I only read a handful of gaming sites… Mostly Kotaku and Kotaku.  I find there’s really not much actual gaming news to be had, and there’s only so many snarky comments I can take from 15 year olds who are just learning how to drop the f-bomb appropriately.

That said, I luffs me some Zero Punctuation.  It’s a video… thing that’s a bit of a combination of Bobcat Goldthwait and the entirety of IGN’s review history.  Yahtzee Croshaw is an Australian who apparently has done auction calling in the past.  He talks a mile a minute, has a fantastic wit, and shockingly amusing stick figure animations.  He releases a new one each Wednesday… Its worth checking out.  And if you’ve not seen them before, watch the whole archive… great way to spend an afternoon.

I feel the need to chronicle the construction of the TF2 boxen.  Between the 10 visits from UPS/FedEx, 2 trips to Microcenter, and 3 different assembly/integration parties, it was quite an adventure. 

First, to be clear, the moose watched us always.

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Well, we survived ShmooCon. The TF2 tourney went better than we could have hoped. The scoreboard worked great, even tho we did some on the fly debugging/feature additions during the first few hours of free play. We cut off registration at 8 teams (48 people) as with any more teams and we would have run out of time to play all the matches. All in all, including free play, we had 116 different users logged in the scoreboard database. Not too bad. You can see the scoreboard in action with the streaming video on flickr.

The winners, you ask? The first place team was the Shmoobs:

• squidly1
• unkron
• happy fun grenade
• senior noob
• mish
• bbtick

They all got a poster pack of TF2 posters (we bought) and an AMD poster (complements of AMD). The individual winner of the whole weekend with the most points was skynet3. He received an ATI 4850X2 complements of AMD. W00t.

We’ll be posting more about the scoreboard and all the code that makes it work here in another day or so.

Can’t make it to ShmooCon? No problem. The ShmooCon TF2 server will be publicly available for play on the Internet as well as at the con (knock on wood). When there’s no official matches going on the server will be available for public use so you can frag ppl at the con. It’s a good way to take out your aggression for not getting a ticket. Watch this space for server info.

Logan, you’ve got this all tested out, right?

Two weeks from ShmooCon. Normally around this time of year when I give status updates on crazy projects that are going to come to a head at ShmooCon, the general feeling is “fear and panic” because nothing is done. While there may be some panic, there is little fear. Things are really coming together on this. A few updates:

Hardware
One of the big challenges of the tourney is getting together enough systems to run TF2 on to make a real tourney out of it. We went through a long build/buy/rent/try to find sponsors decision making process. We spec’d out new machines from Dell and iBuyPower that met the “has dual cores and a stand alone video card” requirements of TF2. Those quotes ended up being a bit more than we wanted to spend. We looked at renting TF2 capable machines, which while the prices weren’t bad, if we do this at least twice (like we’re planning on for DefCon this summer) renting would cost just as much as buying. Building them from parts at Newegg actually seemed to be the best deal all the way around, but it was still a bit rich. All our sponsorship requests had come up empty… until we contacted AMD.

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So, I’ve been forcing myself to play spy more and more. It’s by far my least played class (12 hours vs 170 hours for demo) and many of those hours were for achievement farming and not “real” game play. Last night I was on the No Heroes payload server playing pl_norad_b3 spying it up on defense. I had one of those epiphany moments that makes you realize why spy is probably the coolest class. Blue was pushing the cart with 8 people (it was a bit of a massacre). I came up behind as a medic, backstabbed 6 of them and assisted with a kill on the 7th. I left one guy standing while I burned to death. w00t! What a riot. I plan on being a spy a lot more. It’s like being a jerk in real life without the negative ramifications.

Cashworks. Seriously one of my favorite payload maps. I can’t get enough of it. Created be eerleone, the map is still under development, though it’s out of alpha phase and is in beta testing. eerleone has an interesting definition of “alpha” and “beta”. The alpha releases were very well refined, but the map periodically had some pretty major changes in gameplay as playtesting and feedback progressed. There were very few bugs in the alpha releases, which is a nice change from some other maps. Now that the map is in beta, there seem to be just minor bugfixes with the gameplay largely untouched.

Keep on reading for the cashworks reivew. I’ll warn you, it’s gushing and full of teddy bears.

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Over the last year, we’ve been going through the incredible learning curve of becoming game server admins. Between simply understanding the software used to run the server (in our case, SRCDS) to figuring out all the platform and performance tuning issues, it’s been quite a climb. While we generally have a pretty good handle on the software, we’re still struggling with hardware selection.

The initially platform we ran on was an old 2GHz celeron (single core) server from Rackmount. This machine didn’t make it past about 4 users until the lag about blew it out of the rack. Yikes. So then the system got upgraded to a 2 x dual core 2GHz Opteron. We used taskset to nail a server down to a core and fired things up. This time we got to about 8 users and things got really laggy. Shocking for a pretty serious piece of iron. So I bought 2 x dual core 2.8GHz (2222’s I think) off of eBay. I kid you not, I got them both for a shade over $100, and they showed up in a DVD case wrapped in duck tape. The chips still had thermal paste on the back of them. Don’t ask, don’t tell I guess.

Got these installed and we ended up with exactly the same results. Turns out that Linux pulls the cores back to 1GHz to save energy until more CPU is needed. Apparently the algorithm to determine “need” assumes that you aren’t running one processor hungry process that can’t run on more than one core. Because even at 80% load, the CPU’s were still at 1GHz. So we hardwired it to 2.8GHz and things got much better. But still not as good as we’d like. Now at 16 or so users the server really starts to labor.

I think there’s some tuning left to do, but I don’t think there’s 100% performance to squeeze out of it. I just don’t think our box can become a 32 slot server without a damn miracle. Or a change of vendor. I’ve heard for a while that Intel performs better than AMD for SRCDS. Well, we just ordered up a i7 2.6GHz setup (complete with SSD) for the server at ShmooCon. I’m going to install an OS on SRCDS and test out performance on an i7, Opteron 22xx, previous gen Xeon, and current gen Xeon. This may not get done before the con, but watch this space for the results.