The PlanetQuake crew deserve a rather large THANK YOU! Things kicked off to a grand start and we got got rather overwhelmed at the response! 5000 hits in 2 days! Snow'd under and plow'd over, would be more accurate!

        Who ever posted the screen shot by ComBat of Crunchy Frog and PsychoBat in action deserves a special thanks as they choked our server, with users, immediately! Such that we setup a second directly there after.

        The response has been amazing, and I think we got off to a decent start. The shear number of users showed us a few quirks we need to iron out. We are working on these. Just before the release here on PQ we had decided to "freeze" the code as is and merge it into the q2 v3.20 code base. Thus taking out our redundant code and whatever other "features" are not going to be used.

Missing..!

        As with all new MODs quite a few players "miss the point" and with Night Hunters this seems to have become an extremely large percentage. NH is not meant for DM style "frag fights" or quick kills.. It is designed for a suspenseful HUNT and some good chases. Small maps, our mistake for leaving them in the map rotation list, are not good for a lot of players. Predators die all too quickly and too many Marines kill their "buddies" way to often and wind up getting auto-kicked regularly. Everyone gets frustrated. Not good. For 4 or 5 good players small maps can be severely frantic and a lot of fun, just not for a lot of new players starting out.

        Larger maps give Marines a decent chance to survive and get equipped and give hi-ping predators room to sneak around and take out Marines with "smarts". The larger the map, the more suspense. Some do get impatient, being used to mega free-for-alls. This is a hunt, at night, with a powerful adversary ..some team work just might be useful to flush the bugger out. :)

Quirks..

        Some things will be addressed immediately. One, Marines killing Marines is going to be more painful as an example. An exaggerated warning and greater penalties are a couple of possibilities. One server admin (Coldly unmentioned) got seriously annoyed and set the "MaxMarineKill" to 1 and everyone got kicked real quick. Ouchy. Some Marines do fire without regard for their "buddies" and then other Marines do jump in front of yer guns all to quickly. <sigh>

        ...thanks again to the PlanetQuake crew, we get a chance to "pay back" the Quake2 community with some more fun! LOL

        The "Bats" salute "id".

Version 1.44.4a of the server has been released and can be downloaded from he Download section if you want to run a server yourself.  If you just want to play, you don't need to download the 1.44.4a files.  You just need the client files which can be downloaded in the Download section..

1.44.4a fixes a few minor problems such as:

-another problem with the scoreboard.  For now we are working 'around' the problem..
-allow all the sounds to be downloaded when connecting to the server (but I recommend you just download the pak file - it'll be quicker)
-cleaned up the menu a bit
-when someone got killed and they had their flashlight on, the buzzing of the light could still be heard where the person died even though the person is dead

We will be moving to the 3.20 code soon.  This will allow us to use some of the 3.20 features and improve what we have by looking at the Xatrix and Rogue sources..
 

Friday December 25th, 1998

Merry Christmas everyone!
I have posted some new screen shots in the (take a guess) Screen Shots section.  Thanks to Combat for sending me the first four!

-Overflowing while switching levels at a frag limit hit has been fixed.  It had something to do with the new scoreboard
-NH Scoreboard doesn't say 'Intermission' anymore when displaying the scores
-No more annoying spawn function errors on the server console when manually switching to a regular map
-Menus cleaned up 
-new command added: 'SETUP'.  This command will bind all the default keys as explained in the about section and in the help menu in the game.  It will also re-bind the ENTER [ ] and TAB keys to the defaults for Quake2.  Sometimes a user has messed up bindings on those keys which prevents the menu from functioning.  The menu uses the same system as the inventory does so if the users inventory doesn't work with those keys, then neither will the Night Hunters menu..

If you have any suggestions or comments on Night Hunters, please give us some feedback on the Message Board or email us directly.

More work will be done on the web pages as soon as we can get to it, but for now you can find all the required files for playing Night Hunters from the Download section.

Also check out the 'story' and the 'tips' for playing Night Hunters..

V1.44.4 fixes a problem with the new scoreboard.

Night Hunters Server files
Night Hunters v1.44.3 SERVER files are available for download from the Files area.  Both Linux and Win32 versions are available.  Please read the readme.txt file included with the archives.  If you have any problems, please email myself or BatCat.

We still get an amazing amount of new people regularly! Sometimes this is a problem as most do not know a thing about NH! Less than 1/2 are smart enough to ask, some just disconnect thinking their system is screw'd up as there is no "lights" and the rest jump right and assume it DM and kill marines won't listen and get kicked. Generally this just adds mayhem. We are thinking that an "opening menu" is needed with the default position going to "help/setup". This will cure a lot of the mayhem, I'd imagine.

Backtrack a little here.. The "bats" have started helping out with the programing of Night Hunters. Majoon is still "boss" and could nuke our help at any time. We will not release anything, he will. DingBat is doing most of the work, BatMax follows doing mostly system stuff yet helping with the odd tweaks and myself (BatCat) doing the most serious consulting and suggestion thingys. (Blame me if it all goes screwy as I opened my big mouth and stuffed my even bigger foot in the door.)

So far..
What we have done so far is take over from v1.41 (might have been 1.42 or 1.43) and started 1.44, taking snippets from Majoons 1.5, like map rotation, and adding new things, like Flares ...building up to a full 1.5. Well that's the plan at least.

Map Rotation is working.
I have wedged in a level map between each DM map. Some are not very good for a lot of users, some are. The thought now is to go with two map lists, large and small maps, and switch automatically between them depending on the number of users at the end of a level. (one suggestion was to add another predator and 3rd map list if you had ALOT of players, like 20 or more!)  8-)

Flares in beta.
A Marine would spawn with a handful of Flares and throw them like Grenades ..bounce, bounce, glow, then fade. This is working. Tweaked colour, size and look. Only thing left is deciding what defaults to have for number of Flares and burn time, also what to give the predator in balance to this!

One thought is to give the predator a quick escape TELEPORT. Work has started on this. Before the advent of flares we noticed that sometimes the predator would start in the middle of a bunch of  Hunters and get slaughtered immediately. Not fair! Personally I have done a bunny hop to the nearest lava/slime hole to respawn elsewhere, swallowing the -2 points and hoping for a better chance. Rare, but the only thing one could do. Suicide is going to have its own pitfalls now too. So the idea of giving the predator a single "quick teleport out" idea was born. So given the "no fair" situation above AND flares ..this might be a good solution. One variation has the predator lock a destination then recall/teleport back to it in times of serious trouble. Testing has started on this.

DingBat is doing some pretty cool stuff, huh.

Oh, I saw, well almost saw, a screen shot of a Night Hunters map on their main news page. I was in a hurry and never let the picture fully load. 

Upgraded Quake 2 to v3.19