Three weeks since the last update, which makes sense because today is the last day the servers #3 and #4 were kept online (or rather: kept crashing).

So, what's new?

• Servers #3 and #4 will be decomissioned 2014-09-01.
  
  
• Experimenting with the new Garry's Mod update on the dev branch which fixes some of the terrible regressions. I will not modify the gamemode until the update rolls out to prevent jumping through hoops more often that I'd need to.
  
  
• The bots finally have their attack pattern and they pack quite a punch. Unfortunately they still like to noclip through the environment, so there's a little bit of work left to be done...

With P.T. available and Destiny just around the corner, there are certainly enough distractions to keep players busy until the new update rolls out.

Two weeks have passed again, you pretty much know the drill... So, what's happening?

Not much, as it turns out. Most of the stuff is either ongoing or behind-the-scenes plumbing work. Nevertheless, here is the list of things going on:

• Added "Prop Hell" zones. Hiding in these zones will kill a Prop with a "xxx cheated and went to Prop Hell" kill message. The only spots tagged "Prop Hell" right now are beneath the bed in ph_restaurant, the rooftop of ph_barrel_house_x3 and the usual cheatsie spots on cs_assault. The zones will replicate across all servers automatically and can be created in-game.
  
  
• The new UI takes longer than expected, the base gamemode Prop Hunt builds upon is designed to be modular - but not exactly designed to be customizable in terms of look. I do not want to replace the entire scoreboard and UI drawing with my own... so there's still work to be done.
  
  
• Added a new web-based control panel for selected admins.
  
  
• Built and tested my Workshop emulator. This will enable the use of linked-collections on a Garry's Mod server. The prototype works fine and enables me to split my local server into 4 collections: 1 main one that holds all linked collections and 3 collections with maps, models and extra props. There is a companion add-on that will automatically resource.AddWorkshop() all contents of a given collection (useful for player models and/or props).

Apart from that I very much enjoy Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn on the Playstation 4.

While many of you enjoy your summer vacation I have kept myself busy with some changes. While there is not much to note in terms of deployed changes, there are some organizational topics I'd like to address.

What I have been working on
My primary focus for the past two weeks were ironing out the last slew of bugs that made it's way into the gamemode after the Garry's Mod update. Round timers and door burst timers are still occassionally broken (it's an issue that Facepunch needs to address). The grappling hook should stay disabled for the time being, it causes all sorts of whacky, uncontrollable behaviours, I have not been able to reproduce any of the problems locally.

There is also a new user-interface coming, addressing some of the shortcomings of the original Fretta HUD and the way we "blind" Hunters at the start of a round. On some smaller maps you notice that the screen gets all bright and chat text will "smear" all over the place. The new blinding mechanism will resolve this while keeping all the good things of the old one.

The Feral Props pathfinding and animation is coming along, while nowhere being done the entity is coming closer to becoming feasonable for everyday use. They might make a first appearance during the next 6 weeks.

As I have pointed out in my last update post, there is now the beautiful domain http://prophunt.eu, adding to that you can see our banlist on http://bans.prophunt.eu. The group rewards are working and joining the Steamgroup prop_hunt will give you an achievement ingame.

The ugly political stuff
You might have noticed that we currently operate 4 servers. #3 and #4 are running on the same VPS which will be terminated 2014-09-01. I will be searching for a feasonable alternative, my goal is to find a reasonably priced host that will no longer overbook RAM, bottle the CPU and will allow us to grow and scale (in terms of having some excess performance). Or simply put: I will continue to search for a host that will eliminate the red-text of death lags we sometimes have.

Servers #1 and #2 are not affected as both serve multiple purposes right now, even though I am unhappy about their overall performance/cost ratio (I am looking at you, play.prophunt.eu...).

The not-all-that-ugly-but-still-bad political stuff
Fretta voting has been disabled a while ago due to the fact that a minority of people vote for an unpopular map like de_nuke or even TF2 maps unsuitable for Prop Hunt that no one really wants to play. Due to people being dumb and our map pool being big, two votes on a map have a chance to win. The consequence: players leave the server (if I join a server to play cs_italy, I want to play cs_italy - not de_nuke).

