Finnish Philanthropy

Hello and welcome back to another update of Forgotten Hope. We hope you are eager to get some more information on the upcoming Forgotten Hope 2. But before showing you the new images we would like to draw your attention to something else. Battlefield Podcast asked for an interview with a Forgotten Hope Developer and StrangerThanFiction volunteered to join them for an interview (after only a little "encouragement" from Lobo).

If you are interested in listening in you should visit here and check Episode 9. The part of the podcast about FH2 is in the second half of the podcast btw (after about 35 minutes), as there is quite a bit of other content to listen to. In case you do not know what a Podcast is, we kindly invite you to watch an helpful introduction here.

We would like to kick off the content part of this update with some special news. Many mods never make it to release, despite having talented, hardworking people on the team. One such mod was Finland at War, which was a Half-Life 2 modification about the conflict between Finland and the Soviet Union in World War II. The FaW team made a lot of great models and skins before they decided to stop production. When they decided to offer the work they had done so far to Forgotten Hope 2 we were both honored and excited to be offered so many attractive models and skins.

Most of the work was not appropriate for the North African Theater, but there was an exception, which we are happy to show you today. Finnish as well as British Forces used the Boys Antitank rifle, so it is the one item from Finland at War that will appear in the first release of FH2. This 5-shot magazine, bolt-action rifle fired .55 inch (13.9 mm) caliber ammunition and had an effective range of almost 300 m, while it penetrated up to 20 mm at 100 yards. This made it somewhat useful against more lightly armored early tanks, but it became progressively less effective against their later, more heavily armored replacements. More than 60.000 were built. The FH2 Boys Rifle was modeled by Ripa of Finland at War and skinned by McGibs.

Below you can see a selection of other weapons donated to FH2 by Finland at War (Russian 1895 Nagant revolver and PPD-34 SMG as well as the Finnish Suomi M31 SMG). These weapons were modeled by Rabid, Rakim and Ripa and were skinned by Eric, P_Witty and Ripa. These, and other models, will not appear in FH2 until we move on to the East Front, but when we do they will be ready for action! Other FaW members that did not work on the models shown today, but also deserve to be mentioned are Eric, Intimidator, Polygon, Roska, Skorz, and zlad.

As these models were made for the Source Engine some modifications are required to fit them into FH2. Some are skinned and some (like the Boys Rifle) were not, but as you can see we got some very high quality work. Special thanks go to Skorz, who first approached us with this offer, and Ripa, who collected and organized all the files, however, the Forgotten Hope Developer Team would like to thank the entire Finland at War Developer Team for this generous donation!

To close today's news we have some more statics to show. Duke of Holland has kept busy with creating a water well and the El Alamein train station. We beg your pardon that we just placed it somewhere in the endless open desert - but this one is still red hot from the forge and no mapper has given it a home yet. We'd also like to use the opportunity to present the El Alamein signposts created by Lobo.

   

   

   

That's all for today, but be sure to come back next week for another Forgotten Hope update. And don't forget to join us on IRC at irc://irc.gamesurge.net/fhmod. Feel free to visit our public forums to discuss this update or other news.