Fortress Connected Developer Update June 2026
Hello again! It's been a couple months and once again we have some fun stuff to share! This is SaintSoftware, co-lead of Fortress Connected. In this dev update, we will be covering the following:
- Half Life 2 NPC crits, along with the ability for NPCs to use TF2 weaponry
- New animations
- Weapon changes and additions
- UI and Menu changes
- CSS gamemode changes
- New map entities
- Mod supports
To start us off:
NPC Changes
We have given the TF2 weapons to the regular Half-Life 2 NPCs for use in custom maps or servers! HL2 NPCs can now use all stock TF2 weapons, meaning you can have a Combine soldier gun you down with Heavy’s miniguns!
We’ve added a new option for NPCs to do random crits, which would pose a real challenge!
Have you ever wanted to make use of NPCs in PvP maps? Now you can, since now NPCs have the ability to capture flags, control points, and push payloads!
NPCs now also have custom inputs for map makers to use that allows NPCs to drop MvM currency (or any other entity) when killed!
Animations
We have some fancy new animations for when our mercs are being pulled or choked by the smoker!
Co-op bots
Don’t have friends to play with but need a team to help you fight off the Combine or Infected? Add some bots! These will follow the player around, fight alongside them, and revive the player when downed in Left 4 Dead maps. They can even enter the passenger seat of the vehicle the player drives! (JUST DON’T LET THEM DRIVE!)
HL2 Mod and Source game supports
As of the time of writing this, we have over 45 supported mods and games on our workshop, with compatibility for additional mods being worked on all the time! You’ll see all sorts of mods like Entropy Zero 2 or Mission Improbable. We are creating EDTs for our mods, and testing all sorts of Source mods every week! You can think of EDT files as a way to edit maps without changing the original maps, simply through a simple text document. All of this means that workshop users can post their very own mod supports to the workshop!
Speaking of Source game support, we also now have basic support for GMOD painted skyboxes with a simple fallback set in place until we have the entity working perfectly. This means that now mounted GMOD maps that use this entity will no longer have broken skyboxes!
Weapon Changes
We have a new system in place for loading custom weapons! Custom weapon scripts can be placed into a dedicated folder in the game files and then they will be loaded into FC automatically. Along with that, if duplicate weapon IDs are detected, the game will automatically adjust them to resolve any conflicts. This will work with both Steam Workshop and regular custom folder mods! There have also been various new experimental weapons added to the game since the last dev log, as well as some balance changes! The stats of these weapons are not final and are subject to change!
Gauss Cannon
Fires a shotgun burst of energy blasts that can penetrate walls when charged! If charged too far, though, you will spontaneously explode, as well as any enemies standing near you!
Hive Hand
Fires a swarm of hornets that will automatically target nearby enemies. It regenerates its ammo in full every 5 seconds, at the cost of no random crits.
M249
Increases its fire rate and decreases spread while attack is held down, deals increased damage, and has a massive clip size, at the cost of sprint capacity, sprint regen rate, and slower sprint speed. This weapon also initially has poor fire rate and spread.
Sidearm Satchel
This item generates 2 health per second, increases secondary and grenade ammo, sprint capacity, and refills sprint via collected health kits, at the cost of replacing your primary weapon, sprint regen rate, and increased minimum time needed to sprint.
Alyx Gun
Has two fire modes: automatic, and burst fire. Automatic fires in a full auto pattern, deals decreased damage, and is less accurate. Burst fire fires in a… well… burst fire pattern, deals increased damage, and is more accurate. Both firemodes can be switched with secondary attack. This weapon also has an increased clip size, and deals no headshot damage. Currently it has a placeholder viewmodel, but this will be changed out in the future.
The Mesa Protection
This item grants +50 max health on wearer, as well as various damage resistances to help keep Renegade alive for longer, at the cost of losing a lot of your sprint speed and a lot of other capabilities in terms of sprinting. This weapon’s model is also a placeholder.
The Grave Digger
This two-handed melee weapon has increased range, knockback force, and deals crits when airborne, at the cost of decreased firing speed and slightly slowed sprint speed.
