Further Review of The Custom Maps For FNF

Here is another write up about the maps we are playing this Friday Night from Tman of the PDX clan.

This is going to be a great night!

OK, hopefully most of you know Fields of the Fallen. Its a great mid-sized map, with tons of variety but an infantry map. No armor nor planes. Youve got a cemetary on a hill, a wood processing plant on the river, another flag tucked away in the hills, a church on a hill and best of all no uncapturables.

Next up, another familiar but crazy infantry map, The House of Hellsing This map promises close in fighting on 3 levels in the heart of a city. Stairs, catwalks, and tons of nooks & crannys. Throw in a river, a few boats and tanks that can circle the city and youve got MAYHEM but FUN mayhem!

To give the tank freaks their day, theyve got Battle Mountain back on the menu. Its a circular path with four flags, all capturable. In the middle, is a huge gutten crater with a sole flag. Tanks galore, and narrow streets, with huge cliffs that will crush your tank if you waver from the path.

OK, now with the new maps. Wake a new Day, which is a new twist of Wake Island. The best part of this is that its night, and the stars and moon are out. Creepy. How else has it changed? Well, the allied airbase is an uncapturable this time around, there are bridges connecting the two familiar reefs, and the axis have a uncapturable, but its on the edge of the map, on dry land. Planes will rule as there are plenty to go around. The allied may feel safe with more tanks and an uncapturable, but can they defend against a stealthy axis ready to paradop through the night sky? Well see.

A promising new map, Archaic Animosity is a really BIG map. Imagine if you will a map the size of Gazala, with a feel of Gazala, El Alamein (the germans get a wicked bomber to match the B-17 the allies have), but it also has a phillapines feel, because the map is surrounded by tons of water. And that means patrol boats!

Ok, now for the cream of the crop, the new map Atomm & GRB put together, Ghost Front. Imagine you are in a forest, and when I say forest, I mean a thick, congested forest where you can get lost and sneak around. It has snowed recently, and the thousands of young firs provide a false comfort of home. Youre feeling kind of lazy because just beyond the edge of the forest is no-mans land, where the artillary have levelled all the trees leading up to a river and just beyond in the haze and you can see the german barracks laying below. Youre sitting around a campfire with a cache of health & weapons hidden into a nook into the hill. You feel comfortable.

That, my friend, is about to end!

Youve got 5 flags to defend, and the germans awake on the break of dawn and come rushing over the river. The question is, can you stop them before they get to the forest? Because if you cant, now youve got to worry about the rear 4 flags. And these are classic Stalingrad type of flags, the types of which you have to be almost touching the flagpole to take.

One flag is in the middle of a blasted out crater, that is rimmed and has a trench surrounding it. But there are so many approaches, you will go dizzy trying to defend this.

Further back, you have a farm that overlooks what once was a pastoral village, but now is a skelton. The farm provides little comfort and if the axis capture it, they get tanks, which you the farm wont give up for allied. Once these are taken, youve left with a skeleton of a village with two flags. But youve got two tanks to defend that village with. The question is, can you do it with the germans coming from every direction?

I cant wait to play Ghost Front. This is going to be GREAT!

I implore all of you to join GamersRadio as they host the final BF1942 custom map night. It promises to be a fantastic night!

BF42 Final FNF – Custom Map Night

Here is the line up for our final Friday Night Fights – Custom Map Night. Since it is the last one, we are playing some old favorites, along with 3 new maps.

The first three you should have seen previously.
304 Fields of the Fallen – Still my favorite custom map.
304 House of Hellsing – Multilevel BF42, wow!
Battle Moutain – Had several requests for this one.

GRB Ghost Front – I dont have a review of this map because it was made by myself and Raze. Instead, Ill tell you a little about it. It is based on the Ardennes-Alsace battle of the bulge fights from the winter of 44/45. The trees are thick and the iced over pond is cool to drive tanks on. There is a hidden cave by the river outpost with lots of suprises. All smoking buildings have health and Axis gets tanks when they capture the farm. I hope you like it as much as we enjoyed putting it together.

Archaic Animosity – This is a very large Desert Map. It has an interesting layout and good looking towns. The German bomber is interesting enough to make it worth while. Also, we need a map to break up some of the other maps and since we did not have a desert map, this fit the bill perfectly. I hope we have enough people to make this one worth while.

Wake A New Day – I started playing battlefield 42 when it was a single multi-player demo on a map called Wake Island. I played that thing like it was going out of style. To this day, I love wake island. I never get sick of it. That leaves us with this bastardized version of Wake. All I can say is WOW! I cant wait to play this. Its Wake and its not Wake. The Americans hold the island and then some. The Japanese have an airbase on another island and they control the carrier and destroyer. The lagoon in the middle now connects the whole rest of the island in a T configuration. I hope this map is as fun as the original because I could see it staying in permanent rotation on our server if it is.

Installer is in QA and should be available shortly. Watch this post for an update!

Because this is our last BF42 FNF-CMN, I wanted to take the time to do an honorable mention of sorts. There are several maps that we did not play because they were too large for a smaller turnout and I didnt want to bore everyone or we had too many of a particular type of map, so we couldnt include it. If you want to see our honorable mention list, click Read More… to get the skinny on some other interesting looking maps that we just didnt have time to play. Continue reading BF42 Final FNF – Custom Map Night

Friday Night Fights – Custom Map Night

Its that time again! Dust off your old Battlefield 1942 cd for our final BF42 Custom Map night. Things should get started this Friday night, April 30th at 7:00pm CST and go until there is no one left to play.

We are still working on the maps list, but since this is our last BF42 custom map night before switching to BFV, we are bringing back some of our favorite maps.

