Thank you to those who help and make things better. No thank you to those who don't help, complain, and bring down the mood.I'm thinking about this:
https://miasma.rocks/index.php?topic=1355.msg22285#msg22285 and how some people help and others complain without attempting to make things better.
I am
really grateful for (in no particular order, and definitely not an exhaustive list. Some people are in more than one of these):
* Those who help with the hardware and running costs. Every bit helps. You know who you are. Thank you.
* Absolute_Madness/Justice and Wife who have the skills to improve maps that I simply don't have. For for helping out with licences for things we needed. For helping with a redirect server until we had one close to the game server...etc... Thank you.
* For the admin team helping with keeping things running so well, and for being a great team. Thank you.
* For Nardaq_NL for funding a test on better hardware which helped us make the jump from Virtual server to Physical server, and for helping with hardware selection. Thank you.
* For Holyspam for the in-depth low-level coding work he's done in unrealscript, and for helping trace issues and tweak every bit of performance from the hardware. Thank you.
* For Kops - artwork and web-stuff (he put together
https://freon.miasma.rocks/ ). Thank you.
* For people like TheCowboy and Shambler who've helped with code where it's beyond me. Thank you.
* For those who keep any eye out for cheats and report them with evidence we can assess. Thank you.
* For those who I didn't get to in this list as it's after 11pm and I'm starting to lose track of all the people who need thanking but for those who "did" and I didn't mention: Thank you.
It's very easy to moan about things. It's a real shame how quick people are to do that...but then never do anything to help or make it better.
Take the Freon code for example. There were massive complaints that netcode wasn't enabled - so not only was it enabled, but the logic was considerably enhanced to make it even better. People still complain. It could go off again. The people who worked on it have low enough ping not to need it.
People complained that the Freon balancer didn't keep the teams in line. My code now keeps track of average PPR but also "how you're doing in this game" and keeps the teams in line as close as mathmatically possible each time a high ppr player joins or leaves. People now moan about being swapped. They complain that not every game has to end 10:9. They don't. We had a well balanced game last night that ended 10:1 - with these teams it could have gone either way:
I did have the beginnings of code that tracked each player's PPR at each player count for even more granular balancing. I've stopped working on it as the stream of compaints made it not worth spending any more of my free time on it right now.
There's always something that could be done to help. If you can play you can help. Volunteer to beta test, to code fixes or new stuff, to model, to map, to find maps, to grab screenshots for the server monitor....
Most recently TheCoolest has had a look at some C++ to see how if he can work out what changes would be needed to make it work in the latest Visual Studio. If you are a whizz at large scale C++, and want to help please let me know.
Anyway. Please. Less moaning and more actual helping when it comes to map improvement would be much appreciated.
