We promised you guys an update, and here we are. As everyone knows, back in November 2023 Valve pushed a 25th anniversary update for Half-Life. That update, while great for the base game, didn’t do the modding community, as a whole, any favors. They broke many mods, and the only way to play many of them now is to change Half-Life to its legacy beta branch.
This works great for games that don’t rely on Steam functions. Unfortunately for us… We do rely on Steam’s connectivity. This means in the future, when the legacy version starts to have issues connecting to Steam servers, ESF:F will no longer work. The short version of all this is, that they adjusted Half-Life’s memory usage, causing more “out of memory” bugs. Half-Life doesn’t have the “LargeAddressAware” header flagged, so it only has access to 2GB of total memory. Had they enabled the “LAA” with the update, it would have allowed up to 4GB of total memory and all of this, could have been avoided. Sadly, they didn’t and our base Trunks model alone is as big as all of the Half-Life models combined. We simply hit the memory wall and the game didn’t work.
So, to fix this issue, after years of believing we could get it all to work on HL, the team decided to swap to Sven Co-op. The irony is not lost on us. We could have enabled the flag ourselves, but the concern became putting out a mod that could potentially trigger a VAC ban. Something we don’t want to do, obviously.
So Sven, unlike our project, which has asked several times for the source code, they were given it. Thus could alter the game to use the 4GB of memory. So, we made the decision to move our mod. That has come with its own set of challenges. While it fixed some of our major memory issues, it became more apparant that other parts, like the old version of FMOD, that we use for sounds, are so outdated it is causing its own problems. So we still need to fix this. The trade-off has been every model/character is now in the game, mostly animated and working. All that is missing is everyone’s unique transformation animations and their bonus tiers. We don’t have to close the game and reopen it every time we want to change a map, though there is still some cleaning up we need to do with the clutter system to make this work flawlessly and not have rocks spawning in the air.
Dalte is currently working on the bonus tiers for those characters and also getting audio set up for each character’s transformation to send to DarkTooth, so he can begin working on our remaining transformations. Ryokeen is still knocking out small issues that’ve croped up from the move to Sven like some of our tools not working quite right. Once that’s finished, it’ll be onto the new audio issue, then finally onto fixing the remaining gameplay issues. Our resident macdaddymario is back to working on a small cavalcade of things, such as map audio not looping correctly, trying to finish setting up the varying levels of our camera provider to allow minimum cameras, a medium amount of cameras, and a lot of cameras, aka the “Dalton Special”, while helping get transformation audio tracks laid out for Dalte to have an easier time adjusting timing/adding needed sound effects. Once all the missing animations are in, he’ll be back to balancing everyone.
The team would like to take this moment to thank a few people. Dio and Andreasus for helping us finish up the rest of the missing cast! Without you guys, we’d still have so much work that needs to be done. Thank you both for getting our models where we needed them to be and for all of the other projects you guys have taken on since completing the cast. Another thank you goes out to DJ Ready, or antiReady as members of our community may know him today, and Layne. Both are responsible for maps you guys have seen over the years. Without them, we wouldn’t have a world for our game. And now, with most of the maps finalized and complete, except 2 (we’ll share more about them when they’re ready), the rest of the team is excited to see DJ cross that finish line! Thank you both for the years of your lives you’ve spent making the maps of our game some of the best any DBZ game has had.
Lastly, although his work isn’t finished, on behalf of everyone on the team, a HUGE thank you to Ryo(keen)! We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again, we could have released this game with cut cast and maps. However, without you, ESF would have been long gone! Thank you for the years of work you’ve put into this project. We know that we can overload you sometimes, but know that all of your efforts and work have never gone unnoticed by us.
That wraps it up for the update. We know this isn’t the news everyone was hoping for, but hopefully, this helps everyone understand a bit more about how much has been going on over the last 5 months alone. We know we missed our 2024 trailer. We’re sorry about that. Once the memory issues became apparent, a lot of things needed to be put on hold. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get the remaining converting issues out of the way quickly and get on to getting the game in a more stable place.
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