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6 anonymous guests on-line.
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Shoutbox
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News
Factory is running on Futurama all day.
The ladder is working :)
Have at it troops.
GL and HF tonight.
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| Saturday, September 18, 2004 |
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The SunLit Heat of Battle server is back in action. Heat of Battle is a modification for the Call of Duty engine that makes HOB faster and more fun.
Here is the server info for anyone interested:
Server name: SunLit HOB
IP Address: 67.18.13.94:28960
The HOB server was taken offline a while ago due to concerns about CPU utilization. We've brought it back up again to test it out and see if we can run it comfortably. If you're curious, you can read about it in this forum post.
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| Thursday, September 09, 2004 |
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Our Natural Selection Server, SunLit HMS Beagle, has been upgraded to the latest version of NS, version 3.0 beta 5.
You can download the latest version of Natural Selection here.
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| Thursday, September 09, 2004 |
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Some of you may have noticed our website down for brief periods recently. We're having some problem with our dedicated web server, which has caused the server to crash.
Our web server provider is going to be taking the whole machine off line to check out the hardware (we think we may have some bad RAM). They will be doing this sometime in the next 24 hours, and the whole site will be down for about two hours when it happens.
The game servers will remain on line, as they are on our dedicated game server machine in another location.
Just giving everyone a heads up :)
UPDATE:
4pm CST 8/31/04
Maintenance Completed.
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| Tuesday, August 31, 2004 |
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There is a new mapcycle up on the Annex. We have continued to keep the mapcycle there alternating between standard and custom maps, with auto-download setup, to attract and keep new players around.
You can see the new mapcycle on the Annex Mapcycle page.
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| Saturday, August 28, 2004 |
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The SLDL's week 2 map, Solitude_b2
will be playing tonight
Futurama , 7 - 9pm est
See you there.
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| Friday, August 27, 2004 |
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SLDL Matches will be played at their scheduled time today.
The disruption of last last night's SLDL matches was caused by
[GIMP] Beach_Girl aka [GIMP] Heineken
Steam_0:1:2403270
Steam_0:1:1062729
IP: 24.186.204.143.
**UPDATE**
The second player attempting to enter using the name [I&S]Rosie was
[GIMP]Turtlehead
Steam_0:0:1135501
IP: 24.190.184.26
We have taken several steps to better secure the servers. The SLDL Team Leaders will be e-mailed shortly with new server passwords and other information.
The matches today and tonight will proceed as scheduled. If someone does manage to somehow disrupt a match, we will simply reschedule and try again.
Let's not let a few jerks spoil everyone's fun.
To everyone who has a match today, good luck, play hard and have FUN.
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| Sunday, August 22, 2004 |
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11:20 am est Steam Network is down
No information as to when it will be functioning again
Its not your PC
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| Sunday, August 22, 2004 |
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Futurama will be running the SLDL Week 1 map, dod_Northbound this evening from 7pm - 9pm est.
A good opportunity to run through the map for everyone :)
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| Friday, August 20, 2004 |
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We have just released our very first HL Rally custom map pack, SunLit HL Rally Map Pack #1. You can find it on our HL Rally Map Pack page. You can also see thumbnails and full size screen shots of the maps, as well as download the maps individually, on our HL Rally Map Gallery page. And, of course, if you don't have HL Rally yet it is also available for download here.
There are some cool new HL Rally maps in there. Most of them are rc-type (or Rally Course) maps, which are my personal preference.
There is also a new mapcycle to go with the new map pack. You can see the new mapcycle on the SunLit Rally Racing Mapcycle page. I discovered a new feature in HL Rally recently, and I'm trying it out with one of the maps in this new cycle. HL Rally actually lets you set a map to race a certain course "backwards." I have setup ab_baume in this manner so when you play it, you start at the finish line and finish at the start line. It's like playing a completely different map. Try it out and let me know what you think.
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| Saturday, August 14, 2004 |
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With the release of Doom 3 and the imminent release of Half-Life 2, many of us are strongly considering upgrades to our computers. Recently, we noted some interesting test results comparing AMD versus Intel CPUs. The other major component many of you may be considering upgrading is your video card.
Tom's Hardware Guide has come out with a good analysis of the performance differences under Doom 3 between the latest from nVidia and ATI. The results for Half-Life 2 are likely to be similar. The chart below, from Tom's Hardware, sums it up nicely.
The complete article can be found here: Matching Doom III with the best Video Card. The bottom line seems to be that the top of the line cards from each company are close to even at lower resolutions, but the nVidia GF 6800 Ultra series begins to pull away decisively from the ATI x800 XT at higher resolutions.
The GF6800 series supports something called "Smart Shader 3.0" for DirectX. This will allow the rendering of certain parts of scenes to be done in one pass rather than multiple passes. It may offer an even greater advantage in HL2. On the other hand, the nVidia card uses more power and takes up two slots compared to the ATI's one slot.
