I'm pleased to announce that after nearly a month of work in Source SDK, I have released the first beta version of MGE Training V8 for public play on our MGE Beta server at tf2dm.trashedgamers.org:27015! MGE Training V8 is designed to eventually replace MGE Training V7 completely, and has the following improvements:
-Two new arenas: Gravelpit B and cp_process middle have been added as brand new arenas. No arenas were removed from mge_training_v7!
-Some exploit fixes, because I was tired of seeing trolls jump out of arenas due to player clip errors.
-Optimizations/Tweaks: At my discretion, I have removed unused/unnecessary textures from the map or replaced rare textures with very similar textures used elsewhere on the map. I also added/fixed a few details that were missing or broken, and converted the Power 4 displacements in the Badlands arenas to Power 3 displacements by hand, as the original displacements (despite Valve using them in official Badlands maps) cause severe problems with terrain physics calculations during compiling, and added nearly 7MB to the final BSP. Because I redid the displacements in Badlands, they do deviate from the original displacements, so the terrain in some spots may look different. I tried my best to make sure key points were as close to the original as possible to prevent problems with players getting stuck in spots or whatever.
I would like to receive any bug reports through our "Suggestions" form on our website, or email us at admin@trashedgamers.org with any problems you might have discovered. I want to make sure this map is near perfect before it is released with a configuration for use by all servers.
Many thanks to Lange for maintaining the plugin and making the new configuration for this map, as well as everyone who has helped me or him test the map or supported MGEMod in any way. :D
I've made some changes to the servers over the last few days, most of which apply to our Donators. I figured I would mention them here so everybody knows what was changed.
First off, every Donator (if you donate $5 or more as your first donation, or have already donated pre-Pyromania weekend) now receives Round End Immunity. This means that you will not die from anything at the end of the round, and you get a buff banner particle effect and be "marked for death." Donator chat text is now olive as well, and because we have some Admins who have previously donated, there is a new [Admin/Donor] category with olive colored chat text and Round End Immunity. If you are one of those players, please contact us to make sure you are changed to the new group in our database. Donation status still lasts forever (as long as we have the technical means to recognize you).
Secondly, we have upgraded to a new advertisements plugin that supports the recently released RGB chat color support in the Source 2009 engine. So, I've changed the default colors of our ads and may tweak them further. Hopefully, they are slightly more visually appealing than green, green or green. :P
Lastly, I forked the Alltalk Manager into another new plugin that toggles sv_allow_voice_from_file at different times of the round. My intent with this is to have periods of time where micspams are allowed, and other times when they are not. While micspammers might feel more restricted by this update, our player guidelines have stated that micspamming is only allowed during the humiliation round and setup. We'll see if toggling that ConVar works as I wanted it to, but in the end it would prevent us from having to mute or ban micspammers, and prevent possible player/admin conflicts and drama resulting from that. If there are any players who play sound clips on our servers and want to test this functionality, that would be greatly helpful to me.
As always, thank you for your support of TrashedGamers! Your donations and playtime on our servers keep our community going strong. As much as we try to manage server costs and keep them lower, they do still cost a tremendous amount since we rent from a quality GSP. Any money you donate is that much less Xena has to pay from her own pocket, so keep that in mind!I am pleased to announce that at this time, we now have a TF2 server in Atlanta, GA. One of our donators got in touch with a coworker who operates a personal dedicated server. This dedicated server is located in a datacenter environment in Atlanta, and the operator only uses a small portion of the resources that this server offers, so he made a very worthwhile decision to let us operate a game server on it, instead of letting it basically sit idle. I would like to extend many thanks to \TG/ Cykotix for donating his dedicated server resources for our usage, as well as \TG/ Cimpy, one of our donators who introduced Cykotix to our community. We may potentially add another game server in the future, depending on what Cykotix wishes to do.
So, our first TF2 server in Atlanta is "Absinthe," a 24 slot standard server. The hostname we made for it is atlanta.trashedgamers.org:27015 and feel free to add it to your favorites list.
Again, many thanks to \TG/ Cykotix for his generous contribution to our community, as well as the rest of our donators who keep our community well supported!
After nearly a year, I decided to pursue the task of redoing the website, as I thought it needed to be improved significantly. So, today, I went ahead and pushed myself to make a site that I feel is much more appealing than our previous one. I hope everyone agrees with the revamped website, and let us know what you think on our forums!
I'd like to thank those who have chosen to make a donation towards our community this month as well as all the previous months we have been in operation. The ChipIn widget that we are using on our websites as of last month seems to be working out well, and I felt it would be beneficial for everyone to see roughly how much we spend on server rental costs, as well as how many donations have been made recently, to hopefully help keep donations more steady. Last month, we raised $115 or 82% of our monthly goal of $140, which is great! We're glad to see the support of our community from everyone, whether they be a new player or a seasoned regular member.
This morning, I added this month's ChipIn widget to the websites, and added the past month's donator chat tags for the respective donators. If you donated to us anytime in the past and haven't received your tag in error, please message Ms. X3na, Jstn7477 or send us an email at admin@trashedgamers.org with your PayPal name and your Steam Community ID e.g. "http://steamcommunity.com/id/jstn7477" so that we can match up your donation with your Steam profile and give you your tag. Remember, you will have your Donator tag for as long as the method we give them works. You won't lose it in 3 months or some other silly rule if you choose to only donate one time. And, of course, you're always welcome to donate more than once if you wish, although your chat tag will not change.
We thank you for your continued support of TrashedGamers! Let us know of anything we can do to make our community better for everyone via our forums or by emailing us at admin@trashedgamers.org. Thank you!A TrashedGamers regular, TempVariable, created this awesome montage from TF2 replays taken on our servers. On June 27th, 2011, this video was featured on the official Team Fortress 2 website! http://teamfortress.com/post.php?id=5748