Team Fortress 2 Windows, Mac, X360, PS3 game

Kept you waiting eh?

Mercenaries, this has been a hell of a ride! Alot has happened since our last dev blog article. Some of you are aware of what we have been up to on Discord and others not that much… But it’s ok, we are back for more and with exciting news!

Shaders

This is a very optional topic for our sweaty and highly skilled mercenaries, but hear me out, who doesn’t love good graphics? As you have guessed, we implemented new shaders, but this doesn’t mean that you must play a TF2 Sourcemod at Ultra settings and in 4K resolution (or even 8K)! But what have we been working on lately? I am going to tell you.

Skydome

Skydome makes the skybox, 2D or 3D, more realistic and believable. This was taken from VDC and we thought it would be interesting to see its results on vanilla maps like 2Fort. This tech isn’t present in all tf2 maps, but if you’re a mapper, you can add them and play with its settings!

SSAO

SSAO has been added into this mod, but still needs some work around. There isn’t much to talk about this. Here’s an example:

PBR

PBR is an amazing graphical tech right? Right! Well, we added it for map and model textures. Here’s some screenshots (Right: no PBR | Left: PBR)

Parallax Corrected Cubemaps

You read it correctly! We have these cubemaps tech and a custom VBSP compiler for this! This one took alot of effort to make it work, but we did it. Screenshots below:

Upgraded FMOD Studio Entity Logic and System

FMOD has received tons of changes and upgrades, but now it won’t be touched for a very long time. This time, we have been given access and permission from a HDTF dev to use their FMOD Studio system. This will allow us to work better with music events that will be presente at certain phases of a competitive match. Something like CSGO Music Kits that Valve has made for their game. We haven’t tested this system and triggering some music events, but this will be for our next dev blog post.

Ok, this is all gorgeous and awesome, but isn’t this supposed to be a competitiv-

Hold your horses my beloved mercenary! We have plans for Weapons Rebalance and new competitive focused features. Let’s talk about some of them!

Tournament Mode

Tournament Mode, Ready up system and Stopwatch have been ported into our build. We couldn’t forget these important features for competitive matches! Although they have been ported, they still need some heavy work to be as functional as live TF2 build. This screenshot represents its current state:

Loading Screen Backgrounds

Loading screens will be unique for each map! The only downside is that you cannot view tips and statistics, but don’t worry, you can check them on the main menu. This is our default loading screen background:

4th Weapon Slot

We decided to add a new weapon slot for these selected classes: Scout, Soldier, Pyro, Demoman, Heavy and Sniper. Crazy right?! But why? Rebalance purposes. We decided to make this experimental change to see how impactful it will be for competition. But what about Engineer, Medic and Spy you ask? Well we did initially have some ideas for the additional slot to the engineer (such as having the gunslinger an additional weapon slot) and the medic (adding some sort of health packs), but we felt these changes were too aggressive to the current game state. However, there is still a possibility of adding it, just not now. We want to see first how the 4th slot to the other classes works out. More information about this will be below in this article.

Now I, Nunozki, have spoken a lot in this blog and now I would like to let my sound designer, Tiga Diax, talk about his work and his plans!

The Sound of Team Fortress 2

As a sound guy, I have grown to despise how Team Fortress 2 sounds, quality wise, it aged really badly, after all it’s a 15-year-old game! So, as the sound-designer I will gradually redesign the sounds of certain weapons and maps. Here are certain things that I will have in mind when updating the sounds.

The Iconic Sounds

Sounds considered iconic by the TF2 community won’t be changed, as the feeling of nostalgia is really important to the game. I don’t want to take that away from the community just because a single guy thought it sounds bad, unless it's causing major gameplay concerns like audio readability but this will be almost impossible to happen.

Sound Quality

Sound quality is what made me start this, TF2 sound quality wise aged badly so certain sounds will be changed simply because they have bad quality. This has been fixed thanks to MiniMP3 that replaced Miles Sound System of Source Engine

Giving Items Identity

Some weapons in TF2 don’t have a unique sound, for example most melee weapons. So, I will be making sounds for them, giving it a new way to distinguish weapons just by hearing it.

Wait, don't leave yet, we have something big to share with you all…

Thanks Tiga! Now before we finish this article, I am proud to announce that our prototype alpha version is ready for playtesting! Our 1st online playtesting session will happen on Discord server in the next month at least, but there is something I am also proud to share with you all… There will be a local private playtesting of TF2 Promod! We still don’t have an exact date and time when it's going to happen, but more information will be shared on Discord Public Server! And yes, there’s a chance that there will be a live streaming session as well!

One last thing, after the first alpha version release, we will organize a map contest! This idea is brand new, but stay tuned for this event in our Discord server.

Discord Server: Discord.gg

We have reached the end of our dev blog! We couldn’t be happier with its current state and we are excited to see what is going to happen in the near future of this tf2 mod. Thank you all for reading this and take care!