Developer Diary #21 - Twigs news

Continuing our revival of the Developer Diary this week on the eve of the next release, it is the turn of FSDev Twigs. Now we must not allow him the modesty to sell himself short, he'll say he doesn't do an awful lot on First Strike, but he is currently a backbone of the dev team, ably switching between mapping and coding tasks and project management. If you want a job done, he's your go-to-guy. So let's see what he has to say on the subject of his development on the team, and his love note to X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, the space map Strike at Parmel...

Hey folks, well looks like we’re starting the Dev diary series again so here is my little entry. I’m Twigs, many of you may have seen me in game where I usually go by JE_Twigs and wear the FSDev clan tags. The JE comes from my old clan, TRA (The Rebel Alliance) and stands for Jedi Elite. Anyways, on with the important stuff, what exactly do I do for the mod? Well, not a lot really! I started off as a tester, recruited shortly after the release of First Strike 1.0, eventually becoming the so called ‘Testing Team Leader’. A lot of the devs and testers used to hang around in an IRC channel, and some of us discussed porting some of the X-Wing series missions over to First Strike. As a result of this FSDev Woodrow and FSDev Imperial conjured up a magical little programme, the First Strike Space Editor. This allows you to create the very basics of a space map, creating the play area, spawn points and ships.

I started playing around with the space editor, making little maps for my own enjoyment. The limits of this programme though prevent you from adding static objects, for this you need to use the BF Editor, so it was a natural progression for me to start looking at that. Around the same time I decided that some of the objects in First Strike didn’t quite work the way I wanted them to. This resulted in me learning how to clone an object and then beginning to alter pieces of the code to get the results I wanted.

My love of the X-Wing series has resulted in one of the new maps to be released in 1.5, Strike at Parmel. It has blended together everything I have learned in under 12 months, from mapping through to coding. Yes, admittedly it’s possibly the simplest space map to be produced, but it also brings back some memories for anyone who has played the X-Wing games.

This isn’t the first space map I’ve produced for First Strike though. There is another that is still in production, while it won’t feature in 1.5 due to a couple of reasons, it isn’t too far from being completed. So, you want to follow my example and try your hand at producing a map? All you need is the BF Editor, windows notepad and some patience!