Progress Report, May 2025 - Where have we been?
Hello! We have been fairly silent for the past three months and wanted to give you all an update on where we’re at, and the status of the project as a whole. We have been very busy porting the game to the new SDK and haven't had much time to reach out to the wider community who play our game day-to-day. So, here's the run-down of what's going on:
When we began the process of porting TF2C to the SDK, we quickly realized it would be a massive undertaking. We are trying to take our copy of TF2 with its 10 years of changes, and merge it into Valve’s copy of TF2 with its 15 years of changes. If we simply copy and paste our code into Valve’s code, things break. Lots of features depend on missing functions, or are incompatible with code Valve rewrote. In short, we are effectively remaking everything from the ground up, which takes a lot of time and testing.
We had also been dealing with manpower issues for this colossal task. While our website lists a lot of programmers, this is somewhat misleading; we do not kick out developers for being inactive. While it looks like we have over a dozen programmers, the total we had available for the port was… 3. We since have massively increased that count to about 8 which allows us to give this remake the care it deserves.
As of right now, our internal build is in a somewhat functional state. VIP and 4Team are mostly working, 18 of our 22 original weapons exist in some form, the item schema works properly for custom weapons support, and many lighting and visual improvements are trickling in. This may sound close to complete, but most of the game is missing visual flair and QA passes, and there is still a long way to go. However, we have reached a state where we can resume internal beta testing, and the beta is being set up as we speak.
We deeply appreciate the patience the community has with us, and we hope to be more interactive with the community in the future. Part of that is getting a better sense of what you want out of this project, and what is most effective at rekindling that feeling of early TF2. To help with that, we are hoping to send out many more surveys in the future, not just for what works in gameplay terms, but for what strikes that core experience we’re trying to evoke. The first of these, a survey on which of our weapons feel the most “classic” to you, will be out next week.
~ Nito
When we began the process of porting TF2C to the SDK, we quickly realized it would be a massive undertaking. We are trying to take our copy of TF2 with its 10 years of changes, and merge it into Valve’s copy of TF2 with its 15 years of changes. If we simply copy and paste our code into Valve’s code, things break. Lots of features depend on missing functions, or are incompatible with code Valve rewrote. In short, we are effectively remaking everything from the ground up, which takes a lot of time and testing.
We had also been dealing with manpower issues for this colossal task. While our website lists a lot of programmers, this is somewhat misleading; we do not kick out developers for being inactive. While it looks like we have over a dozen programmers, the total we had available for the port was… 3. We since have massively increased that count to about 8 which allows us to give this remake the care it deserves.
As of right now, our internal build is in a somewhat functional state. VIP and 4Team are mostly working, 18 of our 22 original weapons exist in some form, the item schema works properly for custom weapons support, and many lighting and visual improvements are trickling in. This may sound close to complete, but most of the game is missing visual flair and QA passes, and there is still a long way to go. However, we have reached a state where we can resume internal beta testing, and the beta is being set up as we speak.
We deeply appreciate the patience the community has with us, and we hope to be more interactive with the community in the future. Part of that is getting a better sense of what you want out of this project, and what is most effective at rekindling that feeling of early TF2. To help with that, we are hoping to send out many more surveys in the future, not just for what works in gameplay terms, but for what strikes that core experience we’re trying to evoke. The first of these, a survey on which of our weapons feel the most “classic” to you, will be out next week.
~ Nito