Yeah that’s me runnin’ around, yelling ‘Yay, I posted news, I posted news!!’… aherm 8-)

Alright, let’s see what I got for ya today… the long-awaited 1.03 patch for Halo: Combat Evolved was release just a couple days ago. This patch fixes a few bugs, adds TK-handling, allows for longer server names, supposedly better network code… that’s about it. The new sv_tk cvars do not work in the init.txt file however, and ban lists are now all screwed up, it’s a major pain in the ASS to get haloded.exe to write to them. Any ban list ya had before is basically null and void.

I have *never* seen a dedicated game port developed this way, with components of said dedicated server being strewn all about the operating system. I am betting we can blame Microsoft for that one… and I’m not sure who to point the finger at for the lack of instructions on what do to with the new cvars and how to use them (and the readme I did find was incomplete as well as incorrect… and this was an official document). I just don’t understand why Gearbox/Microsoft are making it so difficult. And don’t even get me started on the complete lack of features still missing… like ‘standard fare for an FPS kinda things’ missing :-/

Almost makes me wanna drop Halo altogether, the lack of support and quality of support is disturbing. Was expecting a lot of good things to come about in this latest patch and it fell short in a big way. No worries tho gang, I’ll keep the server up in the hopes that HL2/CS2 makes a debut here for 2004. Halo will stay up too for the time being. Just needed to vent… I hate running products that are not quite up to par.

Oh hey check this out… heh ;-) I started my own IRC server! Yeah! You can now use your favorite IRC client and connect to irc.hardfought.org (default port) and join #hardfought. I am using the latest version of BewareIRCd as the backend (it closely emulates the IRCd gamesnet.net uses) and a windows-compiled version of srvx, which is the services package gamesnet uses as well (chanserv, nickserv, etc). So if ya want, hop on in and check it out. It’s nothing major mind you… just wanted to see if I could do it. I am going to keep it up however, as CPU/network/memory usage is almost nil.

To wrap up… boy am I tired :-P Just finsihed a very long week, been loading up all of our gear and humvee’s to ship off to Iraq. It should all get there a few days before we do… hopefully. I’ll have some more details about where we’re going and maybe even a mailing address in a future news post soon.

Ok… laundry time ;-) Take care gang, see ya soon.

K2