Oh the memories, sitting around the old sound box, recounting tales of chivalrous exploits, listening to the latest WW2 PSA.
If only we could harken back to these olden, golden times.

WELL SHUT YOUR MOUTH AND LISTEN!

We've added the Radio Beacon mod to the server!
What does this mean?
It means that anyone can now recreate the magic of radio through their very own in game radio beacon!

"But how, what, where, when and why" I hear you ask..

The gist of it is that you can place a particular block, and this block can both send and receive tranmissions from other special blocks. The distance that this transmission will travel is based on the height of the beacon extension.
Also you can use a compass as a portable receiver, to help you track down those pesky messages!

So here's what ya need:
The main beacon is made with a Diamond Block (yes, a diamond block)


The masts are made with Iron Bars

• To create a beacon, you need to attach the diamond block to a powered redstone circuit. This activates the block, and it can now send and receive broadcasts. You need to place the redstone circuit before the block or it doesnt work.
  
• Then you add a minecraft sign to the side of the block. This will contain your message.
  
• To increase range, place an iron bar on top of the diamond block. Each bar adds 20m range to the beacon, for a total of 5100m maximum range.

There's lots more to discover, so I suggest you have a read of the main page for the mod:
http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/radiobeacon/

It has a more in depth description of the mod, including info on repeaters and the compass, and basic tutorials:
http://imgur.com/a/Ft06F

NOW GO AND SPREAD THE MESSAGE...

THE OC DYNAMIC MC MAP

Hi guys, I've been a busy little worker, and I've added a brand new Dynamic Map to the server!

Some of the features include:

• Dynamic player positions
• Shows player health/armour
• Displays beds
• Shows the server time and weather
• in game chat

It renders both top down and isometric for the normal server, the nether, and the end. You can click between the maps on the right hand side.
At the bottom of the page is an in game chat. You'll show up as [Web] Username for anything typed in.
I've removed the cave renders, and the rendering of ores, just so not to spoil everything
It's currently running the initial full render, so the map won't be fully updated yet, but in the next few hours it should be finished.

Have fun!

Image stolen from http://lockrikard.deviantart.com/art/De ... -201395796

I think the title says it all really. But in case it wasn't clear, the Minecraft server is to be migrated to another place, though I'm buggered if I know where that is just now. This is because our supplier was bought out by another company and we are being moved to their host machines.

What that means for you is there will be a long period of downtime, followed by a new IP address. We should hopefully notice better loading times, less lag, perhaps even better capacity - so this is all a good thing

Downtime is scheduled as:

Service Window starts: Wednesday Aptril 11th, 6.00am EST
Service Window ends : Wednesday Aptril 11th, 1.00pm EST

Might be up sooner than that, will let you know.

Does anyone else play this?

I can't claim to have been on it a lot but i noticed in Steam tonight and thought I'd give it a download. When I was at Uni the original Stronghold had almsot legendary status as it was the game we played to death on our student LAN. We'd actually convene to play a game for several hours having an artificial truce allowing us to building up a town/castle/stronghold of epic proportions and then send vast armies juddering across the screen. As we were playing on AthlonXP's, Pentium4s (no HT) we frequently had apocalyptic lag issues that would inadvertently brig the game to a sudden game as all PC's crashed or better yet would (ala minecraft TNT explosions) lock up all PC's involved until several hours later the epic battles had resolved themselves.

Ridiculously fun game; with both warfare and resource management simulation thrown in to one. So I ahve high hopes for Stronghold Kingdoms which is a free to play MMO version of the original classic. I'll keep you posted!

We all know you can just go to Good Old Games and pick up a fully working copy of Thief 2 on download, Bob's your uncle, Fanny's yer aunt, you are up and playing in no time. But say you are feeling a bit tight? Perhaps you don't want to fork out a whole ten dollars for an ancient game you know you can get for little over a pound, I know I didn't... but I am a Scot.

My plan: To see if what they said on RPS about possibly not needing the GoG version to make the game playable was true.

What I did: I bought me a copy of Thief 2 on CD (a sort of stone age Blu-Ray or something) second-hand from play.com, for £1.09 + free delivery. Nice. One week later it showed up in my mailbox and I set to work downloading the Taffer Patcher. It suggested on the patcher's site that people with the Sold Out version (what I had) could just use the auto-installer to get the game running but I couldn't get that working due to a Shockwave issue (it offers to install a version off the disk, but I didn't want an old version clogging up my machine) so I just opened the disk up in explorer and copied the entire two CDs onto two folders and pointed Taffer Patcher at those. Simple as, that worked like a charm.

There are supposed to be problems with getting the game's cutscenes to play on newmachines due to the video codec not being in the registry nowadays, but it can be re-registered with the patcher. The patcher also comes with a generous handful of patches and mods to install at the end. It recommends that you try just the DirectX compatibility patches first and see if the game loads, then you can stick in the improved textures etc (they make a HUGE difference). On the last page of the patcher is a couple buttons to tweak options if ever want to, one to change the CD crack path (should be fine if you installed everything at the first installer screen) and the other puts on some nifty graphical tweaks. It's worth turning a lot of these on (pro-tip - turn down the bloom to 200-ish and uncheck the bloom UI to save your eyes from burning out) as it makes the game passably pretty to our modern eyes.

And that is that, really.

Conclusion: It was true. I have a working copy of the game, with physical media, for a pound, a little work and a small wait. Totally worth it, especially if you still have a CD kicking around.

Handy links:
Thief forums: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=65
Installer/patcher: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=131106