TPU (Tanks n Planes Unlimited)

I've made a couple of changes to the TPU schedule. These changes are not necessarily permanent. It all depends on the kind of feedback I get. Desert Combat Tuesdays have been suspended, and wildcard Wednesdays will run regular BF1942. That means the TPU-modded BF1942 maps will run from Tuesday through Saturday, and TPU-modded BG42 maps will run on Sundays and Mondays. Go ahead and let me know how you feel about these changes in the comments here, or in the related topic in the forum: http://jdrgaming.com/geeklog/forum/vi...topic=432.

One of the more annoying things about playing with bots in Battlefield 1942 is that they tend to hog vehicles. Sometimes, if you get lucky, pressing 'E' to enter a bot-occupied vehicle is enough to get them to exit. But usually that doesn't work.

This problem was resolved in Battlefield 2: in that game, pressing 'E' to enter an occupied vehicle always forces the bot to exit. But back to Battlefield 1942: you can sometimes get a bot to leave a vehicle by pressing F6, F7 (ALARMS, BAIL OUT). But again, that usually doesn't work, especially if the bot is engaging the enemy.

Recently, I discovered (at long last) a combination of commands that actually works: press F6 (ALARMS), then F3 (HOLD YOUR FIRE), then F6 (ALARMS), then F7 (BAIL OUT). The first command pair tells the bot to stop engaging the enemy, and the second tells the bot to get out of the vehicle. This seems to work reliably for vehicles, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work for emplacements (AA, artillery, defguns, MGs). Still, this makes playing alongside bots a lot less frustrating!

Update 2013Mar16: The TPU schedule is working again. Stats are running, and should be up to date. The modded Road To Rome and Secret Weapons maps are now running instead of the stock maps. There's a problem with the modded bf1942 Gazala map: it causes a CPU to max out while it's running, so I've removed it from the rotation until I can figure out what's going on. The server is currently restarting the running map when the second player joins, but I'm working with http://bfmods.com to get a patch for this.

Windows is throwing BSODs all over the place on Hubie, the PC that hosts TPU. I'm looking into it. Until I can fix the problem or migrate TPU to another PC, TPU is down.

Update #1: Looks like it's bad RAM. If I can get replacement RAM for not too much money, I'll do that. Otherwise, I'll be buying new server hardware. Meanwhile, why not try the TPU BF2 server?

Update #2: Hubie (the computer that TPU ran on since day one) is deceased. The motherboard has a row of bad capacitors. Maybe they've been flaky for a while, which might explain some of the BF1942 server crashes. Anyway, rest in peace, little buddy. I'm ordering new server hardware.

Update #3: Server hardware has arrived. I hope to have the server built and TPU back up and running some time tomorrow (March 6th).

For your convenience, the official Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 patches are now available for download from this site. Check out the Files and links section. Everything you need to upgrade any version of either game to the most recent version is there.

The Punkbuster service has been down for an extended period, which has taken hundreds of games offline.

I guess our decision to disable Punkbuster for TPU is reaping unexpected benefits.

Yesterday I discovered that the WAN link used by TPU was operating at a slower speed than it should have been. The problem seems to have started at the beginning of 2013. I contacted Shaw and they reset the line, which seems to have solved the problem. You may not have noticed any difference, but given the restrictions on outgoing traffic, it's possible TPU was not able to handle larger numbers of players during this period.

Happy new year!

The TPU stats for 2012 have been archived and a link to the archive added to jdrgaming.com.

The current TPU stats have been reset.

Congratulations to RebelScout for being the highest scoring non-admin player on TPU in 2012!

Good luck in 2013. See you on the battlefield.

IGN recently sold Gamespy to a company called Glu, and - presumably in the interest of improving their bottom line - Glu has started turning off support for certain games.

So far, Glu is targeting older games, such as Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Swat 4, Sniper Elite, Hidden and Dangerous 2, Wings of War, and Star Wars: Battlefront. For some of these games, it's still possible to host a server, and for players to join that server... as long as you know its IP address. For others, multiplayer has been effectively killed.

As you're no doubt aware, Battlefield 1942 uses Gamespy to find servers within the game. And the game is definitely old. How long will it take for Glu to drop support for BF42?

Luckily, Battlefield 1942 works just fine without Gamespy server support. Without Gamespy support, players will have to depend on third-party services like XFire and HLSW, as well as known server IP address lists on gamer web sites, to find servers. Some players have already given up on Gamespy because of its flakiness. Maybe it's time for everyone to stop using Gamespy completely.

To celebrate the game's 10th anniversary, EA has decided to make Battlefield 1942 available for no charge.

However, there are a few gotchas:

• The only way to get the free version of the game from EA is to use their awful Origin service.
• The game is not compatible with the regular version. This means that you can't join servers running the regular version, including TPU. You can run a server with the new version, but only people running the new version can play on that server. Update: servers running the new free version appear in the in-game server browser, and the only way to distinguish them from regular servers is to look at the server info, scrolling all the way to the bottom, until you see the server version. The free version shows as 1.612, while regular servers appear as version 1.61. If you try to join one of the new free servers using a regular client, you get an error message telling you that there's a version mismatch.
• The original expansion packs (Road to Rome and Secret Weapons) have not yet been made available for free.
• The new version may not be compatible with BF1942 mods. Update: some work, but many don't.
• The new version of the server is vulnerable to being remotely crashed by commands, such as game.setTeam and game.createLocalPlayer. Update: Tuia (the person who patched the exploits in the original server) has patched the Origin version of the server.

I don't know whether to thank EA or tell them to go screw themselves.