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TPU (Tanks n Planes Unlimited)

Battlegroup 1942 changes

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.

Server no longer restarts when the second player joins

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.

Gazala is back

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.

TPU schedule changes

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.

How to get a bot to leave a vehicle

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!

TPU is back up!

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.

TPU is down

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).

Bandwidth issues

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.

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