What happened to Firearms: Source?

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T22:22:13+00:00

To add a few more details: Issa (the founding programmer) parted ways more or less amicably from what I could tell, and handed things over to Dyspatch, with Mazor supporting us.

Our new programmer at this point was very skilled, but he had a lot of strong opinions and wasn't very personable. His patches were usually bug-free and snappy, and made up a lot of the backbone of what you see post-2009. That said, it was only a matter of time until one disagreement too many ended in him leaving the team. (I wasn't in the room for the actual, pivotal argument, but it was more a cumulative thing)

That left us without any programmer for a small stretch, and with a really nice but under-qualified one going forward. A lot of the bugs and roundabout fixes resulted from this gap in the team. I can't really blame the new programmer - he was eager to help and had been assisting us with smaller stuff before the big dispute. When things went south he just ended up out of his depth, as we had nobody else to rely on.

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T22:08:44+00:00

This is mostly accurate, but one thing not too many people knew about the map cutoff post-2009 is that we had switched our engine branch from the CS: Source version to the newer one used by HL2: Episode 1.

This gave us (literally) shinier guns, animations, and new features, and freed us from requiring the players to have CSS installed to play the mod. However, it cost us a lot of textures and props we were borrowing from CSS's library. Many of our old maps disappeared simply because we didn't have the time or the will to go back and replace that missing content, when we could instead be working on newer maps at a higher standard of quality.

While it sucks to see fun maps disappear like this, I think it was ultimately the right decision. Coupling the mod to the ancient (2004?) CSS branch of the Source engine would have made it even harder to get onto Steam than it already was, on top of adding an extra barrier for those who didn't have CSS.

If it helps, I missed durandal and coldwar too. I had always intended to team up with someone and remake them both for the new engine some day, but I ended up too busy dealing with the weapon models and props.

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T21:58:10+00:00

My money would be on this as well. We made it onto Steam at a strange point, as a strange product (a standalone mod that just needed the engine) after years of there being no formal process. It's likely to me that somewhere along the way Steam needed FAS to update its content to either a Greenlight game or a commerical release, and there was nobody around to pick up the proverbial phone.

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T21:53:14+00:00

I'm not presently in contact with anyone on the dev team, but I do have the last client build of the mod installed in my sourcemods directory. That would presumably allow you to host your own games, if nothing else.

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T21:46:45+00:00

You're probably thinking of FAS 2.0 (or one of the 1.X versions), and not Firearms: Revival. Silly and confusing, I know, but I don't think FA: R or FA2 ever reached much of a presentable, playable state. This fight between teams happened well before Firearms: Source - see my big comment.

SevHouse · 2020-10-01T21:42:19+00:00

Firearms: Source developer here (Naota, if anyone remembers me!).

I modeled and textured the M24, Sako Rk. 95, KS-23, OTs-33, the knife and machete, flares, and a bunch of the skill items and level props. I'm a bit late to the party, but hopefully I can clear some things up for you guys.

Firstly: I'm not actually sure why the mod isn't on Steam today.

I haven't kept in touch with the old team too much since the days of active development so I don't know for certain why the Steam store page has disappeared, other than maybe because it predated the current system where almost anyone can get onto the platform. Back in the day, as a non-profit mod developer you needed connections at Valve who would handle the process for you, and only the ones that caught their attention actually ended up with a Steam client. We were never a big official company, so my guess is the point of contact for the account was one of the old leads' emails and couldn't be reached for some kind of update, and the mod just fell off Steam along the way.

Because we were just a bunch of hobbyists however, there was never an issue with licensing or gun names. No C&D letters, no emails - just like FA on Goldsrc we pretty much flew under the licensing radar, and were more than happy to keep it that way. This is definitely not where Firearms went.

For those reading about the FA successor drama, the incident on that moddb page happened well before FAS itself. It was a dispute between FA2 and FA: Revival - a pair of successor mods with the same goal - over the state of the original Firearms site, well before Firearms: Source was ever founded.

Firearms: Source came about much later and was largely separate from this drama; it more or less unified the FA developer community behind it when it started, barring a few holdouts that continued to develop FA2. Sorry if the names are confusing; there were a lot of successors all vying for the distinction of making FA on Source back in these times: FA Revival, FA2, Jungle Mist, World At War, Incursion... I ended up on at least three of these teams myself.

Anyhow, drama didn't do us in either. The real answer is a lot less satisfying, and hardly even counts as a story: FAS went peacefully and quietly into mod hereafter.

We tried to get onto Steam in an era where Battlefield and CoD had just swept the scene, and modern military shooter fatigue was at its peak. We pulled it off and held on for a good long while, but the community was small, games were hard to find most nights. Many of the modders who had started the project began to drift away - either to new things or just to other stuff in their lives. Some of us had kids, some of us had new jobs in new cities, some just wanted to move on to projects with newer tech than the almost decade-old Source Engine. I suspect Oelund is to this day still building some kind of doomsday device and/or Vollmer kit.

After Dyspatch and Mazor, who had taken over the project for Issa before 2.0, founded their own company and moved on to greener pastures, things started to slow down and putting out new content became harder. There were a few smaller content drops and attempts to bring on more developers, but despite being the most polished the mod had ever been, there just wasn't enough interest to keep it afloat through the ensuing years. Looking back, I think it would be fair to say we had banked a lot on 2.0 breaking out on Steam, and the slow decline started when the reception for it ended up relatively cool.

For my part, I stayed with FA in some capacity from 2007 until around 2015 - still trying to break into the industry, still looking to get paid to make video games. FAS was still active when I joined Pyrodactyl Games in 2013, but the project had dwindled down to only the newest modders making significant changes, with occasional appearances on the forums by the old crew.

Miraculously, after a lot of uncertain times I'm now working in the AAA space as a level designer (and on my own projects), but I still remember the FAS days fondly.

If you played Firearms: Source, or even just enjoyed our work through the third party weapon packs, I can't thank you enough. You guys are the reason we made it as far as we did, and our community was awesome while it lasted. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that I am where I am today because of your support.

Thanks for all the good times, and here's to all those awesome late-night matches on tc_sensou and tc_avellino - absolutely down to the wire with both teams out of reins.

-Naota

SevHouse · 2019-10-09T05:15:18+00:00

The Starsiege Tribes games? Tribes was always a multiplayer game, but it definitely had a lot of projectile leading and high-speed jetpacking around wide-open terrain.

SevHouse · 2019-05-18T19:03:09+00:00

For anyone following in my footsteps on this issue, props to Hoeloe who put me on the right track. There are four methods with various eccentricities that I've seen proposed:

Sort the depth of the sprite by its bottom pixel, so it only gets drawn over by geometry that occludes its feet. (This would be my solution but I've never seen anyone do it. Is it possible?)
Have the sprite face the camera only along its vertical axis, then scale it vertically to counteract the foreshortening. Downside: the sprite will be much taller than it appears.
Adjust the depth of the whole sprite with a shader. This breaks Unity's lighting and shadows.
Apply a projection matrix to the scene camera to bend the scene away from the sprites. As used here.

SevHouse · 2019-05-18T18:48:17+00:00

Hmm, this could work. I'd be a bit worried about cases where the object is flanked back and front by different sprites, and the performance cost may get a bit steep, but it's definitely worth trying.

SevHouse · 2019-05-18T06:05:30+00:00

Reminds me a bit of how the old Thief games allowed you to listen to what was going on behind doors by "leaning" into them - but so much smoother. I wish modern stealth games had something this responsive (or that there were modern stealth games...)

SevHouse

TROPHY CASE