Unfortunately this has implications on the overall operation: I either have to manually reset the map to something "proper" or cease operation of a server that runs at approx. 2 players, which is simply not enough to justify the expenses/time. My stop-gap solution for this has been disabling Fretta voting but I do not intend to keep it that way.

We have a few feasonable options:

• Have a static map per server (i.e. #1 runs gasstation, #2 runs assault, #3 runs assault and #4 runs restaurant). I'm not a huge fan of this because it would make it hard for staffers to change maps inbetween.
  
• Define a custom Fretta votepool per server (i.e. offering 5 maps instead of 25, we can set different pools per server [machine], so #3 and #4 would always have the same voting options).
  
• Have a number of randomly chosen, pre-defined mappools that will offer x predefined maps to choose from on vote.
  
• Install the mapvoting solution I used on the Vicious Cabaret (allows customization per gameserver).
  
• Have a fixed mapcycle of 5 maps and no voting (i.e. gasstation, assault, office, restaurant and then gasstation again, would also be per machine).

I would really appreciate your feedback, opinions and your ideas here!

Garry's Mod updates, disco glow, new materials and the birth of new life in the world of Prop Hunt. In other words: It's time for an update on what's going on with the server.

• Added another tauntpack by Mr Hofmann. Congratulations for making it on the "most popular" page on the Garry's Mod Workshop, enjoy your comment spam!
  
  
• Fixed the regression that caused the "Sucker Punch" and "Is It Possible?" achievements to spazz out.
  
  
• Added a bunch of unique icons for our Prop Hunt achievements.
  
  
• Added a killicon for weapon_barehand.
  
  
• Added the hook ph_PlayerRevive. Fires when a Hunter gets revived through a Reviver weapon and will trigger 2 new achievements later on ("Zombie" achievement for getting revived x times, "Angel In White" achievement for reviving x teammates).
  
  
• Added sync of bans/users across the servers (note: does not work on PH #3 and PH #4!). Bans should sync within 30 seconds, users within 90 seconds. (Thanks frankaroo for making me rethink the mechanic behind this!)
  
  
• Fixed a rare race condition when a Hunter gets revived and would receive LUA errors during spawn. (Thanks MiaTheSir for reporting this!)
  
  
• Hopefully fixed the "mod_studio movetype_follow with no model" error spamming in the console after teamswap from Hunters to Props. (Thanks Toffee for reporting this a while back!)
  
  
• Fixed ragdolls of disconnected players still being present as a revivable entities in the world and causing serverside errors when being revived.
  
  
• Oh my God! Garry's Mod update 14.07.08/14.07.11 changed the behaviour of some functions. Do not believe the bickering of other administrators, the changes made to the game are great - but they come at the expense of having to rework some of the old addon and gamemode code. So a big "thank you" shout to robotboy and _Kilburn for keeping up with the bitching on Facepunch[facepunch.com] while still improving the game!
  
  
• GMod update: Replaced our Valid(ent) function with the standard IsValid(ent) function as they finally behave the same again.
  
  
• GMod update: Updated ULX to 3.62.
  
  
• Added the first draft of the "Feral Prop" bot. The bot will take the place, model and angle of an existing prop in the map and lay in wait. When used, it will follow and attack the Hunter that dared touching it. Spawn and movement logic are in place, attack patterns and loots are still in the making.
  
  
• Added/removed/re-added PH Queuemap command.
  
  
• Added linking to a Steamgroup. Not sure what I will do with that yet but since FoRgE was unable/unwilling to provide the internal group identifier, I had to create my own. And no, this group will not go away because of that!
  
  
• We have a spanking new domain: http://prophunt.eu
  
  
• Linked play.prophunt.eu to our main server and play2.prophunt.eu to the secondary one.

While I have monitored the 4 server consoles since Wednesday and investigated the errors I encountered while you were playing, please try your best to break the game and go crazy on the common commands (kick, ban, gag, mute, gimp etc.) so I have a chance flush out the last regressions.

On that note: the servers will be down for a brief period on 2014-07-12 to ensure the addons/gamemode is consistent across all machines (too much hotfixing, sorry!).
Addendum 19:35 GMT+1: Maintenance finished.

I hope this week's chaos does not put you off from using our servers. As usual I'm delighted to hear your feedback/input!

