Dear NF Fans,

The year 2011 is now coming to a close, and we, GMs and TNF members, hope our players are having a great time as this year ends. We are thankful for having been able to keep Navy Field running well this year because of our player's strong support, and we hope our players will have much happier and greater times with Navy Field in the year 2012.

I am here to provide some details and announcements on several items to help keep you up to date on what we are doing right now, and provide a glimpse of what will be patched in 2012.

1)    Navy Field with Windows 7

I know many players continue having some unexpected problems running Navy Field on Windows 7 even though we have had several patches related to this. In response, we have decided to touch our game engine and upgrade to DirectX9.0c. This work is in the finishing stages at this time, so we expect to patch this to our live servers in early 2012 – February. We expect this will allow our players to have a much better and reliable game condition after this patch.

2)    New Nation – Italy

I know many players are curious regarding the release of the Italian nation. Fortunately, NFNA will be the first server to see the new nation! According to our development schedule, Italy will be added to our test server in the middle of January to have the final balance and sprite tests. The estimated test period is 30 days, so every player will meet Italy in our live servers soon. The test server is open for all players; you are encouraged to visit our test server and leave your valuable concerns about the new nation on our test server discussion board. If you have any question about the test server, please PM “mailman” who is currently leading the testers (Thank you mailman). Few images will be announced as soon as possible for you guys.

3)    HA battle mode

You couldn’t play the Harbor Assault because you don’t have any fleet or you are in a small fleet? Then this upcoming patch will help you, because we are planning to open a new battle mode, simply titled: HA battle mode. The main system will function the same as the current HA, but of course, we will need to fix as many bugs as possible so our players don't have to stress because of this. We plan to set this on our test server in late February and will try to put this on our live servers in either March or April.

4)    HA Upgrade

While we are adding HA battle mode, we will also fix the current HA mode. This is a very unstable mode at this moment as many of you may know, so we will put all of our efforts here to allow our players to enjoy future Harbor Assaults without any stress. This is under the development stage at this moment, so I will get more information about this to announce to our players as soon as possible. We hope the first patch related to this will be in the first semester of the next year, but it will be patched continually.