TF's 3rd Birthday: The Interview
Kick back and relax as we hash over some fond memories and get some insights on the past three years of TF goodness.
— The PF Staff
It is hard to believe it has been three years! Join us as we probe for answers to some of the questions we have always had, but were afraid to ask...
Planetfortress:
Did you have any other ideas before you started making TF or did you
consider making anything else instead of TF?
Robin:
TF was the game we wanted to play at our LANfests, so we did it first. We
had a few others planned, but they never reached fruition, mainly due to TF
consuming too much of our time.
Planetfortress:
What do you think of the transition from QuakeC and script style languages
to dll's and other lower level coding for mods... Good, bad, or was it "No
big deal"?
Robin:
It's great from a modmaker's point of view. Our code runs faster, and we're
given more control over the game, allowing us to do more. It comes at the
price of less security, but that hasn't been a problem so far.
Planetfortress:
Where there any planned features that did not make it into TF (counting all
versions)?
Robin:
Only a few hundred!
I couldn't possibly list them all... but to give you an idea, here's a quote
from TF 1.0's readme:
"What are we working on now?
More classes - Technician, Observer/Referee
More items - Personal Teleporter devices, Deployable autocannons, JumpJets,
Personal
Shields Generators, Rebounding Shield, Armor protecting against specific
weapons
More weapons - BioDiseases
More grenades - Shock grenades, Teleport grenades
Skins for each class, Mdls for all weapons and grenades,
And some maps built specifically for this code. "
So you can see that we had some weird ideas there that never made it in. We
playtested a lot of
features that didn't work, and these were culled before release. You can
also see from that last line
that we hadn't even released any TF maps yet, so yes, TF can exist without
2fort.
Planetfortress:
Ever since the release of TF, we have seen a steady increase in the number
of class based mods. How much of this do you think has been inspired by
quake TF/TFC.
Robin:
I'm guess a lot of them are TF inspired. The mod community's like that
though... once someone shows that a particular idea works, everyone feeds
off it. Nothing wrong with that. The only really depressing ones were the
mods that were trying to simply copy TF, instead of improve upon it. We used
to wonder why every class-based mod we saw after TF copied our classes so
obviously, until one day we got an email from one of the authors of a
class-based mod, saying "Do you guys realize how hard it is to come up with
classes that aren't TF's?!"
Planetfortress:
If you had a chance to turn back time, would you have done anything
differently?
Robin:
Yes. We've learned an enormous amount about game design at Valve, and there
are many things in TF we'd change now. With TFC we managed to sneak in a few
small changes.
Planetfortress:
It has been mentioned in a few places that the original idea for TF came
from a map for Duke Nukem 3d and had some influence from Hexen gameplay. How
close did we come to playing TF on the Build or Hexen Engines?
Robin:
We did a lot of tinkering with Hexen, making maps and scripts. We had this
vision of a co-op RPG using its engine, but the vision fell apart when we
began to learn the limits of its scripting system. We then tried messing
around a bit with Duke3d's scripting, but by this time the next generation
of engine technology was out.
Planetfortress:
Do you think you ever managed to truly balance the classes in Quake TF?
Robin:
Not really. The one which really sticks out in my mind as not achieving its
role is the HWGuy, so we fixed that in TFC. Off the top of my head I can't
think of any changes I'd make to the TFC classes, so overall I consider it
to be better balanced that TF1.
Planetfortress:
As a wrap up, we have to ask, what are your favorite TF classes?
Robin:
John's is the Scout, with the Sniper a close second. Mine's Scout... I'll
take speed over strength anyday.
Thanks from all of us at PF for taking the time away from TF2 development to sit down and rehash the good times. It is hard to believe it has been three years. Great years, at that. What does the future hold? I can see nothing but more of the same... but better!
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