Gaming News

Evil Twin have stopped playing CounterStrike, and are now concentrating on Team Fortress 2. Their CS:Source server will disappear very soon as a result. This is really disappointing news for DFC as we used the ET server for our regular Friday night games. The 3 vs 3 knockout tournament will also clearly be cancelled.

I've put links to their new TF2 server, and also a link to DFC's TF2 HLStatsX page on our Friday Gaming page. Any suggestions for a new regular CS:Source server are welcome. KM's server is still on the go, and with a decent player count, so that's a possibility.

Evil Twin have reset their HLStatsX scores for CounterStrike. The new DFC clan scores can be found on the Evil Twin HLStatsX site.

Evil Twin now have a TF2 server that we're free to use: 85.234.155.54:27022. Thanks to Simon (aka ExtremeOne) at ET for the info, and for allowing us to use their servers in general - much appreciated by all at DFC.

Talking of TF2, I spotted in the release notes for yesterday's TF2 update:

Added the ability for servers to have map-specific .cfg files in the cfg folder

If this is engineered into CS:Source, it means we could set map-specific gravity, weapon restrictions etc without mincing around after map-load.

Evil Twin have a new CS:Source server on 85.234.155.54:27017 - add this to your favourites.

Evil Twin are currently without public CS:Source server. This also means the 3 vs 3 competition is on hold whilst they secure another server.

The good news is that their HLStatsX site and database seem to be intact. Indeed they look to have fixed the issue where [DF]Lynx appeared to be on top of the DFC clan rankings :p

Our friends at Evil Twin are organising a knockout CS:Source competition. The games will be 3 vs 3 (squad size is at least 4 players) and the map will be cs_office. DFC have entered a squad - Pup, Lynx, AngryDaz and Mesmer. If anyone else wants to play, then let me know.

Details of the event are being kept updated on the Evil Twin Forums, and I'll post info relevant to DFC in >our own forums.

Battlefield 2142 has been patched to version 1.40. The patch contains a new map, and an autosave for kit combinations.

It's pretty large at nearly 380MB. There is a download link on our BF2142 page.

Another great LAN came to an end on Sunday. There was surprisingly little mincing, however the general concencus was that there was too much CS and not enough variety of games. This can be sorted for next time, but we need everyone there to actively play the multiplayer games on the go at the time. There were plenty of occasions where we had enough for a great game of BF or TF2 but there were splinter groups doing other things.

There has been some good >discussion about the LAN over on the Forums.

Looking ahead, Easter 2008 is pretty early in the year (mid-March) so not too long til the next one :)

The LAN is now well underway, and with far less mincing than previous LANs :)

The games played so far include:

• Counter-Strike (of course)
• CS GunGame - level-up mod for CS
• Team Fortress 2 (low numbers - will try again later)
• Halo 3 on X360

On the food front, it was a curry on setup night. There is currently a cheeky set of pies in the oven for Friday tea, courtesy of Dan and his trip to Lime Tree Pantry :)

Further updates to follow...

There's been some good debating on what new games we should try at the LAN in a couple of weeks time. Apart from the usual suspects, the two suggestions for new games areTeam Fortress 2 and Enemy Territory:Quake Wars. Most people have agreed to buy TF2, but ET:QW is yet to be decided. Both games are also available on Steam.

For all the other games (with the exception of BF2142) we'll be using the current latest version of the game. The latest version numbers, and links to the downloads, are available on our Games page. For BF2142, we'll stick to the version from the last LAN.

Age of Empires III has been updated to version 1.12. The update contains minor bug fixes, changes to some multiplayer scenarios, and some tweaks to the unit balancing.

Download link available on our AoE III page.

Following the refactor, I felt the site needed a bit more functionality. I remember back in the QW days that there were no tools for parsing the QuakeWorld console logs in a way that could be integrated into a clan website. Now we have one :)

Most of the Match Report pages have a link to view the console log. For an example, see the log of DFC vs NUT. The log rows are colour-coded so you can see the change of fortunes in the match. Things going our way are green, and enemy success is red.

There is also a summary for each player in the match, totaling their contributions, or otherwise :)

DF-Lynx has picked the weekend of the 26th - 28th October for the next round of gaming festivities. This has been chosen to coincide with the end of BST...

In an attempt to get the most possible playing hours into the weekend I'm think that the clock change weekend would be a good one, giving us the extra hour as the clocks go back!

More news to follow as the event draws near, and watch for forums for the usual games discussions.

Congratulations to Gobbers who got hitched at the weekend. The event took place in Ellmau, Austria, where he moved recently to set up a mountain bike business.

Best wishes from all at DFC to Keith and Manu :)

This site has had a major refactor. Gone are the old Classic ASP-style inline SQL scripts, in favour of the n-tier approach.

If ne1 clan members spot any odd behaviour, please let me know. I should now be able to fix any issues in an agile manner :)

This Friday saw a return to CS from the lads. Daz, Bob, Pup and Mes turned up on the ET server, and a good evening was had by all.

Following a brief outage due to hardware rationalisation at FreddysHouse, our TeamSpeak 2 server is back up and running.

Details of the server can be found on the TeamSpeak page.

This was announced a couple of weeks back. Virgin are to employ traffic shaping to temporarily limit the connection speed of "heavy downloaders". It defines "heavy" as 350MB between 4pm and midnight for the M package customers, and 750MB for L. That equates to a normal and HD TV show respectively. Pretty poor.

Read more about it on the PC Pro site.

Another great LAN came to an end last weekend - thanks go to Bob for hosting once again :)

A good range of games were played, and with the arival of Wii and PS3 since the last LAN, console games proved very popular. Here's the list of stuff that was played:

• Battlefield 2142 - this was a newcomer to BobLAN, and once it was all installed and setup, was a great hit. It managed to provide a tense finish to one particular game, which finished 0-2
• Battlefield 1942 - this was played on the Thursday evening when t'internet was down preventing Steam auth, and Pup wasn't around with any other servers. It was still a fun game though depite its age and relative slowness compared to Desert Combat, Battlefield 2 etc.
• CounterStrike - the perennial favourite, and with improved VIP support and Deathmatch mod, was played a lot.
• Call of Duty 2 - great game and not played as much as it should have been. We've setup a proper dedicated server for next time, so hopefully it'll get more play time.
• Company of Heroes - the game should have lasted hours. It actually lasted around 20 minutes. One team was still mincing around with foot soldiers when quatoria's lot sent in tanks and rocket launchers. RTS games really do need a fairly even level of experience across all players.
• QuakeWorld - a quick Team Deathmatch game was all that was played this time. No CTF unfortunately. It might be our age, but it looks to be getting faster every year :/
• Airfix Dogfighter - this game stopped working when we upgraded beyond Pentium II a few years ago. However, when Bob tried it the other week, it worked again. It might have been a DirectX update or graphics driver fix - who knows. The network code proved a bit flakey as some people couldn't join. Fun game tho.

On the console gaming front, Wii Sports Tennis and Bowling on the projector was great fun. We also had two Guitar Hero II sets, and were able to play both together.

A few photos were taken, which I'll be putting up in the gallery soon.

Update: photos uploaded to the Gallery.

Bob has confirmed that the usual Easter LAN is on. It will start on the evening of Thursday 5th April and go on til the Sunday afternoon. Let's hope the WoW veto is still in place :)