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OLD NEWS

GameSpy 2142 Server Browser List ceases operations June 30, 2014.

You can still play Battlefield sort of, using Game Ranger. For me, it was the writting on the wall, however, time to hang up the hat and do something different.

AIRWAR is a massive Server Side Only Mod for Battlefield 2142 developed by independent game developer, CHOPPERGIRL.

If you have Battlefield 2142 installed and updated to 1.51, there is nothing further you need to install. Just connect to the AIRWAR Server and enjoy.

What "Server Side Only" means, is that all upgrades to the game were done on the server side of the game, not the client side, the client being the software game you use to play the game. Because AIRWAR alters the game 100% on the server side, there is nothing you need to download, install, or change on your game client to enjoy playing AIRWAR. Please be sure to read the FAQ, however.

Server Side Mods are incredibly hard and challenging to make, as 4 out of 5 of the brillant ideas you have to change the game, do not work, can not be done, or they crash the game client. Working expermentally inside an officially undocumented system is very frustrating and time consuming, much like working with a black box. Please support my six years of hard continued work modding, testing, and continued programming and development on 2142 (over 5000+ hours), by making a donation using one of the Paypal buttons below. Thank you, and have fun! Choppergirl

AIRWAR in its combined versions for BF2142 Demo, BF2 Demo, and BF2142 Full Game, has been played by over 150,000 people and climbing to date, from all around the globe. You can actually see in game, what country a player connects from, as a country code is automagically added to the end of their player name when they connect and visible in the scoreboard.

Because of AIRWAR's unique Server Side Only nature, unlike other mods (and there are many excellent ones), where players have to download and install extra huge cumbersome mod packs which often they can not get to work, AIRWAR is the MOST PLAYED BATTLEFIELD MOD IN ALL OF THE BATTLEFIELD SERIES GAMES COMBINED. My intention when modding is to unlock the most intense game action for the most number of people.

I think it'd be cool to get some digital pictures from players around the world, holding hand drawn signs that read something like "Airwar BF2142 rocks! [playername]" or "Hello Choppergirl from [playername] and [cityname]".

So if you read this and are feeling creatively motivated, and have a digital camera and some free time on your hand, scrible something on a piece of paper and go take a picture and email it to choppergirl@air-war.org and I may just put it up around here or use it somewhere or make a page just for them. If you want to be in the picture is up to you, but if you do, put your playername somewhere in it so everybody knows who you are.

Above is a picture of the AIRWAR server. It is a Pentium 4 @ 2.4 ghz with an 800mghz bus, with 1 gb of RAM, and a 30mb harddrive. Even though the CPU runs at 100% always (because the P4 supports no kind of throttling), it stays frosty cool all the time because it is entirely open. Notice how there is no panel on the side, all the drive bays are open, and the harddrive (which produces heat itself) is not crammed into any bay, but is located as far away from a heat source as possible (the CPU, chipset, and Powersuply). It can run a maximum of 24 players. Twenty four players is more than enough. Quantity does not equal quality gaming. Anything more than 24 players and the game becomes impersonal and a stupid frag fest.

But why a Pentium 4, which is arguably 20 year old technology, and this is a box most people throw away as worthless? Because running 24/7, the most likely things to fail are the Power Supply, harddrives, and fans. 24 pin Power Supplies for dual core motherboards are expensive; 20 pin powersupplies for Pentium 4 comptuers... I can get for virtually... free (because people do throw them away as totally obsolete now). And with no players making any donations any more, even to buy a motherboard or power supply off of ebay, the server is reduce to running on "free equipment". Normally I run my server on a dual core, but here we are, reduced to this indestructiblly fundable-indefinatly-by-me-alone plan.

People have some idiot idea that the side panel on a comptuer are there, to help the case fans increase air flow through the box. That is the stupidest idea ever. If anything, they trap heat extremely, and turn your PC into a toaster oven and a room air filter (like an air conditioner) collecting dust. Side panels on a computer only exist to keep the rats out when computers are being stored (rats love to chew on IDE cables to wear away their teeth). Since I have no rats in my house (duh of course), the first thing to come off are the side panels on all my systems. I recommend unless you have a compelling reason not to (children in the house, rats, a theiving roommate), you do the same. My computers stay cool even when the house is 80F, and collect little dust this way. All I have to do is occasionally blow their fans out with a leaf blower (or hair dryer) outside.

I've shutdown the BF2 Demo server, which was tweaked out to the max, and fired up a BF2142 Full game server instead, as I became nostalgic for flying the gunship like in the good old days of BF2142 demo. Well, it turned out to be a smart move, because someone gave me some code, that allowed me... using some other code... to run a ranked server... AND... bypass the cursed "The game will start when X more players join" bullshit.

So now we are rocking with some hardcore gunship action on the 2142 server. Here's where to find the server in the full game of Battlefield 2142 v1.5:

CHOPPERGIRL's AIRWAR Titanium Version: 20140206- 'Airwar is Fucking EPIC'
Welcome to Choppergirl's AIRWAR ( http://air-war.org ) Est. 2008
Resident Goddess of Server Side Modding: CHOPPERGIRL
More righeous cool explosions per second than any other BF server in the world....

For six years I have run highly modded BF2142 demo and BF2 demo servers
Six years of hardcore development, bug fixes, and constant play testing...
To bring you the most EPIC, BRUTAL, and uber VIOLENT FUN game experience EVER.
I've busted my ass harcore working on my server, for thousands of bleary eyed hours.
Battlefield was never meant to be modded, hundreds of people sharing their discoveries have made this possible.
Most of the mods here I developed and perfected, or built upon the work of others.

AIRWAR is player supported, please donate so I can keep the server running.
http://donate.air-war.org or send Paypal donation to choppergirl@air-war.org

All Vehicles multispawn, are faster, and stay around as battlefield junk when destroyed
Honk the horn on Jeep to deploy explosive poison gas
Honk the horn on the Air Transport to drop Smurfberry Carpet Bombs
Watch out for Gunship Missles that missed, they will circle around and bite you

Parachutes are paragliders, Press Backwards (D) to go up
Engineer Rocket shoots Starburst Air Tracking Missles
Sniper Rifle is one shot one Kill 50 caliber
Pistols now have Double Tap Cop Killer Bullets for close range assassinations
Knife is EMP knife which screws with your visor, for epic knife fighting

There are no unlocks allowed on my server, everyone has the same weapons.
Top high last scores are displayed in game and on the welcome screen
If the server crashes during a new map reload, just reconnect
Add AIRWAR to your FAVORITES LIST by clicking on the PLUS SIGN

Ramming and all other tactics are valid tactics of war and allowed.
If someone is roof campign, pod up there and sniper rifle him
If someone is base raping, pick a different dot on the map to spawn at
Smack talk is allowed, but chat spamming and baseless insults makes you look like a fool.
Please do not be an fucktard and run aimbots, they crash servers and are slap FULL of viruses.
Tweak your keyboard settings and set your view distance and resolution higher.
There are over 800 game graphics, see them all at http://banners.air-war.org
Mr. Fu (my code foo) handles all the in game admin 24/7/365; no admins needed.

Brutal harcore players are always welcome. Play the game, and we all have fun.
If you suport hardcore gaiming, support AIRWAR with a donation. http://donate.air-war.org
I've busted my ass laying down new coding to make this server as comfy, balanced, and hella fun as possible.
Personal vendeta's and rivalries are fine, just don't let it get extreme acrimonious.
Remember, killing and being killed is how you play this game, don't take personal offense.
Lastly, I don't want to hear vague lag or cheat reports; I'm here to have fun too.

Your brain is the weapon.
Hunt your enemy, make the kill, and move on to the next target...
Lead your target
Anticipate what your enemy is going to do, what you would do, and out think him.
Set traps and killzones
If you get killed, its a moral imperitive to return and kill your killer...

...as well as... my [[[Special Thanks]] below... and... [[The Lyrics to M.I.A - Paper Planes]]]

Want a keyboard mapped like an expert? You can download my keyboard mappings here... just right click on this link Controls.con and save it to your desktop. Then rename or back up your Controls.con file in c:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents\Battlefield 2142\Profiles\0001\Controls.con and place my Controls.con file in there.

Some things to note... the mousewheel click and mousebuttons are setup for seat jumping... Numpad Enter is your Parachute... the keys around WASD are perfected for your gunship look views... F to look behind you, C for flyby view, SPACEBAR to return to normal view from either (press again to toggle cockpit overlay), G for rearview (not so useful). Most everything else is the same; its the same mapping I've been using for five years, and it fixes the worst bugs (like Parachute set to 9 key... yeash). Anywhere, there is no way I could like an expert without this custom mapping.

