TPU (Tanks n Planes Unlimited)

We've been experiencing intermittent Internet over the past day or so. It seems to be back up now, but it may still be intermittently down.

Update 2013Dec07: Another lengthy outage last night, and again it seems fine now. Shaw is sending a technician today.

Update 2013Dec11: Outages continue. Shaw is sending another technician today.

By special request, next Tuesday (2013Oct29) will be set aside for playing DarkRyda's maps on TPU. That includes The Race Track, always a crowd favourite.

For this special day, the Allied:Axis ratio will be 1 to 1 and of course the ratio will not flip every six hours. The game mode will vary, depending on the map, and will include Co-op, Conquest and Capture The Flag. You can play on either side, and killing other players is allowed.

To play all the maps, you'll need the DarkRyda Map Pack as well as The Race Track, both available for download from this site.

DarkRyda day will start at one minute after midnight on October 29 and end 24 hours later.

We're hoping DarkRyda himself will make an appearance, and I will try to be in game as much as possible. See you there!

I've been using Skype for a development project for a while now and despite some misgivings about security, I like it a lot. It works well as a basic text chat client, but it can also be used for voice chat and of course video. I find that the novelty of video chat wears off pretty quick, and nobody needs to see me looking weird at my desk, but voice chat can sometimes be handy. The basic version is free, but if you pay for a subscription you can initiate multi-way conversations, which can be very useful.

I leave Skype running all the time on my main computer, so as long as I'm at my desk (Skype status: online) you can reach me at jeff.rivett. Those of us who have been playing on the BF2 server are using Skype to alert one another when we're available to play. Feel free to join in!

I just noticed that repair points were being too heavily weighted in the points formula, so I changed the formula to reduce the impact of repair activity. I also reduced the impact of healing activities. As a result, the player stats (when sorted by points) are a lot closer together than before. It's still a good idea to repair and heal, but doing so won't give you an excessive advantage.

The stats points formula is posted in the forum in the Server/stats FAQ.

The good news is that WAN speeds are back to normal here. Shaw found something that was misconfigured somewhere in their system and all is well again.

The bad news is that TPU may not be showing up in some users' Battlefield 1942 in-game server browsers. I've checked with a few players, and it shows up on some, but not all of their server lists.

If you can spare a few minutes, please check your in-game server browser and let me know if you see "Tanks 'n Planes Unlimited CO-OP". Don't forget to click the UPDATE button first. Thanks!

TPU's connection to the outside world was down for about 15 minutes around 3:30pm today. Speeds have been slow in this area recently and Shaw is performing diagnostics. Sorry for any inconvenience!

You may have noticed that TPU, and the JDRGaming BF2 and Minecraft servers, were down for an extended period yesterday. There was a long power outage in the neighbourhood due to some unscheduled maintenance issues. That's the first time anything like that has happened here - the power is generally excellent.

Sorry for the delay in posting here. When the power came back on my main PC stayed off; I had to install a new power supply.

A couple of notes on BG42: first, the change I made to prevent the map from restarting when the second player joins wasn't working for BG42. I finally realized that the file I modified to fix the regular BF42 maps is different for BG42, so I changed that one as well and it should be fine now.

Second, I noticed that the BG42 map 4302-faid_pass was crashing the server repeatedly, so I removed it from the rotation.

Thanks to some help from the awesome folks at bfmods.com, I was able to modify the main BF1942 objects archive, adding 'game.setMinNrOfPlayers 0' to the 'objects\Soldiers\common\CommonSoldierData.inc' file. This stops the unwanted restart behaviour in all maps, since the modified file is loaded on every map load.

Please check it out and let me know if it's working as expected.

I discovered a typo in the orientation parameters for one of the willyspawners in the map's ObjectSpawns file. Once I fixed it, the map stopped messing up the server. So Gazala is back in the rotation.