Somebody's Been BAD RARGHHH!!!!!

Thanks go to Stinky for the find.

Red Orchestra 2 mod tech demo

Tripwire's Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad won't be released until Q2 2011 at the earliest, but they've already released mod tools to a select few.  The  video below is from Pop Smoke's "In-Country: Viet Nam" mod, showing off their dynamic foliage and some weapon models.  It's pretty impressive stuff, particularly since (almost) nobody knew that the Unreal 3 Engine was capable of this sort of thing.

I'll have much more to say about HOS at a later date, but for now, you really have to watch this:

CoD: BO ... patch-in-progress

From Treyarch's Black Ops forums:

Hey PC gamers:

We are listening to you and we’ve been busy working on updates based on feedback from the community. We have already deployed a number of updates, and there will be many more to come. Stay tuned right here for all the latest info.

IN PROGRESS

• Added an option to create shaders during load time. This fixes hitching when viewing a new area of the map for the first time on some video cards.

• Incomplete server browser results.

• Improvements to Quickmatch results (with better ping and reduced lag).

• /connect

• /reconnect

• Improved threading performance on computers with only 2 cores.

• Fixed random freezes in certain computer configurations.

• Increased reserved slots to 9.

• Improvements to the spawn system to resolve an issue where negative spawn influencers from specific game events were not always being deleted after the danger had cleared – in some matches, this was causing good spawns to be erroneously flagged by the game as bad spawns, which in turn forced actual bad spawns to get selected later in the match

• Weekly and Monthly leaderboards will now track all kills, deaths and assists properly (All Time leaderboards were not affected by this)

• Prevention of killstreak selection getting disabled in Combat Training under rare conditions

• Array: Added collision to prevent players from partially clipping into a tree

• Launch: Added collision to prevent players from strafe jumping onto an invisible ledge at the base of the rocket near B3

• Summit: Added collision to prevent players from jumping to a location outside of the map boundary when in Custom Games where player speed is maxed out

• Havana: Added collision to prevent players from jumping onto an invisible ledge above a doorway at C2

• Nuketown: Adjusted a spawn point that would spawn players on top of a mannequin’s head when that mannequin was randomly spawned in that location

• Launch: User could access a small platform outside of the intended play space below the rocket gantry by jumping to a very specific location; now blocked from access

• Launch: User could access a small area inside geometry at vents near Dom flag A by going prone and moving around in a very specific location; now blocked from access

• Some users reported that weapon attachment challenges were not resetting after prestige; now all are guaranteed to clear as soon as selecting the prestige option

• Radar sweep when there are only 2 players left in One in the Chamber will stop functioning if the 2 players have multiple lives when the sweep starts

• Villa: User can clip into rock at west edge of grid zone B2 and see through to the other side

• Crisis: User can clip into LVT between grid zone A3 and B3 and see through to the other side

• User can get an infinite number of 'Sam Turret', 'Care Package' and 'Sentry Gun' killstreaks (commonly referred to as the “care package glitch”)

(Emphasis supplied.)  With all the changes to the maps, expect this to be a huge download.

CoD: BO - single player easter egg

Super-weapons are just super:

Not exactly game related

But since I haven't had a chance to say hey to everyone in a while I thought I'd post a status and a "hey look at me" note.

My surgery seems to have gone well. I'm in a little less pain now, but it's a different pain, so that's good because it means it should fade. I spend 23 hours a day in bed and walk the other hour. I did get out yesterday and ride in our local parade, but instead of driving myself I had one of my employees drive my truck and I rode in the passenger seat and tossed candy - The whole driving experience is still not fun.

So, while lying in bed bored, between rounds of Minecraft (the only game I have on my work laptop, which runs Linux by the way,) and connecting to the work VPN to keep up with projects, I taught myself Java and learned to develop Android applications. I now have two in the Android Marketplace; a free mileage log and a low cost utility to download ebooks from a Calibre server.

I'm now working on a combination bedside clock and all-day ring controller that will stop your phone from ringing under certain conditions (like blocked caller-id) or override a silent SMS ringer if the sender puts in an exclamation mark or is on a specific list or something. Still in the early stages. Any Android users in IT()E who know how to use ADB and might want to beta test? I've still got another couple week of bed rest, so no doubt I'll have a test version by the end of the week.

Theater mode is good

False hackusations are rampant, but there's no doubt here:

Post your BLOPS emblem

CoD: Lag Ops

The newest Call of Duty is fun when it's working well.  Damage and recoil are about right with most of the weapons, the maps are surprisingly good, rank progression moves at a breezy pace, and I have yet to find a server overrun with noob-tubers.

That's the good news.  The bad news is that there are network problems that are leading to massive lag spikes, especially when two players get close to each other. Thanks to some quick maintenance, the spikes now only happen intermittently, and you can go for a couple of hours without seeing one.  These are temporary, jury-rigged fixes thus far, however, and they had to break the server browser in the process.

From the gameservers.com forums:

Due to huge volume of traffic that is occurring on the back-end systems, a temporary fix was put into place to randomly limit the amount of servers that are listed on the browser. This is a temporary fix and we will provide an update once it has been fixed.

A poster on Steam's Black Ops forum had this to say:

It seems that the issues plaguing PC Multiplayer are two fold.-

First of all, poor CPU management is causing bottlenecks, especially with what seems to be thread context switching. This causes the system to hang intermentently as data is switched between the cores of your CPU.

Next is poor management of the netcode. The netcode must be shared with the game engine in such a way that when the CPU hangs, no data is being transmitted to or received from the server, causing packets to timeout in both directions and LOADS of redundant data being transferred between all players.

So fixing the lag on your computer should help to alleviate the load for everybody else on the server and give all around better game play.

Then, there's this, from Bash and Slash:

Issue is with the sv_maxrate, currently on all servers it is set to 5000 (because of consoles I would assume) it should be set to around 25000 for PC.

Therefore most pc users are finding a poor online expierience.

I have been on with gameservers all day and their tech team.

We tested the different rate on our server as a fix (via the tech team) and guess what, absolutely perfect.

Our server has actually just been changed back, of course they can't edit the servers, They have submitted a request to whitelist the command sv_maxrate for all users to activision to be able to edit to what they desire. (They didn't want to set all servers to it by default because they believe people will have bandwidth issues).

To help yourself and your fellow players, open your MP config file, which is located here:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\call of duty black ops\players\config_mp.cfg

And edit the following settings to the values provided:

seta cl_maxpackets "100"

seta snaps "30"

seta rate "25000"

r_glow_allowed "0"

That should help a bit.

Black Ops preload

If you've pre-ordered Call of Duty: Black Ops from Steam, you can download the game files right now (8,038.3 MB). Do it soon, because the servers are going to get slammed over the next six days.

The game unlocks at 11:00 AM on November 9.

EA: yeah, MoH kinda sucks

From Eurogamer:

EA's admitted Danger Close and DICE's recently released Medal of Honor reboot "didn't meet our quality expectations".

However, the gargantuan game maker denied the Afghanistan shooter was a failure, and promised gamers next time it'll make "something they appreciate more".

"I'm not going to comment on the sales because EA has an earnings report going out and we will unveil sales in that meeting," Patrick Soderlund, the executive in charge of EA's driving and shooting games, told Eurogamer.

"What I can say is the game didn't meet our quality expectations. In order to be successful in that space, we're going to have to have a game that is really, really strong.

And yet, they have the balls to charge for the DLC.