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.

Wow. I just tried Forgotten Hope 2. I had to update my BF2 to version 1.5, but that in itself was a good thing, since 1.5 finally no longer requires the original disc to play, and apparently all of the add-ons are now free to play as well.

But FH2 is awesome. WWII combat, with all of the advantages of the BF2 interface and bots. I'll be looking at hosting 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.

I've played more hours of Battlefield 1942 than any other game on any platform. I even run a Battlefield 1942 co-op server called Tanks 'n' Planes Unlimited. But as good as BF42 is, BF2 is better in almost every way. Keep reading to find out how.

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.