S.L.A.M.
This weapon can be either thrown or placed on a wall. When thrown on the ground, Slams can be manually detonated by pressing your secondary fire. When placed on a wall, Slams become a tripmine that explodes whenever the user or an enemy touches the laser. The Reload button switches between these two modes, and the max amount of Slams you are allowed to have alive at once is eight.
The Chopper’s Cohort
This minigun has gotten many changes since the last time it was seen! The user can now move at full speed, jump, and crouch when spun up with this weapon, at the cost of decreased damage, max primary ammo, slower spin up time, and marking its user for death when spun up.
The Firebreather
A new Pyro minigun. Bullets engulf enemies in flames on hit, do increased damage to flaming targets, and destroy projectiles in mid air, at the cost of a drastically decreased fire rate, halved max primary ammo, and slightly decreased damage. Bullets also have a decreased range in which they can hit. This weapon currently uses a placeholder model.
Kick attack!
Have you ever played Entropy Zero 2? If not, you may not know that it has a special kick attack function. This was brought over as an optional feature outside of EZ2 in FC with all classes having a first person viewmodel to go with them!
Cosmetics and playermodels
Our new class, the Renegade, now has support for a lot of existing TF2 cosmetics. We’ve also been prototyping a new custom Playermodel system! This would mean that hopefully in the future, workshop users can make playermodels and upload them for other users to use in game.
UI and other HUD changes
We've updated our main menu to support animated backgrounds via WebM files.
Along with that, our loadout menu saw a nice small but nice refresh with a style that better matches our main menu.
Remember the ping tool we shared in the last video? We now have the option for users to filter it out via chat filters.
In one of our previous dev logs, we showed off the quickinfo hud from HL2. We have added a few more HUD elements from HL2, with the option for players to set a custom color they want in settings.
The Renegade’s sprint HUD has also had some changes! It has been further simplified and will now turn yellow, then red, depending on how much sprint you have left, and is a lot smoother compared to how it was before.
Controllers and Steam Input
There is a new indicator in the main menu that appears when you have a controller connected that is using Steam Input. Along with that, there is now a default config set up for most controllers that makes use of FC’s features, like radial voice menus.
Counter-Strike: Source
Since the last log, we’ve done a lot of work on our Counter-Strike gamemodes. Now when the bomb is dropped or planted, all players on the RED team will see a new arrow HUD pointing towards it. When the bomb is planted, a new HUD element will appear and even flash to indicate that the bomb is planted. There is also music for bomb planted events similar to CSGO for 60 seconds and 10 seconds left on the timer.
Balancing the regular MvM upgrades in a PvP context is quite difficult to do. We’ve removed a lot of the overpowered upgrades and made extra tweaks to existing ones to make them more fair in the PvP scenario. There are also some new custom canteens. A weapon buy system is also in the works with the ability to buy weapons that a class would normally not have access to, which gives you more use for the currency earned!
Vocalize Command
Yet another Left 4 Dead feature brought over, the vocalize command! This allows users to play a talker script at any moment, with options for delays and radial menus
New Map Entities
This is mostly intended for custom map makers. On top of Mapbase, we have a bunch of our own new entities for mappers to use! For example, “ambient_generic_multiple”. This is a new version of ambient_generic that allows for a lot more sounds to be triggered with outputs per sound! This can help with cleaning up a lot of the more messier sound setups mappers would normally have to do for a multiple sound based system.
If you’ve played Left 4 Dead, you’d know there's certain sections where you have to bring an item to another spot and hold the “use” button to activate. For example, the gas can and cola sections from Dead Center. Those entities, timed buttons, and even the elevators from Left 4 Dead are now functional within FC! They even work already with existing maps making porting content to FC from these other games a lot easier!
Conclusion
Thanks for reading our June devlog! Once again, we’re still looking for developers! If you can program, animate, model, or even just want to help us playtest the game, send us an application! The link will be in the description.
Stay connected for more in the future!