What's the history of FAF?

Crofis

In the last few months i kept wondering about how FAF came to be the way it is now, i have pieces of the story, some names from old posts and discord chats. It's like having pieces of information while trying to reconstruct the puzzled lore of a soul-like game .
Figured that the best way would be to ask you guys.

I know that after supcom came out, it was fairly popular, then the expansion forged alliance came, then gpg flopped with supcom 2 and stopped supporting the games (maybe this was around when the company failed? Watched an interview with chris taylor and read a few articles about it).

I've seen that in the old days supcom had some nice competitive scene, maybe not too big (none had at the time i think), but it looked similar to what CoD lans, with the old headphones and pcs in a dark room XD.

What i'm missing is:
When did FAF start? After the company failed? Before? Did it continue to support the game or it resurrected it from the grave?
Why/How did it start? Was it initially kind of like a group of friends who wanted to do something or the purpose was to keep the game alive as a community?
Who created it? Who are the initial members? Where are they now?
How did you guys manage to do this from scratch?

Bonus point: what are the future projects?

I hear people talking about how the community is struggling here and there, what's the "official" state of things and how is it going to be in the future?

It's your time to shine guys!

Sheikah

Here is a potential starting place on the old forums https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8569

Sheikah

And this is the proper link to Lu_Xun's post https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5566&start=20

Crofis

Wow i had forgotten the old client's ui, good memories unlocked

BanthaFodder

I miss the python client

FunkOff

Im definitely the oldest user who still checks these forums. Ive written up the history once or twice before. I was also the author of the original FAFpatch. When zep first wrote in gpgnet chat that there needs to be an alternative for when gpgnet eventually fails, which I think he wrote in 2009 or 2010, I immediately understood what he ment and threw my unwaivering support behind ZEP and faf.

Zep did the client side faf development, and I did the FAF side lua modding. I was never a fantastic coder (Im not a programmer in my day job) so most of my work was finding the best FA mods and including them in the FAF patch. The first one was the shipwreck mod. Then I adapted it to work for hover wrecks and aircraft wrecks in water. Then I added the community bugfix patch that I found in the gpgnet vault (and which more talented modders than myself had made).

The only 3 large FAF features which I coded myself were the air/hover wrecks in water, the anti-offmapping script, and the shield interference script to nerf shield stacking.

Faf is still my favorite game ever, I just cant play it much anymore because I have 3 young children, so I can't just spend all day on my PC anymore ;-(

FunkOff

Oh, and I also wrote a lot of script to support predeployed units for GALACTIC WAR. Sadly, galactic war was very short-lived and will probably never come back

Strydxr

@FunkOff Some people are looking at Galatic War repos rn

Cheerios

I have been here for about 10 years and before dual gap there was normal gap of rohan and loads of people played that one instead of the dual one we got today. I wish I knew what the goated players back in the day where doing. Zock/Lu_xun/MadMozart/Crazed Chariot hahaha but as I am getting older getting better at this game becomes less and less important and perhaps thats what happened to them

Aulex

^ Yes

Rowey

Back in my days we had Galactic War and Zep xD

Cheerios

@Aulex This dude was my teacher!!! TEA_Aulex!!!

Uveso

Ze_PilOt released the first public version of FAF (0.4.2.25b) on 05 Jul, 2011

I'm happy to announce that the first public release is out !

0.4.2.25b : (the updater should update to the latest version from there)

Forged Alliance Forever - Lobby 0.4.2.23b
********************************
- Why using it ? Gpgnet is still alive !
- What is it doing better than GPGNet ?

Here is a few reasons :

- GPGNet is not alive. It's still up, but not maintained anymore.
- Live Replay Bot equivalent is working all the time.
- Chat is not limited to 100 peoples. And it's faster. You can also join with any IRC Client on Mibbit.
- Custom games : No bug when you create a new game with the same name as an old one. You stay in chat. Games are announced in the lobby.
- 1v1 Matchmaker : TrueSkill matchmaking. Better than Elo, take ANY custom game in account for your rank !
- Why TrueSkill is better ? See here : viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52273&p=908046#p908046
- All the games are using the most recent and debugged version of FA, ladder included !
- LeaderBoard : It works. It doesn't mix with vanilla or whatever.
- And hopefully an update will come this week with a working Live Replay announcer in chat, and an automatic replay vault !
- It's faster, more responsive, take less memory, and it's actively supported by his developpers !

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QABrzUsCkOQ

Crofis

ZE_Pilot yt channel is still active after all these years lol, that was unexpected. Old client seems pretty cool for 2011, i thought it would be uglier. At the time i remember using Xfire (for games like cod4), faf seems way more ahead of the time compared to that, wp to the initial faf team.