TF2 – Post Halloween Review

TF2 updated for halloween over the weekend, if you didn’t already know. Even though pretty much all of the content is going away, (most of the update was just an event for the holiday weekend itself) there are still a couple of cool things left over.

First of all, though, I’ll just explain the temporary stuff. Mainly this was the new community map koth_harvest’s event map. This came with 5 new achievements, regenerating exploding pumpkins, ghosts, and packs of candy to replace the models for health. Overall, the goal was still the same, though. Except that ghosts would be able to appear randomly and turn off lights, and if they exploded near you, you would be scared and unable to attack for a short period of time. Exploding pumpkins are exactly that, if an enemy wanders too close to one, you can shoot the pumpkin and the resulting explosion would damage or kill him. Occasionally, killing an enemy would drop a little bucket of candy, which would give you crits for a few seconds. Finally, there were new hats, one is a paper bag (mildly disturbing halloween mask), the other an old top-hat (ghastly gibus). Oh, and taunting as any class with any weapon would often make you do a little thriller dance.

Now, the stuff that’s staying. Besides a small change to sawmill, and the addition of harvest, there really isn’t much being added to the game itself (although the ghastly gibus might stay). What I’m really excited about, once again, are the secret pages that were contained in the update page. One of them contained the will of Zepheniah Mann, who’s ghost is the one haunting harvest, and another contained a family portrait (complete with aforementioned owner of the ghost). That first page containing the will can be found >>here<<, and it contains huge clues about the history of the game. From what I can tell, Zepheniah’s sons brought him over to a continent filled with what they thought to be gravel, but which turned out to be sand. Zepheniah’s trip ended up killing him, and his will gives out a ton of information. First of all, he says he will haunt any foul-smelling uneducated simpletons who use any weapon near his grave. Then, he gives his maidservant Elizabeth his estate, deeds, etc. My guess is that Elizabeth is the announcer, or at least related to her. (He also asks her to find gravel and place it in a pit, in honor of him.) He gives Barnabas Hale complete control of the ‘Mann & Sons Munition Concern’, and finally proceeds to give his sons (Redmond and Blutarch) all of his land, split evenly between them. This means the reason RED and BLU fight is because of a dispute over land between brothers, apparently. The final item he gives out is nearly completely covered in sand, the only thing you can see is “Lastly, to **** I leave the entirety of my ******* and swear you to utmost secrecy in its keeping.”.

Zepheniah’s family picture (found >>here<<) pretty much contains all of the people mentioned in his will. You can figure them all out yourself, although it is interesting to note that Elizabeth looks a lot like some of the fan-art of the announcer, which pretty much gives away who she is. Also, there is a person who’s standing outside of the edge of the photo, with only his left half showing, although not enough for the face to be visible. This is most likely the guy who was given that last item in the will.

Robotology – Walking Test video

There hasn’t really been a ton of new media on Robotology at all, but there has been another walking test demo, which I feel is worthy of posting. Why is a test demo worthy of posting? See for yourself!:

Those bots all have a walking animation which isn’t controlled by any kind of AI, so if the little ‘bots’ run into a wall or encounter any kind of obstacle, they’ll just keep running. Which means there’s definitely a lot these guys are changing about them. (the video was posted a month ago, and they apparently have been working their asses off to get something playable completed, so I have no idea what kind of progress has been made recently.) Still though, even considering that these puppets don’t have any clue where they are or what they’re doing, they still look incredible, and a game including a bunch of these things as AI controlled enemies sounds awesome.

If you don’t know what Robotology is at all, you should definitely head over to Metanet’s blog, they’re the guys who created N and N+, and they write such incredible posts, even if they don’t post often enough sometimes.

Also, I just realized what this video reminded me of: the AI in Cortex Command. I wonder what they’ve updated over there recently..

A New Zero

Another game from Cryptic Sea, and it looks pretty cool.

Once a game is started, you have 2 teams to choose from, and 3 vehicles to play as. The Fighter is a plane that can drop bombs, and moves fast. Slightly hard to control, though. The Missile Boat is armed with 4 missiles and a cannon, and the Gun Boat is armed with a cannon and gun. Each of these costs money, and money is gained from factories, which can be destroyed if the enemy shoots at it enough. You want to protect your factories, and destroy the other team’s, but your ultimate goal is destroying their capitol (and preventing them from doing the same). Each vehicle has advantages and disadvantages over the others, etc. Before I forget, this game is also multiplayer online. So, even if nobody’s playing it, that’s nice to know. (The site tells you what port you’d have to forward if you want to create a game)

What I really like about this? Everything is procedurally generated using algorithms. This includes the textures, models, music, and effects. So, the game’s size is actually only 432kb, and it’s just one executable file. That’s, as it says on the site, 1/10,000th the size of Left 4 Dead.

>>here<< is the site with the download link, along with a little extra information.

.. Speaking of L4D, I recently bought it! Finally.

Pseudoform – Leela

Pseudoform’s first release is here, and although it is indeed very buggy, it’s rather fun. Of course, I’m still trying to get pretty much all of the features to work, but it’s still nice to be able to run through a portal and come out the other end smaller.

>>Here’s<< the download link.

Guard Dog.

I’ve been focusing on TF2 a lot recently, but I think this is hilarious. Nearly every thread in the TF2 forums at this moment is talking about the guard dog, which is a slightly professional looking community-made update page, featuring a tenth class which is, in fact, a guard dog. This hasn’t yet been totally discarded as fake by all of the forum members (although nearly all of them know it’s a fake), because the TF2 blog itself decided to make a joke about it. >>Here’s<< a link to the blog post.

