New on my list of things not to do: fix my computer's clock while anybody is currently using my QuakeWorld server. It had fallen behind by 15 minutes in about 2 months, so I put it back to where it should be. All of a sudden, the QWSV declared that all the players had suddenly timed out, and dropped them. Ouch! (and sorry!)

CTF 4.2 has been released, which hopefully cures all of the known bugs. I've dropped in my random-level patch, and everything seems to be going well.

I have released my randomize level-patch for CTF 4.2 here on my site at Road.Kill.Com.

I have made a minor QuakeC patch to randomize map selection. The CTF server op can pick which episodes he wants to allow with the 'samelevel' variable, and it will never pick the same map twice in a row. No more voting!

I have set up four methods so far:

• Group maps by episode. The server op can filter out any unwanted episodes (such as, say, the deathmatch episode), or include only favorite episodes (such as, say, the CTF episodes).
• Same as above, but a map in the CTF episodes gets twice the probability as any other map. If all 7 episodes worth are selected, then this gives roughly a 50% chance that a CTF map will be chosen.
• Rank maps by size. Server ops can pick a range of maps that will work well on their servers.
• A custom mapset. If you want to change the set of maps, then you have to edit the source code and recompile it. By default, I have it set to all of the CTF1 and CTF2 maps, minus the three largest server-hogging levels, plus a new "end" map mod you can find at The Midnight CTF page.

My CTF server has been patched to prevent two bugs. The first one was just annoying, the one which always told you that you were on the Blue team upon joining. The other one allowed anybody to crash the server pretty much at will. Thanks go to Dr.DooM for the patch.

Oh well, I guess I can't do Midnight CTF then. Every time somebody tried to connect that hadn't already installed the Threewave .pak files, the server crashes. I think it is just a bug in the Linux qwsv, but I don't have any other machines to test this on. So maybe later then we can all play in the dark..

[confirmed: it seems to be just the Linux qwsv that crashes when auto-download is enabled. Only when a connecting player doesn't already have the map, even if allow_download_maps is disabled. If I unpak all the files and remove the original .pak files, maybe it will work, but I'll wait until nobody is playing on my server before I go and test that.]

A new version of Midnight CTF has been released for QuakeWorld servers only. I am going to try running it for a few days to see if enough players enjoy it. You don't need to install anything to make it work, assuming that you've already installed the regular CTF files. What this mod does is turn out the lights, and gives you a flashlight and flares.

For a flashlight, use "impulse 45" or select your shotgun twice. For a flare gun, use "impulse 46" or select your grenade launcher twice.

More info is available at the Midnight CTF page.

A new version of QuakeWorld has been released, including OpenGL support for you lucky bastards with 3D video cards. Grab it from the official site, or from id's own archive.

Rant Mode Despite the fact that my server is always going to be some variant of CTF, one of my favorite mods is Team Fortress. In my opinion, there are too many people bitching about the spies. Team Fortress is a team game. You've got team-only communication with messagemode2, so use it! Only let people near the key if they spit out some kind of passphrase. Or make them jump twice, pause, jump once, and then approach. But don't bitch!

Source for QuakeWorld Rogue has been released from Oskilla's Bleat. So now I'm running a second CTF server on Rogue levels at rogue.niagara.com:27500. I've got a local copy of the client-side files here.

The votes are in: just about everybody would rather play normal CTF than Rogue CTF. I figure that's because normal CTF is free, and not everybody has purchased Rogue's excellent product. So pretty much the only time you'll see the Rogue server running instead of the CTF server is when I am personally playing a game versus other local players. Don't worry about us LPB's on our LAN, we'll play fair and have even numbers on both teams. <grin>