A lot has been happening on the SourceForts team over the last few weeks, and being the Holiday season, it's only stuff to be happy about!
First off, we're getting 2.0 development into full swing, but of course, the quickest way to a failed mod is just telling everyone to start working. That's why we've spent a lot of extra man hours searching around for ways to streamline our development.
We've set up an account on the project management tool
FogBugz kindly supplied by the up-and-coming Manhattan based software studio
Fog Creek. If you're really interested in the whole system, you should pop over to their site to give it a read through, it's got some incredible features which should really speed up our work flow - in fact, it's getting so well known in the industry, it's used by the well known game studio
2k games who are of course the artists behind the 2007 hit FPS/RPG
BioShock.
As for our file distribution, we've switched our SubVersion servers over to
CVSdude, a profesional hosting company who supply SVN to big companies like
Apple,
the BBC and
Intel. For those not in the know, SubVersion is a way to make sure that everyone has exactly the same copy of a program at exactly the same time, and allows users to collaborate on the work quickly and efficiently.
We'd also like to give a big thank you to the community at
Tigris for their combined open-source efforts in programming
Tortoise SVN, the powerful SubVersion tool we recommend to all our staff and beta testers.
As you can see, we've gone to great lengths to find the best of the best supporting software to produce the best mod of our combined abilities!
But the good things don't stop there; we'd also like you to join us in celebrations and congratulations for our latest team member,
Slice.
Slice may seem a little new around the block, but actually, he applied for his role as modeller almost a year ago, while the team itself was under somewhat of a crisis - and I think I'm speaking for the whole team when I say we're very lucky he decided to come back to us. We're a little caught into development of concepts at the moment, and we don't want to give too many little details away at this stage, but here's a lovely (somewhat untextured) shot of a model Slice produced of the first concept (though we're currently on the second iteration and this is almost totally outdated) of one of our planned new weapons. I'll let you guys decide exactly what it is! (clicky clicky)
So there we have it, Version 2 is now in the works and we're going to keep you as up to date with the changes as much as possible. Keep an eye on the
Developer Diaries for more media-in-progress.
Of course, we're always looking for more staff members to join our ranks - even if you've applied and you haven't heard back from us yet, we keep all applications on cold-storage for when we need them. We don't, for example, need 20 mappers just yet, as we have no tasks we can set them on, and setting up so many people with the kit to get into development would take up a lot of time!
But that isn't the end of this epic news post. We're still working at full steam on 1.9.4, and HisChild is killing off the bugs so fast, we're considering renaming him to 'The Fumigator'. We don't want to set a solid release date just yet, as we can't really have much confidence in any estimation - while bugs get fixed, more are inevitably going to pop up.
Anyway, from everyone on the SourceForts team, we'd like to wish you all a happy new year!
Q1, 2008
Keep up the work
Hybrid Mode