Two weeks have passed once again and as usual there is a small list of changes, fixes and additions for you to see:

• Added Prop Radar to the weapon raffle. Sniff out Props with this miracle of modern science in no time!
  
  
• Automatic taunting for idle Props has been introduced. If a Prop does not move much for 30 seconds and does not taunt manually during that time, the game will automatically taunt for that player. If a Prop moves around (and is therefore not bound by the former rule) but does not taunt, the game will automatically taunt within the last 15 seconds of the round. The definition of "moving around" is reaching a velocity of over 200, so simply jumping or wiggling around a bit does not count as moving and will trigger the automatic taunt. Additionally, if automatic taunts are being fired and the Prop still does not move, the automatic taunt delay will be halved to 15 seconds after 2 automatic taunts. As some people have noted this is often perceived as an "unfair" mechanic - but if people were taunting in the first place, I would not need to spend precious development time on features like this one. Staffers can disable autotaunt in the Prop Hunt game settings under the panel "Props".
  
  
• Added frankaroo's tauntpack. Thank you for being awesome!
  
  
• Published the Tauntpack Loader to the Workshop (see post above this one).
  
  
• Changed some existing achievements and added a few new ones along the way. Unique images for each achievement may or may not come later on.
  
  
• Hunters can burst doors with the secondary shotgun fire. No more building barricades to lock yourself in, you little rascals!
  
  
• Hunters and Props now have their distinct victory sequence. Hunters will automatically dance, Props will get fancy trails in rainbow colors and lower gravity for a few seconds.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where a Hunter would drop a no-drop weapon on death.
  
  
• Fixed magical ammo multiplication by dropping/picking up weapons (thanks to Toffee for reporting this!).

The Tauntpack Loader for the vanilla Prop Hunt version has received much better ratings than I ever expected and gained an astonishing amount of subscribers. Considering the addon does nothing by itself, this is quite surprising. My heartfelt thanks to everyone who uses the addon to decrease the amount of Prop Hunt repacks on the Workshop. I hope I can provide a cool tauntpack for Workshop users within a resonable timeframe.

Except for a few small points I am happy with the state of our version of Prop Hunt. To the best of my knowledge there are no longer any blatant/game-breaking bugs present in the game, people rarely get stuck anymore and the game mechanics are balanced enough.

This means I will probably start polishing things up a bit. A few points from my ever-growing to-do list:

• Add the long overdue sound effects to the flamethrower and finalize it's damage model.
  
• Add server-side ragdoll mechanics to enable things like reviving hunters or defiling their dead bodies.
  
• Experiment with a Modern Warfare Prop Hunt'ey "hide as Hunter" feature (maybe for Elimination mode only?).
  
• Experiment with drawing our own, custom UI.
  
• Fix all the remaining non-critical bugs (keep the reports coming!).

I hope you like the changes. As usual, please feel free to provide feedback, suggestions and/or ideas.

I have added the Prop Hunt Tauntpack Loader to the Workshop. This should enable you to test and use tauntpacks with the vanilla version of Prop Hunt.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=272852615

Thanks frankaroo, that is much appreciated. I've added the tauntpack and it works beautifully. :)

Edit: To add Hunter taunts, simply use GAMEMODE.Hunter_Taunts instead of GAMEMODE.Prop_Taunts. You can also do fancy things like re-ordering taunts or removing taunts altogether. You can see the Garry's Mod wiki[wiki.garrysmod.com] for some practical examples.

I will offer an addon you can use to create/test your tauntpacks in Sandbox gamemode to ensure they work as expected. Download will follow somewhere around the weekend.

The last two weeks have been all about bugfixing and improving the code.

• Disabled Fretta mapvote on round end. The current map will repeat itself once the round limit/time limit has been reached. New maps can be voted for via ULX. This is apparently necessary due to the fact that nobody ever seems to be happy with the vote result. A ULX mapvote makes this a lot easier; it's either "Yes, I want this map" or "No, I don't want this map".
  
  
• Hopefully fixed the rendering of a player's "invisible" own prop.
  
  
• Corrected the view behaviour of dead players, the focus point works as expected now (problematic for Hunters that died with ph_thirdperson enabled and Props).
  
  
• Added zooming in/out for Props. Hold MOUSE3 to zoom in, hold SHIFT+MOUSE3 to zoom out.
  
