It recently occurred to me that I could repurpose an old Windows PC as a Windows game server and run the Forgotten Hope 2 server on it. Testing confirmed that the current FH2 server runs fine in coop mode on Windows.

So the JDRGaming BF2 server is once again running FH2, albeit on a different physical computer.

It's still possible that whatever prevents the FH2 Linux server from running in coop mode will be fixed, in which case I'll move the JDRGaming FH2 server back to the main Linux server. That dooesn't make any difference to players, of course.

As usual with FH2 releases, some of the maps have problems when running in coop mode. Please let me know if you encounter any problems running a particular map.

The latest version of FH2 has loads of improvements, most noticeably in the user interface.

If you've never tried FH2, I encourage you to check it out. It's more resource-hungry than BF1942, but if you can run it, you'll be amazed at the visual and audio improvements over BF1942. I particularly enjoy the much more realistic and diverse sounds of vehicles and weapons.

Here's a link to the official FH2 download page.

DJ ErrorProned, who uses the player name 'ErrorProned', produces audio commentary for battles and events on TPU.

I've posted a few examples of his work on a new page on this web site, which you can access from the sidebar panel under 'TPU Stuff'.

DJ ErrorProned is busily refining his methods, and plans to produce more commentary. We are considering using his commentary if and when we have more special events on TPU, and we're also exploring options for adding his commentary to gameplay video.

Check out his stuff! You might even hear your player name mentioned, especially if you did something amusing on the battlefield.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been evaluating a Battlefield 1942 client tool called bf1942plus.

bf42plus inserts itself into the BF1942 process during startup, and its features can be controlled with a config file or using client console commands.

Here are a few of the features of bf42plus:

• Assign more and different colours to player names.
• Fix crash when the game is minimized.
• Fix other windows getting resized when the game is launched.
• Center kill message now shows who teamkilled you.
• Fix a loading screen crash caused by a bug in the game's memory allocator.
• Speed up reconnecting to servers on map change.
• Changing mod when joining a server from the serverlist is faster.
• Nametags are lowered when u get close to other players so you can see them more easily.
• Yellow server messages are immediatedly copied to the console so one isn't lost if it is overwritten by another.
• Message when someone connects to the server.
• Show player IDs in chat and/or in kill messages.
• Show player IDs in nametags.
• Show in the console who started a vote or voted.

There's now a link to bf42plus on the Files page on this site.

NOTE: this mod has some features that are considered cheats on some servers. I currently don't see any reason to ban its use on TPU.

Take a look! I'm finding the player name colour function to be particularly useful.

I just discovered a wealth of useful resources on the Battlefield 1942 Information web pages maintained by Eric Haines.

These pages in particular are extremely informative, and if you play BF1942, you should take a look:

• Frequently Asked Questions
• Annotated Maps - maps marked with vehicles, emplacements, ammo, medical, etc.
• Tips and Tactics
• Weapons Effects and Grid O' Death - paper vs. scissors vs. rock.

There's now a link to Eric's BF1942 pages on the How To page on this site. There's also a link to a local copy of Eric's pages on the JDRGaming server, because Battlefield 1942 is an 'old' game, and web sites about BF1942 tend to disappear.

Some of you have already noticed that the Gametracker widgets at the top of this web site are showing all the servers as 'UNNAMED', although the server IPs and ports are still showing correctly. But player stats are also not being shown.

Here's an excerpt from a recent post on the Gametracker forum: "Please understand; this is a Gametracker global issue. Management has been notified. The technicians do not require individual server IPs or names to resolve the issue. I will update the thread when there is further information available. Yes, this is why some/many/all servers are showing as '--unnamed--' or similar."

Hopefully the service will be fully functional again within a few days.

I think most gamers have come to accept that they will sometimes need to upgrade their PC hardware to run the latest games. We understand that since the quality and quantity of visual and audio resources required by top tier games continues to increase, so will the requirements for graphics processors (GPU), CPU, and memory.

Of course, we can often delay the inevitable, by running games at less than their maximum settings. But those of us lucky enough to be able to afford regular hardware upgrades will often happily pay for a new GPU if it means we can run the latest new games.

But now, according to The Verge, at least two major game developers are saying that we will also be required to run their upcoming titles on solid state drives (SSDs).

Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, will require 125GB of SSD storage when it debuts on September 6th. It’s not a recommendation — it’s a minimum spec to play Starfield on a PC.

CD Projekt Red also revealed that it’s bumping the minimum specs of Cyberpunk 2077 to require an SSD at minimum and phasing out HDD support.

Have you ever noticed that some high end games load faster than others? And that games from certain companies seem to consistently suffer from slow load times? What that tells me is that the developers working on those games haven't figured out how to load game resources efficiently.

