Archive for the 'Graphics & Photos' Category

We’re living in these hard times. In last weeks there has been such a concentration of bad events for Smokin’ Guns’ community that’s hard to summarize them all. Like in a domino, our beloved game has witnessed a chain reaction of pieces falling down.

So, in the right column of this site, we have tried to collect all relevant SG’s links to be used as a “survival kit” while waiting for a new official site.

What we’ve lost so far.

• December 2011–January 2012: SG forum is heavily targeted by spammers. 10-20 posts a day in The Silver Screen thread are enough to scare legitimate posts.
• 19 January 2012: US Justice Department forces Megaupload.com offline. Megaupload, was hosting many files linked from SG site (demos, videos of new maps, and so on). Lost forever.
• 30 January 2012: After 7 years of honoured service RAWHIDE is put to sleep. Players from the Americas, loose their reference point. ReD NeCKersoN declares his tiredness in contributing to the game. Pardner will follow him soon.
• February 2012: Master server crisis. SG master server goes offline, so servers list in game, in XQF and in MonsterBrowser becomes useless. The problem is partially solved with a new master server (master.smokinguns.fr), but you have still to configure your client for using it and not all servers are listed. Newcomers are becoming scarce. A brave group of developers starts working on a new release to correct the problem.
• 29 February 2012: SG site and SG forum are down. Nobody exactly knows what happens, but they’ll never be put online again or at least this is what the webmaster says [unverified rumors]. We loose 10 years of memories, fun times and hard times, images, videos, discussions about new maps, new features, new models, an interview with IronClawInteractive, the way to private messaging a player, our mail history, SG manual, a lot of useful links and informations, and much much more. Not the work of one man, a whole community contributed to the growth of such a complex, living site, for years. The same brave group of devs starts working on a new site … there is a slight chance they’ll be able to get something good from old database.
• 01 March 2012: SG name. Rumors report that we can’t use “Smokin’ Guns” name anymore. A call for proposals is opened in this site. Next the threat seems to fall.
• 02 March 2012: Due to policy changes [??] our URL shortener “lameclan.tk“ is no longer free, we are forced to go with “lame-clan.tk”.
• 03 March 2012: SG maps. Unverified rumors talk about a couple of maps that will no longer be available, due to license issues.

What we should expect to loose soon.

• The fuel in Molotov cocktails
• Both barrels of Sawed-Off shotguns
• The sound of the Gatling Gun
• The saloon in NewTown
• The bell tower in San Cuchillo
• The trains in Station
• The canyons in Coyote Bluff
• The money in safes
• The smoke in guns
• FuzzyQjones’s pants and AwesomePossum’s skirt
• SG will be no longer available for PC. Only for Nintendo GAME BOY

[Drawing courtesy of SNH. Click on image for full size].

Well, this was only a personal opinion about what we should expect to loose next. And your opinion? What do you think we are going to loose?

Seems like we are going to experiment 2 new types of gameplay tonight, in our weekly clan deathmatch (Terra Nova 20:30 CET).

First proposal, by Slowly John, is called “Minesweeper”, that means you can use only dyna to kill your opponents, but without lightning it … to make it explode you have to shoot at it with your gun.

Second proposal, by Biondo, two teams using only knives in Station. Each team should occupy a distinct side of the map, using the middle rail as a delimiter. So, no knife shaving will be possible, just knife throwing. It’s not allowed to kill who respawns in the wrong zone, and similarly who respawns in the wrong zone can’t kill anybody until he reaches his team. Team composition has still to be decided.

[Inspiration: The physics of knife throwing, On the job, Il coltello Bowie].

As you probably know there have been huge problems with master servers lately (see: Master Server, This is the end…, and Serverlist of Monsterbrowser). With the going offline of ID Software master server the situation has become dramatic because the builtin server-tracker of all SG clients is now useless (as are MonsterBrowser and XQF), and it’s complicated for newbies to figure out how to join an online game. If this situation would last for long, SG would be at risk of extinction.

In these last few day some new master servers have been created by ricochet and Joe Kari, while barto (with his batchfiles connecting directly to single servers), dansh (with his precompiled binaries) and a.k47 (with his video tutorials) tried helping players in configuring their clients in order to connect to online games. Thanks to all of them for their efforts (I hope I haven’t forgot anybody … it’s not simple to follow a discussion that spreads along three threads).

So now we have an official master server to query: master.smokinguns.fr. In order to be able to get in-game server list you have to edit your q3config.cfg adding the line: seta sv_master1 "master.smokinguns.fr" [I’ve already updated our FAQ consequently].
Warning: not all servers are reporting to these master servers yet (due to mysterious problems, BB, SB and TN are not listed yet, for instance). If you have added servers to your MonsterBrowser manually, some of them might disappear when you reload the server list.

Latest news: given these problems and given the fact that most part of SG developers is inactive at the moment, Joe Kari took the initiative to start distributing a new SG version that should bury both SG 1.0 and SG 1.1b4 under 2 meters of soil. The new release is named “SG 1.1 beta 5a unofficial“. Read Joe Kari’s call for help and download the new release here: A CALL to the community – SG 1.1 beta 5.

Waiting for a better hosting service, at the moment the download is slow, but keep in mind that it’s not just a simple update, it’s a complete SG binary ready to be run. No Windows installer until now, simply unzip it to some place in your hard drive, enter the directory and run smokinguns.exe.
It’s probably better if you backup your q3config.cfg before running the game.

Until now I don’t know of any server that is ready for SG 1.1b5a, so you can test it only in single player mode or in LAN.
Once you have played some games you should also vote in the poll about your experience with it.
Smokin’ Guns lives as long as it has a community behind him, and you can take part into it by helping with tests. Hopefully, SG 1.1b5a will soon evolve in a stable SG 1.1!
Get 2 coffins ready for SG 1.0 and SG 1.1b4!

[Click on image for full strip. Source: A Fistful of Dollars ]

Stay updated, because it’s a rapidly evolving situation.

After having played our weekly deathmatches in Terra Nova for more than 8 months, it’s time to summarize which maps the clan enjoyed more. Not all matches were well documented, but 90% of them were. So, this is the chart for 45 games played, and the winner is … Tijuana, with a total of 16 games!

Nobody exactly knows what happened at Greenhill Lake on Thursday, but sure it’s the most bloodcurdling event in the history of the county.
Nine men have lost their lives in the carnage, while the police is still searching for a missing one. Friends of the victims report that the group went to the lake for a hunting trip, as they were used to do on every Thursday since long time. Nobody could have expected such a tragic end.

[Click on image for full size].

The Police is at work at the crime scene collecting traces and clues that might explain what happened. For what transpires until now, it seems that –probably under the effects of rivers of Whiskey– a discussion among the ten friends had degenerated into insults. Someone said “Lame!”, someone else replied in the same tone, another one (probably the one known as Jippi), extracted his knife and started aiming at the pardners. In a flash, all the men pointed their Winchesters one against each other and after few minutes of hell, a deadly silence retook possession of Greenhill Lake again.

The scene that appears to our eyes is disheartening. Corpses lying on the ground here and there, under the trees, over the turret, inside, around, and even over the roof of the house. But the most striking thing of all is the colour of the lake: red! Red of blood.

🙂 Hehe, just to say: it’s Thursday! Propose your map/server/game here.