Hi Zouga,
I'm still of the opinion that our numbers are low because of the season , most folks are busy enjoying the milder weather and all the activities that go along with it.
I looked at gametracker yesterday and the top 47 players on our pot luck server have all downloaded and played the custom maps , how do I know this? I know this because I have played
custom maps with all of them. Where are these 47 players we might ask ourselves , well as I said before they are doing other stuff. (In my case I have been very busy at work often starting early and finishing late
with so little free time and then when I do get some time I spend it on the dambuster coop development.)
The cmm ended up being a ghostown with only a couple of players ever showing up, this was a real problem because cmm was conquest so not much fun with just two playing.
Most of us will remember why pot luck is now coop only , it was switched to coop because we had such low numbers (long before custom maps were included in the rotation) that conquest was unrealistic. Initially this was a good move but the downside is that we lost a lot of good jiffers and regulars because they prefer conquest. Another factor to consider is the plethora of new games that have hit the scene recently , this has fragmented our jif players as they have all gone off in different directions so the days of lots of jiffers all having fun playing the same game may unfortunately be gone forever [i hope not
]
I used to be a huge fan of bg and although I still do enjoy the game I must admit that since I tried out EOD v2.3 , I am hooked , why? well it's all about the gameplay , it's fast and furious , the bots are a lot smarter and you don't have miles and miles of terrain to traverse only to be picked off by a hull down King Tiger at the far end of the map (Gnomey on MOB knows what I mean) In EOD the weapons are terrific just like BG but the maps are better the playability is better and they even play sixties music in the background. I must admit would like to see an EOD day on jif in the near future.
The dambuster coop is looking really good , it's taking a lot of time because I want to get it spot on.
I already have the bots doing some cool things and they are fighting amongst themselves really aggresively. I have added many new vehicles and some terrain changes to improve playability.
The most challenging task has not been configuring the ai , it has been painting the 2 dimensional pathmaps on what is essentially a 3d map. I didn't want to compromise the original designers
concept so I have had to do lots of tweaking to make the pathmaps work effectively.I also have tried to make this map appeal to different types of players , the sniper/spotter , the dancin infantryman , the tanky , the engy
and of course the pilot and his arch enemy the aa gunner.
I am really enjoying playing it in development mode , the original map is such an excellent design that I want to do it justice so please be patient. I hope to get a version ready for testing with a few volunteers in the next couple of weeks , I have a linux server ruuning at home so that should be fun and provide good feedback before we finally release it. After dambuster i am going to figure out why rheinmetall panzer coop is crashing on linux servers , it works fine on windows servers.
When I am finally done with dambuster and Rheinmetall Panzer I will be playing a lot more on our server because as sure as eggs is eggs if you have a handful of jiffers playing on our server , not only is it fun but it will attract others to join in.
PS
A major problem with new people not having the custom maps is "ADVERTISING" when a new player visits our site to get the maps where does he go? We MUST advertise our map downloads more effectively so that it is easy for new folks to get them. I have asked Mike to make some changes to our front page that will help solve this
