|
more recent news | previous news
| |
|
Apr 11
|
New Map Archive update. A bunch of us on #bolo talked over my
proposed policy change yesterday, and I've gotten some email feedback
too, thanks. Wharf rat is in the process of looking over the existing
'famous map maker' collections both at the Official Bolo Archive and
courtesy of several private map maker/collectors such as palp and
sluggo. He will weed out the random swamp nasties and many repeats, but
otherwise keep each collection as complete as possible. The 2000+ maps in the old map archive will still be available in some sort of compressed archive format, with an online listing so you can find old stuff easily. ThoughtPort FTP archive to be shut down. I've heard from the Powers That Be at ThoughtPort, and they are in the process of shutting down their Bolo FTP archive and will put up a forwarding notice to my new one. I think this is a good time to acknowledge their contributions and generosity to the game over the last year. Many of us are quick to blame them for all the evils of the world, but in truth they donated considerable time and bandwidth at a time when it was really needed. Without them, Bolo would have died off long ago. While things probably could have been managed better, I think we should still be grateful.
|
|---|---|
|
Apr 9
|
Proposed Change to Map Submission Policy.
There are over 2100 files in the Official Bolo Archive, but
94% of them are maps. Yes, there are actually 2000+ maps out there!?!
This is IMHO fairly silly. It's quite difficult to find any one specific map, because it takes forever to maneuver down the directory path to /pub/bolo/maps/j-k/whatever... ugh! then find the map which may be named quite differently than its 'normal' name out of the scores in each subdirectory. In any event, how important is it to maintain such a service anyway? Do we really need to humor every map-maker wannabe who invents some silly map which probably will never be played? It's a considerable load on disk space and more importantly a burden in time to manage everything - time which nobody has, certainly not me. Here's a proposal.
Thanks to vert for most of the ideas, but flame me not him.
|
|
Apr 8
|
Vert is da man! Today we bring you 2 amusing URLs courtesy of
vert. His collection of wall-in's is available at http://lucid.cba.uiuc.edu/~csh/misc/bolosnapz/,
while his impressive massage movie (1 MB) is available at http://lucid.cba.uiuc.edu/~csh/movies/timing.mov,
also mirrored at our Bolo movie
theater. Kids, don't try this at home! Most Popular Maps - update. Here are the most tracked maps according to bolo.usu.edu, showing the number of times each map has been played recently. I don't bother to add together the misspelled variants because I have no clue which is the right spelling, it would be a pain, plus for all I know the map was intentionally renamed.
Tournament Games Open Games 57 Chew Toy 4 97 Everard Island 50 Everard Island 13 Wash DC map 46 Filled Chew Toy 11 Double the Fun 46 Chew Toy 96 6 OpenGame Acres 29 Easter Island III 6 DH-Oil Rig 27 Chew Toy Variant 5 starsearch 26 Chew Toy 2 5 Slugfest XXVIII 23 DH-Oil Rig 5 Drive-By Shoot-Out 19 Double the Fun 5 CookMap1 500/2 15 Slugfest IV 4 Smugfest 15 Chew Toy II 4 Gothic Industrial 14 Crankcase 4 Dead Pills!! 13 DH-Oil Rig v2 4 DH's OilRig 12 Chew Toy 3 4 Close Encounter 11 pesty 4 Christmas Fix 11 Skew Toy 2 4 Bolo Requiem 11 Hell's Rig 4 Anyone welcome! 10 chew toy2 3 Raptor World 10 Oil Rig 3 Pink Panther Strikes Again 10 Chew Toy IV 3 MOB-Castle Island
|
|
Apr 7
|
Sorry for the long hiatus, I've been incredibly busy since returning
from vacation, plus things have been relatively quiet on the Bolo
front. After a few weeks of testing, the Official Bolo FTP Archive is stable and ready for business. You may upload stuff to the incoming directories. For now I'll just deal with these files manually and see how much time it takes. You must follow the directions in the .message files in each directory, or your uploaded files may be discarded.
Joke from #bolo today: If you haven't yet, be sure to add your name and email address to the Bolo Rolodex. This is not a mailing list in the sense that you will never receive any mail from me just because you're on the list. It simply allows your friends who may not know your email address to find you for whatever reason, such as to discuss a game you just played, or to set up a game or meeting, or just to be friendly. This is a periodic reminder that all pages on this site are copyrighted by Joseph Lo and Chris Hwang. This is true of all web pages even if there isn't an explicit copyright notice - if you're interested you can check out a relevant legal reference pertaining to the copyrighting of newsgroup FAQs. We've had a few incidences of abuse recently, so I just wanted to remind everybody again. If you are interested in copying or mirroring anything off this site, email me first. You'll find me a lot friendlier than my lawyers.