To seat jump, press Mouse2 (Right mouse button), which will switch you to second seat... then press Mouse1 (Left Mouse Button) to fire your missle... then press Mouse3 (Middle mouse button) to return to cockpit view. Practice this while parked on the ground... you want to be able to do it very fast... because while in the second seat, there is no pilot, and your gunship drops like a rock. So unless you have a lot of altitude, you don't want to spend a lot of time in the second seat. You can also use this method to seat jump in other vehicles... tanks, jeeps, etc.

I've run a game server for 4 years, and in my experience 95% of players game lag is caused by the following 3 things.

1. Open programs in the background (webpages with flash youtube videos or animated gifs on them are especially bad), including tons of little tray apps/icons.. esp Skype, Pidgin, Yahoo Mesenger, AIM - close them all!
2. Running processor and network intensive torrents / limewire / azureus / etc in the background. Note, many of these programs install themselves to run at startup as tray bar apps
3. Game graphics set too high, esp. antialiasing, dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows -which when you hit fog, slows your computer to a crawl - turn them off or set them to a low setting.

Before you start gaming, close all your other crap you have running, and run only the game. Set its process priority at Above Normal or High (check out Process Lasso to? do it automatically). I use a separate computer just for gaming, where I leave my favorite game open, and a separate computer for everything else (webbrowsing, etc). A gaming router is not going to fix your stupidity of having background apps open while you game.

As for anti-aliasing... do you need it? No. Anti-aliasing is only useful for taking screen snapshots in game (say, to use on a website), or if you have a very crappy monitor with low resolution (1024x800 or less). In just about all cases, a higher resolution graphic setting with no anti-aliasing is superior. I run my games at 1600x1200. Higher resolution is even better, if your graphics card can push it. At higher resolutions, any jaggies fade away... and really, while you're playing the game, you're almost always in motion and they are going to blur away anyway. Anti-aliasing is a big hit on performance.

Another thing you can do, if you are using an nVidia graphics card, is go into the Nvida traybar control panel and into the game settings for your game (BF2), and set rendering to "Best Performance" instead of the default "Balanced" or "High Quality". Best performance will render a whole lot faster with some loss of quality, but you won't notice at all. Something like High Quality, you would only use in an app like Google Earth.

A SHUT DOWN BF2142 Demo for PC August, 2011 permanently, forever. I ported AIRWAR over to running a BF2 Demo server. I also ported AIRWAR to BF2142 full game, where I currently am running a server.

HELP, I'VE BEEN KICKED!

Follow this link to http://kicked.air-war.org to read a simplified explanation about why you got or are getting kicked.

In another Choppergirl first, I've implemented a new rating system of my own, the Bogo-Violence Rating or 'BV', which is displayed at the end of the game. The Bogo-Violence Rating is in the general spirit of the BogoMips which is used in Linux land to benchmark CPU performance. A Bogo-Violence Rating for the game is displayed at the end of the game, and on the scoreboard, so that people can get a general idea how violent the last game was. Think of it as if it were a 'game thermometer'.

Choppergirl's BV Bogo-Violence Game Violence Rating (BV) Chart of the Level of Game Violence:

0 : "Non-existant"
1 : "Warm"
2 : "Toasty"
3 : "Hot"
4 : "Excellent"
5 : "Superb"
6 : "Violent"
7 : "Ultra Violent"
8 : "Brutal"
9 : "Hellish"
10 : "Nightmare"

Note that this rating of the amount of violence in a game is rather arbitrary and non-scientific and in fact, rather bogus (hence the name), and may not at all reflect the amount of violence that was actually in the game. However, hopefully it will be more often than not at least somewhere near to a general estimation, and give you some general indication of how violent a game was.

Special thanks follow... AIRWAR would not be possible without the work of these clever folks

Special thanks to Detrux for running BFEDITOR.ORG for years and years on his own dime

Special thanks to Devilman (Whitecats) for answering my first mod question ever, and his epic work

Special thanks to Awesome Atrain for publicly sharing his epic shoctgun rocket launcher code

Special thanks to Hum@noidV2 for cracking the private full game server, to run as ranked

Special thanks to Topner Harley for sharing how to get rid of "6 players needed to join" code

Special thanks to Steven 'Killing' Hartland for his groundlaying work on Modmanager

Special thanks to Jat Gotamaro for developing his Private Rank Code System

Special thanks to the demoscene modelers and hackers at D.I.C.E., and the orginal Refractor Engine Developers

---

Thanks to all the admins for running all the servers - its a bitching lot of work.

Thanks lastly to all the players that play the game right, bringing the violoence to you, hardcore and your face

Here forever immortalized are the KNIGHTS OF AIRWAR who guard the survival of AIRWAR
Amongst them you will find those who are truely AIRWAR HARDCORE

They put their money on the line to maintain an arena for them to battle to the most violent extreme.
To all the fallen warriors, in time you are forgotten, but the Honour of the Knights remain here engraved for all eternity.
RESPECT

Date	Amount U.S.	Player Name
07/14/2011	$11.64	BizzBattleBr
05/31/2011	$100.00	NewWatcher / Basttard
12/10/2010	VPS servers	madz dissolvanizerx
10/06/2010	1024K RAM	Rule 42
09/21/2010	$20.00	Big_Ol'_Dookie_Rider
09/15/2010	$50.00	Badnoodle
09/15/2010	$50.00	AK-1200
04/11/2010	$20.00	Big_Ol'_Dookie_Rider
03/08/2010	$10.00	qqbun
03/04/2010	$5.00	UB-001
02/15/2010	$66.30	Anonymous RO
02/12/2010	$20.00	Jamie W.
02/09/2010	$10.00	UB-001
01/01/2010	VPS server	nutta1
12/22/2009	$15.00	UB-001
12/15/2009	$5.00	UB-001
12/14/2009	$2.00	Fire$torm
12/11/2009	$5.00	Santani6
12/07/2009	$5.00	whofuqincares
11/25/2009	$15.00	UB-001
10/25/2009	$5.00	Santani6
10/24/2009	$10.00	qqbun
10/16/2009	$22.22	ShotInTheButt
10/06/2009	$10.00	UB-001
09/26/2009	$20.00	Big_Ol'_Dookie_Rider
09/16/2009	VPS servers	madz dissolvanizerx
09/15/2009	$10.00	UB-001
09/07/2009	$30.00	king-kong-fuzi
09/04/2009	$5.00	Santani6
08/00/2009	VPS servers	nutta1
07/03/2009	$20.00	Big_Ol'_Dookie_Rider
06/06/2009	$5.00	Santani6
05/11/2009	$40.00	Rayzor54
03/30/2009	VPS servers	madz dissolvanizerx
03/25/2009	$100.00	alt+del (zerofunction)
02/21/2009	$60.00	Joe W.
12/20/2008	$30.00	Makebelieve
11/01/2008	$12.30	Warrior77
10/04/2008	$25.00	badnoodle
09/13/2008	$5.00	Chaim B. (World of Warcraft Player)
03/01/2008	$200.00+?	CHOPPERGIRL (plus 1500+ Hours modding work)

All funds go to pay the monthly rental bill on the game server, nothing else, so we can keep playing.
Server rental cost on average about $1 per slot per month, and it adds up real quick. :-(
(36p server = $36/month x 12 months = $432 a year. Yeah, would you pay that to run a server?)


Get your name here! Use the Quick Donate Buttons below...

Or, click the button below, and enter any amount and then remember to click the "Update Total" button...

All funds are in United States dollars, but Paypal will do an automatic currency conversion for you.

If you do not have a Paypal account, you can still donate by using a credit card without having to sign up with Paypal.
On the left it will say "Don't have a PayPal account? Use your credit card or bank account (where available)."
There will be a "Continue" link to click at the end of that sentence, just follow that link.

Be sure with any donation to put a note with your game name in it, so I know who the donation is from!

HOW TO SWEEP THE SCOREBOARD

To get any sweep, you MUST get the high scores in ALL 3 LAST GAME HIGH SCORES:

last game top pilot, last game top score, AND last game top kills. Without all 3 of theses, its not a sweep at all.

That alone, is called a 3x SWEEP (Three of a Kind). And its pretty good. But you can get even higher...

If you have all 3 last game high scores, AND have 1 top dog high score (even from a previous game), that's a 4x SWEEP!
(Four of a Kind)

If you have all 3 last game high scores, AND have 2 top dog high scores (even from a previous game), that's a 5x SWEEP!!
(Full House)

If you have all 3 last game high scores, AND have 3 top dog high scores (even from a previous game), that's a 6x SWEEP!!!
(Straight Flush) If you get a Straight Flush, and the server hasn't just rebooted, you're pretty bad ass...

If you get ANY sweep... 3x, 4x, 5x, or 6x... you capture the 7th line of the Scoreboard with your name on it. So a Straight Flush 6x SWEEP gets your name on all 7 lines of the Scoreboard! And you have swept the scoreboard! Quit, walk away, and gloat!

So you can talk all the idiot smack talk all you want, but when it comes to battle, are you the ultimate cleaning lady like CHOPPERGIRL, are you a 6x Sweeper?

IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO KNOW

I have set up some dedicated knife fight areas on both my servers, consult the maps below for their locations:

On BF2142, the knife only area is inside the circle of the core flag/silo capture area in the center of the map



In BF2, the knife only area is inside the tiled area of the pool beneath the crane in the center of the map

If someone is inside these areas, you are only allowed to kill them with a knife. If you kill them with any weapon other than a knife, 20 points will be substracted from your score. This might put you below -12 and get you kicked off the server depending on your score, so beware. Only kill other players using a knife in these areas. Do not shoot rockets or drop bombs or artillery strikes into these areas, you may kill someone and get punished.

WHAT COUNTRY IS ...?

One of the pioneering mods I made was to add a country code to everyone's nickname, so players could see what country other players were connecting from and guess what language they spoke. This facilitates same language players finding and communicating with each other. This is done automatically on my server.

My country codes caught on so well that people started recreating their nickname with their country code attached, so their country code would be seen on other servers as well (I don't recommend this).

If you see a country code you are curious about and can't guess where it is, you can look it up here: Alpha-3 Codes.

I am through trying to unlock all the game for everybody and be a hero to the people, when they throw stones at me and laugh at me and say "what work... you are stupid and fat" even though they clog up my server and its the most popular and most played game mod in the world.

The way I see it, even if the server lists close down, I will still be able to play against the bots on my dedicated server without any changes. All I will lose is the aerial dogfighting against humans (because bots can't do that). Oh well, at least I will still be able to fly the gunships, so that's fine with me.

All I get is insults and stupidity from these people, and all these new people that are coming into BF2142 now, go straight into my server, and think, AIRWAR is how the game came out, not how I fixed it working every week on it for 6 years.... sometimes for very long, hard, tiring stretches. They could care less about who I am or what I've done. Its just a funny stupid game to them, a place to be an ass and act stupid and be a dick to everybody.

When I started this 7 years ago, all I wanted to do was unlock the game for everybody, and play the game the way I wanted to play, as hardcore and intense as it could with as many explosions and as much action and tactics and variety as possible, with carefully tweak balance of everything, all like carefully constructed fairy chess game.

I have done that, and I am finished, AIRWAR is complete. It is beautiful and gorgeous. It is my baby. I fixed the Unlocks that went missing yesterday, and today I put the autocontroller cannons back in, and that is that. That is the final, final, final version, which I am calling, "Concrete Mix B". Because that is the version, I am going to burn out to CDROM, and that they bury me with when I'm old and grey, on a USB key around my neck...

It was the most frustrating, most fucked up, most buggy game ever to work with... you fix one thing... and that breaks something somewhere else... but I finally got all the variables write, all the hundred thousand lines of massive amounts of new code I wrote debugged...

It all... just works... the way the game should of worked, when it was sold off the shelf.... when you play on my server, what you are playing, is not 2142 any more, how the designers conceptualized it... its how I saw what the game could become, and made it so... with a lot of brutal work and pounding on the keyboard hundreds of hours all night long writing new game logic, tweaking settings, debugging, and testing... testing... testing.

If you haven't tried out my BF2 Airwar yet, you don't know what you're missing. Check out a slideshow of some screenshots. This is not your grandpa's Gulf of Oman!

Since I wasn't selling anything anyway, and the world is in an economic depression, I lowered my Zazzle store prices as low as Zazzle will let me make them.

I figure its better to sell some AIRWAR stuff at a rock bottom price and make no profit at all, then to sell no AIRWAR stuff at a high price and make no profit at all. Makes sense, right. That way at least all you hardcore players can get yourself a rock bottom airwar T-shirt for as low a price as possible, or a coolio two sided one like I did for $3 bucks more. And it is pretty cool. Get yourself something new to wear, get yourself some 'airware'!

The one sided shirt is only $12.95, plus they charge you a couple of bucks for shipping (like $4). They ship it in this plastic mirror reflection anti-static bag, the same kind you get like motherboards and video cards in when you buy them new, which is cool. I don't make any money off of any of this... or running the servers, I just do it cause I love the game and have a lot of fun with it. If you think I do you're crazy cause its a bit drain of time and money. I need to get my ass in a Taco Bell uniform like the rest of you losers! So bum some money from your grandma and at least get yourself a t-shirt. Sometimes Zazzle has free shipping, like right before holidays, or other big discounts, so sometimes with their PROMO codes you can get it for even a couple of bucks less. Check out the rest of the AIRWAR booty here.

The BF2 AIRWAR demo server has been moved to a better location in Houston (TX, USA), to clear up any lag issues. A lot of you who first tried the server ran into some hella lag; that should be gone now and from all my tests and feedback from other players so far it is. I also was able to get punkbuster to behave and run right, so the BF2 server should be showing up in the server list of everybody who still has thier PB filter box still on (set on by default with a fresh game install). Hopefully from here on out with more people seeing the server and it acting rock solid stable, we'll have a few more players join the game and stick around for good times. Download BF2 Demo

Wow, just out of curiousity, I decided to check how many of my BF2142 players (8,800 players since GameTracker started counting!) were listing themselves as fans of AIRWAR by putting AIRWAR in their clan tag. I counted 100+, not including myself, or CGAQ dead_7c (who has to be different and use CGAW (Chopper Girl Air War) instead - hey, he was an early adopter). Here's the auto-generated list by GameTracker.

Now the question is, why aren't you on it? Especially you hardcore players who I know LIVE on my server because you're there all the time. Us AIRWAR demo dog players are the most viscious tactically dangerous players on the planet. Its time to step up and lock and load. One day the demoscene may have the opportunity to take on those pussy assed full game teamplayers, and I want the hardest of the hard in my crew who have been chiselled in the fire of AIRWAR combat.

Oh, and with a clan of so many players, how come only myself and ROCCO35 are joined up on the AIRWAR CLAN PAGE. I think most of you don't even know it exists because its so new, so I'll point it out. Under the list of clan members on that page there is a text link called 'Apply'. Sign up and be counted, and add the AIRWAR server as your favorite server and the AIRWAR clan as the clan you're associated with, so you can get linked to all the demo guys you play with.

Oh, and AIRWAR is currently ranked #27 BF2142 server out of 910 in the world (game-monitor.com). Pretty darn good for a tiny 26 player server... against all those 64 player servers with way more money than I have. Just goes to show quality trumps quality. Just adding more players does not make for a better gaming experience! Ok, I'm done being silly and tooting my own horn. Back to modding my BF2 demo server... its got starburst shoulder fired rockets now ;-)

AIRWAR SUMMER FUND DRIVE - YOU BETTER READ THIS

Well, its nearing summer time and soon the servers will be packed and clogged with kids bored out of their mind. They are already packed as it is, but its going to get way worse. So its time to start a fund drive now to raise money for more slots so all you guys will have some chance to get in and play. You're paying for yourself, and for the life of me you guys just can't get it into your thick head that if you don't donate, it only hurts yourself.

See, here's the deal... no matter how full the server is, I can always get in. I have admin powers. If the server is full and I can't get in, all I have to do is simply kick some loser out which frees up a slot for me to jump in. I can always get in. No, its you who's going to have the problem. You're going to find my server slam packed all the time and you're going to be stuck playing on sucky servers all because you won't spend a few bucks to help out. You'll readily blow this money on chips and a coke or a burger and fries in a second flat, and then its gone, and then you'll suffer for a whole month frustrated and waiting in line trying to play your favorite game or stuck for hours on a boring server that is not even in the same ballpark of fun as mine.

So, what I'm trying to do is raise $100 bucks so I can run 8 more slots over the summer, or a second 16 player server. Just $5 from 20 people, or $10 from ten people, of the 1000 of you that play my game would do it. My guess is, you won't do it. Because most of you are stupid and cheap as a rock. And all I have to say is, have fun waiting in line then. All you are doing is hurting yourself. It doesn't hurt me one bit, I always get to play. And I'm not paying your guys way to play. I pay only the bare minimum for myself to have the smallest server possible for me to play. I've done my share a thousand times over working long stretches of hours to make AIRWAR as fun as it is. Its not on me to pay for you to play for free. If you want to play for free, well, there's ten other servers that won't ask you for a dime. No, AIRWAR is special, in fact, its way more special. Its for those who want to pay a little bit more so they can have an awesome game experience, rather than a mediocre one. There is no shortage of players. But there is only one AIRWAR and only 16 slots. There's 8 billion plus people on the planet. Yes, do the math. The odds are not in your favor of being special just because you are a player, you like my server more than any other else, and you know where it is.