304 Fields of the Fallen
304 House of Hellsing
Battle Mountain

As well as the public debut of Ghost Front, by myself and |GRB| Raze. I have a bunch of maps to go through and Im trying to find some good plane maps or Pacific Theatre maps. If you have a map that has not been submitted to FilePlanet, shoot us a line and let us know where to grab yours.

Keep it here for a complete list of maps, a single download installer and our initial review of the new maps.

FarCry – The Way It Was Meant To Be Played

Something unusual happened with the release of the GeForce 6800. Typically, the hardware is released, then the software makers start to take advantage of the new features. Not this time around, at least not with FarCry.

From an article on the Inquirer website, “THE AMAZINGLY good looking game Far Cry has support for the shader model 3.0 but thats currently supported only by Nvidias Geforce 6800 cards.”

In addition, the next generation Unreal engine supports Shaders 3.0.

Bah! Just another reason to buy a new video card. I can see it now. Hello, My name is Atomm and Ive been addicted to Video Cards since 1997 when I pre-paid $240 for the lastest 4mb S3 card. Yes, I am addicted…..

Battlefield Vietnam tops Unreal Tournament 2004 and FarCry

The sales figures are starting to come out from NPD Techworld for Top selling computer games. These figures are from March 21-27, 2004. Since BFV, UT2004 and FC were not released until April, we will assume this is the preorder sales figures. Even with more than a Million downloads of the UT2004 demo, Battlefield Vietnam started out on top. I bought BFV as a preorder, then I bought UT2004 and FarCry in the following weeks after they were released. It will be interesting to see if BFV maintains this position in the upcoming weeks.

1. Battlefield Vietnam
2. Unreal Tournament 2004
3. Counter Strike: Condition Zero
4. Far Cry
5. The Sims Deluxe
6. MS Zoo Tycoon: Complete Collection
7. MS Age Of Mythology
8. Tom Clancys Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
9. Call Of Duty
10. MVP Baseball 2004

First screenshots of Battlefield 2!

Looks like EA and Digital Illusions have made the official announcement in regards to Battlefield 2. They mention some great features and have provided all of us with a couple screen shots to get us going on what looks to be a very impressive game.

Quote From EA:
Battlefield 2 features immense, richly detailed, destructible environments, from city streets to remote forests, in some of the most notorious hot spots around the world. Each map in Battlefield 2 adjusts in scale to support the number of players in the world, providing the ideal vehicle-to-player ratio and an optimized game play experience. Enhanced team play features allow players to enter the action on the front lines as part of a formal squad, or work behind the scenes in Commander Mode to direct the strategic assaults of their teammates. With in-game success, players increase their rank from recruit all the way to General and unlock awards, including new weapons, vehicle decals, medals, and more.

   

Check out the full story here: EA Games

Battlefield 2 Exclusive

By now, you have probably heard about the Battlefield: Modern Warfare coming to the PS2. How about this, Battlefield 2, coming to the PC. I cant tell if the games are the same, but they are both based on Modern Combat. Sounds like Desert Combat for $49.95 if you ask me.

There is not much meat in this article, but it does mention how to find out more info. Buy the magazine……

Tribes 1 and 2 For Free

For fans of team based FPS Capture The Flag Games!

From Fileplanet.com:

“Vivendi Universal Games and FilePlanet will be distributing the full version of Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 for free on a special-edition DVD-ROM bundled with the newsstand edition of the June issue of Computer Gaming World magazine and online via FilePlanet.com. The special versions of these games will be available starting May 4, 2004, and will be simultaneously accessible for online download through FilePlanet.com.”

I played Tribes 1 and really enjoyed it. I cant wait to try Tribes 2 for free!

Dice Admits Mistakes in BF42

There is an article, written in German, where DICE acknowledges the things that they did not have time to implement in BF42 because EA would not give them the time neccessary to complete them.

Here are just a few (translated by google)
– destroyable buildings and Spawn points
– parachute price increase (Not sure what that means?)
– dynamic Multiplayer campaign with effects on the following maps (That would have been very cool.)
– shooting as a passenger in vehicles
– a good communication system, approximately by Headset or speech recognition for Bots
– vehicle formations

It looks like a lot of the things made it into Battlefield Vietnam. Is it too little, too late?

Additionally, a lot of vehicles were removed because EA felt they caused too much CPU usage on the server, preventing servers from running 64 players.

The article is interesting, if slightly difficult to read. Check out the english translation.

Sandbox Manual 1.1 and FAQ

If you have even glanced at the Sandbox editor for FarCry then you know that this is the most amazing map editor known to man… Period! Just so happends that they have updated their manual and FAQ to address some common questions.

Quote from FarCry:
An updated version of the Sandbox editor manual has been uploaded to the Far Cry FTP. Version 1.1 of the manual has the following changes:

-Updated objects (dynamic light, raising water, particle spray, all pick ups); Appendix B.
-Updated AI anchor jobs list; Appendix C.
-Updated light types heading, and dynamic light table; Appendix E.
-Removed step 12 and updated step 8, first walkthrough, Chapter 1.
-Corrected explanation of position saving by switching “control” and “shift”; Navigation section, page iv.
-Corrected “shift” and “control” errors in Steps 1 of Chapter 7s walkthrough, and steps 3 and 6 of Chapter 2s walkthrough.
-Added Layer Painter section, Chapter 1
-Updated numerous jpeg images to bitmaps to improve visual quality

The FAQ V1.0 aims to provide answers to the most common questions that are being raised

Download Sandbox Manual v1.1 (5.87mb)
Download Sandbox FAQ (107Kb)