Sorry for the recent up/down rollcoaster ride this past week. The server's been unstable as hell and it was due to one of the fans freaking out and going from 4000 RPM to 300 RPM to "N/A" whenever it felt like it. Replaced it with one of those spiffy copper 7000 RPM fans and looks like we'll be good. On the plus side, I found an interesting item on the motherboard that was causing the server to apparently lose 20-30% of its performance. Ouch. Fixed it and hopefully we can run a 18 player NS server now :)
Anyone have any Athlon 2800 MP CPUs they'd like to part with?
-JP

October 27, 2005 - 7:57 am PST

Found a funny video that pretty much sums up the state of Internet gaming and the little brats that infect it - "Gimme a shotty!", anyone?

"I want some MFing chocolate milk!"
Someone punch this kid already.
-JP

October 16, 2005 - 8:11 am PST

Sorry for yesterday's site downtime. I was doing routine maintenance earlier yesterday and something evil happened - Apache2 got completely redone under Gentoo and I didn't discover the problem for a while. Spent a few hours getting everything reconfigured again to the new Apache2 config spec. It's all good now.
Another great Southern California day~ Did anyone else catch the awesome sunset yesterday?
-JP

October 11, 2005 - 10:04 pm PST

The site should be fully operational now. Forums, vhosts, servers should all be running. Whew.
Damn, it's hard to get bandwidth.
-JP

October 09, 2005 - 12:06am PST

As many of you might have noticed, tfc.panduck.com's been down for a couple of days. It sort of fell off the internet due to errr... IPs being made non-routable. Seeing as how I'm never going to get my 64.14.241.93 IP back, I've already made arrangements to move o ver to a different IP space (@ XO Communications) thanks to the nice folks at NR Software. I requested the cutover late Friday night so realistically don't expect the new IPs to be routed to this switchport until Monday (Not pushing them.. it's not an emergency and they've been extremely helpful through this difficult period). In the meantime, you guys can insult each other all you want on the old "board" - here.

Honestly, this is going to be a big pain in the ass. Losing the IP is a big deal seeing as how the STEAM browser tracks servers via IP, and not the hostname. That, and the old Exodus/Cable and Wireless/Savvis network is seriously uncontested in the area of latency. Ouch. NR Software does do traffic over the Savvis network (they do badass peering all over the place), but I'm not going to push for it - they're doing this without any financial gain on their part and for that, I'm grateful. They don't owe me anything and the server would not have been around (since I left the Savvis organization a yea r ago) if not for their generosity. I wish I could sit on the Savvis network again, but as the premier enterprise-class provider of Internet services, there's no way I can afford their service on my own. This server has always been nonprofit and will continue to b e so that we may serve the public gaming good, without a cattle prod from third parties. Keeping this server up on the cheap is not easy and going to a Data Center on a Friday night to put together pieces of the outage puzzle after a LONG week of work is very, ver y sucky. I guess what I'm getting at is this - please be patient with us while we try to get through this. FYI: DNS TTLs... ugh.

To make a long story short:
1.) New IP means people will have to update their steam server browser list to see the new (old) Jigglyrooms
2.) Higher latency means that pings will be higher across the board
3.) Possible bandwidth throttling
4.) This page is temporary and will probably go up and down due to DNS transitioning and your ISP's handling of domain TTLs.

The short version for the technically challenged:
Shit hit the fan and we're working on it.

-JP

P.S. Thanks to everyone that IMed me about the site being down! For those who didn't get a response - I'm sorry, I've just been floo ded by IMs from others regarding this issue.

May 02, 2005 -11:08 pm PST

Whoa, it's been a while since I last updated. Here's what's going on:

o Updated the NS server to 3.03
o Skeletor has joined the NS JR admin family
o Fixed most of the horrible lag issues on the NS server.
o Toying around with a new interface for this website. I guess the ol' 1990's-ish modem friendly site isn't really "in" anymore.

Also in other news, my messiah, Family Guy has returned to TV!!! The only reason to watch network television is back :) :) :)

I want Seth McFarlane to have my babies
-JP

February 16, 2005 -9:46 pm PST

Just a quick update - Cheating Death version 4.28.1 was released yesterday but it looks like the UA site is getting hammered. Lucky for you, the Jigglyroom regular, I've got a treat!

cd-client-4_28_1-en.exe
Edit: cd-client-4_29_0-en.exe (Version 4.29!)

Enjoy!
Steam-free is the way to be!
-JP

January 9, 2005 -11:26 pm PST

A very interesting bit of NS news!:

[ January 7th, 2005 ] :: NS, NS retail, NS: Source, NS2, etc. (Flayra)

There's so much confusion and misinformation floating around about all these projects that I think it's time to set the record straight.

First there was Natural Selection. Then I formed Unknown Worlds to make more ambitious retail games. I thought that the best bet for the company's first game was putting NS into retail, on the Half-life engine. This would be like Counter-strike or Day of Defeat in retail, and would've essentially been the same game, but polished up and packaged with the Half-life engine so people could play it without owning Half-life. I then decided that it would be too costly and a little boring too do this project, so it was skipped.

So the next project is likely going to be NS on the Source engine. We don't know for sure if we're doing this, as we haven't had time to evaluate how much work it will be, but everyone on the team is excited to do it, so I think it will happen. We don't know yet if it is going to be a straight port over to Source, or if we're going to redo a lot of the artwork/animations, or if we're going to change a lot of the fundamental gameplay (flamethrowers, physics, etc.). We need to look into it more, see how many months it's going to take (the bad part) and then make a decision. As soon as we know, we'll let you guys know. NS on Source will be done primarily by the current NS team. I'll be doing the game design and overall direction, but the NS team will be doing all the actual work.

The OTHER project, is Natural Selection 2. The game design has been started (hoo-boy, fun stuff), but this will be a full-fledged $50 (or so) retail game, not a mod. It will use a next-generation engine (like Source, Unreal Engine 3, etc.) and will take years and millions of dollars to create. This is what I'm now spending the majority of my time on.

Please trust that as soon as ANY information is available on any of these projects, we will post here on the front-page news of this web-site. You won't have to dig through the forums or IRC chat logs, we're going to broadcast loud and clear. We're also planning on making particularly big announcements to the Unknown Worlds mailing list, so make sure you've registered an account and subscribed there if you're interested.

January 4, 2005 -11:28 pm PST

Happy New Year!

Well, I guess I'm a few days late but eh, better late than never, right? RIGHT? Hmm.. let's see what's on the agenda.. Let's hope I can find a successor to the original TFC Jigglyroom. Nobody plays there anymore. Wasted CPU cycles!
Doh, another year older
-JP