TPU (Tanks n Planes Unlimited)

Omaha Beach on TPU now has more heavy tanks at the Axis base. There's also a plane at the Axis base. Yes, that's right, a plane. It's west of the fence, almost out of bounds. It's tricky to take off, but possible. Of course there's not a lot of room to fly around, except over the channel. Thanks, Mojo!

TPU has a new Cassino map thanks to DarkRyda. This new version of Cassino has PAK40s that respawn, more unit variety, better tanks and more tank spawns for both sides.

DarkRyda also provided a new version of Santa Croce, with Shermans, M10s, Mustangs and Spitfires for the Allies; Tigers, Pz IVs, BF109s and Stukas for the Axis, along with more tank spawns and spawn points.

The Yak9 in Battle of Britain has been moved away from the AA tower at the eastern airfield.

Subs in Midway have been tweaked to try to fix the bot spawning issue. Landing craft now spawn to the initial sub locations, so that bots can make it to land without drowning. We're still looking at ways to improve this.

There have been sporadic problems with the responsiveness of TPU because of a lot of GameSpy traffic being generated by a few specific IP addresses on the internet. There are a few possibilities: a) a misconfigured or misbehaving server monitor or GameSpy client; b) a DDoS attack against TPU; or c) a DDoS attack against some other site that is attempting to use the TPU server as part of the attack (GameSpy-enabled servers like TPU can be used to propagate DDoS attacks).

I'm blocking these IP addresses when I see them, but unfortunately that requires rebooting the router, so any current server connections are dropped. I will try to time the reboots to occur between maps.

Here are the offending IP addresses (note that these may be spoofed):
99.198.97.162 (server.g4tc-us-razor.com)
96.42.17.206
69.162.99.35 (a high profile game server in the US)
69.162.99.38 (a high profile game server in the US)
208.64.121.101

Guadalcanal is sporting a few new tweaks, courtesy of Mojo:

* B17 at the Allied base.
* Heavy tanks for both teams (that means the Japanese have imported Tigers from the Germans).
* All spawn points can now be captured. At the start, each team only owns its main base. Capture radius has been increased for home bases.

Enjoy!

Thanks to Mojo, Midway on TPU now has subs! You can spawn to them and use them just like in Conquest games. Check it out!

DarkRyda's latest map mods are now live on TPU:

• Mimoyecques
• changed Allied fighter to Mustang
• added heavy tanks
• added artillery
• added Kettenkrads
• added T-34 (rocket launcher) Sherman
• added lots of new tank spawn points
• Battle of Britain
• more plane variety
• more car spawns
• more AA on buildings
• radar buildings at airfields
• you can now spawn at airfields!
• Berlin
• added a cool new air raid feature

Thanks, Ryda!

TPU is down for maintenance and network traffic analysis. I hope to have it up again within 24 hours.

UPDATE: TPU is back up but may not be appearing in server lists. The Game-Monitor tool also doesn't seem to be finding TPU.

UPDATE: TPU is appearing on in-game server lists but Game-Monitor can only find it with a server name of _BLANK_.

UPDATE: And now Game-Monitor is working again.

The Gamespy server problems appear to have been resolved. In-game Internet server browsing works normally. No word from Gamespy on what the problem was.

Gamespy is apparently having problems since moving or upgrading some servers on August 26. This is affecting all multiplayer games that use Gamespy as a conduit for server browsing, regardless of where the server is hosted.

Gamespy has said nothing official about this on their web site, but there is some discussion on the Gamespy forums.

The problems are intermittent. If you are trying to join a game on TPU, you may not even be able to see the list of Internet servers in the in-game browser; the game seems to hang when you click the INTERNET button. If you wait long enough, the server list may appear but the game will still be unresponsive.

If you can get to point where you can click the JOIN SERVER button, click it and enter the TPU server address directly: 174.6.245.193. That should work.

However, there are also reports that once you join a game, you may be dropped from the server at any time or between maps.

Additional resources:

• Live updates related to Gamespy from Google Realtime


• More forum discussion


• Even more forum discussion

UPDATE: On the recommendation of a commenter, I finally relented and installed XFire. I confirmed that joining TPU from XFire works fine even with Gamespy messed up. Although there aren't likely to be many other players while these problems persist. My XFire username is SquareBracket.

Once again thanks to Ryda and Mojo, we have new versions of these two maps.

Stalingrad is now tankless, like Berlin, so it's an infantry battle.

Here's the complete rundown:

Stalingrad:

• added more MGs some in 2nd and 3rd levels of buildings
• added a few AA guns
• removed all tanks
• added cars and APCs
• added artillery to both sides
• artillery = katyusha/wespe
• all 5 cars/jeeps are in this map
• all 3 APCs are in this map

Salerno:

• replaced one fighter plane on both sides with a medium bomber
• added katyushas
• added kettenkrads
• replaced cars/jeeps with sherman/panzeriv