Pseudoform is also being released later today this Friday, I think. Although admittedly it’s basically still a tech demo, and there won’t be many props or maps to play in.

Would you like a sandvich?

TF2 updated a few days ago, with some changes, but for the most part it’s nothing really noticeable. Only things that effect gameplay are the new sandvich-throwing powers, and the medic’s new regen rate (with the buff it gives if you have the normal syringe gun equipped).

First off, sandvich throwing is starting to become my new favorite thing. I’ve been throwing sandviches left and right every time I play heavy, and it’s usually just for my amusement, not really to help my teammates or anything. I’ve also discovered that you can use the sandvich as a sort of peace offer to your enemies. Normally this doesn’t work, but occasionally if you throw a sandvich at your enemy and attempt to look as non-threatening as possible, they’ll take it and stare at you until you leave, or until they decide you’re not going to attack after all. I recorded a few demos of enemy reactions to this, and I did indeed have a little success.

Now, the new medic regen rates are fairly straightforward, when you have the syringe gun equipped, the base regen is 3 hp, and as 10 seconds go by, it increases to 6, until you’re fully healed. Once you’re fully healed, it drops back to 3, and the next time you take damage it’ll repeat, giving you more HP as time goes on. Originally the blutsauger was unable to crit, but now, instead, it just drops your base HP regen by 2. So, with the blutsauger equipped, the HP regen goes from 1 to 4. Originally, I didn’t like this idea, because I felt like having the base regen so high with the syringe gun would basically make any HP gained from blutsauger damage meaningless. I still think I’m right, but I suppose it just depends on if you’re a battle-medic, or one who stays behind his patient.

Oh, the backpack was updated recently as well, it now has 2 pages of slots, 100 in total now. There are some nice backpack sorting options as well, but I prefer to organize them based on my design.

Finally, while this isn’t related to the update, I got a new hat yesterday! It’s the Engineer’s Cap. I have no images for these things yet, but I’ll try to update the post with some if I can.

TF2 Beta 2.0

Apparently, a huge new update for TF2 is in the works. One which would give each class a bunch of things. Noteworthy mentions include: GRU (Gloves of Running Urgently), which allow heavy to run as long as he has the gloves out. There’s also the P.D.Q for the engineer, which builds everything 150% faster, but doesn’t allow him to upgrade anything. Besides the new weapons, there is evidence that there will be changes to a ton of things, like new Blutsauger and Ubersaw nerfs that are coming. Here’s a video which shows some of those changes I mentioned:

There’s also a >>thread<< on the forum which lists the supposed changes.

Portalized/Pseudoform

This is a project that is apparently nearing completion. It basically looks like a souped up version of Portal, complete with a ton of mind-bending things Portal could never do. This includes making portals physical objects that can be moved around, making portals of different size scale objects, and more recently, making portals able to transfer light. Here are a couple of videos showing off some different features.

An actual release date hasn’t been given yet, but I think it’s safe to assume it’s going to be here before the end of September. >>Here<< is the site.

Refuge + My hat story

First off, here’s a game which in addition to having space-invaders-ish graphics, also has some really cool lighting effects, physics, and reminds me quite a bit of missile command.

Not very hard at all to play, move with the arrow keys, C or X to shoot, and a few other buttons to change the volume, etc.

>>Refuge<<

In other news, I’ve recently found a hat! TF2 hat, that is. It happened like this:

It was Sunday, maybe 10:00 PM, and I had decided to start working on my latest map. After a couple hours of mostly adding detail, I suddenly became aware of the fact that it was around midnight, and nearly just quit altogether. But before doing so, I decided I would compile and test the map really quickly. After waiting a good 10 minutes for it to compile, and another 3 minutes for the game and map to load, I was there. Looking at the displacements and prop_statics I’d placed recently, and making mental notes of things to change or add, I was starting to wonder how the new stuff would look from the air while rocket-jumping. So, I changed my class. Instantly, I was greeted with a message telling me I had acquired a huntsman. So, big deal, I already had one. Then I noticed an arrow telling me there was more. I didn’t expect much, maybe another Bonk! duplicate. So I clicked it. Then, the unthinkable happened. What I had on my screen at that moment was something I had never seen before, and I couldn’t help but stare at it for a good while. It showed a hat with a feather in it, dominating nearly all of my screen. Forgetting everything else, I clicked OK, and had the presence of mind to take a screenshot of the text-box while it still had my new items in it.

I also decided to take a picture of pushing random keys into the textbox, to show how surprised I was from the find.

Finally, here’s what I assume my expression looked like after I got over the initial surprise of finding the hat.

I then attempted to sleep, and gloated like hell the next day.

Fake Idler is illegal!

Yup, if you haven’t heard the news, anybody who earns items through the fake idler is getting them taken away. Now, I haven’t seen anybody lose a hat yet, but I’ve personally lost the items I’ve idled, so this isn’t a joke. Also, apparently, if you continue to idle even after you get the warning, you’ll get all of your items taken away. As if that weren’t enough for the idlers, now non-idlers get a free hat! It’s a halo, and I was starting to get really tired last night of hearing people go crazy over them. Honestly, if 95% of people HAVE the halo, that makes it basically worthless, and you might as well just not wear it at all.

However, there is some good news to go with the bad: Hat drop rates have been tripled! That (apparently) gives you a 3.57% chance of getting a hat once every 4 hours or so.

With the fake idler program gone, this is going to mean a comeback of achievement_idle servers in-game, I just know it.