|
|
Mar 31
|
I'm back from my vacation, did ya miss me? :) I'm still catching up on
stuff but here are 2 new developments. New WWW page for 3 tracker stats. Nix (He Who Runs Tracker) has improved his tracker stats page, which now features 3 plots, showing the number of players, games, and tracker accesses per each hour of the day. It is updated semi-automatically every so often, i.e. when nix needs to procrastinate. New version of BoloScape. Nathan Lamont has updated his pseudo-random map generator program BoloScape 0.06A. It now runs on PPC only, requires 8 bit color (instead of 4 bits which is not possible on some monitors), and has a slightly smaller window to fit in a 640x480 monitor.
|
|
Mar 21
|
Jolo on Vacation. I'll be out of town all next week, so there
will not be regular Bolo News updates.
|
|
Mar 20
|
New WWW page for 2 tracker stats. Nix's 2 plots are now on 1 page at
http://bolo.usu.edu/~nix/stats.html. More Tracker Stats. As nix continues to procrastinate from writing his grant proposal, here is another interesting plot of tracker accesses at different times of the day. Tracker Stats. Today we bring you 2 interesting glimpses into how we all play Bolo. Using statistics from the bolo.usu.edu official U.S. tracker, nix generated a plot showing average number of active games during each hour of the day. Somewhat surprisingly, the most games are played between 5 and 6 PM EST - East Coast people playing happy hour games? Another interesting stat is the now automated Top 20 Most Popular Maps started on the tracker. There are separate lists for tourny/strict tourney vs. open games. Again it is surprising how popular certain specific maps are. CT96 and EI3 are not far behind Everard among tourny games, and CT96 is the #2 open game map as well!
|
|
Mar 19
|
New Bolo archive. It's finally ready for public testing at ftp://ftp.lgm.com/bolo/.
Please note that it is not final by any means. I've cleaned out some of
the ancient binaries which won't work anymore and updated some stuff
too. There are still a lot of things that need updating, but right now
I'm opening the site up so people can help test the network bandwidth
etc. Right now you should be able to upload stuff to /pub/bolo/incoming/maps or /pub/bolo/incoming/other but there is no facility for dealing with those files yet, so don't start uploading important stuff yet - anything I find there might just get tossed w/o warning. Incidentally "fly" will likely be the new location of the Bolo home page, but that's still many weeks away at the earliest. The machine "fly" is a SPARC 5 running Linux, more or less dedicated to FTP and WWW serving. New Borgs by Masher. All of these are available from the new FTP server ftp://ftp.lgm.com/bolo/. Here is a note from the author: "I put together these 3 'borgs (not stand alone brains) after a few discussions with a friend that I used to play bolo with. Hugh and Builder Helper add some 'features' (depending on your perspective) that we thought we'd like to see. Borg Template was put together do be a tutorial of sorts on how to put a borg/brain together. It has all the .c files and a copy of the brain."
|
|
Mar 18
|
IBL est mort! Well it's official, after several weeks of
disappointing turnouts, the Middlebury guys finally pronounced IBL dead
(again). Good work guys, sorry it didn't work out. I think the time
simply past for IBL - it was a brilliant idea when Wmute started it 6
seasons ago, then we kept the idea going with a lot of heart and hard
work, but all good things must end. In its place we've managed to get
quite a few tournaments and Pseudo Bolofest League (PBL) games going,
plus there's always regular ol' pickup games, so people should certainly
not view this as some harbinger of the death of Bolo. Think of it as a
restructuring - hmm that sounds familiar. OBHP gets a face lift. Thanks to vert, the Official Bolo Home Page now has a new front page incorporating several new links. News gets its own link finally, Hotlist is now Links, and Bin is now Archive. The navigational bars at the bottom of every page are also updated. Samhain's Bolo clinic trip to Oregon. Members of an Oregon middle school computer club have been playing for over a year now but with limited internet experience due to their low bandwidth. Their teacher/advisor is Joe Alexander (Smaug). Anyway these guys decided to sink their club dues into inviting a Bolo expert to come visit them and show them the ropes. Samhain was a logical choice, being both a Bolo god and a good, patient teacher. They flew Samhain up last weekend and he showed them how the game is *really* played. The following guys were nice enough to write a paragraph about what they learned from the experience: Amigo Montoia, Carnage, Intrepid, Nobody, Chubbs, and Stealth. The full text has been posted to r.g.b. and will be available at this site shortly.
|
|
Mar 17
|
Duke Bolofest Report. It's all over! Three days of Bolo and beer
has left everybody tired, happy, and hungover. Here's the quick recap.
