PCGZine Interview with Eric Biessman

The current issue of PCGZine has an exclusive interview with Eric Bliessman, Wolfenstein Creative Director.

The ETA for the game is "Summer" which is good news - having said that though the game has been in development for quite a while now.

There is still a lack of detail about the multiplayer but there is a new trailer that gives a good atmospheric introduction for the game.

Treasure in the game will be used to purchase weapons / powers / upgrades which is something new for Wolfenstein.

Enemy Territory maps in 60 seconds

I started putting videos on you tube of Enemy Territory maps in 60 seconds.

The maps show the main objectives of the maps and I think it will make a nice refence to get a quick and dirty idea of what kind of obectives a map has and how it will play.

So far I have done 110 Factory, 1944 Cherbourg2, 1944 Beach, 1944 Huertgen and 1944 Overlord.

Check out all of the videos on YouTube.

How to install Omnibot on Jaymod

I am not sure when Onminbot 0.7 will work on Jaymod so I decided to give installing Omnibot 0.66 a go on my Jaymod 2.18 test server.

The first hurdle (for me) is that glibc is not installed in Ubuntu JeOS and initially I thought that I needed to install it from source - fortunatley I found that I could just do this instead:

sudo aptitude install glibc-source

Then I downloaded Omnibot 0.66 and extracted it and then copied the Omnibot and Omni-bot folders to the enemy-territory folder on my server.

Now that the Onmibot files are in place I needed to tell Jaymod where to find them - so I opened up server.cfg in the Jaymod folder and added the following (just change the path to your own Enemy Territory installation path):

set omnibot_path = "/home/etserver/enemy-territory/omni-bot/"

I found that there were still a couple of things that I needed to do to actually get Omnibot to work and to get some bots to play against ... the first was because Omnibot produced an error when I ran the server:

OMNIBOT: load '/home/etserver/enemy-territory/omni-bot/omnibot_et.so': failure: libstdc++.s o.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

A quick google and I found how to install libstdc++.s o.5:

sudo apt-get install libstdc++5

Great, so I ran the server again and Omibot loaded but there were no bots ... so I made some changes to /home/etserver/enemy-territory/omni-bot/et/scripts/et_autoexec.gm. This is where you can change your bot settings and I just un-commented the following two lines to quickly get some bots up and running:

// Set minbots/maxbots on map start
MinBots(2);
MaxBots(4);

Visit the Omnibot site for more information about Omnibot!

How to make a transparent watermark for ETPro with GIMP

If you don't have GIMP installed download it from here.

Lets convert the etpro logo into a watermark.

So open the logo and select the magic wand tool in GIMP.

Hold the shift key and select all of the black areas of the logo until they are all selected.


Click Edit and then Copy.

Next click File then New to open a new window.

Set the Image Size to 256 x 256 pixels.

Expand the Advanced Options and set the Fill with drop down menu to Transparency.

Click OK.

In the new window click Edit and then click Paste. Now we have the logo with a transparent backhround.


Now save the image as a .tga file.

Now we need to create a .pk3 file with the watermark in it that we can upload to our etpro server.

So, create a folder on the desktop called watermark. Open the watermark folder and create another folder, I will call mine pow. Open the pow folder and put your .tga file inside this folder. Mine is called pow.tga.

Now return to your desktop so that you can see the watermark folder. Select it and make it into a compressed zipped folder. Now change file file extension from watermark.zip to watermark.pk3.

Upload this .pk3 file to the etpro folder on your server.

The final step is to add the following line to server.cfg in the etpro folder on your server:

set b_watermark pow/pow

Here the first pow refers to the folder in our pk3 file and the second pow refers to the file name of our .tga file.

Reboot the server, and viola!

Set up an ETPro server for testing on Ubuntu JeOS

Set up another Ubuntu JeOS ET virtual machine - this time with etpro installed. POW El Rey Ray sent me the ETL 3vs3, 4vs4, 6vs6 and STA 6vs6 configs and so I could test them before uploading them to the POW etpro server: et-pro.com:27961.

The virtual machine has 1.5Gb of dedicated HD space and 256Mb of RAM. A vanilla Ubuntu JeOS installation takes less than 300Mb of HD space and only uses 30Mb of RAM so running it for virtualization is sweet!

Also figured out etpto semiadmin which allows for the use of rcon commands without using the rcon password - very nice!

For example - create a file called etpro.cfg in the etpro folder:

//semi admin levels - 0 disables semiadmin. You can have up to 99 semiadmin levels. Here 1 states that there is one semiadmin logon

set b_semiadminlevels 1

//semi admin password. If we were defining a second semiadmin password then we would set a password for semiadminpass2, and so on through to semiadminpass99 if required.

set b_semiadminpass1 "password"

//semi admin commands - this defines which rcon commands the user of a given seminadmin password can execute. In this example, the ability to kick players.

set b_semiadmincmds1 "kick"

All that is left to do then is to add +exec etpro.cfg to the bash script that starts the server!

Wunderbar!

