOut should continue on for a while longer, adding things such as secondary attacks to the stopwatch grenade, melon and holy hand grenade.

Also after discussion and some brainstorming with Mastix(Lead Tester), I decided to take some suggestions of him and then went even more radical as to fully change the workings of Last Man Standing, that it will become something more like a deathmatch but still not completely.

Since Last Man Standing felt alot like deathmatch but with the downside of lives lowering the action, it eventually became clear it needed change. This change will no longer make it to be Last Man Standing, the exact name will still have to be determined, but instead of lives there will be Survival Points, once these are out the player can still play like usual, but his eventual score and thus his chances to win will be affected by these survival points. It will work the same as lives aside from the fact the player won't have to spectate for running out of survival points.
Frags and Survival points will be used to determine the eventual winner.

There are several more changes:
Such as that there will be a hitsound system, if you ever played dystopia you should know what it's like, Dystopia isn't the only game with this though, games such as wolfenstein enemy territory, quake, and enemy territory:quake wars, also had hitsounds.
For those who aren't sure what a hitsound is, it's basically a short sound that will play whenever you have a confirmed hit, this will help you better determine how much you injured an enemy.

Also there's a HTML window that can be opened with F1 at pretty much any time, in the case of having gotten owned in Last Team Standing, or just wanting to read up on some quick basics, you can press this key and it will show the player manual on the fragout site(which doesn't exist.. YET but the window is there and works)
there may also be a second window to be called with F2 showing the html window as local html in the case the website is down, this would mean it's likely to be outdated though, while the Manual on the site could be updated any time with more tips, tricks and strategies.

Last but not least, I feel a bit annoyed now and then when I run out of melons and have to spam skulls around, so basically, there's not enough killling gear in my opinion, while sailboat and stopwatch are nice, they don't help much with the killin, so it's very likely there's gonna be a 6th grenade added after all! considering the sailboat was first gonna be 2 seperate nades and the stopwatch will have functions for 2 seperate nades too, you could say that there's actually gonna be 8 grenades, packed up in 6 grenades

Phew, pretty big wall of text there, I think it's safe to say FragOut won't be releasing this month, maybe not even after that. But when it does, expect to have a blast playing this!

One last thing!!!
For any server owners out there, we're looking to have both a normal windows dedicated server and a linux dedicated server for testing purposes, the amount of slots should be at least 9, no more then 16 slots is needed though hehe, that's insane in this mod.
Should you be interested in playing FragOut earlier then the rest, be sure to send a pm my way and you may become a Contributor and Beta Tester. I'm afraid we can't pay you for it though, so be sure to think it through at the least you will have people reguraly playing on your server

Well that's it... Keep watching!
P.S... 100 watchers.. WOOT!!! thanks to everyone watching! you keep us motivated!
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po-news Holy Cowsauce! lots of maps!
February 04, 2009, 11:07:24 AM by DuckSauce
Hey watchers,

not much happened lately in development, except for maybe SoUlFaThEr from Kreedz(lead dev) joining our team, kicking all our other mapper's arses by pumping out 3 maps in a short amount of time.
Behold some of the screenshots:

fo_zone_one:



fo_ghosttown:



fo_sacred:




The last one fo_sacred was the first one and has been playtested for several hours already and is really a GREAT map, recently there haven't been playtests so though the rest of the maps weren't tested yet.

SoUlFaThEr also helped improve some details in Alt's map fo_outpost so that's also better then before



Recruitment:


Like said before, SoUlFaThEr(Kreedz Climbing) has joined the team as a level designer, what hasn't been said is that Dj Dogidog left the group, since he doesn't have time to do sounds anymore, he does still allow us to use the sounds that he did make, replacing him is Ghost who is a developer for the mod Ivan's Secrets.

So hopefully he'll bring some quality sounds and maybe some music to FragOut

Also Mastix is Lead beta tester, meaning he can boss around the testers, take care of organizing on top of the other things he does, some testers have left or might become kicked depending on their activity so beta testing is gonna become a tad more serious.



Development:


Development has been both slow and fast:
most of us haven't done a terrible lot lately, been doing other stuff, with coding I haven't spend alot of time but when I did I was trying to freeze the animations whenever a player is hit by our new timefreeze grenade(read more about it further ahead). Since this didn't really work out well, I'm just gonna leave it for now and continue with the rest of the mod so I can get some things done.

However, SoUlFaThEr has really been working SO hard, it's amazing since he pumped out 3 great looking maps and the 1 tested played really well, so a huge thanks to SoUlFaThEr for his hard work.

Also Alt' has taken on Draken's map fo_complex, since Draken wasn't really getting anywhere with it.
So hopefully you'll be seeing some new screenshots of complex soon.

My internship has started meaning I will also have less time to work on the mod but the time freeze grenade will probably be the last grenade to be in the first release meaning gamemodes and weapons are all pretty much done aside from some tweaking meaning there isn't a huge lot of things to do anymore.