Something else worth noting is that the newer generations of cards from both companies are often nearly twice as fast as their predecessors. In the chart above, for instance, the previous top-of-the-line model from ATI was the 9800XT and it yields about 32 fps, whereas the new top of the line x800 XT yields 63 fps holding all other things equal. That tells me there's no use buying any expensive video card at this point in time unless you're going to get either a x800 or 6800 series card.
Everyone will make up their own minds on what's most important. Tom's Hardware does a good job of laying out the differences.
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| Saturday, August 14, 2004 |
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We will be running the map dod_railroad2_b2 tonight from 7pm to 9pm on the Futurama server.
If you and your clan mates would like a chance to practice the SLDL map of the week, or if you just really like dod_railroad2_b2, here's your chance to get in two hours on this map.
Everyone welcome.
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| Friday, August 13, 2004 |
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AnandTech has done a comprehensive review on CPU performance in DOOM3. The rest of the article covers the differences between many different models of processors. The big news, though, can be seen in the chart below.
I know from our recent poll that many of you are considering an upgrade for the newer games like Doom 3 and HL2. If so, you might want to read through this article on the different CPU's first. AnandTech has a recommendation in the mid-range price CPU's.
Making our way further down the chart we see that the Athlon 64 3000+ is quite possibly the best buy for excellent Doom 3 performance, weighing in right between the two Extreme Edition processors at less than 20% of the cost of those chips.
I wonder if the results will be similar for HL2. If AMD performs better on HL2 as well, they may have a real winning processor line on their hands -- at least as far as the gaming crowd is concerned.
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| Sunday, August 08, 2004 |
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"The Steam Users Forum is down as we ride out a external network problem (a Denial of Service attack). Thanks for your patience -- we'll be back up soon."
-Valve
It appears it is affecting servers as well
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| Sunday, August 01, 2004 |
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Sunday night saw the final match between the Gold and Green conferences.
[GsS] and [I&S] have had 4 league's worth of history together and knew they were up for some challenging and FUN gameplay.
Clervaux3b as the map made it even sweeter.
After a suspenseful hour overcoming the latest steam update obstacles, the teams buckled down to some intense game play.
[GsS] emerged the victor with a final score of:
[GsS] 932
[I&S] 849
Round 1
Round 2
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It was a great season and a pleasure organizing and playing with all the teams.
We hope that you will come back for the upcoming fourth season starting up Aug 8th weekend. You can read more about the SLDL4 on the new main page.
Cheers !
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| Thursday, July 29, 2004 |
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We have a new Day of Defeat Map Pack, and 17 new maps for your fragging pleasure. You can download the map pack on our DoD Map Packs page.There are some completely new maps in this map pack, including dod_rush, dod_trust_b1, dod_factory and others.
Two great new maps in this pack were done by one of our friends and SunLit regulars, [Skullz] Neutrino. His maps are dod_neutrino and dod_cr44_neutrino. I particularly liked dod_cr44_neutrino because I think it is the only remake of the beloved dod_cr44 in this whole batch of remakes that keeps closely to the original while completely re-skinning it and bringing in up-to-date graphics.
There are also a couple of new maps in here that are quirky "just for fun" things. Dod_rush is a nice-looking but extremely small map with a hut on a hill, where the only flag in the map resides. Another one I saw screenshots of and thought we just had to have was dod_nadetime. Nadetime strips players of weapons as they leave the spawn and forces the players to pick up weapons on the map -- which include nades, knives, and rocket launchers. Should be a blast :)
We've also got a few updates of maps we already know. There's a re-skinned version of dod_hc1 called dod_heutau_b1, a flag-capture version of dod_jagd (dod_jagd_cl), and new versions of dod_slav and dod_kirkenes.
I have posted a new mapcycle on Futurama that includes all the new maps, plus a few of the standard maps to draw in some new players. You can see a list of the new maps by clicking the "read more" option below.
Enjoy.
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Couldn't log onto Steam this morning. Tried deleting the ClientRegistry.blob.
Steam platform updated after 3 tries but still cant log on from the password field.
Checked the Steam forums and find that I am not alone **LOL**
There was a CS update last night but it could also be that Steam is preparing for the influx of anticipated new accounts following the WONnet shut down tomorrow.
UPDATE 10:47AM CST:
All of our game servers have been updated and rebooted. They now seem to be running fine.
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Thanks to the efforts of Lab Rat and Thunderhand, we now have a brilliant new mapcycle on Shotgun Madness. They put together the mapcycle and made up the special "resource" files for each map that we need to enable the auto-downloading. All the maps are listed on the SM Mapcycle page.
This new mapcycle alternates between standard maps (i.e., maps that come with Half-Life) with custom maps from our vast HLDM map library. The custom maps and any necessary related files will automatically download from our new dedicated webserver and install themselves on the players computer.
