=VG= SemlerPDX
-
Posts
4,767 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Downloads
Gallery
Articles
AVCS Bug Reports (automated)
AVCS Bug Reports (manual)
VG Wiki
Blogs
Store
Everything posted by =VG= SemlerPDX
-
I am unable to properly function, so I'm copying a note I sent to a few of my oldest friends here at VG:
I can't login, I can't think. I can't even process life right now. I've been in a stunned shock since Sunday (Dec 31st) evening. In moments of clarity, I am reaching out to those I can think of - I consider many of you real friends, and I just want you all to know what has happened and why I'll be absent.On New Years Eve morning, my brother took his life. We were extremely close our entire lives almost like twins, but he had cut off contact with us all and moved far away for over a year. He had been struggling with mental health issues including audible hallucinations (hearing voices) that berated him and tortured him "verbally", as well as addiction problems, and we all have to just accept that he felt there was no other way to stop it all and escape. He was a talented musician and a knowledgeable composer. If any of you have watched some of my old gaming videos on YouTube, you've heard my brother's music in the background.
He will be cremated and released to us around the 12th, and I will be spreading his ashes at Wahclella Falls near or around then, presuming it is accessible this time of year, and we will hold a private Celebration of Life rememberance in our home somewhere around the 17th.
I may not come around for the next couple weeks, or until these matters have concluded, as I do not feel sociable at this time. Certain individuals can reach me when I am offline if there is a technical emergency, so contact =VG= m823us if there is a matter that requires my attention, and I will resolve it if/when I am able, and if not, it will go on the top of the "to do" list for when I am feeling better. I've already noted that I will be helping Oniblood work with the ARK Survival server as he expressed interest in that, and those who knew I was developing weekly PR event "team workshops" with custom maps should know I will continue with that project before too long.
I feel like I'm walking around in a daze, like a bad dream, and my time is filled with moments of painfully deafening silence and extreme grief, and the rest of it spent with family and friends, as people I've not talked to in years come over to express condolences. Hearing others talk about this all sounds like I'm listening to a commentary of my own life and it is too surreal to tolerate, so much so that my family now hushes up if I'm walking by when re-telling someone who has not yet heard, out of respect for my feelings.
I will eventually return because hanging out with friends online will help me to move forward and be strong, but I am having a hard time using the phone at this time and it's most comfortable for me to text for now - messages through this website or facebook are just fine if friends need to contact me.
Thank you all for understanding, and for being my friend.
-
-
3
-
- Report
- Show previous comments 8 more
-
Condolence. :/
-
Thank you all for the kind words
-
My condolences for Your and Your family's loss Sem. Stay strong as you always are no matter how hard it may be...
-
This looks like so much fun!! Thank you very much, TEDF!!! I'll be there throughout, and I'd love to lead a team; not sure which group, will decide something and send off the PM soon.
- 45 replies
-
- 2
-
-
- meh
- project reality
- (and 2 more)
-
Yea, this is pretty much what is happening already. Everyday, the server stops, performs a health check and backup of key files, swaps out the maplist file, and starts back up, all on a schedule. That's about as smart as it gets without me getting into zones that would not only require me to code additional utilities, but to add layers of security on top of it that increase the work load far into the realm of "why bother". Everything works rather well as it is, many persistent servers have a one to two hour maintenance window daily or weekly; ours is a daily maintenance window of only 2 minutes, and I don't think anyone here views that as unacceptable. If it was easy to improve on that, I would have already considered it - not to say I'm against going back to the drawing board, but the payout has to be worth the cost.
-
It's not like this is possible, and for some reason, we're just not doing it.... There's no shortage of quality of life codings that I've created on our server, but we have to work within the realm of what is feasible (and which doesn't create a gigantic back door into our server to accomplish a task), and not what merely sounds ideal on paper. PR is an extremely old game.
