Firearms: Source Website and Other Updates news

Howdy folks - I just got done swapping out our old site with the new one. You can catch a glimpse of it at www.firearms-source.com. A special thanks to the team and testing staff for all their hard work in helping me proofread it and give it the content it so desparately needed. :)

Some of you will recall that we were undergoing private alpha testing starting last summer, and that we closed it down in December. Well, we've revved that up again after we gave ourselves some time to re-think parts of our gameplay model. Since Issa stepped down, there have been approximately 240 entries in our build changelog, not including map changes. We've done a massive quantity of work and testing over the last two months and as our testers can attest to, it's really starting to all come together. In fact, two weeks ago we had a 16-player game on the new Durandal and an 18-player game on the new River this past Sunday. You can see screenshots from these testing sessions over at the new Screenshots section.

For those asking about a release... we're still a little ways off yet. But make no mistake, progress has been steady regardless. Even though this team is very small and overworked, we make up for our size when it comes to motivation and dedication. We have 24 guns in-game and fully skinned, animated and coded. There are "nomenclature" animations for each weapon, the bipod code is fully functional along with the associated animations and HUD art, claymores have been done for many months now, and all the skills have been working as intended since early last year. That includes mortars, and we've even thrown in a new way to call in fire. Without giving too much away, it's actually a rewarding job to be a forward observer now.

We've also thrown in some unique maps to truly evolve the FA series beyond just remakes and ports. While many of us love River, Durandal and Coldwar and want to see them on the beauty that is Source, we aren't really evolving the game if we're just rehashing the same maps over and over. So to help mix things up a bit and give you guys some truly new and original content, we've added in ps_juarez, ps_forest and tc_asylum. You can read about and see more of those on our Maps Page. We've also have two more unique maps done by expert level designers undertone and DysPatch that we'll hopefully be showing to you very soon, along with several remakes of classic maps that are as-of-yet unannounced. We're also working hard on getting a lot of new art assets in the game that not even our testing crew happens to know exists - believe me, there's a lot going on behind the scenes!

In the coming weeks you're going to be seeing more site updates as we keep beating the drums of war on our road to RC-1.0. We're all very excited to have gotten this far, and while we're still a ways off from releasing, things have truly started to come together since December. I'd like to thank all of you for your support of FAS over the last few months, and be sure to stop by our forums and say hello while you're here. We appreciate any feedback, suggestions and input you may have about the game, from FA vets and newcomers alike.

We're still looking for team members! We have a small but highly-motivated crew put together and a ton of completed work, but we can still use your help. If you're a weapons modeler, skinner, character animator, texture artist or level designer, and like what we're offering as a mod and think you have a talent that'll help us make it even better, please don't hesitate to contact me.