I finished inserting all the old news into the news database. As an added bonus, I dug up some very old news we called the “Playlist”. Loogie and I used it to wax poetic on our current gaming trends. It was a short-lived excursion that lasted from March to May 2000. Its role was later replaced by the main news page. It’s an interesting read from when we first became addicted to TFC and thus online gaming.
Speaking of online gaming (well, sorta), I was playing around on my CS server alone last night and figured out something about the bot customizations. Before Vicky left for NC, we were toying with the idea of TMP vs MAC10, but the bots can only be set to allow or disallow certain types of guns. So while I could restrict human players to only use either a MAC10 or TMP via Mani, the bots could still use UMP45s and P90s. So, the humans got pwned pretty well. Well, I was thinking about it last night and decided that maybe the bot profile had to be loaded at map start, so I changed the bot_profile_db cvar in the server.cfg to a special DB that had the bots prefer MAC10s or TMPs. That didn’t work. As a last ditch effort, I tried replacing the standard botprofile.db file with the special one, which if it worked, would mean that the bot_profile_db cvar is totally useless. And wouldn’t you know, it worked. On the second round, all the T’s would buy MAC10s and the CT’s TMPs. And occasionally, they would pick up the opposite gun as per the random weapon preference order I defined in the DB.
After playing three maps with this setup, it was clear that the TMP is way better than the MAC. It doesn’t go inaccurate as quickly with sustained firing, plus it fires a lot faster and is silenced. The MAC has a damage increase over the TMP, but it’s pathetic trying to use it at range. The higher price of the TMP is very justified. Here’s a funny ragdoll screenshot I got while playing today.
Rough day at the office?
I also remembered that I could get parts of the site that were lost with Google’s cache. It took a while, since Google’s “site:” command doesn’t like the dashes in my domain. Eventually, combing through Google and Yahoo yielded a decent bit of recovery. I believe I have nearly all of Marcus’ journals, and at least most of Rachael’s and mine. The Demoboard, though, is still mostly lost since my last backup from 2002. The newest reviews I could recover were Act of War and Myst. Apparently, they don’t cache everything. Still, it’ll be months before I get to repairing the Journal and Demoboard DBMan databases, if at all. Blarg.
