Bunches of new stuff

There's a pant-load of new stuff on Far Cry Community Maps. I added a phpBB forum and a coppermine image gallery. Pretty easy to do with fantastico out of cpanel. We're up to 150 files for download with over 90,000 files downloaded to date. That's an average of 750 downloads per day since I first started the site. Bandwidth for the site is right around 20 GBytes of transfer per day. Pretty frickin awesome, I had no idea I would be hosting that much stuff when I first started this little hobby.

I'm looking for ways to help subsidize the hosting costs for the site; all that bandwidth does not come for free. The ads and PayPal donation link that I have added are coming up short in terms of paying the bills. So it looks like in March I'll be adding web hosting plans for sale, reselling some of my bandwidth capacity. The idea is rather than try to figure a way to charge for just map downloads, I'll offer something of value and use the proceeds to subsidize the overall hosting costs. Raynserv has been fantastic in terms of offering me reseller permission, giving lots of advice on how to proceed, and being fair with pricing. Couldn't ask for a better host. To give you an idea of where we're at, my next incremental purchase of bandwidth will put me at 1 terrabyte (TB) per month. That's 1000 GB per month, folks.

What is 1 TB per month of transfer? Well, I have a cable modem broadband connection with a 4 Mbps download capability. If I were to use that 4 Mbps and download files continuously for 24 hours a day, I would download around 1 TB in a month.

All I need to do is finalize on the name of the hosting site and put together the web pages for it all. I'm going to be lazy and use a pre-built template, so it should go reasonably fast once I get the name figured out.

So to the thousands of readers of this blog (hah!); if you need a web site, give your pal Slugworth a shout. You'll get a good price, great features, and great service.

New design for main page

A few weeks ago NowWhat sent me an email offering to help make some changes to the design of the map display information for the main page of the web site. We set it up and he got busy. Working with uBm from www.kapsreiter.org, he figured out how to get map play time to display on www.farcry-maps.com. But that's not all, he also redesigned the display of the maps for download, categorizing by game type and enabled through tabs at the top of the map display.

It's live now, and all in all, a very cool result. Many thanks to NowWhat and uBm, this is something I've wanted on the site for a long time.

nifty little web page

Found some neat ideas on WebMonkey and put a couple to use. The result is a capability to have an indication of the users currently on the web site. Now the front page gives a count of current users in the site stats section. I also coded a short php page to show more infomration about the current users - IP address, host name, and pages/files they are using. Example is here.

Geez, this kind of stuff is fun. If my real job didn't pay so well, I'd quit and do this kind of thing full time.

I should be sleeping

Been a long week, lots of hours getting the new Far Cry community map pack ready and out the door. Plus had some big time real world work stuff to address this week. But it's all good, map pack is out, lots of downloads, mostly positive feedback, and some good gaming going on.

Moving day

Moved farcry-maps.com to a new web hosting provider today. In the end it was pretty simple once I got all the map files moved. New provider has good prices and top notch service. Check out raynserv.com if you are looking for a hosting site.

New features are available with raynserv., I'm looking to see what I can use to make farcry-maps.com even more easy to use.

It just keeps getting better

Whee ... got a comment on my blog. Anonymous, so I don't know who it was.

So along with the new production 18-player game server, I'm keeping my other dedicated server running. I can probably host 6 to 8 players max. I will use it to host more new maps; play testing, messing around, etc. I'm here to serve.

Working on changing web site providers this week. My current provider is not so good. New provider gave me a package deal with the game server and has so far given far better service and support than my current provider. Biggest trick is getting the mySQL database that crives the main page moved. Second biggest trick is moving the 2 GBytes of content quickly and easily. So far, these seem to be going well.

Slugworth's early Christmas Present

My Christmas present came early ... a full blown 18 man server on a commercial grade internet connection. Loaded it up with custom assault maps. wheee!

Gone again

Leaving town again, third time in five week. More jet lag awaits, I think it's 14 time zones this time. Leave today around noow, touch down at 8:00 PM Sunday after about 16 hours of travel. No Far Cry on my laptop, so I'll be going through withdrawl. Hope the hotel has broadband, wouldn't want to end up like xtencilate.

Ooooh .... Aaaah

Did a little PHP/mySQL programming this morning and added a running file and download count for the site in some white space on the main page of Far Cry Community Maps.

Some numbers

Uploaded a half dozen new maps tonight, and I was curious so I ran some numbers. We have over 90 maps available for download, with a cumulative download count of over 27,000! That's an average of around 300 downloads per map. There are 30 maps with over 300 downloads, 12 with over 600 downloads and 7 with over 1000 downloads.

Thats a lot of downloads.

Real dedicated server

Put together a decent computer system with some spare parts I had left over from various other system upgrades. Set this system up to run as as Far Cry dedicated server and nothing else. Previously the dedicated server I was running was off of my gaming rig, so it sharing resources with everything else running on that system.

Now, dedicated server is truly dedicated, with around 360 Kbps upload and 4 Mbps download for a network connection. When I play Far Cry now, the dedicated server doesn't suffer. Coolness.

A fistfull of FFA

Sweetness. Got the next map pack released. It's full of FFA and TDM maps. Here's the things you have to do to get a decent release of something like this:

1. Figure out which maps might be good
2. Decide on your theme
   
3. Play test the maps to see if they are OK, don't have technical problems, are interesting, etc.
4. Put together an installer, upload it, and ask some friends to DL and test the installer
5. Fix any installer problems and retest
   
6. Update web pages as necessary
7. Set up your server mapcycle.txt file to play the new maps
8. Run each map through the server. You make sure they load OK, and get a screen shot for each map
9. Put screen shot files on your server so your server status page work correctly
10. Announce your release on the appropriate forums
11. Watch the downloads, and then watch people try out the maps on your game server
    

A fair amount of work, but there's no reason to do a half-assed job. Do it right or don't do it at all.

Phear my l33t PHP skillz

Well, really more like my lame PHP skills. In any event, I modifed the main page for the web site to display the files for download through database-driven PHP scripts. The files now show the download count from the web site instead of the Gamespy server stats. Further, the files are listed in descending order of DL counts. DL counts are automatically updated when the link URLs are clicked.

I started with download management scripts from Exploding Panda, then modified the database schema and scripts to include enough information to make things fully DB driven. I converted the index.html file to an index.php form, and included the db connection and sorting code to make it all work.

Some travel and some updates

Been home for exactly one day in the past ten days. After seeing the parents at the beginning of the month, I had a biz trip to Corporate HQ and spent a week doing that special kind of corporate fun and games.

Got back this afternoon, then spent some time updating web site stuff. The main page now tracks and displays downoad counts for each MP file; I'll get the SP stuff done in a day or two. I'm underwhelmed with display speed of the page, I'll have to figure out how to do mySQL tuning or re-write the PHP script that drives the display to be more efficient; we'll see in a few days.