Migrated My ET Jaymod Test Server to ESXi

My Promise SATA card arrived a few days ago and today I had time to put it in my server and install ESXi which is now available for free!

I installed VMWare Infrastructure Client which is free with ESXi on my XP machine and then downloaded the free version of VMWare Converter to migrate my virtual machines to ESX.

So the first machine that I migrated was my Ubuntu JeOS ET Jaymod test server.

For some reason eth0 did not show up after migration to ESXi and I later saw that eth1 was present and used that instead, so now my first virtual machine is up and running!


For those of you who are interested this is the (unsupported) hardware that I built the server from:

ASRock ALIVENF6G-VSTA AM2 NVidia 6100 Motherboard 1
AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz 2
Intel Pro MT 1000 NIC 3
OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (x2) 4
PROMISE SATA300 TX4 PCI SATA II Controller Card 5
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3250310NS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive 6
SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W Power Supply 7

It was well worth $60 for the Promise SATA card to avoid having to fool ESXi into using the onboard SATA controller.

Quake Con 08 - Wolfenstein Trailer

The new Quake Con Wolfenstein trailer contains a fair amount of footage from the E3 trailer and gives a little bit of a better glimpse of the new Wolfenstein.

Click here to view the trailer.

Welcome to the new Reich!

PlayXpert Open Beta - Initial Impressions

I found out that PlayXpert was available again today and so I was keen to install and test this out on my XP rig - I ended up a little disappointed. This could have been avoided had I read the PlayXpert FAQ properly, but alas I did not.

The Open Beta has Open GL support turned off, a situation that is, for now, 'temporary' - so you won't be able to see PlayXpert once you launch ET.

The software itself looks quite nice and when you run it you get a snazy looking (customizable) widget bar.

I added four of the seven available chat "gateways" without any problems whatsoever - xfire, msn, yahoo and gtalk.

The xfire functionality does not yet match the functionality that you get with xfire itself so it will be interesting to see how this develops.

The chat window is what you would expect with a small selection of smileys.

Once you get into the settings you can configure hot keys to control PlayXpert - Crtl + Shift + B is the default to launch the web browser for example. Other hot keys with bring up the widget bar, or "dock" and you can specify if you want to use Winamp or iTunes to play your mp3s.

There is already some VOIP functionality is built in but I looked in vain for the TeamSpeak widget to be able to test that out.

Unfortunatley all of this is a bit mute for me because without the Open GL support that is needed for ET, I can't (yet) use this with my favourite game.

Still, being a gamer you would have thought that I would have learned some patience by now ... hopefully I will be revisting PlayXpert soon once Open GL is supported.

Either way, once PlayXpert is ready for prime time it looks like it will replace my current xfire installation quite nicely!.

Update: the Teamspeak widget should be available for download again soon.

Game Informer scans at Pro Gamer

Looks like someone has been naughty and uploaded Game Informer scans to the Pro Gamer site. I'm waiting to hear back from Game Informer on their forums ...

Competition for Xfire?

PlayXpert is a "next-generation in-game community management toolset" that lets you multi-task while gaming.

This means being able to chat on MSN, AIM, ICQ, GTalk, Yahoo, Xfire, and even Sony Station Friends, play mp3s and even open up a browser, surf the web and toggle transparency without leaving your game!

It looks like there will be compatibility with TeamSpeak 3 (whenever that comes out) - and there is an existing TeamSpeak widget for the current version of TeamSpeak.

So I am just waiting for the next build to be made available so that I can download it - I can't wait to try it out and see who is on TeamSpeak without having to Alt Z to the desktop!

Wolfenstein in next months PC Gamer Magazine

It's due out July 31st.

Wolfenstein Screens at kotaku

Only half of the screens seem to be working for me right now on the kotaku site but the particle cannon looks like fun!

Check the screenshots out here.

Wolfenstein - E3 2008 - Activision Press Conference

Well the main points from this video are that there will be a mixture of realistic and new sci-fi / supernatural (Shroud) weapons available in the game.

The best news (as far as I am concerned) is that there will be a multiplayer that will retain the WolfMP / ET team based objective gameplay that I have come to love! And the Shroud weapons will be available in the multiplayer.

More details should be forthcoming in a couple of weeks at QuakeCon.

August Game Informer Wolfenstein Exclusive

Apparently there is a 10 page exclusive on the new Wolfenstein game in the August Game Informer.

Bet there is no release date though!

Should be worth a look ...

Enemy Territory - Video Review of Radar Summer 1.3

Radar Summer is a conversion (by 2Bit) of the orginal Wurzburg Radar map for ET. There's a lot more to this conversion than summer skies and lush green vistas ...



I learned a bit more about video editing making this review - the quality of the colours is better now that I am using WeGame to record the footage and I have also learned to how adjust the brightness and contrast before uploading it to YouTube. It takes me much longer to edit the video when I use WeGame for video capture and I couldn't get it to record the game sound ... hopefully the end result is good enough though!

You should be able to see my first video review - Battery Recharged 1.3 in the video bar for this blog.