For those that don't check the forums, here is some good news. TO:Crossfire 1.7 will be released in mid April. There will be many significant improvements like the removal of the corner bug, the sniper desync issue and a few other things that you, the community had found to be a problem. Oh, did I forget to mention that as well as increased integrated anti cheat/exploit effort, 1.7 is an active and crucial step towards getting a 3rd party cheat protection up and running for TO:Crossfire.

More detail about exactly how 1.7 will be essential to you will appear in the run up to TO:C 1.7. But for now, we decided that we could do with an extra bit of community involvement. Below are four pics of the brand new map from Ssswing, which is just one superb surprise included with the 1.7 patch. Although the map has an internal name, we thought that it would be a good idea for the community to give ideas for a name for this excellent map on the forum, in this thread:

http://community.to-crossfire.net/forums/showthread.php?p=77947#post77947

The announced 1.7 patch is in progress.  At the moment the state of the patch is that all features are either ready or well in progress (since we have other improvements than announced that we want to fit into this patch release).

Our main aim, beyond fixing the corner bug, is to bring cheat protection into the game.  Early work here has seen several known exploits blocked and we continue to co-operate with 3rd party security teams in order that servers can be protected with their tools and be fully supported by the game to do so. 

Once 3rd party anti-cheat support, our own internal anti-cheat protection and improvement work is completed we will prepare the release.  We should be able to give about 2 weeks notice and it's still our intention to get this to you as fast as possible.  Work rate is good at the moment (10 weeks since 1.5 release and we are in the final stages of our second patch of the year) and we are confident that pretty soon 1.7 will provide fast, fair and fun gaming to the public.

In the meantime, 2.0 work is still continuing, the first work we are seeing from UBH, our new animator is great, the animation plans we have for 2.0 should make TOC a game to impress.  New maps are in progress and the team has expanded quite a bit in recent weeks with people coming onboard to provide 2.0 content. 

That's this week's blog, hope next week I can give a release date..