-
See those low peaks I've circled? Those are the average "lowest population times" over the past 7 days on the VG PR COOP Server, and they usually correspond to between 0300-0800 GMT. See how the peak is not exactly in the same place each day, how it fluctuates between a larger period and some days is WAY higher than others? This is because even though the server empties for the most part every day, 'when' that happens is an organic factor, so it varies with the day of the week, the season of the year (re. Holidays!), or with the phases of the moon itself (believe it or not). Since I cannot automate my daily restart/map rotation swap system to know how many people are online at a given time and then decide itself that the number is as low as the population is going to get in that 24 hour period, there is no way I can force our server to recognize that the "most off-peak hour possible" has changed for that particular day by, say, 45 minutes or more. Some of my automated systems on the server are able to wait for all players to empty out of the server, but this one needs to be forced to prevent issues where no one empties out and the server runs for 48 hours without it's scheduled reset/map rotation swap. PR is a mod built on a 12 year old game engine, and even some of the most recent, modern games aren't fully capable of such 'average player count rationalization' automation. It is already set up for the average "most off-peak hour possible" for sure, averaged over about a month. I wish it were possible to float it, but at times, we have to accept that what would be ideal is not always as easy to implement as it seems in discussion, if even possible at all. But, hey... better than Mutrah City starting map every single day, and after every single server crash, right? Could be worse.... your story could read, "every night we get into a good map, late when no admins are there to change the map - then it crashes back to Mutrah and the server empties out"
-
@Echo1 We're not trying to be mean, here, buddy. Seriously. Believe it or not, but I am personally quite sympathetic. When I began playing Project Reality COOP at VG back around 2010, it was during US midnight hours, and there were not only no Admins online, but I didn't see an actual =VG= member until I had been playing here for about a month. They just did not happen to have any clan members who regularly played during those late hours back then, and all of us regulars on the server knew it. It could get unruly at times, for sure. Not everyone who plays video games is a mature, level headed adult (to state the obvious). It's like, welcome to the internets, right? ugh We used the report function in game to make sure players knew we were all united in supporting the server rules even when Admins were not present, and once in awhile, we had to give up on an area, or asset we had rights to claim, or take a break for a few minutes to wait for a griefer/troll to get bored and move on. Yea, it pretty much sucked.. but we knew all the admins were sleeping or away, and our choice was to either not play, or play and just deal with it (without breaking the rules ourselves, or taking matters into our own hands). We didn't cry foul because there was no one to Admin, we just understood that rarely do ANY game servers ANYWHERE have 24/7 admins online, and even still a few of us fell in love with the community and it's values & spirit enough to make friends and eventually join the group, and then subsequently found ourselves as Admins in the game as a bonus. We also did not have non-VG Clan Member in-game PR Admins back then - this evolved over time to enable us to cover even more timezones by allowing players (who may even be in a different clan) to get vetted for integrity, respectfulness, level headedness, and a maturity level consistent with the values and spirit of the VG Clan.
-
that further makes my point
-
re. Steam - yes, we have one, but it's incredibly difficult to manage an online community in 5 places at once, which is why groups such as Steam, Facebook, Discord, etc. are less effective and less popular than our standard forums or TS3 -- also, because those services are so seldom used by the public OR our group, they just lose out as "the" way to make a community work, and end up as just sign posts leading to our true home - the TS3 and website, and game servers.
-
Like 8-bits said, look for PR Admins on TS3 first*, and use the report function in game so we can review any activity later. It's not a useless function - though there are always going to be times around Holidays or just in general, where no admins are online at that time. We are very careful in our Admin selection process and therefore it is not easy to simply fill the server with Admins who are covering all 24 hours of the server's uptime. It's not something that can be "fixed" on any server anywhere, it's just a thing that happens during non-peak times or during Holiday seasons such as this, and especially on older games such as this. We do appreciate specific reports here on the forum such as this, as it will direct our attention to the logs for the time period you are referring to. *I've been on TS3 for the last several hours, and I have PR tags next to my name which means I'm a PR Admin, and you could have maybe got my attention to sort out a mess. Not everyone might respond, if they were AFK for example, but it's still worth a try. Cheers!
