Disabled incapped grenade plugin

I have disabled the incapped grenade plugin.
It causes some bug (see forum)

Installed Simple AFK Manager

Installed Simple Afk Manager on all servers.
Settings are the plugins default.
Idle players will be kicked after 2 minutes.
Admins are immune (with flag "k").
Hope it works.

Updated the dynamic list of maps on the servers

Updated the dynamic list of maps on the servers.
Added further columns.
Added sorting by "Campaign Name" and "Changed" column.
I know these columns are not filled so much at the moment but I will add each new or updated map.
Older maps may be completed later.

New coop map: Lambda L4D2

We have installed a new coop campaign on alServ2016:
Lambda L4D2
Seems to be a nice campaig.
9 maps.
The first 5 are quite short and easy then it is getting more difficult.
Didn't play it till the end until now.

The talker.vpk also has problems with this map.
Crash dump occurs when connecting to the map.
Talker.vpk is disabled therefore at the moment on alServ2016.
We have to find a compatible talker.vpk version quickly.

Some also report incompatibilities with the "I hate mountains" campaign.
So if you see any problems please report them in the forum.

New survival map: Left For Evil Dead

We have installed a new survival map on alServ2020:
Left For Evil Dead
Seems to be funny with a lot of details from the movie "Army of Darkness"

Map update: Crash Bandicoot: The Return of Dr. Cortex

Updated custom map Crash Bandicoot: The Return of Dr. Cortex to v2.0 (final) 10/22/2012
When I tested the map, the bots were all dead when I connected.
The same problem has the Helms Deep survival map.
As a workaround you can vote for campaign restart via game menu.
After that the bots were alive.
I have loaded the second map and this problem did not occurs there.
So maybe only a problem on the first map (campaign start)

And have a look at the dynamic list of custom maps on our servers here

"Newbie" names are banned now

"Newbie" seems to be a new generic player name.
The HLstatsX shows 44 "Newbie" from several countries.
So this name is banned now for 5 minutes as all other bad names.
So change your name if you want to play on the servers.

Update of dynamic custom maps list

I have updated the dynamic generation of custom maps list.
See here
Now nearly all is automated.
It uses a MySQL database now.
The URLs to the maps are currently extracted from the VPKs itself and they may not always point to the correct location. The map creators seem not to care about this URL sometimes.
So soon I will fix the URLs by hand.
But you can always search on l4dmaps.com for the campaign name by yourself.

The dynamic generation now takes also care about the maplist files used in the votmap plugin.
So these files are now generated automatically too.
 Just one step is missing atm.
I will integrate the dynamic generation to our server start/stop scripts so that everything is automated.

So now it should be as easy as this:

• Add a new VPK to some servers addons folder
• Add the meta data (campaign name, map name, vpk name, gametype,..) to the MySQL database (has to be done only once for a new VPK)
• Stop the server with the script (has to be done anyway for each new VPK)
• Start the server with the script. This will execute the following:
• scan the servers addons folder
• update some data in the MySQL database
• generate the maplist files (maplist.txt, mapkick, maplist_sv.txt)
• Now the list shown with !votemap in game shows the currently installed maps
• And the dynamic list of maps web site shows the same list with links for download (this list is generated from the MySQL database and is way faster than the approach I have used before)
• Now the VPK can be copied (better hard linked to save hard disk space) to any other servers addon folder
• After stop/start of these other servers everything is updated automatically too (no need for manual MySQL edit of meta data. This has to be done only once for each new map. Delete in MySQL is not needed when a VPK is deleted. This entry can stay in the database and does not hurt.)

Also easy is deactivating a VPK:

• Delete the VPK from a servers addon folder (or just rename from e.g. "2ee.vpk" to "2ee.vpk_" to deactivate the VPK)
• Stop server with script
• Start server with script
• Done! The map should now no longer be in the !votemap list and it is not visible anymore in the dynamic list of maps web site.

So the players should now be able to see exactly what custom maps are installed on which server on the dynamic list of maps web site and the in game !votemap list should show exactly the same.

And the server admins now only have very little to do when adding or removing a custom map (VPK)

r0r plugin fix for special ammo

There was a problem with special ammo in the r0r coop plugin.
Sometimes explosive ammo was activated even if you don't have any special ammo left.
There was also an error message in the sourcemod log file about "player not in game" during map start.
It seems that this error was preventing some cleanup code.
So I added a check for "player in game" so that this error should no longer happen and the cleanup code should run.
This may fix the special ammo problem.
We have to test more thoroughly on the r0r servers to see if it works now (also after map change and during the whole campaign)

I just forgot to blog about this fix.
If I remember correctly I have added the fixed r0r_coop.smx about 14 days ago (2013-02-17)