May 5th - Cinco De Mayo Update news

Hey there Firearms: Source followers, I am glad you can join us for our fortnightly news updates. I hope you enjoyed your Cinco De Mayo, and if you didn't, we have some tester screenshots to brighten this week a bit. I would suggest getting excited for the next news update as it will be quite substantial. We will be unveiling something that that team has been working very hard on. So today I would like to do a bit of a recap of what has been going on recently with Firearms: Source.

The first thing I would like to mention are the developer journals. If you haven't been checking them out, I would highly recommend it. DysPatch has recently updated his developer journal with an update to his PS_Snowstorm and has also made a lengthy entry about the whole construction for TC_Iwojima and the various stages it has gone through. Hitman recently posted a hefty entry that covers all the maps that have fallen during the testing stages. Maps like TC_Asylum, PS_Juarez, and many more had their development halted as Hitman moved from dedicated mapper to dedicated programmer. Undertone also made a new entry describing his current status with the development as well as his future plans. So please, if you haven't check them out yet, do so.

I would also like to inform you about what has been going on behind the scenes. Vigorous testing has really helped us making sure FA:S is not released with game breaking bugs. That is not to say, expect FA:S to be a bug free game, but we are doing our best to make sure the game is stable. All the weapons are getting the balancing tweaks they need. Recently our machine guns have been getting some serious attention. Balancing the immense fire power and high rate of fire of machine guns against the other weapon classes is no easy feat. We have also been playing around with the credits, so that if we like the way a gun feels but is very cheap, we up the credit cost to help balance it. For example, our fully automatic pistol is a killing machine in close quarter combat, but is useless else where, so to help balance it against the other pistols, we increased its credits.

Lastly, we would like to inform you to check out our latest Picture of the Month. This month was the first month that we have started a Picture of the Month contest for our testers. During testing, whatever interesting or silly screenshots they take ingame, they get to vote on to see which gets added to the website. Our first Picture of the Month winner is Skitz, aka Pork Fried Squirrel. You can view his PotM entry at the top right of this web page. The other entries included "Icey Death", submitted by DysPatch showing a last stand on PS_Snowstorm, "Meat Stack" submitted by Bald_Eagle showing a pile up of dead bodies, and "Killer Flatulence" submitted by StandingCow showing a player crouching in the middle of a mine field with explosions all around him.

Ending this update, I would like to remind you all to register on the forums and make sure you don't miss the next news update, because it will be a good one.