So the way I interpret these announcements from Bethesda and CD Projekt Red is that they're giving up on ever figuring out how to load and manage large amounts of resource data efficiently. Instead, they're adding to the already significant pressure on gamers to buy new hardware.

I don't imagine we'll see much pushback from gamers on this. These days, gamers with high end gaming rigs are already using SSDs. Most new pre-built PCs now come with SSDs.

But wouldn't it make sense to allow these games to be installed on and run from HDDs, and then show an alert to the user, to the effect that load times would be greatly improved by running from an SSD? Why force the issue, potentially angering and alienating potential customers?

Due to some recent updates, the JDRGaming Unreal Tournament 99 server was running with incorrect settings for a few weeks. I finally noticed and resolved the problem today.

You should now be able to see the JDRGaming UT99 server in the in-game server lists.

It's a sad reality of the gaming world, as in the world generally, that no matter how much a work of culture is loved and cherished, if the corporation that 'owns' it decides to kill it to save a few dollars, there's often nothing you can do but weep.

That's where we are (or more accurately, were; more below) with the massively popular Unreal Tournament series of games, including Unreal, Unreal Tournament (1999, GOTY Editions), Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Unreal Tournament 3.

Epic apparently wants to purge the Earth of these games, since it not only killed the master servers for these (and other) games, making it more difficult for players to find servers, but also removed the games from their own stores, as well as from the Steam and Good Old Games catalogs. GOG would not have removed those games from its catalog unless it was threatened by Epic, so it's safe to assume that's what happened.

Epic's official announcement about this sad reaping provides clues as to motive: "Starting today, we will begin turning off out-of-date online services and servers for many older games in the Epic family as we move to solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features." They couldn't figure out how to monetize some older games, so rather than leaving a few old servers running as a way of thanking their fans, it's off to the firing squad with them.

Epic had numerous other options. They could have:

• encouraged fans to recreate the master servers by making the code running them available;
• open sourced the games;
or
• continued to run the master servers themselves, costing them almost nothing but gaining the respect and love of fans.

But no. In this corporate hellscape, culture is owned by gatekeepers, and if they can't figure out how to make money from it, nobody else is allowed to go anywhere near it. Corporations routinely lock up, hide, and even destroy their own 'property', just to keep it out of our hands. Fuck them.

But sometimes, there are ways to fight back.

Shuttering the Unreal Tournament 1999/GOTY master servers won't actually affect a large subset of its fans, because the community had already created several replacements. With a few changes to game settings (clients and servers), we can thumb our noses at Epic, and carry on playing.

The situation was initially somewhat more urgent for Unreal Tournament 2004: at the time of Epic's announcement, efforts were underway to create repalcement master servers, and I'm happy to report that several are now available. As with UT99, switching to the new master servers for UT2004 involves changing a few lines in a configuration file (clients and servers).

The JDRGaming UT99 and UT2004 servers are now both using community master servers. Both have been tested, and work just fine. Bonus: if Epic games goes out of business tomorrow, we can briefly applaud, then get back to gaming.

Please reach out to UT fans. Let them know that there are solutions to those sad, empty server lists.

Due to some technical issues with recent versions of Forgotten Hope 2, the JDRGaming Battlefield 2 server has switched back to the Hard Justice mod.

Hopefully at some point the issues with FH2 will be resolved and we can go back to running it regularly.

I finally decided to upgrade the FH2 server. Before August 8, it was still running FH2 2.57.

I held off upgrading because there wasn't a lot of useful information about how to upgrade, or how the upgrades would affect co-operative play. That, and the server files were not available on the FH2 web site for a while.

FH2 2.61 has a ton of changes, many of which are immediately visible in the client. The in-game user interface has had an overhaul: various elements have been moved and/or changed in their appearance. For example, instead of Axis/Allies ticket numbers, there's a graph with a blue line for Allies and a red line for Axis.

Despite some initial problems making everything work (and lots of CTDs), the server seems to be working fine now. In case such things are of interest, we're now running the 64-bit version of the Linux FH2 server; previously we were running the 32-bit version.

However: as is usual with FH2 updates, some maps that previously worked fine in coop mode may now crash when loading, or if bots do certain things in-game. I will gradually test all the available maps, removing any that are not stable, or crash the server, or crash the client when attempting to play on them in coop mode. I will add any maps not currently in the server's map list, and will test those as well.

If you play on the JDRGaming FH2 server, and you notice the server or your client crashing when you try to join, please do let me know which map it was on, and when it happened. Click 'About/contact' at the top of this page for details on how to reach me.