TPU (Tanks n Planes Unlimited)

A few announcements:

[1] Wildcard days are now Wednesdays. We'll stick with DCFinal on wildcard days for now, but there's been some discussion of changing to BF1918 soon, to see if that generates any more interest.

[2] Meanwhile, Tuesdays are now dedicated to DCFinal.

[3] There was a problem with stats processing on Tuesday, but it is now fixed and the missing stats should be on the stats page.

[4] There are some problems with the AI on a few of the BG42 maps. In particular, on Omaha Beach, the Allied bots don't seem to want to move off the beach. I'm going to start a new forum thread about AI problems in general. One thing we have yet to determine is whether we can make changes to the AI on a map without forcing clients to download the changed map.

[5] There are a few misbehaving maps in DCFinal: Bocage (day one?) doesn't run and when voted for, sends you to a random map; also the server seems to get stuck on Mimoyecques. I'll be taking a look at those issues today.

UPDATE: I tried DCFinal Mimoyecques on TPU and it seemed to work fine. Not sure what it was doing earlier since I didn't see it for myself, but perhaps the problem fixed itself. As for Bocage, the first one definitely doesn't run. I'll fix or remove it.

UPDATE: Unable to determine why DCFinal Bocage doesn't run on the server, I removed it from the DCFinal map rotation. There are still two other Bocage maps in the rotation.

UPDATE: DCFinal Market Garden was also acting weird so I removed it.

Thanks once again to the efforts of DarkRyda, a bunch more BG42 maps have been given the TPU touch. What does that mean? It means you won't spend much time walking, because there are rides aplenty.

Here's a list of the maps updated today:
4508-yamashita_treasure [okay]
4504-crossing_the_spree
4212-tebourba_breakthrough [fixed]
4504-volkssturm [okay]
4504-seelow_heights [okay]
4503-cologne_trainstation
4301-stalingrad_winter
4106-battle_of_brody
4104-thermopylae
4104-battle_of_keren
4103-koufra_raid
4011-kalamas_line
4005-stonne
4005-kornwerderzand
4005-hannut_steel
4005-grebbeberg [okay]

Most of the maps have just had their tank and plane spawns bumped up, but these deserve special mention:

4504-crossing_the_spree has two new tanks for each side, a flamethrower for the Russians, and some other new units.

4212-tebourba_breakthrough - changed a lot of the cars to tanks.

4508-yamashita_treasure - changed the cars to floating tanks and boats, added small ships (destroyer type, landing craft and subs), changed the tanks and support vehicles to much stronger units.

Should be loads of fun.

This morning I changed the 'server bandwidth limit' setting for TPU from 'no limit' to 2048 Kbps. This setting is just under the actual upload bandwidth limit for the Internet service I'm using. Please let me know if you notice anything different - good or bad.

According to Sisko, the regular BF1942 Battle of Britain is still causing the server to crash repeatedly. I've played that map myself on TPU recently, so I know it's not happening all the time. I had previously assumed that the problems were caused by the B17s, which led me to remove them from that map, but clearly there's more going on there. Any additional observations?

Is anyone else having problems with the regular BF1942 Guadalcanal map on TPU? Whenever I try to join TPU when that map is running, my game client crashes. The server keeps running fine, though.

This Techdirt article summarizes the much more reasonable approach to 'piracy' being taken by some of the more enlightened game developers:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/2011...hing.shtml

A notable quote: "If the game gets pirated heavily, if it's a good game that people really like, they're going to either buy it eventually or they're going to tell other people about it. Either way it's just going to come back to a sale."

Exactly!

Reports from players and my own observations show that some of the DCFinal maps are a bit flaky. In particular, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima are causing client crashes. I have removed both of those maps from the DCFinal rotation. If anyone notices any other problems, please let me know.

TPU is currently down so that I can image the hard drive. Having a current image is crucial for disaster recovery situations. In other words, it makes recovering from hardware failures a lot easier (and faster). Sorry for any inconvenience. It should be back up by about 11:30am PST.

UPDATE 2011Jul30 11:54am PST: TPU is back up and running.

*GP* not-a-bot pointed out that DC games weren't showing up on the TPU stats site. I tweaked the stats processing code to add the missing mods, so stats for all DC games played to date should show up on the TPU stats site overnight. Thanks for letting me know, not-a-bot!

UPDATE: Confirmed - all DC games from July 26 now appear in the stats.

Some players are having trouble connecting to TPU when it's running DCFinal maps. There are a bunch of different DC maps and mods out there and it's bit confusing, but as far as I know, it works like this:

DesertCombat is a full modification for BF1942. Its last version was 0.7N. That's the version I'm running on the TPU server and on my client computer. Here are the DC files on Filefront.

DCFinal (aka dcfinal/DC_Final) is apparently a mini-mod for DesertCombat; it requires DesertCombat to work properly. DCFinal's last version was apparently version 3, although that version appears in the BF1942 client as version 0.8, and also as 0.8 in the server browser. I'm running that version on the TPU server as well as on my client computer. Here are the DCFinal files on Filefront.

I've made all the required files available from the Files and links page on this web site, which you can find in the left column.

Note that you will also need the DC versions of the Secret Weapons and Road to Rome maps to play those maps on TPU. They are also available on the Files and links page.

If anyone has any different information about the Desert Combat mods and their most recent versions, please let me know and I'll update things accordingly.