Delta Engine Blog

Yeah, I finally made the first RWA (Replay with Audio) for Arena Wars. There is now a new Replays with Audio Section on www.ArenaWars.net, if you want to record and publish yours there, just write me an email with the .AWReplay file. Download Michi_vs_Seno_commented_by_abi.AWReplay Choose save as "*.* (all files)" or rename it back to .AWReplay if you got IE, else it might get renamed to .Zip. You can play any RWA with any Arena Wars version (even the Demo) and even record RWAs with the Demo. Have fun! Its really fun to record and watch RWA's, I hope you like it and if I get some response in the ArenaWars boards I will do some new cool ones (currently its in english, but maybe someone can convince me to make some german ones too).

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, I should be happy, few weeks ago I was somewhere in the hundreds. But now it's getting close, when searching for Nitschke at google there is some other guy in first place still: Ray Nitschke. I will get you, hehe! And don't tell me I have no chance to accomplish that with "Benjamin", I know that myself :-( Other news: As you can read on exDream.com and ArenaWars.net, we won the german developer price in 2 categories: 1st place in Innovation and 2nd place in the mid-price category. More information about the german developer price (in german) can be found here: www.deutscher-entwicklerpreis.de Btw: As soon all this Arena Wars stuff is finished (soon), I will get back to business and post more about Game Development again.

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 ^^).

Well, first of all check out www.ArenaWars.net and download the new released Arena Wars Demos if you haven't played it yet (I've build even a very small version with only 57.1 MB for a quick check and modem users). There are also tons of fixes and a lot of new features, as you can read here. However, working on the Release of v1.2 did took a really long time, I'm now awake for over 24 hours and everything is getting strange and weird, but I kinda like that sometimes. Being very tired feels like taking drugs, if you move your head fast, your perception can't follow and stuff ^^ Over and out, good night everyone :-)

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 :-)

As you can read on www.ArenaWars.net Arena Wars v1.2 Beta2 was just released. Man, this was a long night, but at least I found all the nasty bugs in v1.2 ^^ Anyways, there are still some features missing, maybe there will even be a Beta3 before the real release :-) The major improvements are stability of the game when players leave, speed and response of the gameplay and voice and webcam support working now fine. You can download v1.2 Beta2 (1.8 MB) here directly if you like.