I'm offering to up the server slots for you guys; all I have to do is message the server company to raise the number of slots and bill me more. So its up to you. Pay a couple of bucks each and play your heart out on an insanely fun 24 or ever 32 player AIRWAR server all summer long... or slog it out waiting in line to get onto a tiny 16 player server. Remember how fun the 26 player server was, and that was before my awesome player kicker existed to churn the noobz and kick the trash out. Remember how you hated to see it go, because nobody donated? Yeah. You all thought let someone else donate and I'll mooch. Let someone else do it, someone else will. Well with everyone thinking that like the stupid monkeys you were, it never happened. And I had to slash costs to the bone to the barest minimum.

I don't run this for a profit, I run this because I love to play the games; you guys could never pay me even at $5/hour for the 1000+ plus hours of work I've done on the server. I didn't do all that work for you. I did it for me. All I want you guys to do is pay your own way for the slot you play in. Thats it. The cost to the game server company to host the game. And its not a whole heck of a lot of money at all. One stop at the gas pump costs me as much as it would cost to run a 24 player server for a month.

So visit the donate page and make a donation through paypal to choppergirl @ air-war.org. Nobody else is going to do it. Its on you. You play, its on you. A lot of these players are stupid kids who can't set up a paypal account even if they had the intelligence beyond monkey level of how to do so, or foreign players that can't even read my website.

For those of you who have already donated, I'm not asking you, consider yourself exempt, and, THANK YOU for doing your share to help out, and I hope you enjoy my server to the max as much as I do (I'm sure you do). This is instead addressed to all those who have yet to donate at all.

Big Dog Scoreboard and 5/12 Player Kicker

Just a quick update, this week I've written some new Python code which is running on my server, which tracks Pilot kils and reports them on a scoreboard, along with Highest Player Score and Player Highest Kills. So if you're a gunship pilot who wants to test his metal against other gunship pilots, there's plenty of them on my server and you can now try to beat their top pilot score per game or top pilot score since reboot. This will encourage more people to fly on my server, and since its a big map with a few slots, this brings people into combat contact a lot quicker in the gunships and leads to far more action. The more people flying on my server the better, as it increases the combat action, and adds dramatically to the ground air interaction and the amount of debris falling out of the air from destroyed aircraft in air battle.

How it functions: pilot score tracks only kills made when you are (piloting so to speak) in an air vehicle: gunship, air transport, parachute, or pod. You get 2 points for each kill; however, unlike player score, you do not loose a pilot point if you are killed or die. So it can only go upward. You don't necessarily have to be driving to get a pilot score, for example, you will also get it as long as you are in an air vehicle when you make the kill. For example, the gunship gunner position will get it if he kills someone, as well as the gunners on the transport. Even if either is parked on the ground. And you should also (though I have not confirmed this yet) get a pilot score if you kill someone by piloting a pod to crash land on their head or vehicle and kill them. Parachuters shooting rockets and killing aircraft or ground targets will also get a pilot score. As long as you're in an air vehicle when you make the kill, your pilot score is increased 2 points.

Also even better, I've enhanced the kicker code to kick poorly skilled players out of my server so its a field of battle for hardcore veterans only. Players have 12 minutes (ample time) to make a score of 5 of they get kicked... this does a wonderful job of kicking all the retard monkeys and noobs off who would clog up my slots. This code is written to let the server fill up to 100%... only when its completly full will it start kicking retards off (they make acceptable targets until then). After that it will start kicking idlers and retards every 10 seconds to always keep one slot open so "someone better out there" can join. It does an awesome job of filtering out the goombahs over time so there's a much higher percentage of highly skilled players on my server, which makes for a far better and more competitive and action packed gaming experience. But at the same time on offhours (like Monday morning) it lets noobz play to their hearts content when nobody else is around. And even when its full at high periods during the day, it at least lets noobz get in and get at least 12 minutes worth of play round robin style.

Bouncers, Bouncers, Everywhere...!

Perhaps you're wondering what all these bizarre Claymore looking red things on the ground are. A devilish new invention of mine, they are new anti-jeep mines which I call 'Bouncer Mines', or simply 'Bouncers'. I always liked the 'thumper bumpers' in pinball; you know, the round things that when you hit them with the ball, they kick the ball back outward and spice things up your game play. Same principal. AIRWAR is a game after all, so lets add even more fun game elements.

Hit any of these mines with the tire of your jeep at a some rate of speed, or detonate them accidentally by deploying jeep poison gas pellets near them, and they will explode with a percussion that tosses your jeep well into the air, or in some direction away from the mine was when it detonated. More often than not, your jeep will land upside down and your will have to make a hurried exit and run from the jeep as it will quickly catch on fire and explode.

What's so fun about them, is that sometimes they'll send you careening far into the air with a lot of super fast rotation, so you're hurtling through the air spinning wildly around and around. Other times you're playing the game and have completly forget about them and you hit one, and it will explode unexpectedly on you and scare the bejeezus out of you.

They will detonate if you shoot them (don't stand close or the massive percussion will kill you), or if you drive anything over them such as tanks or APCs and probably if you land an air transport or gunship on them just right, but the bounce is not as pronounced as these vehicles have quite a bit more mass than the jeep. They'll also explode from bombs from the air transport, adding even more damage and random chaos and hurtling vehicles in the explosions that follow. Lots of fun.

And of course, being yet another one of the many unique mod creations of mine, these are only found on AIRWAR... and AIRWAR alone... you will not find them on any other BF2142 server anywhere!

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Battlefield 1943

DICE and EA have announced Battlefield 1942, which according to their website uses the Frostbite Engine (destructible environments) and the really exciting part, it will be available for the PC. If so, lets hope they have a demo server so I can run one... Frostbite on the PC side, its about time. This looks a lot more interesting than Battlefield Heros... you can check out their website at http://www.battlefield.com/1943/. Why they haven't contacted me and scooped me up as a developer is beyond comprehension.

Thanks to Devilman, I took off the NO-FLY zone (technically called the Combat Area boundaries) on my server. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. You can now walk, drive, and fly out into the yellow zone of no man's land to explore all the extra terrain out there. Who cares, you say? Well, I care, because I can build some neat stuff out there like some stunting obstacle courses and so on in these areas that are generally hidden and off the beaten path of the main game melee. And, if I were to make a client side mod, that built whole towns out there, I could expand the basic SIDI map and you'd be able to see it all by downloading a custom BF Demo Client developed by me, which you could use to replace what's currently installed on your PC. All the other demo servers would play as normal and you'd see no changes at all, until you went on my (or any other demo server) that had the NO-FLY zone turned off... then you could fly out there and access the whole new towns and battle areas.

Low Flying Clouds

Here are some snapshots of some low flying clouds I've come up with. As you may have never noticed, there are no low flying clouds in the game. What I want to do is have these as explosive bursts at the end of the ground Anti-aircraft cannons, to look like flak bursts, which you would of course be flying through and dodging, but I can't change the burst effect at the end of the life of the AA projectile... its rendered client side, so I am going to have to figure out something clever. Of course, the demo game was never meant to be modified, so its a nightmare of beating against code that does not want to cooperate or do this. Its not easy, at all, its rather a nightmare to create anything new inside the demo world. You guys have no freaking clue. I often spend many days straight with hours at the computer, trying a million different things, over and over with slight changes, to unlock some feature or get something I dreamed up to exist inside the game.

Extra Weapons for all the Soldiers and Vehicles

Well, this should get you excited...

I have been trying to figure out how to get the ALT-FIRE key to work inside the game for me, so I can add second alternative weapons to all the soldiers and vehicles. For example, left clicking will still fire your standard weapon. , but by clicking the ALT-FIRE (right mouse button by default), I could have the gunships drop bombs, the air transports drop poison gas, the tank fire a tv guided missle, the jeep drop mines, and all the soldiers throw grenades depending on what type they are... i.e., frag grenade for assault, emp grenade for sniper, poison gas grenade for support, etc. all when you left mouse click instead of right mouse click.

Second 16 player Server

I have a second server I've bought on the way, to replace the gone 26 player server, but there are some technical problems with getting it online, so it will be a few more days. Of course, I took the 26 player server down because it was too expensive, and you guys never donated. It was a shame to see it go.

I've installed some other games such as Quake Wars, COD4, etc to see about running a server on them as well, but without donations or support, its not going to happen. To be honest I wasn't impressed by them... some had better graphics but game play was too scripted and vehicle huds were poorly done. AIRWAR on BF2142 is still way more fun to play.

One goddamn good pilot

In memory of Hugh Thomspon, Jr. (died 2006), a helicopter pilot from Georgia during the Vietnam War, for his quick assessment of the situation, humanity in battle, unbelievable bravery, and courage to do whatever he could to stop the Mai Lai Massacre, a mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, entirely civilians and some of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968

"Thompson took off again, and Andreotta reported that Mitchell was now executing the people in the ditch. Furious, Thompson flew over the northeast corner of the village and spotted a group of about ten civilians, including children, running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Pursuing them were soldiers from the 2nd Platoon, C Company. Realizing that the soldiers intended to murder the Vietnamese, Thompson landed his aircraft between them and the villagers. Thompson turned to Colburn and Andreotta and told them that if the Americans began shooting at the villagers or him, they should fire their M60 machine guns at the Americans."

