Today I sucked at BWCL (StarCraft), then when playing Wolfenstein3D (really funny oldschool, I lost all my lifes in 6.7, but the 6. campaign is really hard) and now I suck to finally make my first RWA (Arena Wars Replay Commentary). I get a couple of minutes good comments and then I just get lost. Man, I just wanted to finish my first RWA today, that's not looking good for me (wanted to do that a long time ago).

At least the programming does work well, I fixed most bugs in my CodeRush plugin and will hopefully finish it this week and release it (with tutorial, sourcecode and everything).

And now a picture totally out of context:

Omg! Are we famous or what? Doesn't make any sense. www.ArenaWars.net was hacked a couple of hours ago. This is how the site looked like (all other www.ArenaWars.de, www.Arena-Wars.com, etc. sites were also affected):


A couple of days ago some russian guy did spam the Wiki Strategy Guide Section on ArenaWars.net, the full story (in german) can be found here in the AW boards.

This has NOTHING to do with the Arena Wars game server, any other service, server or website from exDream or ArenaWars, it was just the website (and only the start page) which got affected. The site is restored now, but sadly the security isn't because I have no direct access to that computer, but the Server administrator has been informed.

I already have a guess how this could have happend, but until can't tell you right now! All I can tell you that some russian guys were involved, I got some log entries, emails und urls, but that won't help my in any way I guess.

If you like to talk about this, please go to this thread in the ArenaWars boards.

Well, there wasn't much news this week here. ArenaWars v1.2.1 did come out, more on that on www.ArenaWars.net, I also did some server improvements yesterday and switched to release mode for the first time (now the server has much more cpu power).
I also wanted to start a Replay Commentary section here, but I'm not really in the mood and am a bit depressed (has also to do with how bad ArenaWars marketing and stuff is doing and the relationship with the publishers). Maybe later or maybe if something makes me happy again.

Other than that I just reinstalled VS2005 to continue with my other stuff (had to do that because the Oct Express Edition was not compatible and stuff, but the Oct Edition is not really useable, just the E&C feature is cool). Also a new version of CodeRush is out and I will check out the new features and hopefully finish my CodeRush plugin soon (it works already great, but it needs still some improvements).

I also missed the start of the DotNetRocks radio show, it started earlier today? Its running right now :)
Update: Ok, they just recorded DotNetRocks and are now broadcasting Mondays

Well, why not ^^ I put up an ad on google's adwords. It looks like this:

You may see this ad if you search for any of the following search terms (at google, it may also appear on related sites with google ads):
- Arena Wars, Arena Wars, demo download, .NET Development, .NET Game, c# game, Real Time Strategy, replays, community, StarCraft, WarCraft
I left some search terms out, e.g. games, because they are searched much too often and are to general, I rather used this more specialized search terms.
Update: This is really working great, I added some more search terms (hehe StarCraft and WarCraft) ^^

But don't click on the link, that costs money (viewing does not ^^)
The ad will disappear if all the money is spend I put into this account, but adwords is still a very nice thing. Works really amazingly well!

The first show is currently recorded, turn in at http://radio1.franklins.net:8000/listen.pls (winamp stream).
More info about the show can be found at: mondays.pwop.com, I think sometime monday you can download the show (if you had not listen to the show live).
Sadly, the dotnetrocks radio show was canceled today, but at least there is Mondays :)

Some small note on Arena Wars v1.2: I'm aware of the few bugs with serverbased games and will fix the serverside, in a couple of hours there are hopefully no more problems, looks even like we don't need a new patch. Everything can be fixed on the serverside ^^.
Update: All serverbased games should work fine now, also fixed some other problems. The only known thing not working are watching replays online with 2 or more players (I think this requires a client patch, maybe later ^^).

Thats really crazy, as you can read on www.GameDev.net Halo2 has been sold 2.38 million times in the 24 hours after the release only in the us and canada. And thats just the XBox version. Uff! GTA had a similar story yesterday about 1 mio sales in the UK after 9 days, not bad either. I guess Halflife2 will even top this, but what I'm really woried about is the fact that only these big games sell that good, there is a BIIIIIIIG gap between them and the rest of the games out there.

About Arena Wars v1.2: There will be no Beta3, the final version will be launched tomorrow and a lot of people will get informed

I've just released the Arena Wars v1.2 Beta (and updated the Patch Changed section),
if you want to download it directly, click here (v1.2Beta, 1.8 MB).

About the features: Please visit the Patch Changed section on Arena Wars.
There are also a lot of pics explaining the new features like this one:


I've also added a new menu entry on the left to link to the websites of my brothers

When I read threads like this Some "vs" thread at gamedev.net, I get sick! Not only I have to deal with so many people not willing to even try out any new technology or programs (like Google Desktop, .NET, Gmail, Arena Wars, the list goes on), now another argument comes up: Everything else than c++ is too easy and only for newbies? When will this ever stop?

Who cares how easy anything is, as long as you can be productive. Well, whatever, people reading this are already convinced in .NET and talking about the ignorance of some programmers here won't help. Maybe some overcomplicated thinking c++ guys think like this all the time:


About Arena Wars v1.2: I fixed some v1.1 Bugs today and improved some parts of OpenGL with glIntercept and will now work full time on the server-based games

For some fun: Click here is also some Helloween related fun flash game.