News

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**Disclaimer:** This tournament is not hosted by the ESF development team. We are simply helping the community by publishing their tournament trailer and using our forums/discord to register the participants. For those who didn't know, we posted an update regarding the progress of ESF Final last month which can be viewed below this news.

Many of us had a chance to experience Earth’s Special Forces (ESF) game at least once in our lives. Nowadays, this game is known for having a fast, unique and skill-based mechanics; however, majority of the players started their ESF journey due to its association with Dragon Ball series, created by legendary Akira Toriyama, who has recently passed away. And while we cannot collect all dragon balls to call him back, we can celebrate his life and work in our own way.



This is why we are inviting you to join ESF v1.2.3 Toriyama Tribute Tournament, where you will have a chance to win variety of prizes, compete under improved ruleset, meet elite players and, most importantly, pay a tribute to the legendary artist known as Akira Toriyama! More information regarding the rules, price and rewards can be viewed at: https://esforces.com/tournament

1. Join our official discord server by by clicking here. (and accept to its rules)
2. Once you've completed the above steps, simply join the tournament by heading over the "Join the tournament" channel and click on the "Join Tournament" Button!.. That's it!

Those who are willing to join, good luck!
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We promised you guys an update, and here we are. As everyone knows, back in November 2023 Valve pushed a 25th anniversary update for Half-Life. That update, while great for the base game, didn't do the modding community, as a whole, any favors. They broke many mods, and the only way to play many of them now is to change Half-Life to its legacy beta branch.

This works great for games that don't rely on Steam functions. Unfortunately for us... We do rely on Steam's connectivity. This means in the future, when the legacy version starts to have issues connecting to Steam servers, ESF:F will no longer work. The short version of all this is, that they adjusted Half-Life's memory usage, causing more "out of memory" bugs. Half-Life doesn't have the "LargeAddressAware" header flagged, so it only has access to 2GB of total memory. Had they enabled the "LAA" with the update, it would have allowed up to 4GB of total memory and all of this, could have been avoided. Sadly, they didn't and our base Trunks model alone is as big as *all* of the Half-Life models combined. We simply hit the memory wall and the game didn't work.

So, to fix this issue, after *years* of believing we could get it all to work on HL, the team decided to swap to Sven Co-op. The irony is not lost on us. We could have enabled the flag ourselves, but the concern became putting out a mod that could potentially trigger a VAC ban. Something we don't want to do, obviously.

So Sven, unlike our project, which has asked several times for the source code, they were given it. Thus could alter the game to use the 4GB of memory. So, we made the decision to move our mod. That has come with its own set of challenges. While it fixed some of our major memory issues, it became more apparant that other parts, like the old version of FMOD, that we use for sounds, are so outdated it is causing its own problems. So we still need to fix this. The trade-off has been every model/character is now in the game, mostly animated and working. All that is missing is everyone's unique transformation animations and their bonus tiers. We don't have to close the game and reopen it every time we want to change a map, though there is still some cleaning up we need to do with the clutter system to make this work flawlessly and not have rocks spawning in the air.

Dalte is currently working on the bonus tiers for those characters and also getting audio set up for each character's transformation to send to DarkTooth, so he can begin working on our remaining transformations. Ryokeen is still knocking out small issues that've croped up from the move to Sven like some of our tools not working quite right. Once that's finished, it'll be onto the new audio issue, then finally onto fixing the remaining gameplay issues. Our resident macdaddymario is back to working on a small cavalcade of things, such as map audio not looping correctly, trying to finish setting up the varying levels of our camera provider to allow minimum cameras, a medium amount of cameras, and a lot of cameras, aka the "Dalton Special", while helping get transformation audio tracks laid out for Dalte to have an easier time adjusting timing/adding needed sound effects. Once all the missing animations are in, he'll be back to balancing everyone.

The team would like to take this moment to thank a few people. Dio and Andreasus for helping us finish up the rest of the missing cast! Without you guys, we'd still have so much work that needs to be done. Thank you both for getting our models where we needed them to be and for all of the other projects you guys have taken on since completing the cast. Another thank you goes out to DJ Ready, or antiReady as members of our community may know him today, and Layne. Both are responsible for maps you guys have seen over the years. Without them, we wouldn't have a world for our game. And now, with most of the maps finalized and complete, except 2 (we'll share more about them when they're ready), the rest of the team is excited to see DJ cross that finish line! Thank you both for the years of your lives you've spent making the maps of our game some of the best any DBZ game has had.

Lastly, although his work isn't finished, on behalf of everyone on the team, a **HUGE** thank you to Ryo(keen)! We've said it once, we'll say it again, we could have released this game with cut cast and maps. However, without you, ESF would have been long gone! Thank you for the years of work you've put into this project. We know that we can overload you sometimes, but know that all of your efforts and work have never gone unnoticed by us.

That wraps it up for the update. We know this isn't the news everyone was hoping for, but hopefully, this helps everyone understand a bit more about how much has been going on over the last 5 months alone. We know we missed our 2024 trailer. We're sorry about that. Once the memory issues became apparent, a lot of things needed to be put on hold. Hopefully, we'll be able to get the remaining converting issues out of the way quickly and get on to getting the game in a more stable place.
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FORMS ARE NOW CLOSED!