-
[23:58:01 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: !r 2tarek steal [23:58:06 TEAM 2] KevinIsMyName: top stealing CAS squad's A-10! [23:58:10 TEAM 2] 2tarek: what [23:58:12 T2 SQUAD 3] KevinIsMyName: !admins [23:58:19 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: hurry before he crash it :D [23:58:27 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: please im not gonna wait 10 m [23:58:30 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: please ! :D [23:58:48 T2 SQUAD 3] Ranger >>>12<<<: !r 2tarek steal [00:00:42 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: 2 tarek i know u can understand my fucking language right now. bring the I10 back [00:00:50 GLOBAL] Ranger >>>12<<<: if you crash it its a bann for you [00:02:33 TEAM 2] 2tarek: i can understand you im not stupid like you Reviewing the logs, we found similar behavior under an alternate account as well. Because of this, 2tarek has placed on the banlist, and will be eligible for an unban provided he takes the time to read the rules here, and agrees to follow them. Thanks for the report! posting this just for fun; in that same log, I also uncovered some infighting between two of our VG Clan Members who are also PR Devs - time to ban some bots! (j/k) [00:19:52 TEAMKILL] [R-BOT] Fastjack [mec_jet_mig29_sp_bomblauncher_1] [R-BOT] melonmuncher /locked
-
Merry Christmas to all the Vet Gaming guys
=VG= SemlerPDX replied to Maverick_667th's topic in Everything Else
Merry Christmas everyone! -
Fun missions on the BMS Server today! Jeffu and I went after the 1st Tank Battalion(s) and got jumped by a MiG, so after that mission, we found the airbase he took off from which had been repaired. We fragged an OCA Strike to take out the runways with BLU-107B anti-runway penetrating bombs with drag chutes. Coming in just off the deck in manual bombing mode, we got jumped by a pack of MiG's and had to send them to hell before proceeding to bomb their home airbase - good times! Merry Holidays!
-
-
1
-
- Report
-
-
May the force be with you luke .. mmm sorry Semler .. happy hunting
-
lmao! "Get back to work, ya bunch of lazy asses!" -
We are going to go ahead an extend an Unban to you. You will be placed on the watch list and if you intentionally violate our rules again, the ban will be reinstated permanently. Understand that this is your one and only last chance. Unbanned and /locked
-
You were banned by Sausage for mass intentional teamkilling at the end of a round. Please wait while we discuss and review your unban request. In addition to the logs below, your account has far too many teamkills and if you are unbanned, you will be expected to watch your fire and spend more time identifying your targets before engaging - and if you intentionally teamkill another player again, you will be permanently removed from our server(s).
-
LMAO - even the base game isn't from the 1990's Weird thing, according to the wiki's, Battlefield 2 (the game PR is built on) was released 2005 (June) like he said...but the history of PR says PR was created July 2004.... so, maybe they started building PR on a alpha/beta of BF2 while it was in development? Odd... Falcon BMS, on the other hand, is a mod built on a base game (Falcon 4.0) that was released 20 years ago. Of course, the current iteration of BMS is only a few years old, and BMS only took the forefront over other Falcon 4.0 mods like Red Viper, etc. about 5-6 years ago.
-
Americans Act Now! Your Net Neutrality is Under Fire Again!!
=VG= SemlerPDX commented on =VG= SemlerPDX's article in News / Events
Well, it happened - FCC voted to kill Net Neutrality, here's the gist of it: (if you didn't know, don't be fooled by the accent, Jim Sterling IS an American, and lives in the deep South - having moved here many, many years ago from the UK) -
Request for a Carrier based Harrier Squadron?
=VG= SemlerPDX replied to =VG= Kavelenko's topic in Pilots Lounge
I can add Harrier Squadron(s) to the current carrier in the campain, the Vinson -- but I'm not familiar with adding another carrier battle group. I'll look into it this weekend and get it done. -
Looks very cool! Huge PvP events are what make the Arma series so awesome! Best of luck! Some friends of ours over at LAMBs might also be interested (link: nopryl.no )
-
If it does become a problem, I can always revert changes or fix them without resetting the entire campaign by editing the save in Mission Commander. Also, not going to assume anything malicious with the Bullseye being moved. I've done it myself when attacking the region of the Bullseye in order to make it less confusing when requesting information from AWACS. I'm sure if it was moved to an area that made it difficult for the entire theater to get easy to use data from AWACS, that it could be viewed as an unwanted/unhelpful, though - but of course, you can always just move it back anytime, so no harm, no foul (in a way). Thanks for the report and keep an eye out. If you see anything else, feel free to post it up and we'll have a look at it.
-
Gotta catch them all!! Deck-a-choo --- I choose YOU! -
That time when you trip over at public
=VG= SemlerPDX commented on =VG= Nyther's gallery image in Project Reality
duuurrrrr! -
Dogpile on the forklift!! -
PROMOTED!!
(I always think of the Battlefield Friends show whenever that happens here or in a game!!)
I wonder if I get a company car now? Or at least the keys to the company jet, I mean, right? haha!-
-
4
-
- Report
