NTL - Technology Maimed

10:35.21 - Friday 25th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Seems NTL are having problems again, which has lead to a few interesting titbits. Firstly, my IP address has been shown here correctly rather than reversed, which lead me to speculate that either [a] they'd fixed this little 'feature', or [b] the servers proxy themselves were knackered and offline.

Seems it's option B. For the past few days we've been getting 'Gateway Timeout' errors trying to access some sites, even when we know those sites are working. A quick F5 and the page comes up, so we know it's not the website that's experiencing problems.

Of course, nothing appears on the NTL Service Status page about this.

Multiplayer Mayhem

10:42.29 - Friday 25th July 2003   (Link to This Entry)

Once upon a time there was a game called TankTime 3D. The basic premise was that you drive your tank around a grey 3D landscape looking for other players and destroy them. It was fun for a little while and it worked OK on a v90 dialup, and as we didn't really have any free alternatives, we played it for a little while.

Searching for something to relieve the boredom, BootBlock and I came across BZFlag (pr. 'BeeZeeFlag') over on SourceForge. It's... a multiplayer tank game in 3D, yes another one, but with much more colourful graphics. It runs just fine in 1400x1050 on my laptop and includes wonders such as jumping tanks, teleporters and ricocheting shells.

It's much fun to 'jump' your tank onto one of the buildings and lie in wait there. Multiple shots make the game a whole lot harder as well, and even the explosion sound effects are time-delayed depending on distance - speed of sound and all that. All that's missing really is hills - BZFlag takes place in a flat arena. Powerups would be nice, too.

I have high hopes for this game.