  
• Cleaned up the code for voicetag broadcasting. Should be less laggy with unresponsive clients connecting.
  
  
• Added cl_hidemychattag and cl_hidemycustmdl cvars to turn on/off your own chat tag and custom player model.
  
  
• Began re-adding hooks into the gamemode.
  
  
• Due to having some hooks again, we now have sweet achievements. Type !achv in the chat to see them.
  
  
• Added a slick new !tauntlist/ulx tauntlist ULX command because people apparently no longer know what the console is.
  
  
• Added two new banned props: the wall light on ph_restaurant and the comfy chair on ph_zombie_bunker.
  
  
• Added a modified version of the standard Garry's Mod weapon_fists that can punch Props to death.
  
  
• Flamethrower raffle has been replaced with a weapon raffle. Win either a flamethrower, some kung-fu skills, popcorn or some SLAM mines.
  
  
• Added the first tauntpack to the server. See below for more info.

I have added the first tauntpack to the server. It's the jacksfilms Your Grammar Sucks pack I have compiled as an example.

You can download the sources for the tauntpack[gamescdn.otakulounge.org]. Hopefully this will enable you to make your own, upload them to the Workshop and give me the IDs so I can test and add them to the server. The advantage of a tauntpack is clear: You can maintain the pack yourself, add/edit contents and do not have to rely on me to update/upload it.

I hope you enjoy the changes, as usual your feedback is highly appreciated and will influence the direction of further development.

Not much news in terms of cool new gameplay elements this time around, I focused on cleaning up.

Because I have rewritten the entire gamemode, there might be a few points missing. However, the notable changes include:

• Fixed new-style camera rotation bug where objects with large hulls would sometimes "glitch" through walls on the player's screen.
  
  
• Prop rotation is smoother.
  
  
• Added target assist (yellow halo) and spy halo (while holding Shift) for Props. Allows easier selection of the target prop and identify other team-mates.
  
  
• First draft of the elimination mode. Instead of 5 vs 5 the game starts out as 1 Hunter vs. everyone else. If a Prop is killed, it will respawn as a Hunter after a short while.
  
  
• Classic mode support. When enabled, Prop Hunt plays like AMT's original version without all the bells and whistles.
  
  
• Taunt Pack support. Allows third party Workshop addons to add taunts to Prop Hunt. This way you guys can get creative. More details on that later on.
  
  
• Requested !round chatcommand implemented, allows players to see which round they're in at every point in the game.
  
  
• ULX admin support, allows admins to easily change the game settings without having to know all the cvars.
  
  
• Added the Grappling Hook to the Hunters' weapon arsenal. Happy spelunking!
  
  
• Nerfed the flamethrower a bit.
  
  
• Physgun now picks up players.
  
  
• Experimental stuck prevention for Props. Takes your future hull into consideration, wiggles around a bit to find out whether it'd somehow fit and if that is not the case, it will not let you become the prop to prevent you from being stuck right off the bat.

I hope the changes are to your liking.

Thanks to Steam's community suspension I was not able to post any updates. Please do not take this as a lack of motivation. It was pretty annoying, though.

The latest bunch of updates contains a few interesting changes:

• Viewmodel hands enabled (by FoRgE's request).
  
  
• Prop rotation enabled. This means that the camera will "free-roam" around your prop and show how other players see you. Holding your "reload" key while standing still will rotate you clockwise, holding "reload" and "sprint" will rotate you counter-clockwise. Currently I only enabled rotating around the y-axis, although this might change as soon as I can effectively prevent props "glitching" into objects.
  
  
• Weapon drop enabled. It sucks when people grab the rocket launcher, fire it one time and die. Previously the RPG was unavailable after that, now Hunters will drop their weapon and ammo when they die. This enables you to pick up the RPG and kill yourself as well! You can also drop weapons by using the console command ph_dropweapon.
  
  
• Most settings (grenades enabled, amount of grenades, number of rounds, blind time etc.) are now configurable via new ph_* cvars. The cvars will replicate and archive.
  
  
• Optimized GM:Think and reduced stress on physics engine. Infernaria or Hotel shouldn't cause lag anymore.
  
  
• Added a bunch of new maps you people have probably played at this point.

I hope you enjoy the changes. As usual, I am thankful for feedback and ideas.