Serving as one door-gunner was his crew chief, Specialist Four Glenn Andreotta and as the other was Specialist Four Lawrence Colburn. All three men received recognition for their heroism at My Lai, although Andreotta died in combat three weeks after the event.

AIRWAR V-2

There's only so far you can push the BF2142 demo, and then its time to move on. I'd like to play some new maps, for example, of my very own, something you can't do in the demo we currently play. So I've started developing my own first person multiplayer shooter, Choppergirl's AIRWAR (version 2, so to speak, or V-2 for the V-2 missles that may be in the final game). All the keycontrols and player control feel will be as close to possible as I can get them to the same to what you are already familiar with, so anyone who migrates over to have some fun alpha testing it can do so without having to learn a bunch of new controls. It will have the same (default) WASD and mouse controls, F# keys to change weapons, Crouch, Fire, etc that everyone is already use to. I myself don't feel like having to do the mental switch when I switch games and switch my brain out to new controls, and when I jump I want to be able to jump just as high and no higher than I do in my other game. I want the physics to behave as realistically as possible and I want as many destroyable objects as possible.

Below is a super quick castle I made by duplicating my tower for four corners, to test terrain and building render speed... in this test map, 40,000 polygons at 200fps... way too many polygons used in this quick terrain I made... for the real game I'm going to build the island from scratch by hand using as few as possible, and build the island like a skin around the mountain's interior spaces which I will design first. With no dynamic lighting, from experiments I'm hoping I'll have 2 million polygons to push and play with at 30fps. Remember, I still have to add trees, vehicles, players, planes, explosions, a gazillion bullets flying about, smoke, water, broken building and vehicle parts, dead bodies, etc.

You guys could care less about plot or game concept, you just want to frag stuff, but never the less I'm going to build my first map around an atmosphere (and guess what, I won't be limited to playing on just one map over and over again, either). Since my first server will probably only be 16 players, with a max I'm hoping of 32 players, I'm going to make my map smaller that what you may be use to, to squeeze everyone closer together, and have fewer control points to fight over which will intensify the action for a server with fewer players on it. You know how it sucks to play on a big map with only 16 players... a smaller map should fix that and make even a 16 player server a riot of action. There will still be more than plenty of places for micro battles and to hide all over the map, especially with one central object which dominates the map and will draw people to fight over it.

Imagine a small south pacific island, off the radar map beyond the fringes of civilization, on which exists in the center an extinct volcano. This island is the micronation... or rather... anti-nation... of Anarchia... where I live. On top of this volcano, in the center of this island, has been built a castle inhabited only by myself. Up in the very top of the castle, is my office, through which you will be able to peek through a window and see the back of me working away at a desk at a computer. Try to blow the door off with a rocket launcher and interrupt my work, and you'll get the bird from me. Adjacent to my office, there'll be a small runway which exits out the roof, which will have a black *special* triplane in it (of course it will multi-respawn!) which you will be able to steal and fly out the side roof of the castle. Various staircases and spiral stairways will lead down to rooms and floors below. A bridge will cross a moat to the front castle entrance, and there will be plenty of sniping locations from the towers and walls, and the front door on the first floor will even be wide enough to drive a tank or jeep or crash fly an airplane into, should you want to make a spectacular entrance.

Down below further, there's also a core, which represents the 'server', which is a large computer circuit motherboard with a central CPU and other chips as big as jeeps. You're literally inside the server's virtual reality matrix, and you can see pulses traveling allong circuit traces, see the blinkey lights on the network card, even follow the the network cable down an access tunnel and out the mountain past a waterfall and the wreckage of a helicopter lost in the jungle, down across the beach and into the sea. Want to crash the game? Shoot at the server, and you may make everone's display shimmer and glitch out for a second... or maybe just the enemy's.

Above on the surface of the island, there's an old abanonded airfield from WW2, with a crashed Zero on, as well as rusting hangers and huts and other such things. There's an old pirate or sunked battleship in the small harbor. Roads wander around the island, and there are various waypoints in the jungle, including three V2 missle sites which are capture points in the game. You can get into the castle by following any of the many secret tunnels which exit at various hidden locations in the jungle below or inside abandoned buildings (Vietcong style).

There's jeeps and tanks and biplanes and triplanes, and maybe even some pterodactyls, some Dutch windmills, Vietnam Hueys, elephants, and all this crazy mixed in stuff to give it a cyberpunk feel. Whats the object of the game, you say? Well there's two main zeppelins floating over the water, one for each team, which you must take down by capturing the V2 missle silos and or holding the castle. Planes will respawn inside the Zeppelins and lower down to a hook below the Zeppelin, from which you can jump in and fly away from. If you need to repair your plane there's the airstrips down below you can land at.

There's a winding road up to the castle, with a bridge to that crosses a moat that is in front of the castle, and there' be lots of sniping from the towers and inside the castle. You'll be able to upload a custom logo graphic for your player, which will be displayed on your player uniform, tank, airplane, jepp, zeppelin, or control point flag or on the castle flag as soon as you capture it, as well as your own selected color scheme or that of your team.

When am I going to be finished with this, you ask? No time soon. I've just started, and I'm just one person, not fifty people like a typical game design studio might employ on a project. And I'm not terribly commited to it as there is no payoff, its just something I want to do because I'm passionate about gaming. So don't nag me and don't ask me cause at this point its just a phantom idea kicking about around my brain with an ass of work necessary to bring such an epic undertaking into reality.

First I'll get a map going where you can run around on it and shoot each other on foot, and multiplayer mode established so people can connect, and some code so it automagically updates itself everytime a new version comes out so people won't have to always download and update the game with the latest beta, it will be automatic. Once I get those three things established, I can just add and build upon it incrementally so it gets better over time. Gain a beachhead, and from there let my magic improving skills do the rest. Flush out the vehicles, and add one vehicle at a time, starting with the jeeps and tanks. The flying stuff is going to be trickier.

BF2142 Video Settings - Learn from mine

You can tweak your video settings by checking your frame rates in the game... to do so, bring up the console with the tilde (~) key, and enter the command "renderer.drawfps 1" and press ENTER. You can then close the console with tilde (~). This will draw your framerates in the upper left hand corner of your screen (higher is better), and inversely, the milliseconds between frames refreshes (lower is better). In a super ideal world, you want your frame rate to always be above the refresh rate of your monitor (60/72/75/80 Hertz). However, for fluid motion such a high rendering is not necessary for the eye to perceive fluid motion... for example, standard television runs at 30 frames per second.

From lots of experience in game play, I will say you want this to be between 30-40 frames per second, or at least 20-30 frames per second. When things drop down to 15 frames per second or lower it gets ugly. An occasional super low framerate is tolerable, like in massive explosions when you die and so on. Generally though, at 15 frames per second or lower you're probably not happy. Of course, the numbers in the corner are not necessarily a true gauge... let your gaming experience of 'if it feels fast enough' be your guide.

Also you should know, the TITAN map is going to be about 10 frames slower everywhere on average than the CONQUEST map simply because all the extra geometry of computing two big honking TITANS in the air and their insides. I try to aim for a ballpark of 40-50 frames/second on the CONQUEST map, and 30-40 frames/second average on the TITAN map. Explosions (effects) also slow things down considerably if they are big and going on at the screen at the moment.

Here's my video settings for a Nvidia 7800GT on an AMD X2 3800, what I consider a baseline average gaming system. Its somewhere in the middle between the latest and the greatest, and some system that is barely playable. After much tweaking to figure out what did what, my settings render a very beautiful immersive world which is still right above the borderline of slickly fast and responsive 90% of the time.

Notice how I don't have everything JACKED UP all the way to high on everything, which is what a beginner will do out of hubris... and what I myself did... the thinking goes like this: "I got this kick ass video card I spent some serious bucks on, it can do anything!" Well yeah, my two 7800GTs cost $400+ retail each at one time (I didn't pay that much for them, I bought them from a crackhead, he did, I probably paid $20 each for them new). After playing a long time though, I realized, I could improve things by turning off stuff that put a performance hit on drawing frames but contributed negligable or disposable improvement.

As a rule of thumb, you can turn everything up in the left column to high, and everything in the right column off. As you can see, I've done further tweaking than this. I like to turn my TERRAIN and TEXTURE to High, as this renderes a beautiful world and totally makes up for the right column being off. Geometry I'm not sure what it does, but I assume it involves CPU cycles and not Graphic card power, so I set that at high as I have ample CPU power. As for effects, Nvidia's dont handle effects very well (things like smoke), so I set this at Medium... you don't want to go lower than that for effects, and I can tell no difference between Medium and High on Effects. Lighting takes a big performance hit and you don't need it. The same goes for Dynamic Shadows, Dynamic Light, Anti-aliasing, and Texture Filtering... all of these incure a big performance hit. I set my view distance at 100% because I do a lot of dogfighting in the sky and I want to see my enemy coming from a long way away. You can probably get away with the standard 90%. Enhanced Lighting Effect at the very bottom, you definatly want to switch to off.

