I apologize for the extended outage last night. The cable techs were here to make some changes to my TV service, but also changed my Internet modem for some reason, and caused all kinds of problems. Everything should be back to normal this morning.

If you needed yet another reason to avoid Ubisoft games completely, they have just provided one. Apparently they are moving some of their services to new servers, and during that time, certain games will not function. At all. Even if you only want to play single-player games. That's because those games won't run unless they can access those Ubisoft servers. Behold the supreme idiocy of DRM.

They haven't even bothered to estimate the duration of the outage, so all you can do is keep trying until your game finally starts working again. So lame.

As if that's not bad enough, many in the tech industry (including myself) are scratching their heads, wondering why moving a critical service to new server hardware would be planned to involve more than a few seconds of downtime. This is not rocket science: get the new hardware up and running, flip the switch, then when everything looks okay, pull down the old servers.

The details are in this Ubisoft announcement:
http://static2.cdn.ubi.com/transition/details/

We'll be trying out a new mod next Wildcard Wednesday: Eve Of Destruction. This is a Vietnam mod.

You can download the mod from the Files and links page:
http://jdrgaming.com/geeklog/staticpa...nloads#eod

As always, feedback is greatly appreciated.

Apparently the DCX map Hidden Airbase was causing client as well as server crashes, so I've removed it from the DCX rotation.

UPDATE: The 'brit' version of the map was also causing lots of server crashes so I removed it. I also removed all the extra 'day2', 'day3' and 'brit' maps from the rotation.

The Brusilov Offensive map has been removed from the BF1918 rotation, since it was causing repeated server crashes.

UPDATE 2012Jan30: Battleaxe 1918 removed for the same reason.

TPU was down for a few hours this morning, between about 1am and 7am PST. Both the dedicated server software and BFSM crashed. I'm investigating.

The new TPU Challenges page is up! You can find it in the 'TPU Stuff' section in the left sidebar. There's a direct link below.

The first challenge has also been posted: it's the =kink= Battle of Britain flying challenge. There's a map, rules and a scoreboard where your name will be listed when you master the challenge.

NOTE: the scoreboard is starting out blank, which means that any previous challenge completions have been wiped out. That way everyone starts on an even footing. Good luck!

http://jdrgaming.com/geeklog/staticpa...challenges

Sisko's latest video is now available for viewing. You'll find it in the Files and links section, or you can use the quick link below.

The new video is a promotion for TPU, and it's epic. There's gameplay footage from several different maps, showing plenty of action. The new chessboard on Dark Ryda's Race Track map is also shown.

Warning: this is a long video. Due to upload bandwidth constraints of TPU's Internet provider, it will take a while to download no matter how fast your connection is.

Thanks, Sisko!

http://jrc-core.com/files/TPU_PROMO4_by_Sisko.m4v

Both servers were down this morning for about 20 minutes while the power meter was replaced. The outage should have only been for a couple of minutes, but there was a problem with the router that took a few additional minutes to sort out. Sorry for any inconvenience.

The map El Alamein Brit has been removed from the DCX map rotation since it was causing server crashes.