PubComp Project http://pubcomp.com A system for playing competitive style Team Fortress 2 Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:45:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.4 A Correspondence to PubComp http://pubcomp.com/2012/02/28/a-correspondence-to-pubcomp/ http://pubcomp.com/2012/02/28/a-correspondence-to-pubcomp/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 18:57:27 +0000 Trent http://pubcomp.com/?p=451 Continue reading →]]> I wanted to share with all of you this email I recieved yesterday.

Hey man. Just thought I’d e-mail you to say that I really love the idea of pubcomp. I have a bro who told me about the harsh world of lobbies and that I’m not ready to be abused by these people so I was thinking that pubcomp would really be for people like me (although you probably already know that). The fact that you can play competitive styled matches with people around your skill level really interests me and I would love to give it a go so that I can practice for when I’m ready to enter leagues like UGC. Anyway, enough blogging. This e-mail is to show that you still have people like me supporting you. Despite the lack of updates I know that you guys haven’t given up yet and I respect that. This may just be me selfishly asking but please don’t give up. This is a really great idea and it would be a shame to have it go to waste. Thanks for coming up with something like this, I’m really looking forward to its release.

Yours sincerely, Count Larc

I suspect that many of you may share this man’s sentiments, and I hope we can see a proper, full, and transparent State of the Project very soon, because there are a lot of people in the dark at the moment.

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2012/02/28/a-correspondence-to-pubcomp/feed/ 2 PubComp’s EU 6v6 team http://pubcomp.com/2012/01/27/teampubcomp/ http://pubcomp.com/2012/01/27/teampubcomp/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 12:21:54 +0000 Trent http://pubcomp.com/?p=439 Continue reading →]]> Oh yes.

As a teamless Medic for quite some time, I’ve formed a team looking to play at a Division 2 level (equivalent of high ESEA-IM for all you Yanks n’ Canucks), and am currently trialling players. The team will all use the PubComp avatar that I love so much, a Mumble channel in KritzKast’s EoReality server, and then a game server from EoReality. Parable’s already pledged financial support regarding that, but I’ve emailed Robby of EoR asking for some kind of extra sponsorship temporarily because he’s the guy who lent us 12 servers for the Lo-Fi Offclass Cup.

All the potential players are aware of the fact that they’re expected to be good community ambassadors for PubComp wherever they go, but especially within the higher tiers of European competitive TF2. My hope is for a long-lived, stable roster more than pure standings, though the latter should follow from the former.

That’s just to let y’all know where we’re at at the moment. I feel obliged to keep everyone here updated, and since we’ve not had a SOTP in over a month why not write an article. Tehe.

The team’s ETF2L profile is here and the recruitment post is here.

Until next time,

Trent

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2012/01/27/teampubcomp/feed/ 4 State of the Project: Week 30 http://pubcomp.com/2011/12/18/state-of-the-project-week-30/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/12/18/state-of-the-project-week-30/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 16:34:55 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=436 Continue reading →]]> Hey All,
I would love to be able to start one of these without feeling the urge to apologize, but I’m sorry for the time inbetween SOTPs :) . Between starting a new company and the holiday season, it’s been a busy month. I’ve been doing a bit of work on PubComp each day, and am working on getting a feature map laid down and everything up onto GitHub now that I’m at the point where the architecture won’t change.

In other news, I’d like to thank and welcome Dranairean to the PubComp team. Hawkeye has been having computer troubles, and Dran has stepped up to help us make an awesome CvP. Thanks also to everyone who signed up!

I received the news today that ESL and Cadred both dropped support for TF2. I realize that makes a good PubComp system more important than ever, and hope the community will continue to support the development as we move forward. Thanks again for your patience, and I’ll talk at ya next week.

Happy Holidays,
Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/12/18/state-of-the-project-week-30/feed/ 5 State of the Project: Week 26 http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/20/state-of-the-project-week-26/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/20/state-of-the-project-week-26/#comments Sun, 20 Nov 2011 23:18:51 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=429 Continue reading →]]> Hey everyone, some mixed news today. As some of you know, I’ve been heavily involved programming for a startup that’s been taking up much of my time. This past week, my client and friend who was the founder and visionary behind the project passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Along with my personal sorrow at his loss, it’s certainly shaken up my business a bit, so this past week has been quite topsy-turvey.

