Design-O-Tron

I’m sorry, but I had to disable the comments, because I recently got a lot of spam comments to delete every day. On the one hand, this increases the traffic a lot, this blog gets more than 100 visitors daily and I’m not posting anything (well, now I am). But of course, spam is annoying and I have other things to do than delete tons of comments all the time.

I’m currently looking for a way to fix this, but for now, comments are disabled.

My blog just got upgraded to the new Wordpress version 2.5 and this is mainly a test post because the person who’s hosting it had some problems with 2.5. Let’s hope everything works fine.

It’s been a while since my last post, but now I have more time. I was working my new website the last couple of weeks and now it’s nearly finished. Don’t worry though, this blog will stay here as it is, although it will get a new design to fit the main site.  I’m currently looking for a host, so it will still take about a week before the main site is going to go online. Stay tuned!

From space art to vector art, my latest wallpaper:

A new fortress tournament is going to take place at the 29th and 30th March. Teams of four (and one substitute) will play against each other. The default fortress settings will be used (old score settings). I’m pretty sure I’m going to play, although I don’t like the times, especially the final is too late for my taste. More information can be found at the official website.

Those of you who look at the Artwork page regularly might have already noticed that I added some space art images over the last weeks. Well, here is a new one, completely made from scratch with Terragen and Photoshop:

Maybe you already noticed a new server called “Bugfarm Newbie Fortress”. That is z-mans’s new playground, and it is already quite different from a “classic” fortress server. There is a winzone, new scoring settings, server messages to help new players and much more. Obviously, this fortress server tries to make it easier for new players to learn how to play. Therefore, players with a bad attitude aren’t wanted and have to expect to be kicked/banned, so try to be nice

For all the details about the changes made to the default fortress configuration, I suggest you read the forum thread, where you can also post your feedback about the new settings.

This ladle, played yesterday, was won by TKR, a fusion of players from TR and KoD. We had two quite good matches against CT in the semi and against |x| in the final. Playing quite bad I thought about some things players talked about:

1. Why are so many people complaining about lag/fps? They know that the server will be quite full (ladle is set to be 8 vs 8 ) and if they don’t like their ping/fps, I wonder why they even play. Nevertheless, there is a silence feature. And I have to admit that it seemed a bit “laggier” than usual.

2. Defense/Attack: Some people obviously don’t get the sense of the game. Imagine the following situation: One defender versus two (or more) attackers. The defender plays good and it gets hard for the attackers to gain space of the zone. What happens now is, that the attackers play secure and don’t risk too much. After a couple of minutes, the defender dies and his/her team loses. And now there are these people who start complaining about the attackers and I don’t understand why. Why should you (as an attacker) play risky if you can clearly see that there is no gap to break through? Once again, there is a silence feature.

It is interesting though to see how the attitude of players can change playing a tournament, so I’m looking forward to the next ladle to see some more interesting statements. And hopefully, I’ll play better then

So, I played with the new alpha for a couple of days and now I switched back to 0.3 because I am totally used to the new (0.3) cockpit. Yes, I know wrtl made a build to combine the 0.3 cockpit with the 0.2.8.3 alpha but it still doesnt look the same. Anyway, the aplha has already some useful features, I especially liked the auto login.