Last weekend I bought a 17″ MacBook Pro to replace my older 15″ MBP.  It’s fast, has a proper HD screen, and a decent video card.  My oldest kid has my oldest MBP, and the youngest kid has a MacBook.  My wife has an MBP…  It’s safe to say the house is full of Macs.  They’re the systems we use all day long for work, play, entertainment, and hiding behind.

That said, we’re also a house that likes to game.  I’ve got a big gaming PC rig that I use for TF2 et al (well, really, is there another game other than TF2?).  The Wii gets used mostly by the kids.  But over the last few years we’ve all started to play more games on our Mac’s.  Granted they’re all portable systems, but they have competent video cards.  In theory the Mac makes a great gaming platform with it’s advanced hardware, solid OS, and great reliability.  But go to the Apple Store and try to buy the latest and greatest AAA title for the Mac.  Good luck.  So how is the Mac for a gaming platform?  Is it a viable alternative for the hardcore (or even casual) gamer, or are we just hitting our heads on the wall?

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Against the better judgement of the part of me that values free time and productivity, I went out and bought the latest Wolfenstein title on launch day (yesterday, aka: August 19th).  The reviews of it seem positive, and the gameplay videos look impressive.  Any game that’s got particle guns and flame throwers seem like they’re worth a shot.

It’s been a while since I bought a new PC FPS, mostly because its hard to top the greatest FPS ever… TF2.  I’ve purchased a few titles in the last 2 years that I hoped would pull me away from TF2 including Farcry 2 and Fallout, but sadly neither title held my interest.  So, does Wolfenstein fare any better?  Let’s see.

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We’ve got t-shirt designs!  Check this out:

Front (over pocket area):

Back (full):

This will be a two color imprint on a black tshirt (SHOCKER!).  If you’re interested, please let me know the number and sizes you want.  We’ll be selling these at cost (which is probably about $10-$12 per depending on how many we order).  Cut off for the orders is July 12.  There will not be any spares for sale at DefCon.

Well, better late than never in posting this. Maybe not since l0l0 and Nick are hard at work at the next version, but a few ppl have asked about this so whatever.

Here’s the code for the TF2 scoreboard we used at ShmooCon.  Features include:

• Player stat tracking
• Per match scoring
• Sexy flex floating widgets full of various stats
• Support for real time flash video streaming of the match (this was really hokey to get working.  We used an audio cable from line out to line in, and used a software screen cap driver to present valid interfaces to VLC.  VLC then streamed those two devices to the linux server as MP4 which then transcoded it all to FLV with VLC on the Linux side.  Crazy)
• See http://www.nomoose.org/wiki/index.php/ShmooConPlanning

You can sort of see the scoreboard in action here.  Anyhoo, we’ll have a new update of it all for DefCon.  Stay tuned.

Get your teams together and mark your calendar. Qualifiers will be the evenings of July 17-18. As teams sign up, we’ll work with the team captains to finalize scheduling. Also, we’ll group the individual reg’s together into teams for the quals as well.

If you haven’t signed up, please do so sooner rather than later. NOTE you don’t need a full team to sign up a team. If you’ve got 4 or 5 friends you want to play with, register a team and we’ll fill the blanks up with individual reg’s later.

http://www.nomoose.org/dctf2/

Team and individual registration for the TF2 tourney is now open.

http://www.nomoose.org/dctf2/

Also, we will have one of the Capri rooms for the entire weekend. This means we can support more teams and have open play throughout the weekend as well. 

As far as signup goes, we think it will fill up pretty quickly, so get your teams together now and head on over. We’ll be having qualifiers in late June/early July to set team rankings. The qualifiers are not required, but if you don’t participate, you will be ranked lower than any team that does participate. That means in the first round you’ll be up against the better teams to start. So if you don’t want to face the pain, you should play in the quals.

So last weekend I gave a talk on Living with Game Servers at Notacon in Cleveland (which rocks in case you haven’t heard).  The talk was basically a broad coverage of how game servers work, what it takes to setup and maintain them, and a few security issues.  It went well if not a bit rushed… Drew Curtis from Fark was before me and he ran a bit long, and then we had a few audio problems at the beginning.  But all in all I got good feedback so I assume that means it went well.  Also, I had a great time at Notacon.  If you’re in the Cleveland area in April next year, be sure to check it out.  

The PowerPoint can be found here.  And if you’d like to actually watch the talk, you can get that here.  Thanks to Media Archives for once again making the trek across the country to film an East Coast con.  Ted, you’re a rockstar.  Please support Ted and buy some DVD’s.

So it looks like we’re a go for the TF2 tourney at DefCon.  We’ve got an official thread on the forums now. Feel free to comment there.  We’ve also got the signup site about finished.  Hopefully in the next week or two we’ll have it online and linked from here.  

Still not exactly sure on the final format of the tourney and the location at the con.  We’re still working the details out and it may depend a bit on how many folks we get signed up.  Stay tuned for more info.