With great excitement and joy, I would like to finally announce that Patch 180 is LIVE!
It has been a very long time coming. Development on this patch started in early 2007 and has faced innumerable set-backs. Those of you who have been around here since then know how it all went down, but suffice it to say, we're past all of that.
I wanted to principally thank joeyz the founder of this server and this community for all of his hard work and financial funding of this community. Without him we all truly would not be here where we are today.
I also wanted to thank Vaptor, T-Virus, Mobster, and Bananaface. These guys put forth a lot of effort in creating this patch and testing it to make sure it was as bug free as possible. I wanted to give a huge shout out to Bananface in particular for undertaking the daunting task of balancing this patch. Anyone can create content, but to balance it and make it fun and work cohesively together is what turns content into a playable and enjoyable game. Patch 180 was simply that, a bunch of content that was rapidly developed but not properly tested or balanced. Bananaface and everyone else who tested on our Development server had to spend hundreds of hours testing the game for functionality, stability, balance, and fun.
It is the efforts of these people that have allowed us to achieve this hard fought for moment. So thank you to all of you for all that you have contributed to make this possible.
Now at this point we have a new set of challenges we face in order to continue development on further patches. As many of you know, joeyz has not been seen in almost a year due to real-life events in his life that are out of his control and are a far greater priority than this community. I was talking with joey during the beginning stages of all of this and was able to have him agree to give me equal control over the server. This allowed us to continue work on Patch 180 in his absence.
However where we stand is I personally only have the source code for a not-refined version of Patch 180. Joey has the most up-to-date code which I need to acquire so that I can release Patch 181. As it stands, I am able to add additional packages to the server (like Commander, Weapons, Monsters, Vehicles, Mutators..etc), however I am not able to modify existing content, create new RPG abilities and artifacts, or new powerups.
This is why you may notice that some artifacts and other things are missing. We had to disable things that were causing weapon loss and crashes since we didn't have the source code to fix them. During the coming weeks I will be enabling some of the disabled content until we figure out exactly what was causing the issues. So if you are noticing any of your favorite features missing do not fret. We will be enabling as much of it as possible. The server is stable now with minimal crashing and no reports of weapon loss, we want to maintain this stability at all cost. So, when we find out what the culprit of the crashes and weapon loss are those things will stay disabled until we get the source code from joey so that we can try to fix them.
So in the mean time, in order to proceed with development I have to create a spiderweb of additions and jerry-rig things to work. When/If I get the up-to-date source code from joeyz this will make the integration of these new pieces a challenge, but not impossible.
So where we stand is development on Patch 181 will not realistically be possible, however new content will be added in the mean time that will eventually be rolled into Patch 181.
I also wanted to mention that even though we can still develop and add new things to the server, development will be slower during the college spring and fall semesters while I attend school full time and work almost 40 hours a week. I have however made arrangements for Mobster to be able to add new maps and restart the server among other things when I am not available. And even though joey does not have the ability to be here with us he is still paying the monthly internet bill.
We have come a long way to get to this point. From the years of neglect, to the server becoming unreliable and finally dying, to buying a new one, to your gracious donations that helped make that possible, and all of the efforts of everyone mentioned (and not mentioned), we finally did it.
So thank you all again for all of your efforts, without you releasing this Patch today wouldn't have been possible.











