-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

I don't know how it happened.. a single line of code got erased when I was putting together CRMod++ 6.0. It went unnoticed for a long time, but it unfortunately introduced a bug which could crash servers. I am therefore releasing a very minor upgrade to fix this bug. There are only three changes in CRMod++ 6.1:

• fixed crkick/crban bug that could crash servers or cause falling through floor
• fixed automatic request to unpause match when match not paused
• increased net_messagetimeout from 20 to 60 (explanation: in v6.0 the console variable net_messagetimeout was changed from 300 to 20 for more aggressive removal of disconnected players. However, because quake.exe was removing the players instead of crmod, the "no response from.." message was not being printed. I had some complaints about this, so net_messagetimeout has been increased to 60)

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, February 11, 2000

CRMod++ 6.0 has been released! Head on over to downloads to pick up your very own copy. There are a limited number of "tin box" editions available.. only the first 50 downloads will receive one! So act now!!

The servers page has been updated with a growing list.. send me email if you want your server added. If you run a server, you should consider switching to ProQuake which is fully compatible with crmod++ 6.0 and has some nice server-side features.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Saturday, February 5, 2000

CRMod++ 6.0 is now in beta - some of you may have already caught it in action at elohim.ai.mit.edu ports 26000 and 27000. Those of you who know QuakeC will understand the significance of the new features, all of which were impossible before qccx unleashed the true power of the quake virtual machine. There is a long running joke at the end of the crmod manual about erasing a hard drive from QuakeC. Well it turns out.. I'm almost positive about this.. that you can. It would be horrendously difficult, and may only work on 25% of machines, but I'm pretty sure I know how to do it. What can I say? If some 16 year old Belgian linux hacker sends you a progs.dat and says that you have to try it, maybe you shouldn't.

Some of the features are things I have always wished I could do but couldn't, like hiding player IPs to prevent nuking and qkicking. It's a crying shame that it is only now, in the twilight of Quake's reign on this planet, that CRMod++ 6.0 arrives. I truly believe it is The Right Thing. Here are some of the changes:

• The code has been heavily optimized using novel compiler technology (qccx), resulting in the smallest and fastest crmod ever to hit the streets
• On-screen match timer
• Shirt colours restored from ghost
• Scoreboard shows "READY" for players that are ready in match mode
• Supports banning of up to 127 IP addresses
• Banned IP addresses can be added to ban.cfg to make them permanent
• Native ProQuake support
• Match statistics persist until the start of the next match
• IP addresses are partially masked (preventing nuking and qkicking)
• added 'ips' console / administrator command for viewing full IPs
• Statistics are displayed with player names on the left
• Console statistics show ASCII versions of player names
• "privileged" mode for code 0 administrators

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, January 21, 2000

I just finished going through the crmod code making various optimizations enabled by qccx. The size of the progs.dat has now dropped to 397680.. definitely the leanest, meanest crmod progs.dat that has ever existed. I haven't added any new features yet, but some old ones have been patched up. For example, the observer heads-up display (for the few of you that use it instead of the status bar) now shows *exact* player armour and health, and the sping console command now shows exact player pings. The Elohim servers will be running the alpha versions of 6.0; let me know if you encounter any bugs!

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, January 19, 2000

I thought that 5.1 might be the last version of crmod, but John Carmack released the quake source code over christmas, and now all that has changed! No, I'm not thinking of integrating crmod into the quake executable. But by looking at the quake source code I was able to figure out exactly how the virtual machine (which interprets QuakeC) works. It turns out that there's a lot of potential power that was previously untapped by QuakeC, so the first order of business was to rewrite the compiler. I now have qccx, the world's only optimizing QuakeC compiler with support for integers, pointers, arrays and string manipulation. Without making any changes to the crmod source code, I recompiled it with qccx and the size dropped from 550560 bytes to 419616 bytes! The next step will be to add features to crmod that I previously thought were impossible from QuakeC alone. Here is a small preview of what you will see in CRMod++ 6.0:

• IP addresses will be hidden (finally, no more qkicking or nuking!!)
• Shirt colours will be restored from ghosts
• Support for banning arbitrarily many IP addresses
• The ping hiding character will be removed from player names
• The scoreboard will show who is ready before a match

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, December 10, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 has been released! Head over to the download page to grab it. I've also added a small list of servers that are running crmod.. let me know if you have a server that you would like me to add to the list.

Included with version 5.1 is DeQuake, a utility for converting files with quake characters to normal text files. This lets you take full advantage of the improved dedicated server console logging features; DeQuake will convert the console log to text so that you can actually read the player names.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Saturday, December 4, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 is now in beta. It is currently running on shreddies.ai.mit.edu:27000 and should be up shortly on 209.163.146.87:26001. The following features are new to version 5.1:

• Support for up to 10 admin codes (so that you can give different codes to different people, and if a code leaks you know who leaked it!)
• 'admins' command (for clients and console) to list server administrators and which codes they used to become admin
• All announcements are echoed to a dedicated server's console, including:
  • obituaries
  • time remaining messages in matches
  • match commentary (who got quad, who has control, etc.)
• Added teamstats command which keeps track of the following statistics:
  • Number of Q, 666, ring, RL, LG, GL, SNG, NG, Mega Health, RA, YA, GA
  • Number of RL paks dropped (including those not picked up)
  • Number of times a player with no RL picked up an enemy RL pack
  • Percentage of game for which a team had control
• Added autostatson/autostatsoff console commands

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Friday, December 3, 1999

CRMod++ 5.1 is coming along nicely and should be in beta by tomorrow. There are a few new features after all, including multiple admin codes, so that when someone leaks the admin you can figure out who it was! This is one of many "Damn, I should have thought of that before!" features that have been suggested to me by Izra'il over the course of CRMod++ development.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Sunday, November 28, 1999

What!?!? An update to the crmod home page? What can this mean??

It means that Paul Baker finally gave me access to these html files, and that I finally got around to changing them. All I've done for now is write this message and add a modest FAQ. It also means that, despite the fact that quake 1 is nearly dead, I will be releasing crmod++ 5.1 shortly. Version 5.1 will mainly contain minor bug fixes and incremental improvements. I don't plan to add any major new features as the current feature set has been quite successful, so it doesn't seem worth the effort to put in something new. I'll be doing things like adding messages to the server console and making voting messages easier to see. If there is something that you would desperately like to see included in version 5.1, or if you are interested in beta testing version 5.1, send me email.

-- Mephistopheles                                    

Wednesday, March 17, 1999 -- Version 5.00

Version 5.0 has been released! Lots of new stuff so download it now! Make sure to read the readme.txt and manual.txt. If you have problems check the FAQ. Any other questions email crbug@mpog.com. Put "I have read the readme.txt and manual.txt" in the subject line or you most likely will not get a reply.

NOTE: A minor bug has been found which sets the maximum number of teams to 0 when a listen server is started in match mode. This problem can be corrected by adding the following lines to the start of crmod.cfg:

skill 2
maxteams

Please see the manual for an explanation of what these two lines do.