I'm running at 1600x1200, and at that resolution I don't need anti-aliasing. Yes, there are jaggies on lines, but when you're in motion, it all blends together. You don't need anti-aliasing at all unless you are doing screen captures or running at a low resolution. Of course, do not set this to higher than what your monitor will do, or you will lock yourself out of being able to see the game when you run it entirely, and have to delete your settings in your Documents/BF2142 folder and reinstall the game - don't say I didn't warn you, I've been there several times myself. Also, here I'm running at 75hz instead of a much more monitor widely compatible 60hz, as higher supposedly reduced eye fatigue. As a rule though you should probably stick with 1280x1024@60hz if you don't know what to do here, or are running an older 3D video card. And you should proably stick with 60hz period, as just about every monitor in the world can do it.

Setting your Texture Filtering Quality from 'Quality' to 'High Performance'
in the Nvida Control Panel will boost your frame rates and I notice little difference.

When you are tweaking out your own card, I recommend you do the reverse of what I did... I started out with everything at High and worked my way down. Instead, you should chose the screen resolution at what you want it to be, and then turn everything down to low and off. From that point, raise your Terrain and Textures up, as both of those return the biggest bang for the buck. Of course, if you've got a super new graphics card, even a bargain basement one, you can jack everything up to high, but for playability it would be indistinguable from my settings. In the game it doesn't really matter if your parked gunship on the ground casts a shadow or not, or if the lightpoles look smooth or a little pixy jaggy when they are at a long distance away. Its nice, but not necessary. Start from the bottom with your settings all the way at low and off, and watch your framerates and see what kind of headroom you have to work with. As you enable things you want you are watching for them on average to go down... and by how much... until you've exhausted your headroom and are hovering around or above the 30 mark (30-40 for Titan, 50-60 for Conquest).

Fore some more information, check THIS PAGE and also the BF2 Tweak Guide. Unlike this article, however, I suggest however you set your Audio settings to 'Hardware' and not 'Software'... software is compatibility mode, hardware offloads the work to your sound card (desirable). I also suggest if you can to set your Audio to "High" instead of "Medium", esp. if you have a 5.1/6.1/7.1 surround sound system, as you hear quite a few extra sounds you wouldn't hear otherwise. At any rate, sound is going to be processed by your CPU (software setting) or even better, your Sound Card (hardware setting), and not your graphics card. Using Taskmgr running in background showing the CPU usage history graph while you play the game, you can check taht you've got plenty of extra CPU cycles to burn. In my case I'm running a dual core, and both CPUs are at 60%, so yes I have plenty. On my old 3500 single core processor, I was running at 100% on a single core, so on a single core you may not have extra CPU overhead to play with.

Eject midair from the Pods

You can now Eject from my Pods in flight. Its tricky, and there's a trick to it, because you'll kill yourself and commit suicide if you don't have enough forward or backwards momentum to distance yourself from the explosive force that shatters the pod when you eject.

To practice doing this without dying from the pod blast, spawn as Assault troop, switch weapon to holding Med Kit (default press "4"), launch in a pod out of an APC and get lots of forward or backwards momentum (default "W" or "S"). Then near the top of your arc while you are moving forwards or backwards, eject (default "E"), and your Pod will detonate the bolts that hold it together and explode and you'll be free falling. Open your Parachute (default "Spacebar") so you can float down and try it all over again.

You can do this with any troop types, but you take damage. The more forward or backwards momentum you have, the further you'll be from the pod blast and the less damage you'll take, and I find it works easiest near the top of your arc. Note that if you die from doing this, two points (-2) is subtracted from your score as its counted as a suicide, so watch your score while practicing so that you don't get kicked from excessive negative score.

You can do this with any troop class, but its easiest to practice in the beginning with an Assault troop holding the Med Kit, to learn how to do it successfully while the damage you take from the pod blast as much as possible.

You can also do this from the Titan pods, the trick is not to do any forward momentum at all, just let it shoot you out and then eject from the pod. Once you're free, you can deploy your parasail and windsail anywhere you want to go.

New Trick! I've found I can do this and take very little damage (my best is no damage at all), by doing this very close to the top of the arc and I was using no forward momentum. You want to do this as close to the top of arc as possible with a little upward momentum, but not past the point of the top of the arc when you start to fall, or you'll die instantly. You will need to experiment around until you get proficient at learning the best time to eject near the top.

HollyWood Tank Trap

In designing my maps, I always moved the action out away from the center of the map. My theory is the center of the map is always going to get plenty of action just from its location, in the very center. It will be traversed across just by about every vehicle and body in the game at some point. However, spreading the action out from the center, this left the center kind of actually empty, with everyone fighting like mad over the other control points and just kind of forgetting about the center. Plus there were these two long big boring bridges there, sitting flat and empty, tempting me, and I had do something with them. I always wanted to write my name inside the game, but never could find an object that would work well to do so. Until yesterday, when I had an epiphany.

So I decided to build a jeep and tank trap on the bridge, to slow down and stop tanks until the tank trap was destroyed. This trap consists of crates of explosives, which I've tweaked to be a bit harder to explode. When I first made the trap if you hit one crate, they would all go up at once, which was one awesome explosion, but devastating on the frame rates. So I designed around the problem and fixed it.

This trap doesn't effect walkers, they can walk right past it, as well as men on foot... if you're in a tank or jeep you can shoot your way through it, using the machine guns... or hand held rocket launcher. The air transport is particularly devanstatingly against it. If you run into the trap with a tank or jeep they will explode, so watch out... it will stop the unwary from zipping across the bridge to get to the center. Of course you can bypass it all together via another route, but it does its job well. You can actually stand on a crate and blast it, which will throw you into the air, and you can deploy your parachute and press the backwards key and actually launch yourself airborne that way.

So here it is, I present to you, for the first time ever, in the history of BF1942/BF Vietnam/BF2/BF2142 (what, like 3000+ servers?), the FIRST and ONLY server EVER to have a word written inside the game. Think of it as my signature on my level. You saw it first here. Yet another BF2142 mod first from me, and you've seen a lot of them. Enjoy! And yes, be my guest, you can blow it up... that's what its there for.

How to Update Your Punkbuster

In many cases your punkbuster software will fail to update, in which case you might get kicked with a "PB Client Failed to Update" error. I see this happen a lot. Its a problem with your Punkbuster install having slipped out of date, not you or your playing. Or you may just have a really ancient version of Punkbuster and need to update it. Here's how to update your Punkbuster:

1. Download the PBSetup program and run it. Its easy. Instructions and Downloads are on THIS PAGE.

2. Once you run it, accept the licence aggreement, and install it, you'll get a blank Window that looks like THIS.

3. Click the "ADD GAME" button and click on the DROP DOWN ARROW in the game name field, and select "Battlefield 2142". It will add an entry for your game into the empty window.

4. IMPORTANT! PBsetup hasn't done anything yet. Click the "CHECK FOR UPDATES" Button for PBsetup to update your punkbuster software for the games (Battlefield 2142) you added to the list. This is where the magic happens.

Be sure you add a game ("Battlefield 2142") as an item in the list in the previously blank window and then click the Check for Updates Button for any install or upgrade of Punkbuster to actually take place. Give it a moment, you will see it downloading and updating the version number.

5. When its done you can click the "QUIT" button and fire up BF2142 Demo and play the game without any problems (you hope).

For more information about Punkbuster for BF2142, you can check the Evenbalance website .

Screen Shots

KiwiClam posted some of his action screenshots from the game in the forum. If you were playing the game at the same time he was, maybe you'll get to see your name in lights in the scrolling chat box captured in a screenshot. Or your name on the receiving end of his sniper rifle, whichever the case may be. Thanks KiwiClam!

Leaderboard

I have some idea for some LEADERBOARD type scoreboard code of high scorers to be displayed inside the game and on the main page here of the website, but the code is turning out to be more tricky to figure out where all this is stored than I thought. And more serious, I don't have time at the moment to work on it. But maybe someday down the road in the future, you may see the MONTH's, WEEK's, and DAY's TOP 10 SCORES displayed inside the game on my leaderboard. The leaderboards for each category will rotate like the messages do with the start of each new game so you could sit through three games to see them all, or just pull up the website here. You'll also be able to check todays, this week's, and this months top scores in more detail on the front page of my website here, such as the top 50 scores for each category (instead of just the top 10). And for those people who have autoready turned on (dummies) and never see the screen below, I'll also show the top 3 scorers for each category inside the scrolling messages in the game. Of course, the coveted position will be 'this month's #1 high score', but don't take it too seriously because it really doesn't mean a whole hill of beans. You never know, maybe the poser was using an AIMBOT.