Thanks for everyone who applied! If you get to be chosen, you'll be hearing from us!







Hello everyone! yes you are reading this correctly!

We are looking for new Testers to add to our Ranks as we are reaching a Point where we need at least 10 players at the same time on one map to test things as Intense as possible!

How can you sign up for Beta Testing? Well quite simple! First you need your Forum Account linked to the Discord server don't know how to do that? Follow the steps here.

After that you need to Link your Steam account and proof that you officially own Half Life right here. Remember that your Steam Profile and Game List HAS to be public, else you are not able to verify.

Once both steps are complete you can head on over to the Beta Tester Application Form!

We hope to work with you in the Future!

Your ESF Team

PS: If it says you are lacking Permission you failed one of the steps!
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Do you think you are the best ESF 1.2.3 player out there? This is your chance to prove it! Join the Legacy Tournament today and win awesome prizes!

UPDATE - applications are now closed. More info soon.



Get the chance to have your very own statue in the City map of ESF Final! Get the game you always wanted, but never wanted to spend a dime for it! If you win the tournament, it'll be yours!

More info at https://tournament.esforces.com/
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Greetings!

As of a little while ago, the forums have been upgraded to a newer forum software. If you by any chance have the time to check it out to see if your account is still in working order, that would be great! Though, a kind reminder that all steam logins have been erased, so you will need to re-associate your steam account with your forum account. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes, it just couldn't be avoided.

If you need any assistance in recovering your account, you can attempt to reset your password at https://forum.esforces.com/lost-password/ or you could fill in the the Contact Form at https://forum.esforces.com/misc/contact/.

You are also welcome to join our discord server for assistance https://discord.esforces.com

In case you didn't know yet, ESF-World is also back in action. You can check it out at https://gamers-desire.de. The site is dedicated to custom files for ESF v1.2.3. All of the files that were uploaded in the past still exists. Custom files are still being released on a regular basis and there is no end in sight! So why not try out some of the old ones for a change.

So let's talk about ESF: Final now.

While development of ESF Final isn't going as fast as we hoped to be, it's still an ongoing project!

antiReady (aka DJ-Ready) has made significant progress and is nearing completion of all current Work in Progress maps. Some have been removed due to them either being obsolete, lacking quality or being re-made entirely. Don't worry though, these obsolete maps may be released as some sort of archived or beta map-pack later, after ESF Final releases.

Multiple maps, with some long distance shots. As you can see, huge maps are indeed possible.





















To give you a good example how huge the map can be, check out the 2 video's below. The first one will show you the border distance between 3 points (2 struggles and 1 person recording) shown through a power struggle. While the other video will show that going through the border (which by default you normally can't go through), you can fly/walk/swim indefinitely. Though for the purpose of that video, only a small portion is shown.





Andreasus and Dio are working hard on finishing up the last few missing models before giving the finishing touches to the existing ones. Currently, only Buu (final 2 forms), Cell (final form) and Goku (SSJ3) are all that's left.









(New cell images (and turntable) will be shown soon in the near future)



Fattum (our latest additional coder) is almost done finalizing the struggle system. And if there's time to spare, it'll be enhanced with OpenGL which in the end will display logic of the beams, this will allow the client to alter the geometry of the beam, which will help with straightening them. To give you a demonstration how a struggle will look like, go check out the video below:



Dalte as usual, is up to no good. Though he's been making some amazing stuff lately. Here's a sneak peak of him finishing up Vegeta's hair transition transformation sequence and thunder/lightning effects for Goku's transformation in the background.





While the models and maps are coming to a close, the FX, optimization, animation and bug fixes is pretty much the only thing left to do. Which pretty much means coding is the most part that is left.

Until then. Stay tuned for future updates! Hope to see you around!
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Welcome back Earth's Special Forces fans, and sorry for the long wait ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Although we have been away from the spotlight for quite sometime, we can assure you that we have been working harder than ever. Over the past few months we have been able to complete much of our gameplay content. Today however, we are going to focus on the members of the bad ass Saiyan Trio: Goku, Vegeta, and Trunks. In the Trailer below you will be able to see the variety of Melee Combat and some Super Moves available, all 3 characters' Transformations, and some of their signature Blasts and Attacks. Also, don't worry your other favorite characters will also be shown off in the soon enough in a similarly juicy presentation.

Anywho, enough talking though, what better way to say it than to actually show you. A picture says 1000 words, so a beautiful trailer says a BungTrillion words...

Remember everything you see below is 'Work In Progress' and is bound to reach its maximum levels of sexiness upon release. Enjoy, and as usual we thank you guys and appreciate all the love and support.

Oh and also, here are some delicious screenshots that I had laying around as well ( notice the different HUDs none are final of course, just demonstrating that you can use any style you want ^_^ )

Make sure to Stay Tuned for Updates. We have tons of content coming down the pipeline for you! Have a great weekend!!!