Ok, a brief history lesson (with video!)
Back a long long time ago, on some forums far far away, a bunch of individuals got together and said "star wars is cool! Lets build a mod for it for BF2 when it comes out!" Sadly no amount of warning, cajoling, or mocking from any of us over at GC (which had just completed several years of existence and releases) would put them off it. We new the pain involved and didn't want anyone else to go through it like we had. But they listened not, and made a mod for BF2 called "First Strike"
Or rather, they said they were making a mod called First Strike for BF2. Fast forward about two years to October 2006. Most of the originators of FirstStrike had given up and left. Indeed, I think all of them had. The mod itself had been passed on to a few individuals who had signed up some months before October. Namely Blitz and Bandu, with xerohour pretending to be useful and blackmailing everyone with the website domain. There are also others that were involved but they didn't contribute greatly to the story, so I'll let them tell their own somewhere else. But anyway, up to this point though the grand total of work done to date was a) 5 or 6 grenade geometries were made and b) Bandu had discovered a thousand ways in which trees didn't work in BF2.
Now, enter September/October when they received a handful of new members which became the core of the team, and also the time when we received 2142 and swapped to that engine for the walkers. The first of the new members to join was Ulph, the sound guy, who put together the first true build for FS. This build consisted of nothing more than the E11 and the A280, and from here the mod was officially born. Here's a short (badly named) video of those early days:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fmg2u9J38D8
Also joining the team was Preacher, Luuri, and myself. Preacher's first great mark was in designing the blaster bolts you see in-game today. A quick vid of the work:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PnwCfB-yKB0
Now it should be said he didn't do it alone. Most of the team all pounded away at it, especially ulph. However it was him who completed the final product which we still use. Of course, it was a bit of hit-and-miss along the way, as this video shows:
http://woodat.com/WoodyLabs-MeshBlasterBolt.avi
Next in was Luuri, a genuinely employed game designer in real life and the chief character modeler/animator. He's the chap who did most of our soldier models as well as the animations for them and the ATST (and probably lots of other stuff I'm not giving him credit for).
And then there was also myself. I was approached by preacher on this, who for some reason had a strange lust to try and do some more star-wars. You may recall us mentioning that we discouraged anyone doing another star-wars mod due to the pain and anguish? Well apparently preach was feeling a bit nostalgic some time after we finished with GC (or was it masochistic?) and contacted me to convince me to join in and give them a hand. Foolishly I agreed, saying that I'd just do a few weapons here and there. Little did I know what I was getting sucked in to.
From here FS began. Within a month we had set up a regular build system to update, test, and distribute the mod (complete with our own updating tool). The E11/A280 soon got joined by some pistols and the sniper rifles, the melee weapons, and the MK1/T21. Of course, because there were no tools to convert maps however, we were still using 2142's maps as our playground.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ArroNaAZPNk
The real map breakthrough didn't come until december. Late one night (sleep deprivation seems to help with breakthroughs) I got bored so I grabbed our BF2 endor test map and dragged it over to 2142. After a fair amount of technical jiggery pokery I was able to get it going in 2142, very much to my own surprise. Check out the tech demo video I did. You may also notice that it's not the same map as we have in the mod now. Endor went through 3 revisions before being complete. Also see if you can spot the problems Bandu was still having with the trees:
http://woodat.com/ProjectEndorHi.wmv
Work steadily progressed and by January we tackled our greatest challenge vehicle wise: the AT-ST. We had almost the entire team working on it. We had Luuri doing the animations, Blitz doing the assembly/importing, our other coder, GD, trying to glue the code together. Before and even after that we also had several modelers and texture artists working on the look and shape of it.
It was at this time we discovered how problematic the thing would be. The 2142 walkers were designed to specifically only work for 2142 walkers. There was little to no flexibility at all. We couldn't alter the speeds, walking distances, functionality, etc in almost any way without severely hacking and kludging stuff together. And, in the end, that's just what we did to bring you one of the best walkers I've ever seen in a star-wars game to date. Anyway, here's some development vids:
http://woodat.com/atst-editor.wmv
http://woodat.com/atst-finally.wmv
http://woodat.com/at-stcomparison.wmv
http://woodat.com/atst-walk2.wmv
http://woodat.com/ATST-WreckFinal.wmv
Our second vehicle, the speederbike, was proving no less easy to accomplish. Check out a few of the development vids and see just how far we've come with it. Also check the cruise video out to see what Tatooine Mos Espa originally looked like. A fair bit different from the one we have today, and personally I still miss it. Many of our original testers will have a lot of fond memories of fighting up and down those red and brown streets, watching combat from the sky as they fell in from escape pods, and moving in squads behind imperial probe droids. The probe droid is actually extremely well suited for squad-to-squad city combat, and we should add it to more city maps. Anyway, I'll add a vid of that also:
http://woodat.com/SpeederBikeAdventure.avi
http://woodat.com/speeder.wmv
http://woodat.com/cruisethroughtown.avi
http://woodat.com/unpleasantprobing.avi
Slowly but surely everything started coming together. As we progressed we updated the mod every week. We set up a testing team and ran tests every Wednesday. And when that wasn't enough we'd have pickup tests whenever we could. With the updating tools all the testers ever had to do was press a button and the mod would update itself, so this meant we could just put something up, have them update, and test it within 15-20 minutes. They also got frontline access in gamebalance and development, as most of the game was played as it was built so we were balancing as we went. This is how we were able to put together such a full featured kit layout and design in our first go, as the whole mod was built up around it and everything was integrated and balanced the minute it was completed.
With all that under way we turned our attentions to space. To do this we had to overcome multiple obstacles. The first was to get DICE to reimpliment a command into 2142 that turned off stall height. The second was figuring out how to get rid of the visible ground. The third was discovering how to make our space maps far larger than any previous map had ever been built in this engine. And finally we had to figure out how to build a combat system that would work over such vast distances and scales.
To that end development was a huge matter of trial and error. We went through revision after revision of strange aircraft and failed weapons on them. We also turned to other mods which had attempted the same thing to see if their systems would work. Case in Point, you'll see the space demo map from the RoK demo released a few years ago. I know LexLuther will hate me for saying this, but sadly the controls and systems for accomplishing space on that map were not very useful.
http://woodat.com/BF2_179.avi
http://woodat.com/the_chase.avi
That said, we finally did crack space, as shown in this video here:
http://woodat.com/spacetie.wmv
And so yeah. With all the fundamentals in place we pushed ahead, slowly but surely. We'd cracked all the major problems, and with the signing of a few new teammates to help with the graphics, statics, and map making we put together the mod that you know and play today. Now obviously there's a lot more to be told, both from the development and also after the first release, but I'll save that for another post later. 
And, of course, this doesn't really answer why we decided to keep calling it FirstStrike, as just about no one from the original team who chose that title was left to justify keeping it.
Fear the Woodzilla
Closed Alpha Test & Deth..