Here is an idea of how it would look inside the game... I just picked filler names of whoever happened to be playing when I made this graphic... there is going to be a math problem I'm going to have to figure out because in game this area uses a variable width font, so I am going to have to do some insanely clever math or just blow it off, to get the second column to come even close to lining up straight.

PARAGLIDERS!

After 8 hours of work, I finally got the parachutes to work like they should of from the very start in the game... you can now steer and control them with the standard WASD key layout! My server is the only 2142 server with drivable parachutes / paragliders that drive like the real thing, so knock yourself out and enjoy them.

Spawn as an Engineer so you have the rocket launcher, take an aircraft up, jump out, hit Spacebar to deploy them, and hit your backwards key to gain even more altitude. Cruise leisurly over the battlefield taking pot shots at flying aircraft or swoop in on ground forces below, and catch a thermal to ride on out of there.

FORWARD - Press your forward key and hold it down (default: W) to go forward. These open some flaps on the chute and you'll drop suddenly for a bit until you gain speed and then move forward).

UP - Press your backwards key (default: S) and hold it down to try and catch a thermal or a gust of wind, and go up. You'll also go backwards a bit so be sure to turn to counter it and keep from going off the edge of the map.

STEERING - steer with your normal steering keys (default A and S). Once you get momentum going in a direction you'll keep going that way, so to stop it, you'll need to turn and face in the other direction and use the forward key to try and counteract your momentum and flare out and slow down.

If you don't press forward or backwards, and just steer like before, they act just like the regular chutes and let you gently decend onto the ground. Keep in mind that when you first press forward, you're opening some flaps in the chute and you'll drop quickly at first... this can be useful when you deploy near the ground and want to get down quicker. But if you're too close to the ground, you'll drop and land on the ground before you ever get a chance to move forward. So if you want to drive a chute around and play with it, make sure you have some altitude first, and when you start to run out of altitude, you can always catch a gust of wind with your back key.

Useless, you say! Now here's the best part. You know how when you get shot down in the middle of nowhere, and have to hoof it back to the nearest vehicle to get back to a base and find an APC to launch, or fend off some attacking gunship on the ground with just a rocket launcher? No more! Now as soon as you think your gunship is going to blow, jump out, hit your parachute, and hit your backwards key to gain some altitute. Then just paraglide out of harms way or back to a friend base or nearest vehicle, or even back up to your Titan.

LOOK WHAT I FOUND!

Holy crap! Probably stored in some farmers barn for almost 100 years and then drug out with a tractor!
Now left to rot in the rain! No!!!!!



You know I want it!!!! Some super rich person donate lots of $$$ so I can save this
100 year old dream gunship and classic piece of world history from the elements!
If you don't know what it is, its a Sopwith Camel from World War 1
and there are only seven original Camels left in the world.

I CRUSH YOUR RAPPER BLING BLING HUMVEE

My friend Christina says "we girls just roll like that"

Fans of Airwar, put AIRWAR as your clan tag!

Being kind of a loner warrior so to speak, I'm not really big on the ideas of clans or being a team player; however some people are and they like to be part of a group and I understand this. So for all the fans of AIRWAR, I'm authorizing you (authorizing? Woo! I guess. I have no control over the idiotic actions of the masses) to put AIRWAR as your clan tag if your a fan of AIRWAR. Think of it not as a clan, but rather more like a fan club (fans of airwar, so to speak), so feel free to express that my server is your favorite if you so desire by putting it in your clan tag!

I know everybody's got crazy nicks out there, so feel free to capitalize it anyway you like to match your nick (i.e. AIRWAR, airwar, AirWar, Airwar, airWar, aIrWar, airWAR, aIRwAR, etc. whatever!) however the freak you like, even with whatever funky characters or symbols in it you like.

Likewise, if some dwork is out there being a dwork with AIRWAR as their clan tag, I'm not in any way responsible for their actions or behavior, it just means my server is their favorite server to play on.

Yeah, I know, I should of said this six months ago for all those people that wanted to join my "clan", but better late than never. Actually, it wasn't my idea, I saw some fan put AIRWAR as clan tag, and didn't think to much of it at the time, but after a while it grew on me that it wasn't such a bad tag after all. Short and sweet, and it says just what its meant to say, that Airwar is your favorite server to play on.

AIRWAR servers now in Battlefield 2 demo and BF2142 full game!

If you're tired of playing Sidi Power Plant over and over again, here's the fresh change you've been waiting for. I'm running a 5 player test bed BF2 server I've been working called, of course, CHOPPERGIRL's AIRWAR. I'll eventually move this over to a 16 player dedicated server.

Download the free BF2 demo client (google search, try the first link first its the best), tweak up your video and audio and control settings (I recommend max everything up except antialiasing and dynamic lighting - turn those off), click on Multi player and uncheck all the search filter boxes just like you do in BF2142 demo, and look for "CHOPPERGIRL's AIRWAR".

If you have the full game of BF2142 you're in for a real treat, because I've modded four BF2142 full game maps to have multi spawning gunships and vehicles. In fact, I need some people to pile in there and favorite it because most people on the full game side don't know about it yet, AND they are obsessed with getting unlocks and ranks. Which means playing on unmodded ranked servers. Which is stupid and lame. So we've got to show them what we in the demo community already know, that its all about fun, not playing to weevil your way up some stupid ranking system! Just load all thousand plus servers in the Advanced tab, and do a search for "AIRWAR" and favorite it.

How much does AIRWAR cost to run?

People ask me all the time, how much does it cost to run your own server, and why am I get so bent out of shape about getting people to donate to run a server that is my own choice to do so? Well, the truth is not pretty, its rather very expensive in time and money. Your first deceptively cheap cost is a server rental, where you're paying for the bandwidth and electricity on a box to run your game. This runs you anywhere from $1 to $2 U.S. per gamer slot. Because I shop around aggressively, a 26 player slot server such as mine, costs me $26 a month, or $312 dollars a year. That's $300 a year someone like you would be spending to get a Wii, or PS2 or XBOX, or a new video card. Because I run AIRWAR and basically paying for your slot and everybody elses slot to play on my server, I'm going without. Add into that a monthly broadband connection at $55 a month (I live way the freak out in the stix, I consider myself lucky to have an option to something other than a god awful modem phone line), to upload files, playtest the game, police the game, maintain the website... and that's another $660 a year. No, I don't need internet for buttkiss anything else. After you watch a couple of Youtube videos, you realize, most of the internet sux. Electric for my computers here, probably another $100 over the course of a year on these 400 watt power supplies. So I figure its costing me just in raw materials, probably around $1200 a year, and I really question my sanity to spend so much to play a game the way I want to play it, considering I don't even like it anymore! Yeah, you have to be a pretty hardcore gamer to spend that much.

Unfortunately, beware my enthusiastic sever admin wannabe, the costs don't end there. You don't just don't go shopping for mods at some BF2142 Walmart style modding site, pick out the ones you want to steal for free, and plug them in. There is no such thing. It just doesn't exist anywhere, because I can count the number of BF2142 modders on my two hands. There's just that few of them, and they don't share secrets. You have to make your own. Yes, you can run a stock server out of the box, but as 800 always empty BF2142 full game servers testify to, nobody wants to play on an unranked stock server at all. They just suck. The plain vanilla server just... sucks. BF2142 was meant to be a vehicle intensive game, I saw it from the moment I laid eyes on it, and stock servers are stingy as heck with their vehicles. Hell, just about all the full game Conquest maps have no vehicles in them whatsoever! Insane. My god, how boring can that be, walking all over a city map every time you die just to get to the center again to be killed by some asshole sniper.

Further, the things you think should be easy, for example, placing a new AA gun in a map, is devilishly and unnecessarily difficult. Somewhere near the center of the map is coordinate 0,0,0. That's the X,Z, and Y center from which all other coordinates are measured. You want to put your AA gun up on a hill, this is what you do. You guess what coordinates it might be, located it far up in the air, add it to a file, rezip the file, restart the server, reconnect via IP to your game, fly to the air, try and find your new object (sometimes its way off and you have to hunt all over for it, that's why its good to put it first way up in the air), and then try and guess how F***ing far it is off from where you want it to be. You reedit your config file, and repeat the whole slow process. When you get it sort of where you want it as far as X and Y are concerned, you start slowly lowering it in steps, until you get down to inches above where it must be. You don't want it buried under the ground, nor do you want it hovering over it. I'm a perfectionist at this point, I have to get it sitting just right. Go to any of my objects in the game, and you'll find, they are sitting just perfect on the ground, if I've done my job right, you can get down on the ground and not look under them. You tweak left/right, backwards/forwards, up/down, over and over again with small changes until you get it just right and every change is a guess. Sometimes you totally go the wrong direction +/-, and throw your object way off.

