Introducing: Frontline! A War-Themed TF2 Community Project!
Since legendary fisticuffs master Sun Tzu invented modern warfare on July 12th, 1914, war has changed. Now fought with infantry and atom bombs rather than by bare-knuckle brawling, the sweet siren call of battle beckons yet again. With heroes on either side, the time for a global war has come - and it needs you. Frontline! is a community-created war effort that aims to rally the troops of the TF2 contributing community and show everyone what they’re capable of. Whatever art of war you partake in, we want you to join. Now slap on your helmet and grab your rifle, as we invite you into the midst of all-out war! Check out the video below!
All mappers, workshoppers, and artists - any and all contributors - are more than welcome to enlist. Get ready to take part on an all-out war!
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‘Progressive Soundtrack’ - Various Artists (2002)
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THIS BOY GETTIN IT
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Gearbox is up to stuff, and it doesn’t look like good stuff.
Fans of retro shooters might do well to start archiving EDuke32 mods, maps, and TCs before it’s too late.
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oldjoewintergreen
Shots from TF2′s TC_Hydro.
I think this map is kind of launch-TF2′s finest hour artistically. As a former Source level designer, it’s super evident that a whole lot of effort and enthusiasm went into every corner of this map. It’s got non-linearly curved, arched corridors lined with pipes (fuck that), intricate displacement caves, and multiple large discrete map sections which aren’t simultaneously accessible (because of the game mode) but which have observable connections. Serious care has been taken over inaccessible rooms coming off of what would otherwise be featureless hallways, and the desert/Spytech theme feels super cohesive, where later maps tend to phone in the Red Barn Blue Shed aesthetic. TF2’s style lets you fluke a nice looking map without much effort, but Hydro really puts its back into it. This was also pre-MannCo, pre-Jarate, pre-elaborate-TF2-lore, so the vibe was different with the Spytech stuff - it all feels a bit Benny Hill to me now.
Very few Valve maps do so well at avoiding the “griddy” feeling you naturally get from this engine, where every prominent non-90-degree angle has potential to be a performance-breaking liability. My favourite part of the map is the guard rail in the top image - this crazy little road bends 180 degrees around, up and down a hill so that standing in the middle and looking around at it feels like a 360 panorama. And Source doesn’t have any kind of spline mesh tools so you know someone exported an AutoCAD .DXF of the road out from Hammer and modelled this special-case guard rail (and the curved fence behind it) just to do this cool weird thing that was probably in some concept art. It recalls a time when the people working on TF2 cared more about TF2 than they do now that TF2 is a weird mixed-up mess of a game with amoral labour practices.
Hydro was also the only official map ever made for the Territory Control game mode, which was apparently wildly unpopular as Valve never made a map for it again, so sadly, nobody plays Hydro anymore. I often wish games would display credits on a per-map or per-asset basis, so I could email the folks responsible for this map in particular and say, hey, nice work.
Thanks to @donhonk for taking the screens for me, since TF2 is like a million gig download now.
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Finished my entry for TF2Maps.net’s current Intel/Spawn Room detail entry - welcome campers, to Camp Redmond!
With nearly 200mb of custom assets made for the revamped theme, it’s surely a labor of love, with over a dozen easter eggs scattered around the campground, along with a fine-print backstory to the locale!
If you wanna check it out in-game, I highly recommend checking out all entries alongside it in the contest over on TF2Maps.net! There’s a lot of good work there!
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oldjoewintergreen
Wolfenstein: New Order is probably my favourite first person shooter of the last decade, which is a hugely surprising thing to be able to say about a Wolfenstein game.
There’s a long, nonviolent underwater part in it where BJ Blazkowicz gives some occasional voiceover about times he swam when he was a kid. For whatever reason I super dug it. BJ Blazkowicz is a surprisingly well-characterised lump of meat. Incidental, non-instructional dialogue is one of many, many great things New Order bothers with that shooters rarely do anymore. There’s also a whole lot of voiceover that only gets triggered if you look at a particular environmental detail for a certain amount of time, something you’d think would be common but which I don’t remember seeing much of. Last I recall was probably Half-Life 2.
“Calm breaths. It’s just the moon. Seen it a thousand times.”
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This is one of my favorite parts of Mirror’s Edge. It’s the part where they introduce a new named, voiced, animated character, and he gets literally this gif’s worth of screen time in the entire game and is never seen or heard from again. Mirror’s Edge is absolutely full of stuff like this, parts where you can see the stubs where huge features and characters and slabs of game had to be cut for whatever reason. I like this stuff because it feels like a little bit of insight into the development of a AAA game, which is a rare thing because of the industry’s idiotic propensity to shroud everything in secrecy.
I don’t have the scoop on how the development went down, but it feels very much like it got rushed out and the team had to figure out how to make a decent game while throwing 90% of their work out, and if that’s what happened they did a great job. The reboot they’re doing now looks like them getting to take a second run at the same ideas they had before, presumably with more time and money, and apparently much more successfully. I can dig.
Also, I dived into the editor and some decompiled source code a while back, and it turns out there were a bunch of cut multiplayer modes where you’d play as various different classes of runners and cops: cops and robbers, package delivery, stuff like that. Hot scoops.
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@nvidia Flex physics tests in UE4. Kinda rad.
Here’s all of the sfm/paintovers I did for the Workshop Wonderland!! Lost lots of sleep getting all these done under a v tight schedule, but it was worth it to do so to showcase what the community can really do. I wish I could’ve done more, but I really do hope you guys enjoy the webpage! (Seeing the sunrise each morning was a nice plus!!)
Check out the workshop wonderland here, and perhaps consider donating to SpecialEffect while you’re at it!! Links and more info about the UK-based charity are in the Wonderland webpage, plus if you donate £5 or more you get this in-game medal that shows you gave to a good cause!
Check out the fruits of the community’s labors, and donate to charity! Happy Holidays~!
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Yo!! For those who don’t know, the Community-Created Workshop of Horrors is now live!! It by no means is official, but while working on all of it, we sure as heck wanted it to look that way! We hope we succeeded!
Here’s some SFM shots that I rendered for WoH then painted over to try and give it that Valve-like flair. Some things are different with these compared to the final ones on the website, but it’s all one in the same! Maaajor thanks to void-oid for setting a lot of these shots up, plus even coming up with this community effort in the first place! Go check him out!