The idea is to attract some new players with the standard maps, and keep them around when the server changes to a custom map. Hopefully the attraction of neat custom maps and the great crowd we have here will keep them coming back. This has worked very well on the Annex.
If you're a DoD fan (or even a HL Rally fan) and haven't tried out Shotgun Madness yet, now's a great opportunity. You don't have to download or install anything, just go check it out! It's fast and furious. The server IP is 69.56.242.81:27015.
Happy Fragging!
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| Friday, July 23, 2004 |
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One of our members came up with the idea of a contest for a new SunLitGames.net logo/graphic.
You can read and chat about it in this forum thread.
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| Wednesday, July 21, 2004 |
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We have a new server running the Half-Life Rally mod. In case you have not heard of this mod, it is a rally racing game built on the Half-Life engine.
Don't laugh! It actually works and it's fun.
The way I understand it, they got around the problem of the limited size of the maps in HL by -- get this -- shrinking the cars. As far as the engine is concerned, all the cars are about the size of a squirrel. Now imagine a squirrel on some large map like dod_campagne (for you DoD players) or Eden (for you SM players). Suddenly, there's plenty of room to race around! Of course, all the textures and other elements have shrunk, too, so the car appears to be a normal size in the game, as does the landscape.
Here is the server info:
- Server Name: SunLit Rally Racing
- Server IP: 69.56.242.80:27075
- Mod: HL Rally
The mod is free. If you've got Steam, all you need to do is install the mod and a patch. Get the HL Rally 1.0 self-install and the HL Rally 1.1 patch. Install 1.0 first, then the patch. Both files are installed to your "C:>Program Files>Steam>SteamApps>{your e-mail}>half-life" folder.
Happy racing!
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| Monday, July 19, 2004 |
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Cutting Edge and some other players have mentioned in
the forums they'd like to see the Half-Life of Horrors
server back up. We certainly have the resources, and
there seems to be an interest in it, so we've set up a
new HLDM server.
Here is the server info:
- Server Name: SunLit HLOH
- Server IP: 69.56.242.81:27085
- Mod: Deathmatch - SunLit Mod
- Notes: Custom Maps with Auto Download
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It is currently running a mapcycle that alternates
between custom and standard maps. The custom maps in
the cycle will automatically download to the player if
he or she does not have the maps already.
The Half-Life of Horrors version of Laz's Shotgun Mod
is different from Shotgun Madness mainly because you don't start with a
shotgun. The shotgun is still faster and holds more
ammo. The egon and the bee gun are disabled as well.
Below are the maps that are currently running. If you
do not have them, you can download all of our custom
maps in one self-installing file here.
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WON Shutdown Timing:
Starting July 26th the shutdown of the WON authentication servers will begin. This process will be completed on July 31st.
This means players will no longer be able to access Internet features of Valve games, such as Counter-Strike 1.5, using the WON authentication servers.
Users can continue using Valve games on the Steam service by downloading the Steam installer and setting up a Steam account.
For more information visit www.steampowered.com.
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| Saturday, July 17, 2004 |
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We have a new feature on the Annex server. It is setup to automatically download the custom maps in the mapcycle to anyone who does not already have them.
There are plans afoot to try this out on Shotgun Madness as well. Some of the SM Enforcers have volunteered to do the work necessary to get this running, and we are hoping to have this ready in the next couple days.
{GL} Showtime and [I&S] Ira Hayes had suggested this previously and I had discounted it as we didn't have the bandwidth to implement it. Now we do, and I think their idea is worth trying out.
I have made up a special mapcycle for the Annex that alternates between standard and custom maps. I am trying to make the Annex a good place for one or two of our regulars to go when the DoD servers are empty. The standard map should draw in a few SunLit newbies, given of course that someone is there to "seed" the server. When the map changes, the new players should stick around because they'll have the map.
Note that it is only setup for the custom maps in the current mapcycle. If you vote in some custom map that's not in the mapcycle, you'll likely lose any new players on the server at the time.
My hope is this will draw some new players to our community. Maybe they'll see some cool maps they've never played before, see the great group of people and come back again.
So, if you're looking for a game and no one is around, try heading to the Annex and vote in a standard map if one is not already playing. Read on to see the actual maps on the list.
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A newer, much better, version of dod_flashville is out. We have replaced the old version, dod_flashville_v1, with the newer version, dod_flashville_b3, on all our DoD servers.
Make sure you have the new version of dod_flashville. You can find it in our DoD Maps library.
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| Monday, July 12, 2004 |
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The semifinal [HoD] vs [GsS] match was a tough one.
Final score [GsS] 641 [HoD] 545
Next weekend will see the last matches of the season.
[GsS] vs [I&S]
[HoD] vs ~*NOL*~
Map: clervaux3b
Plans for SLDL4 are in the works with a proposed start up date of August 8th.
Clans participating in this season have a guaranteed slot.
If your team is in, please have a team leader contact us soonest.
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| Monday, July 12, 2004 |
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