I recently put in nine new AA guns on the roof, and it took me half the day and into the night, working as fast as I could, doing every single one of them at once. Even at my fastests, and I've had lots of practice by now, that's how much work it is. I do it because I love it, to throw more spicey toys into the mix. I don't expect to get paid for my hours, that's my contribution, but all the raw materials that I have to spend real money on... yeah, it sure would be nice to get some help. I'm not rich, and I don't pretend to be, and running this thing is really beyond my means.

So donate people. So we can keep AIRWAR in the air, and play the way we want to play. You play on it, you know how fun it is. There is no other place like it, no other place to fly 10 friggin gunships in the air and have debris and action falling all around you. Not even in the full game. And I'm running my Classic AIRWAR maps on the demo side. How sweet is that for you. Yes, there are other servers, with even more slots. And yes if I can no longer afford to keep AIRWAR running and it falls off the grid forever, you will still be able to play on some demo server somewhere. But god how bad will that suck for all of us. If AIRWAR blinks out forever, it will be the end of a golden age. Don't fool yourself and think other people will donate to cover your ass... because quite frankly, nobody is.

Very soon I am going to have to get a real job, and am not going to have time to play on AIRWAR anymore. I have worked hard on it and at this point, all I have to do to keep it going is pay the server bill every month. I would like to keep it running for all the rest of you, but somehow it needs to get to be self sustaining where it at least pays for itself. Otherwise, the horrible axe shall fall as I won't have time to play on it like I do now and will wonder why I'm paying for a bunch of people I don't even know to play on a server that is so popular I can't even get into it myself most of the time if I even had the time when I was not working a full time job to do so.

New Lasar Cannons and AA guns

Yes, its lasar tag war... and you probably have no clue yet how devastating these little over looked babies are as a sniper weapon... yes, even against lone infantry. Here's the clue: you think these puppies are horribly inaccurate... and you might be right... but did you ever think to ZOOM them? Like you do your sniper rifle or other hand held weapon. Yes, hit your ZOOM button and BLAMMO, these things become pixel perfect deadly from a long range. Remember they shoot from one side, so your lasar line of fire is at an angle towards infinity, so you may need to aim a pixel or two to the left of your target in the distance. Most people won't be looking for you. But keep in mind, repeated firing will give away your position. These are great to snipe with if you haven't respawn as a sniper, but want to do some sniping just the same.

I've also added some more Anti Aircraft guns around the Conquest map Home bases, to make base raping a bit more difficult. A lot of action tends to happen around the main bases as people fly in in a gunship and jump out and start mixing it up. If people start mounting them, the added AA guns are there to make the main bases a hornets nest of AA gunfire and more perilious for these kind of commando attacks to be executed. The problem is too many of them repeatedly tie people to action and fighting in the main base, and they get distracted and never can get out to mix it up on the rest of the map and capture flags. Its a big map and fighting needs to be 'out there', not constantly at the main bases. So use those AA guns. They are up on the towers and roofs. Podsurf up there or climb a ladder.

Rattlesnake Jeeps

Ah, what's the one never before seen thing you won't find in the full game of BF2142 that Choppergirl whips up for you wicked unemployed deadbeat little lay-abouts enjoyment... besides Carpet Bombing Air Transports... *AND* Starburst Shoulder Fired Rocket Launchers... *AND* 50 caliber Sniper Rifles... *AND* Multispawning Gunships and Vehicles... *AND* Dirty Harry style hand cannon Desert Eagle Pis.... oh never mind. That's right, you guessed it (no you didn't)... POISON GAS!!!

And what better way to deploy poison gas, than through a little bout of Grand Theft Auto style road rage. You come home from work, perhaps you've had to sit through a lot of boom boom rap from some retard dweeb next to you at the stop light (where do these people breed at?)... and what you want to do most is gas the heck out of some bastards. I say, go to it, and stomp on that horn in one of my Rattlesnake Jeeps, so named for the distinctive and errie hissing sound they make when the gas pellets ignite and throw up clouds of poison gas smoke as one passes you by. But don't stand to close or you'll feel the bite of the snake. And the snake does bite, and bite hard... those pellets can devastate vehicles as well... if you haven't figured it out by now, yes, you not only can take out infantry with a Rattlesnake Jeep, but walkers and tanks as well.

Special Thanks to Wecome of JOD for collaboration on the code for this neat little mod.

The Awesome Power of the Air Transport

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've noticed the Air Transports drop bombs in my game, and are the equivanent of a heavy strategic bomber. They are also one of the trickiest weapons to master in the game, even harder to master than the gunship, and here's why: an amateur transport pilot is just as likely to kill his own players with collateral damage as he is enemy players. Even worse, with people being TK punish happy as they are even when its unjustified, a person can quickly rack up a negative score flying around indiscriminatly bombing enemy targets. Even a master pilot will rack up a negative or zero score even though he's killed a lot of enemies; TK punishes drastically affect your score (minus 4 each?) and it only takes a few to keep knocking you down to zero or below. You may have killed 16 of the enemy with your bombing campaigns and think you're doing a heck of an awesome job (you are), but you're sitting at zero in the scoreboard because you've had four teamkills along the way. The Air Transport is a deceptively hard weapon to master and I meant it to be; however that does not mean you should not take advantage of it if you see the right opportunity to do so. It is a visciously powerful weapon and if used very carefully to avoid killing your own team members that may be down below or jumping out of your plane, it can be like having your own personal and mobile Oribital Strike.

To help you guys out, here's my own little micro guide to tactically and effectivly using the Air Transport.

• The bombs are on a time delay fuse... which means they will detonate after a short period of time, which effectively limits the height they can be dropped. Dropped from too high, they will simply explode in the air doing no damage to anyone whatsoever.
• The bombs have a wide and devastating blast radius... which means they do hella a lot of damage, but if you are flying too low, they will do damage to you as well. You can be doing damage to your own Transport and blow up it up by bombing too low to the ground; the blast radius is pretty great so you must find a safe bombing corridor height which is not too low, but also, not too high.
• The bombs bounce... which makes them very effecitve if you are bombing tighty enclosed places like the Offices, but nearly useless if you are trying to bomb a target in the air (say a gunship), something on a hill or tower or roof, or in a fast pass over the top of the Titan.
• If you're in a turn, the bombs will sling out much further than your Transport in a wide radius... you may be doing a tight turn over your target thinking you are dropping bombs on them, when in reality your bombs are being slung outward in a wide arc.

Set your keys up so you can look forward and backwards... the default to rotate through views is the "C" key, but I find I have to redefine this. I define the "F" key to look backwards, and the "C" key to return my view to forward cockpit. By occasionally looking backwards while flying, you can check your tail for enemy aircraft, and also see how your bombs are behaving and what they are doing, or not doing.

There are a few different methods I've found to work in different situations. Which you use will depend on your target.

The Straight Pass

This is very effective when you see a lone infantry man running across the ground; fly a medium low straight line over him holding down on the horn. Be sure not to curve or you will cast your boms off to the side. You want a straight line of explosions to pass right over him. This is also an effective tactic to use against AA turrets, even on roofs.

Saturation Bombing

This is very effective against the enemies main base, or against a silo or flag that is crawling with respawned enemy soliders. Hover over the area, and saturate the area with a continuous dump of bombs. Do not stay still, but make little passes back and forth being sure to hit whatever vehicles are in the area over and over for extra explosions. Bomb whereever they may respawn and behind buildings, and always go after soldiers that come back.

Hover Bombing

This is very effective against armored vehicles, particularly Walkers and Tanks. Fly over them and hover directly, dropping a continous stream of bombs straight down. Bombs when droped in a pass tend to bounce and go right through and past walkers without much effect, but even walkers can't survive this waterfall barage of bombs from straight above. Its devastatingly destructive. However, keep in mind you're right above a walker with its awesome anti-aircraft capabilities; if there's any fight in it more than likely the outcome will be mutual destruction.

The Camper Kill

If there's a camper continuously being a pain and returning to the top of your Titan to shoot hand held rockets at your gunships leaving the Titan, this is what you can do. Get in the Air Transport, fly up, and as soon as you leave the safety of the shields hit the Air Transport shields (the default key being "X") and start bombing and sway slightly ever so backwards over the top of your Titan so you are hovering directly above it dropping a torrent of bombs on the top roof of your Titan. It won't do any damage to your Titan, but it will bomb the daylights of anybody up there, even with bombs bouncing off eveywhere. If they blow you out of the air, try it again and again until you drive them off.

One last thing to keep in mind, is that your own teammates will be respawning in your Air Transport and parachuting out. These daft morons in some cases will jump out right into your bombing malestrom even though they can hear you holding your foot down on the horn. Either they are unaware of the bombing modifications, or just unaware that a horn noise means a warning that bombs are being dumped out below. Almost always these daft people will punish you for their own stupidity, so be aware of them. Even though you may have no passengers when you leave the Titan, they can respawn into your Air Transport by clicking your moving dot on the map.

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