New Poll, OS BIG Editor Updates and Tiberian Dawn blog.

Banshee · Last edited by Banshee on Tue Dec 30, 2008 7:23 pm; edited 1 time in total

It's almost the end of the year and I still have to finish the end of the year surprise, otherwise I'll have to postpone it and replace it with another surprised that I've done today. 2009 will be the year of the surprises, I hope. So, to get everything done, I'll be short and quick, because tomorrow I'll barely be able to work on it, since I also have real life, friends and specially a girlfriend.

1. New Poll: Best Mod of 2008, vote now!

After a massive vote for a big RA3 expansion pack, it's time to move with a new poll. There were six projects releasing their work during the year. However, two of them were very early beta thing and they took their work offline, leaving four:

-> The Dawn of the Tiberium Age 1.09 (26/12/2008)
-> Tiberium Essence 1.2 (18/12/2008)
-> Tiberian Sun Dusk 0.9 with a new mod launcher (15/11/2008)
-> Star Strike 0.6x Transitional Beta Build 2 (06/04/2008)

Anyway, I sincerily apologise both Judeau and Eva for forgetting to post a news about the releases of the latest versions of their mods during the year. It was a tough year for me. You can check the poll here, with some information about each mod.

This same Tiberian Sun Dusk 0.9 won last year. In 2006, the winner was Return of the Dawn 2.6. In 2004, we had a huge set of polls that made Tiberian Sun: Total Wars victorious over Return of the Dawn. Funnily enough, Tiberian Sun mods won on every edition. This time we have a strong competition from other games as well. Also, this is the first time that Return of the Dawn isn't competing (it was second in 2 editions and first in 2006), which is the mod with the best performance so far in these end of the year polls. The final results will be posted on February 1st, 2009.

2. OS BIG Editor Updates:

The latest program that I've been touching in these days is the OS BIG Editor. I still have some work to do before releasing the 0.6 Beta, but the tool is already quite stable for those who do not mod games from Petroglyph. If you wanna grab the latest versions, use the SVN. If you don't have a clue and can't figure out how to do that, here's an alternative trick:

-> Grab compiled revision 69 of the program on Petrolution. Then, replace the executable file with this one. Also, replace the english.ini with this one. You can also choose other languages by downloading them from here. So far we have russian, chinese (standard mandarin), french and portuguese from Brazil.

The changes of this version compared to the 0.5 one are amazing. Files are organized in directories, you have many ways to extract them, from right click to drag and drop and some menu options as well. You can also save .BIG files with and without refpack compression. You can preview more filetypes and you can also preview binary files in a proper way. It's pratically another program.

Compared to the latest revisions, the program is working faster, saving faster and most of the lag is gone or heavly reduced. There is a couple of features, like a proper Real Time Edition and the ability to save .BIG files without needing to give it a name.

It also load .MEG files from Empire at War and Universe at War. It saves them in a way FinalBIG understands, but the games are not accepting them yet. I'll probably fix this problem in the next year.

There are still a couple of features that I need to add to the program before releasing a stable version. The main thing is the Preferences part that needs to be revamped and receive a lot of options. Another feature is the ability to use other command line tools to open, convert, preview and save certain type of files. OS BIG Editor 0.6 should not have any sound, animation or movie support yet, which should be coded in future versions.

3. Tiberian Dawn Blog

The rest of the community is quite silent, with few exceptions. One of them is the team from Tiberian Dawn, a TC that should bring the Tiberian Dawn universe to C&C3: Tiberium Wars. Due to problems with their main site, you can only check their new blog at the CnC Source forums. You'll see a lot of renders and work in progress models there from both GDI and Nod factions. These models should be better than the ones that came with Renegade.

4. We Are Moving To A New Server

PPM, Revora, CNCNZ, SlipStream Productions, Freedom Studios and every site hosted on Fawkes server are moving to the new Nagini server in the next days. It has a better connection, but less memory than Fawkes. On every other aspect, it is the same thing.

And that's all for now. I have to work hard at this end of year surprise, or everything will look like a nasty april's fool joke that will disappoint our friend Joshy.

Nyerguds

Banshee wrote:

These models should be better than the ones that came with Renegade.

Heh... they ARE. Loads better Very Happy

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Tore · Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 7:51 pm Post subject:

Renegade doesn't even deserve to be based on C&C95!

Tiberian Dawn for C&C3 does Very Happy

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Destiny · President **Joined**: 02 May 2006 **Location**: Singapore

Less memory, huh...I wonder if the consequences might be minor.

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Please, read the signature rules of the forum.

DoMiNaNt_HuNtEr · Posted: Thu Jan 01, 2009 1:26 am Post subject:

Ah shitfuck, the site still wont load. I, REALLY, like Tiberian Dawn.

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Destroy to create. All for the hunt to dominate!

IN-GAME NAME: MAKINTOKE

Mighty BOB! · AA Infantry **Joined**: 05 Oct 2005 **Location**: USA

Sorry about that, we had a problem with the DNS transfer. Like all the hosted sites on the Fawkes box we too recently moved boxes at CnC Source and the Tiberian Dawn domain didn't have its DNS changed. It is currently changing so it may not display for some people still for the next 12-24 hours.
It only changed over for me just a few minutes ago.

I don't like the idea of having so many hosted sites moving to a server with less memory than Fawkes. There are a lots of big sites all on the same server.

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WOL nick: migtybob

Banshee · Posted: Fri Jan 02, 2009 10:21 pm Post subject:

Mighty BOB! wrote:

Sorry about that, we had a problem with the DNS transfer. Like all the hosted sites on the Fawkes box we too recently moved boxes at CnC Source and the Tiberian Dawn domain didn't have its DNS changed. It is currently changing so it may not display for some people still for the next 12-24 hours.
It only changed over for me just a few minutes ago.

CnC Source moved from Meaaov's server to the Derelict Studios server that was established ages ago. So, a DNS change was really required. At some point, all accounts from Fawkes will be moved to Nagini and there is a high chance that the root account with the name server moves with them, which would avoid a major operation of transfering the DNS from 60+ domains.

Mighty BOB! wrote:

I don't like the idea of having so many hosted sites moving to a server with less memory than Fawkes. There are a lots of big sites all on the same server.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the RAM, but let's give it a chance. There is a big plan behind it and the conditions are currently better than they were a year ago.

Icetex and Fawkes suffered for years due to the horrible code of the PPM website and due to the heavy Revora forums. This year I was forced, around the birthday of the site, to fix the MySQL requests of the site which were really messed up (phpBB fetch all wasn't made for huge forums at all). I managed to tone down PPM's server usage a lot. Revora also had an optimization that reduced a lot the server usage as well. Since then, the server has been litteraly flying, it wasn't rebooted once and gave us no problem at all. The 3rd place on the server usage is CNCNZ, but that has never given any headaches at all. PPM (site) and Revora (forums) were always the big nightmares of any server that served Revora.

Mastermind is also changing the way the server deal with static files by using Apache with Lighttpd, which is also giving a good performance boost.

So, we should be running fine with 2gb of RAM. The current server is using 1.2gb of RAM most of time. If it isn't enough, we'll get another third gb back. The whole idea is to get the server financialy independent from our pockets, specially from MM's pocket, who has already paid loads of dollars on it.