Time freeze grenade:


Also gonna be known as the Stopwatch grenade, as it suggest the model will likely be a stopwatch, the grenade works both as a cookable grenade(think skull) and a contact grenade(think melon) meaning you can make the grenade detonate midair, but once the grenade touches the ground it will always detonate, meaning you can't bounce but still hit people midair alot easier.

As time freeze suggests, the grenade will freeze players in time for a short while, the biggest difference with a cold type of freeze is that players can be stuck in the air while frozen, leading sometimes to hilarious temporary "statues"



Well, that was all for now, keep watching!
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po-news Wind grenades and alive food? ~ By DuckSauce
January 05, 2009, 08:11:45 AM by Nauz
Hey watchers,

Gonna start this time with a quick progress report


Progress:
- The wind grenade has been coded and works, "explosion" effects are not final nor are sounds.

- Outpost received several updates and is in it's final stages

- FragOut.fgd has been made and works, it includes the first health pickup ... the duck! read more about it down below

- Phanrack joined the crew of devs as a 2d artist, he basically does decals, textures, skins, hud icons and more!

- Also Eccentric and Soulfather(from Kreedz mod) agreed to map for FragOut, Eccentric doesn't want to be part of the dev list until he actually made a map and I'm not sure wheter Soulfather just wants to contribute one map or fully join the team, but he's already been with us on one test yesterday, talking our ears off :D

- Score and frags are now seperate, score is awarded to people that survived a round, score is awarded based on lives left and amount of frags during that round, so 2 lives left and 5 kills means 7 points, but cowering in a corner having 5 lives left but 0 kills means the guy who went out fragging will beat you!

However there is still not a way to decide a winner so changes may be made when needed.

- The duck, pig and cow models have been pretty much finished, read more about them below!

- We now have a website which is hosted by Half-Lifecreations this also got us access to SVN and FTP hurray!!! You can check out the FragOut website by clicking here.
Thanks HLC! The webmaster of our site is Nauz, so if you have any suggestions for it then send him a PM or email

- First custom kill icon was added, PhanracK will be making more so on release we will have some nice custom kill icons!



Animals:

That's right.. Animals! They will form your primary source of health in FragOut, functioning like old school pickups but with a twist... they're very much alive and will have different animations that the mapper will be able to choose(at least that's the plan :D)

The first 3 animals are done they are:
- The duck: Delicious and awesome, but small healing a good 25 hp dude!
- The pig: Fat and ... fat? Being bigger and fatter then the duck he will heal 50 hp
- The cow: Huge beast compared to the duck and the pig. This will surely heal all of your hp, don't expect too many of these around though... MOOOO

Also here's a nice preview of all 3 in one picture:



Decal pack #2 and Rebel/Combine skin preview:
Phanrack made a second smaller pack of decals for the mappers to use, containing some characters you may very well know.


He's also working on new rebel and combine skins, here's a small preview:




Sailboat Grenade video footage:

Last but not least, a video containing footage of the sailboat grenade animations and showing off what it can really do :D



That's all for now! Keep watching:)
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po-news Melonzzz?
December 20, 2008, 01:52:07 AM by DuckSauce
Hey watchers,

First the recruitment news



Recruitment:

A while ago we recruited Draken as a Level Designer and he already posted some screenshots of his map in progress, check it out:
     

     

Also thanks to Mastix one of our testers and also helps with PR and recruitment, we now have a Sound Engineer to help out with our sounds, so say hi to: Dj DoGiDoG

He's been quite helpfull and is a great asset to the team.

This means that there are currently NO open positions within the team, we're stuffed!



Progress:

- Code: Focused on finishing the current 2 gamemodes(Last Man Standing and Last Team Standing), ironed out some bugs, added the MelonDeath mode(read on for more info) and modified the HUD a bit so the Lives counter is now next to the Health counter.

- Mapping: Alt' updated his OutPost map with new lighting, changed sounds, made the sounds env_soundscapes and some other things. Draken is still working on his map and hopefully there'll be a version we can playtest soon :D

- Modelling: Nauz got a new mission and it's this time not a grenade! More info once he's done/nearly done

- Sound: Dj DoGiDoG has made a new skull nade sound, we needed a new one due to the other one not having anything mentioned on usage rights, so hence a new one based on a sound that MAY be used and editted.

It's not as great but it was hard to find something good for the skull, and a sound is better then no sound. He also made a sound for when MelonDeath mode is activated though it's not fully done, it also includes voice so that's awesome too :D



MelonDeath mode:

Earlier I mentioned MelonDeath mode, here's an explanation:
Once there's about 30 seconds of roundtime left MelonDeath mode is activated, it's like SuddenDeath but with a twist: players get 1 hp and their grenades are removed and replaced with a whole buncha melons, since players have 1 hp the melons become very efficient at killing off everyone remaining.

However the 1 hp thing can be rather annoying and we're considering changing it to giving everyone 100 hp instead and a special type of melon that can be thrown (much) faster.



FragOut gameplay video by PhanracK:

Here's a pretty cool video one of our playtesters made, for the credits see the video description.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/fragout/videos/fragout-gameplay-video-by-phanrack



That was all for now, keep watching!
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