History of ESF
History of ESF
Earth’s Special Forces holds a unique place in the mod world. It’s a Half-Life mod approaching 10 years of history, millions of downloads under its belt, and its fair share of great success and crude failure.
In The Beginning...
The story of ESF begins in the year 2000 when our fearless leader, Mastasurf, joined a little known DBZ Half-Life mod by the name of Power-up. Mastasurf joined Power-up as a webmaster, bringing along a modeler by the name of SS Vegeta. Shortly after joining, Power-up recruited their first mapper, Stryker.
Time passed and little progress was made. The team managed to create a small Cell Arena map and a rather crude Vegeta model. More time went by, Mastasurf started learning how to skin, but little else was getting done. It was at this point that Mastasurf, SS Vegeta, and Stryker decided that the leader of Power-up was not mature enough to handle the responsibilities of leading a mod team. The team decided to leave Power-up and form their own mod and thus, Earth’s Special Forces was born.
Soon after forming ESF, they found a coder by the name of Harsens who started work on a primitive flight and beam system. Time went on, progress was made, and a guy by the name of pcjoe joined ESF as a skinner. pcjoe soon took up programming and began helping Harsens out on the coding front. There were other members coming and going around this time, far too many to list here.
First Release...
ESF had good momentum going at this point and in early 2001 released the first public version of the game, Alpha 1.5. Alpha 1.5 had 4 maps, a primitive flight system, a beam system that was essentially Half-Life’s rocket launcher slightly modified, and a melee system which could best be compared to knifing in CS. The game featured 8 characters, only 3 of which (Goku, Piccolo, Vegeta) were modeled. Gohan, Buu, Krillin, Frieza, and Trunks all used the default Gordon model from Half-Life. It was a humble start and provided a good basis for what was soon to come.
The Alphas Keep On Comin’...
After Alpha 1.5, the team kept working and pumped out Alpha 1.8, the second version of ESF ever released. In addition to bug fixes, this version added a Frieza model, two new maps, a few new attacks and a new explosion effect to replace the default one.
Shortly after 1.8 was released, the team released Alpha 1.9 which addressed a few bugs that were found in Alpha 1.8. In November 2001, the team released Alpha 2.0, a major improvement over previous Alpha’s. Alpha 2.0 added bug fixes, powerstruggles, visual improvements to beams and explosions, teleporting, a Trunks and Cell model, and many new maps. Interestingly, the Cell model that was created for 2.0 is the same model that’s in the current stable release of ESF, 1.2.3.
(ESF Alpha 2.0)
The community around this time was growing rapidly. Comparisons to Dragonmod Z, the other major player in the world of DBZ Half-Life mods, were at an all time high. Alpha 2.0 lacked transformations, but the community produced an SSJ script which changed the models in the game to appear as if they transformed. Around this time, our beloved animator Darktooth joined up with the mod, and has been with it ever since. DT is responsible for all animations in the game. All in all, it was good times in the world of DBZ mods.
Back To The Drawing Board...
After Alpha 2.0 was released, the team went back to the drawing board and started work on Beta 1.0, the version where the mod really starts to resemble the game that ESF is today. Beta 1.0 was released in November 2002.
(ESF Beta 1.0)
Beta 1.0 tackled many problems that people had with the Alphas. For instance, maps in the Alphas were quite small due to a size limit for maps in Half-Life. The team solved this problem by scaling down the player models and all other assets to 1/4th their original size, effectively quadrupling the map size. Every map in beta 1.0 was new, and took advantage of the new scale change for models.
Another criticism leveled at the alphas was a lack of transformations. Beta 1.0 not only added new character models and animations for every character, but also added one transformation for every character.
The Alphas also suffered from lack of a melee system and a rather primitive flight system. Beta 1.0 addressed this problem by adding swooping and a simple, yet somewhat controversial melee system. Melee in Beta 1.0 was essentially simple melee from 1.2 on steroids. Or in other words, player A flies into player B, player B gets hit and knocked away.
Other changes included various graphical updates such as a new and improved hud and greatly improved animations. The team also added a new game mode in the form of Capture The Dragonballs.
The community was at its high point during this time, with ESF having over a hundred servers at the release of 1.0. The ESF team followed up their success a year later in the form of Beta 1.1.
Beta 1.1 was mainly a bug fix patch, but it did manage to add a few cool features. Of note, the team added beamjumping, tweaks to melee, gave a sword to trunks, and gave two new attacks to Goku, the small spirit bomb and Kame Torpedoes.
The saga of Beta 1.2...
After 1.1 was released, the team decided that more could be done to improve the mod.
