AIRWAR

AIRWAR is the only BF2142 server customized for gunship warfare and aerial dogfighting, period, anywhere, demo or full game! It turns your BF2142 demo playfield into a whole different game, the way it should of been. Titans are what they should be, flying aircraft carriers. Grab a gunship and start fighting, but watch your six. The more people in the air, the more insanely wicked the action is with flaming wreckage falling out of the sky everywhere. There are no rules here, this is total war, just like in real life, any and every tactic you can dream up is a valid kill. Noobz and grunts, this is a gunship server, you can play a conventional game on my server, but why? There's thousands of other servers you can stomp around on the ground on, but only one AIRWAR. One final word, please don't be a poser and connect and then wander off and eat lunch. I only have a limited number of player slots and other players actually want to play. You can reconnect back later.

My server is the best, and always HOT and JUMPING, because unlike any other server out there, it has unlimited vehicles and unlimited gunships. It is the ONLY BF2142 gunship love server period anywhere (out of 15 demo servers and 1000+ full game server). And of all those 1000+ servers, is the only server that has rotating banners. Its got my patented Choppergirl technology under the hood! And my graphics are super fly!

Tweaks

AIRWAR is the most heavily tweaked 'playable' BF2142 server in the world... by playable I mean 'not stupid'. I take great pains to playtest everything over and over again to maintain a very subtle balance and interaction between all game elements. For every weapons or type of attack in the game, there is a counter attack, and for every vehicle and player weapon, there is a strength against some other vehicle or weapon, and yet a weakness to another. Perfecting game balance is something of a fine art in of itself.

Why the Demo?

People have asked me, why modify the demo, when the full game is 'so much better'? I have the full game, and here's my answer:

• The Demo is freely available; you can install it on as many computers as you want (all your home computers and laptop too)
• Everyone can play it and recommend it to their friends with no purhcase necessary
• No CD is required to be in the drive (a nuissance)
• With only one map, you become very familiar with the map
• Level playing field; every game everyone starts afresh as equals, veterans have no advantage over new players beyond their inherent skill
• No idiotic obsession with 'rank' found in the full game world (why this is idiotic, see below)

For those of you without the full game, I will describe it to you. It is the same as the demo, except you have a dozen more maps to play on, more weapons to chose which are award to you as you go up in rank (I personally find them useless), and a ranking system which tracks all your stats.

Some of the new extra maps are simply gorgeous and breathtaking (I can say the same about the BF2 full game maps), and I recommend you buy the full game just to see these maps and soemthing other than Sidi Power Plant. Verdun seems to be my favorite one... its a snow covered European village with a church in the center, destroyed houses, and two gunship bases at the end. Instead of being in a world of all brown, there are maps that have an overwelmingly 'blue' feel to them (Brr frosty), and others with a 'purplish' look. Refreshing, but that seems to be the overall limit to the atmospheric feel... brown worlds, purple worlds, blue worlds. Still, gorgeous maps, and I am impressed by the Level Lord who went to great pains to design them.

There is however a big downside to the full game, and its the idiotic ranking system that brought some insidious problems to the game. First of all, I think adding more to a game is almost always good. I mean, how can it hurt? Adding ranks encourages those who are impressed by such things, to play the game more, and rewards players with little token gifts for continuing to play over time... neat weapon unlocks to try out that keep things 'fresh'.

The problem is that to keep things fair, ranking is only tracked and validated on 'stock' unmodified servers. While this makes sense, so that people can not rank pad on servers that have been modified for it to be easy to do so, it also spells the complete death of a modding community, and its the players fault. Players become obsessed with this nonsense rank stuff, and will not play on an unranked server, because they are obsessed with accumulating these 'rubber' fake points that mean absolutely nothing whatsoever anywhere. You can't buy food with these points, you can't take them to the bank, they are just meaningless in the real world.

Developers flee from modding BF2142 full game servers to be more 'fun', because players simply will not play on them, because they are obsessed with accruing these nonsense statistics and tokens on 'ranked' servers. Nobody cares about how many people you shot two years ago. I don't care. Thats why I will never run a stats package on my server. The only thing that matters is the skill you bring into the game right now, today. Its why I play the demo over the full game any day, and its why I will continue to play the demo. On the demo side there is no such nonsense - everyone starts off as equals all over again in every new game; its skill alone (and my new 5/12 player kicker) that weeks out the good players from the bad.

If I were to design a game, it would be designed for the developer first, and not the player. Every player has the potential to become a developer, if only you make the system easy to moddify. All your code should be in text files that are easily modified with Notepad, and everything is heavily commented explaining what does what, and it all just is made very simple and makes sense. Settings that a lot of people will want to change are easy to find, and easy to change, with the changes to alternatives already in the code just commented out, that they just have to uncomment. Lots of documentation is provided inside the game with every game right where the code is, right where you are working on the bare metal. All changes occur server-side... data is cached on the client side, but when new data is changed or modified on any server, the client game downloads the new changed data before the start of the game. Everything is a variable that can be changed, and files have time stamps on them, so clients compare timestamped files and download the latest and greatest mods deployed by the server admin. Servers are connected in game, so if you cross a game boundary or step through a teleporter or portal you'll seamlessly connect to another different game server with a whole different map.