Well… it seems over the years I have developed an addiction to having to have a game server in some form or fashion, hah ;-) I told Hardfought clan that if they kicked ass this season and made the playoffs, I’d bring back the public server. So it’s back, and it’ll go live sometime tonight or early tomorrow morning. This one isn’t my personnal hardware on what was supposed to be a superior network (looks at colo4dallas, ugh). We’re back with ServerMatrix (http://www.servermatrix.com) as our game sserver host/provider. This is the company that we started out with initially when CS: Source was still beta. It’s also part of the same company (theplanet.com) as Insomnia365 is, so it’s the same network, and so forth. Hindsight being 20/20, I shoulda just kept the server where it was originally with ServerMatrix when we first started, and just left it alone. Oh well ;-) Alright, so on with the details:

The IP address is 74.52.0.26:27015 or you can use css.hardfought.org to connect. From here on out, if for whatever reason the IP address ever changes, it’ll be bound to css.hardfought.org, so that’s all ya got to remember.

The server hardware is a single P4 – 2.8GHz system w/ 1GB of PC3200 DDR-SDRAM, with a 80GB hard drive. I’m thinking of upgrading the memory up to 2GB, should be a one-time fee to do that. Either way, we’re good.

Player stats will be handled by Psychostats again. This is the last thing I gotta setup, should have ’em ready to go by tomorrow.

I’ve installed a newer version of the Mani Admin plugin that allows for a few more cool things I think you’ll all enjoy, those being: a 45 sec warmup mode at the beginning of each new map – knifes and unlimited HE grenades only, open season on everybody, and you’ll respawn instantly within the warmup time block (you wont be punished for TK’ing during this warmup mode). This will give every player a chance to connect so they dont miss the pistol round, plus it’s a quick short breather between maps to go nuts if you want to. Alltalk will be enabled for dead players/spectators only, so all of ya can chat while waiting for the round to finish. If you wanna discuss team strats, just use private chat. I’m also working on a keyword you can type in ‘say’ mode that will tie in with psychostats so you can check your stats in-game. There’s a couple more things but these are the highlights.

Maxplayers will be set to twenty. Server tickrate will be set to 100 – yes, you read that correctly. I’ll post optimal client-side settings so you can take full advantage of playing on a 100 tick server (and these settings are already in the MOTD).

PTBx (player team balancer) will be included. I’ve tweaked the config a bit so hopefully it should be a bit more fair, and generate less spam to boot.

VIP Mod – yeah, you read that correctly too ;-) One of the cool things about the VIP Mod, is that it only activates when a map coded for the mod (read: an as_ map) is loaded. Otherwise it’s normal play as usual. So for right now, I have about 8-9 normal maps in rotation, and just one VIP Mod map, as_oilrig, in the line-up as well. There are two versions of oilrig right now… one that’s a straight copy of the original, and another one that’s done up real professional-like. You can guess which one we’re goin’ with. You’ll be able to get the map and all of the associated material/sound/model files that go with it via fast download in-game. However, I will make it available for download via our ‘Files’ section on the website as well. It takes about 3½ minutes to pull everything down in-game (the map isn’t exactly small) so be prepared for that. Luckily it’s a one-time deal. If as_oilrig goes over well with everybody, we’ll see about adding a couple other decent as_ maps to the mix.

I’m kinda excited about this launch. I’m hoping it’ll kick-off fairly well. I’ve added some things that you all have wanted to see before for some time now, so hopefully I can draw ya’ll back from wherever it is you’ve all been playing at, and we can all play together again as a community. This is also to support our team, who I might add have been kickin’ some serious ass this season in CAL-O. They made the playoff’s, and depending on how they do, may be selected to play CAL-M for next season.

Alright so… spread the word, and keep an eye out for the server to go live real soon. I did a lil trick with the hostname so it’ll show up near the very top of the in-game browser list now, heh ;-) See ya online folks.