The focus of the next release would be melee and improving maneuverability. At the time, many people thought that the melee system was too simple and could be improved upon. The team therefore decided to expand melee by adding a new, more advanced melee system. It was difficult to come up with a melee system that everyone on the team agreed with, so the discussion was open to the community in order to generate some more ideas. The melee discussion thread can be found by clicking here (HYPERLINK TO THE MELEE THREAD MADE BY PCJOE – GOTTA TALK TO SKYRIDER FIRST SINCE I CANT FIND IT, I THINK ITS ON THE ARCHIVE FORUM AND THAT MIGHT BE DOWN)
Time passed, and eventually the new melee system was decided. Simple melee would be nerfed and the system we all know and love, now dubbed advanced melee, would be added into the game. A massive amount of work was put into the melee system, especially on the animating and coding front.
New talents such as DJ-Ready, GodGundam and a short while later Kama joined the developer ranks and picked up work.
In addition to changes in melee, 1.2 offered new maps, the ability to jump off of walls, a few new attacks, improvements regarding swooping, as well as various bug fixes and balance changes.
1.2 was released on May 8th, 2004, and got very mixed reactions. The community who had been playing the game did not like the new melee system, and resented the changes made to simple melee. There were also a fair amount of bugs in this release of the game. Much of the player base left the game within a month after release. While the forum was host to the usual praise for the mod after a major release, for the first time people were posting mass messages of disappointment in the mod.
The team quickly released a bug fix patch in the form of 1.2.1, and then another one in the form of 1.2.3.
After the mass exodus settled down, the game did gain a good following of players who enjoyed the mod. Advanced melee was for the most part was still a disappointment with many players and not widely used within the community, but the game received a healthy player base. To date, 1.2.3 has been downloaded over two million times.
ESF has always had a vibrant mod community, yet 1.2.3’s mod community shone. There are a number of different addons that have been released for 1.2.3, most notably ECX, which has added over 30 characters and the ability to transform beyond the second form.
Opening some Betas
Once 1.2 was released, development of the mod slowed down considerably. The design for the next version of the game, 1.3, had the daunting task of adding all transformations for every character in the game, as well as adding additional characters and attacks.
A few years passed, progress remained slow. Contributing to this slow progress was the fact that some of the core members of the team, such as PcJoe, GodGundam and Ready, had started to work on another half-life mod by the name of Mechmod. Mechmod was released on November 20th, 2004.
Fast forward to 2007, and 1.3 still wasn’t released, or seemingly any closer to being released. Around this time, someone named Dragondude joined the ESF team as a mapper. He then made the jump to coder and gained access to ESF’s source code. He handed the code over to his friend Kurt, who compiled the code and released it onto the internet. Kurt also managed to get a hold of and release the forum with all hidden sections viewable, including the developer and admin section. Everyone associated with the leak was banned from the forum.
The leaked build showed a buggy game that wasn’t anywhere close to being complete. Moral on the team was low, and the leaked build could have very well killed the mod. Instead, the opposite happened. The team decided that too much work had been put into ESF to simply give up, and a renewed effort was made on completing 1.3.
The ESF team opted to do open betas, releasing periodic builds of the development version to the public. Harsens, the lead coder of ESF at the time, described the open beta as follows:
"It might be unbalanced, buggy and contains some console commands to make testing easier, that could be considered hacks. If you want to play competitively at a stable server, this might not be the release for you. However, if you would like to take a look in our kitchen, you might want to check this out."
The open betas continued for about a year, with the last open beta being released on August 29th, 2008.
Graphical Goodness
After the game was leaked, ESF recruited Raven, Greenberet, and Lord of Destruction, the coders behind the ESF plugin ECX. Raven in particular was extremely dedicated to ESF, and some might say a bit obsessed with graphics.
Development of the game started to shine once the final open beta was released. By now, the design of the game had evolved so that 1.3 would not only feature additional characters, attacks, and transformations, but also an overhauled melee system and various other features which were never planned, such as a duel system similar to that of the Jedi Knight series.
Graphical updates were slowly creeping into the game around this time. At first the team added higher quality models, high definition skyboxes, advanced water shaders, and player shadows into the game.
More improvements were made in the form of bloom, depth of field, overcoming a half-life limitation regarding the amount of animations a model can have, character shaders, a new map format which allows for bigger, more detailed maps, an improved fx system, an advanced physics system, and other updates into the mod.
Development of the mod is now progressing rapidly. The next version of the game, formerly known as ESF 1.3, was recently renamed to “Earth’s Special Forces: Final” in order to distinguish it from the open betas, as well as reflect on the fact that this would be the last version of ESF to be released. There is no known release date, but ESF: Final promises to be a worthy ending note on ten years of history.
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