On Friday Berserkir drove his Hummer down from Rochester NY, picking up
Attack Salad (Will) in Pittsburgh PA. The trip was marked by hours of
meandering around some of the scarier backroads of West Virginia,
several conference calls between Max, Jolo, and Berserkir's cell phone,
the Hummer's self-inflating tires deciding to self-deflate instead, and
the quote of the day from Will, as they headed out from Pittsburgh on
the 500 mile last leg to Durham: "We should be there in about 4
hours!" Day 1 (Friday or rather Saturday early morning) The rest of us (Flag, Wmute, Pins, Max, Jolo) hung out in Max's house and played pool, Max's Tempest arcade machine, and eventually got 2 PowerBook's localtalked together for some 1x1 action. Our road warriors finally arrived at 2:30 AM. After a few beers and some pool, just as I was nodding off, somebody came up with the crazy idea to go to Duke and start playing at 3:30 AM. Yes you read that right, 3:30 in the morning. The 7 of us broke into a campus Mac cluster, and we proceeded to play the most intense Bolo I've seen since, well, the Chicago Bolofest I attended in Thanksgiving '95. Surprisingly there were lots of people still awake, and we teamed up with the likes of vert, xav, and Kreep for several memorable 5x5 or 6x6 games. At one point, a curious security guard showed up, incredulous that we were up playing games when the whole campus was deserted due to Spring Break. Amazingly he didn't object and left us alone. One particular game seesawed back and forth for well over an hour - incredible! Finally as the sun started to rise, we dragged ourselves back home to sleep.
Day 2 (Saturday). The next day started late, with everybody
meeting for 'breakfast' at 3:15 PM. Wmute had departed for his Spring
Break, so we could no longer break into campus clusters. Instead we
spread out over 3 rooms (4 Macs in our main lab, 1 each in 2 smaller
offices). We played a variety of 4x4 and 3x3 games with Cat_Butt, Hoov,
and Sev from 5 to 9 PM or so, and finally decided to call it a day.
Sample tracker:
Host: 129.59.101.36 {50000} Players: 9 Bases: 16 Pills: 16
Map: Dream Soda V Game: Strict Mines: Visible Bots: No PW: No
Version: 0.99.7 Tracked-For: 4 min. Player-List:
bolo://sirisaac.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/ .. Vanderbilt University
bolo://emmac.biop.umich.edu/ .......... Hoov
bolo://herold.ummu.umich.edu/ ......... University of Michigan
bolo://icarus.mc.duke.edu/ ............ mildly witty pins
bolo://pds1.mc.duke.edu/ .............. Duke University
bolo://pds3.mc.duke.edu/ .............. Duke University
bolo://lois.mc.duke.edu/ .............. Duke University
bolo://miranda.mc.duke.edu/ ........... Duke University
bolo://ripley.mc.duke.edu/ ............ FEAR JOLO
The Hummer Trip. Saturday night we all piled into the Hummer and
headed down to Franklin Street, the heart of UNC at Chapel Hill. After
dinner and beers at one microbrewery, we ambled over and had some more
drinks at a second microbrewery down the block. At 2 AM we decided to
head home. Max was the designated driver, and on the way home he found a
few out of the way construction sites to give the Hummer a workout. We
would be plowing through muddy ruts and Berserkir would be hollering
from the backseat "Faster! Faster! Go up that embankment! Go
through that field! Run over that log! Do it! Do it!" Berserkir
even took the wheel a few times just to show us what the vehicle could
do - let's just say I had the ride of my life, while Will desperately
tried to decide which side of the windshield would be safer to crash
through if his body went flying. Quotes of the day: "The sign says AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY!" "Run over it! It's just mounted on a cinder block."Day 3 (Sunday) was more laid back. Flag had to go also, leaving Berserkir and Will to play by themselves most of the afternoon. After dinner at Max's place, Pins, Max and Jolo joined in for some games until just past midnight. Tired and satisfied, we all decided to call it a Bolofest. Berserkir and Will are taking the long way home to check out more NC sights, both geographic and otherwise, so they won't be back home for a few more days.
|
|
Mar 16
|
Duke Bolofest winds down. I am currently suffering from too much
Bolo and golden beverages, plus the games aren't quite over yet. I'll
write up the highlights of the Bolofest a little later today. It's been
a lot of fun so far!
|
|
Mar 14
|
Duke Bolofest begins today! At last report, Guy & Fish decided
not to come at the last minute due to icy roads in Michigan. Berserkir
had to head out late due to work but he'll still be picking up 'salad'
on the way, their ETA is 1-2 am. I'm planning on getting to Pins's house
after dinner and I'll be bringing beers. Green Cup lives! Wintermute has volunteered to organize the 3x3 GC. If you're interested, email him at <jll7@acpub.duke.edu> with the following info:
1. Who is on your team? (3 players)
2. What night in april works best?
3. What map? Symmetric? Donut shaped?
4. Should start squares be "CBL" like (ie boxes)?
5. What to do in the event of lag... my leaning on this is that
a team can only have players from at most 2 different sites
6. Who will win the NCAA tourney?
|
more recent news | previous news
[ Intro | News | Links | Archive | Guides | Gallery | People | Misc ]
The Bolo Home Page is copyrighted by
| |
