Why the lack of news?
Why the lack of updates?
Where's this awesome 1.7 version I keep hearing about?
Are you guys dead?
What's up?
^ Just some of the questions being asked.
Truth is, we haven't gone anywhere. Everyone has been busy with real life and/or other projects.
That said, we have some great new updates coming soon! We're cranking it up to 11, 1.6.11 to be precise.
We initially said 1.6.x was done in terms of features and would get only bugfixes. As work on our partially-rewritten 1.7 version has been slower than expected, we thought you guys deserved some of the most-asked-for features without the wait. During the last few weeks, we've been very busy implementing some of the following:
A taste of what's coming in the near future:
- Official support for more games (PVKII, CSPromod, HL1DM)
- Updated support for various other games (CSS, TF2, GES, AOC, TFC, FOF)
- More speed enhancements
- Rcon password now hidden from view in admin area
- IP address search in admin panel now supports partial matches (lookup players matching whole ip block)
- Server name is now able to update even when rcon isn't available
- Daemon now cleans up gracefully when being closed or reloaded. No more losing buffered data
- Perl backend control admin page now works by default on many more installs
- Added cpanel fix option in hlstats.conf so cpanel users no longer need to manually edit files.
- Now compatible with the newly released Perl 5.12
- Daemon no longer gets IP-banned on gameserver if you mistype rcon password (stops trying until reload if pass is bad)
- Awards/Maintenance script totally revamped. Now allows running only a subset of script (ie, just GeoIP lookups, or just re-lookup player clans after updating patterns)
- Various small bug fixes
Click Read More to read the rest!
Also of note, Valve finally fixed the rcon crash bug that has plagued many L4D and L4D2 servers for almost two years now.
1.6.11 will be available to our beta testers sometime this week if all goes well. Release will happen after we're confident that there are no new bugs. Note that beta signups are currently closed, but that may change if there isn't enough feedback from the current pool of testers.
Okay, but you still didn't answer the 1.7 question!
It's still in the works. Thanks to octo-dhd of TF2 Newbs, the templating of the new web interface is just about done. This was easily one of the largest tasks to accomplish and, as we've noted before, will allow much easier customization without having to re-apply edits when page logic changes. It's also built to support multiple languages, one of our most-requested features.
We still have some other major backend changes to do. After that, we start implementing many of the newly planned features, all of which will be much easier to do with the other changes we're making.
Is there anything I can do to help?
Sure!
We can always use more people around in the forums helping answer questions.
We also have a (relatively) new wiki that we're trying to populate. So far it's a bit bare, and many of the existing pages aren't even linked to the main categories yet. We'd be happy to have any help with that that anyone wants to contribute. Anonymous edits are allowed with a captcha, or if you create an account, send me a PM and I'll have it let you bypass the captcha.
Lastly, if you're a developer and would like to help implement any bug fixes or features, catch myself or Packhead in our irc channel, #hlxce. We'd be happy to get you going. Users are also welcome in the channel to get help, give help, or just chill and have fun.
Well, that's it for now. Back to work!