Production on Nuclear Warfare has nearly come to a halt. Right now we are working on making the Sassilization profiles more modular for our servers. Currently everything is a mess and each gamemode handles all the profile saving and loading by itself. This leaves older gamemodes like Sassilization outdated when we update Deathrun or the Lobby. Hopefully we can get all the servers running on the same files for easy management. Once this happens, I hope to revisit the Lobby and make it so players vote which map they want to play before connecting to the server as opposed to having the map be chosen from a list. If that works out, Pharenhite has given me other plans to go along with such a system, but whenever I plan something it rarely works out; I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up for nothing.
On the plus side, I’m done with high school.
As some of you may already know we recently released a new update to Deathrun. The new updated added a store where players go to buy hats, trails, player models, and other assorted goodies for varying prices. Since we know how much our VIP’s loved having free trails and player models they will, upon joining get a free trail, discounted store items, and increased money from winning/killing other players. After purchasing items from the store (hat, trail, or player model) you should head over to the settings tab and set up how you want your character to look.
In light of this recent update along with the nearing Summer months I have decided to put VIP on sale until Wednesday, May 27, 2009. Hurry now because there’s no telling when the next sale may be!
Hopefully everyone enjoys their summer along with our new Deathrun update.
Update:
The sale is now over, if you wish to donate in exchange for VIP you will now have to donate the regular amount of $15.00
The mapping forum has collected dust for too long. My excuse is that I grew weary of taking the time to make mapicons and minimaps for new maps only to have the new map be immediately shot down or have exploits which I failed to find in single player.
I’ve decided, “to hell with it,” and made a new map icon.
Now I can simply add a new map and then simply remove it or publish the images after it receives praise or rejection.
Two new maps have been added:
sa_arabia
sa_junkyard (Removed for missing textures)
sa_snowtemple
Please leave your comments on the new maps.
When you are donating now you will be donating to our new (and shiny) business paypal instead of Sassfrass’s personal one. There shouldn’t be any problems but if you encounter any feel free to post in the complaints section of our forum.
There have been quite a few questions about what has been going on and since most of you who are asking aren’t in the steam group (hint, hint) I figured I would post an update of what has gone down throughout the day. Basically our website has fallen victim to a distributed denial of service attack which is simply spamming requests to our web server. By spamming requests the attacker is able tie up the web server thus preventing legitimate traffic, you and me, from getting to the website, hence the blank pages when you would try to load a page.
At first I had to take down the Lounge, accompanying Sassilization servers as well as the website due to the way they are integrated together but later came to a solution which allowed me to put up the servers. I talked over some solutions with a friend and one clever idea he had was to forward the traffic with some DNS changes to a site which might not be so friendly, Microsoft.com. Although this solution did relieve our web server it wasn’t desirable for obvious reasons. After talking again he hinted me to go look for a module for Apache (our web server) which is made for these kinds of things, so I did. I was able to find a module which looks for rapidly repeating traffic and, when it finds it, puts them on a blacklist which makes successive requests lead them to a 403 page.
We are still being attacked so you can understand if the site goes slow or if a page does not load at all.
Update:
We are no longer being attacked.
Update 2:
We are being attacked again. Whoever is attacking us, if you want to talk and possibly reach a solution please try us on our ventrilo: vent.sassilization.com port 4100
This weekend, Cold and I plan on starting to re-do most of the functionality of Sassilization. What does this mean? It doesn’t really mean anything new for you guys. Cold wants to remake and redesign the website and we both want to redo the current database structure to make it easy to modify & extend. If the site is down over the weekend, don’t fret; it just means we’re working on it. You may also see the servers down or passworded, this just means we’re working on them and the downtime should only be for a few hours at the most. These changes will make it easier for us to link our servers and more features will be available to the other Sassilization servers such as the girl tag in Deathrun, DJ for jukebox, possible forum moderators only and other things. In addition we intend on changing the way ranks are stored to a flag based system which should allow us to easily add and change ranks without causing problems with any of the other ranks. Overall, these changes are mainly on the back-end; it is unlikely that you should notice any differences once we are done.
As suggested by Pharenhite I went ahead and created an IRC channel on Gamesurge. You can find us on irc.gamesurge.net in the channel #sassilization.
We find our selves in need of admins and would like to give everyone who wants it a shot. All the details are in this thread. Good luck!
Update:
Applications came in at a staggering rate and with almost 75 applications submitted I have locked the thread and the reviewing process will now begin. Thanks to everyone who submitted an application!
Update 2:
We had a very long discussion about every applicant and after narrowed it down to these finalists:
- Blankooie
- HavokDooms
- Sniper
- {: DA The Sissy Roo :}
- Crashinpa
- MightyFalcon
- Scapegoat
- [GU]SpRaY[AEG].vtf
After we had reached the finalists we went over them again and decided who we really wanted to be admin and came up with the admin list:
- Sniper
- {: DA The Sissy Roo :}
- Scapegoat
- [GU]SpRaY[AEG].vtf
Congratulations to everyone who got admin and thank you to everyone who showed interest in becoming an admin on our servers.
My spring break just ended and I don’t know if anyone else is still having theirs; but, Happy Spring Break anyway. I’m happy to see Sassilization can run by itself without any problems if don’t log on for an entire week. Many thanks to Cold and the Sassilization crew for making that happen.
Unfortunately, PulsarEffect was hacked and PERP was stolen in the process, which was then release. It sucks to see that happen to such a great, potential community. Hopefully Hunts can turn it around and take this as an opportunity to recode some things; maybe make PERP even better than it was. Hopefully he can pull a “Valve”.
It’s been two weeks since the last blog post and this one has hardly any content. I will try to see if I can find some more content filled news to post.