The upside to this tragedy is that this coming week I’ll be able to devote most of my time to finishing PubComp’s long overdue release. Although I haven’t had any time to play TF2 recently, I’m hearing that a system like PubComp is increasingly in demand, and I look forward to connecting with community once again to make sure it grows into the best system it can be. Other than time for a few social commitments (Turkey Day is coming up, after all), my door will be completely open for anyone who has questions or wants to help, all week long. Just contact me on Steam or Skype.

- Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/20/state-of-the-project-week-26/feed/ 2 State of the Project: Week 25 http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/13/state-of-the-project-week-25/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/13/state-of-the-project-week-25/#comments Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:34:02 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=422 Continue reading →]]> Whew! Feels good to get some time again. I was finally able to crack open my dusty dev environment and get back to it this weekend, making some progress on fixing some pesky login/session sharing related bugs, as well as furthering my goal of getting the dev environment ready to go. I’ve got two things left to do: secure the realtime environment, and get Barncow’s logging system triggering the correct rcon commands to the server. After that, I’ll push up the dev environment and we can get testing started on the real servers.

That means that this week, we’re going to start moving forward again. Devs, I’ll be contacting you individually to start gathering info on your availability, as my time will still be somewhat limited, and I will absolutely need some help to push PubComp to launch. I will be making a couple hours available every day I can over the next couple of weeks for those who would like some one on one tutoring/assistance in getting their own development environments set up.

I’m going to get back to it, feels good to be back :)

<3,
Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/11/13/state-of-the-project-week-25/feed/ 6 State of the Project: Week 21 http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/14/state-of-the-project-week-21/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/14/state-of-the-project-week-21/#comments Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:16:10 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=416 Continue reading →]]> Hi everyone, gotta keep this week brief (it sure went by fast) as I’m in the middle of a code sprint (not for PubComp, unfortunately). Last week I ran into some showstopping problems relating to sessions getting overwritten somewhere weird, that turned into a very, very slow debugging session, so I didn’t get the Play app into the state I wanted. But we’ll get there, I promise! Anyway, hope everyone is doing awesome and having fun desptite the delays. I’ll put some more time in this weekend, and get another update out there soon.

-Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/14/state-of-the-project-week-21/feed/ 0 State of the Project: Week 20 http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/07/state-of-the-project-week-20/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/07/state-of-the-project-week-20/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 20:58:28 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=414 Continue reading →]]> As Trent (Daystar) so helpfully reminded me today, I said I was releasing on September 17th, and here we are, weeks later! All my fault, I’m afraid, although behind the scenes progress is being made on stuff that would have had to get done anyway. I did make time to get stuff done this week, and we are still almoooost there (“Almost There: Part 4″).

However, my most glaring error has been not making the work I’ve done available sooner so the other infinetely more timely developers could help me knock out those last details. So here’s my plan for this weekend. Tonight, I’ll be finishing up the integration of Barncow’s TF2LogParser (what I’ve been working on for the past few sessions). Tomorrow, I’ll be documenting everything so that the developers have something to go off of, and setting up the main pubcomp account on GitHub that will contain the CMS, Play, Messenger, and Game servers. After that, I’ll be uploading the Developer VM with instructions on how developers can hook up their own GitHub accounts, and how to submit feature changes. On Monday, I’ve got a 3 week code sprint on one of my contracts that will be taking up as much time as I can give, but I will be available to help the devs get launched. We’re 90% there, but that 90% often seems to take 50% of the time to get finished.

This week saw some renewed activity on the TeamLab discussion boards. Community Organizers, now is the time to get involved with those rule discussions. Oh, and if I haven’t officially announced it yet, Trent will be our official Community Leader for the European PubComp section. And if I have officially announced, it’s now doubly official.

- Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/07/state-of-the-project-week-20/feed/ 8 State of the Project: Week 19 http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/01/state-of-the-project-week-19/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/01/state-of-the-project-week-19/#comments Sat, 01 Oct 2011 05:27:35 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=406 Continue reading →]]> Howdy all. Here’s the State of the Project for Week 19. Everything is still on, but I had literally 0 time to work on PubComp last week. It’s Friday night, 1 am, and I’m still trying to clear out my “urgent” queue of client work (another one down tonight, woohoo!).

I have promised myself that I will clear my schedule to work on the last bits of the prototype all day on Sunday. I’ve been contemplating simply releasing my entire development environment, and letting our other amazing coders (several of whom are rearing to get a chance to work), but my fear is that if I don’t take the time to organize and document it, there will be more questions than I can handle and code will get messed up in the shuffle. Still, if I don’t get enough done to launch this week, I’ll just release it in it’s current state so we can get some momentum.

Ok, so now for some happy news. Phife, our completely brilliant, probably handsome, certainly deadly Italian designer, has shown me his redone PubComp logo. There has been some talk on TeamLab about getting a PubComp t-shirt. After the first prototype is out, we’ll probably hold a vote for which logo people want, as there has been logos done by myself, Bear, Final Light, and Phife, all of which are awesome except the first.




- Parable

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/10/01/state-of-the-project-week-19/feed/ 9 Lo-Fi Offclass Cup Roundup http://pubcomp.com/2011/09/27/lfoc/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/09/27/lfoc/#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:48:34 +0000 Trent http://pubcomp.com/?p=368 Continue reading →]]> Having had my very soul punched and kicked into the ground for days, I was very pleased when the Lo-Fi Offclass Cup came to a dramatic conclusion on Saturday evening and I could sit back with a drink. I commentated on the finals live on VanillaTV alongside Comedian and Agro, a fitting end to the trial-by-fire that this event has been for me.

With a team list which numbered over 200 at the end of the signup period, it had to be manually cut down by at least 50 to account for people who can’t read and decided that they alone were a team, as well as no-shows. This meant a delayed start by half an hour or so on last Friday evening, but I’m pretty sure we were all expecting that to some degree. The rest of the night went pretty darn smoothly, if I do say so myself, with only minor issues to deal with amongst the 40 teams. That’s still a very sizeable number for a TF2 tournament, especially a never-before-seen weird gamemode and a single elimination tournament on a Friday and Saturday organized by one man with only in-game hats for prizes. Yes, ‘poor planning’ was called by a few pros and I didn’t disagree with them. I think they were really just bitter about not being available, though… hehe…

Due to the sudden lack of teams, the tournament became 6 rounds rather than 8, meaning Friday was as planned on the schedule but the quarters, semis, and final were rescheduled to be played and covered by VanillaTV on Saturday evening instead. As the creator of the gamemode, experienced medic, and general all-round character that I am, I was invited to co-cast. I did so with relish, and after Comedian and I dragged Agro into the casters’ channel on Mumble during the break between the semi-final and final for a chat about PubComp, KritzKast, and all things TF2 we decided we didn’t have the heart to kick him out. N’aww.

The favourites, Team YoYoTech, did indeed proceed to the final as expected. They didn’t, however, slide in as easily as they thought they would, having to fight to stave off Espilon (no, not Epsilon eSports unfortunately), and fight ridiculously hard to overcome Crab People in the final. I can’t say I’m complaning, they were fantastic games to cast.

So, the aftermath. Feedback even from teams (like Team Kritzkast) knocked out in the first round was entirely positive, and with interest in the gamemode from North America and OzFortress too so I’m told, hopefully the Lo-Fi Offclass Cup has a future legacy, though not in my hands. I will offer advice, support, and time to anyone willing to head up an LFOC anywhere in the world, so please contact me. Oh, and it has to have koth_lolcano in the map pool. I kinda promised it on the air. Sorry.

Who knows, perhaps it could even become popular as a game mode in the PubComp system, though I’d rather keep it pushing boundaries than struggling to achieve inane dreams. For now, here is a collection of links:

Thanks are again due to Tempest for the idea, huhy and CanFo for admin help, Robby of EoReality for the servers, Agro and Comedian. Cheers guys, couldn’t have done it without you.

Trent

European Community Lead

]]> http://pubcomp.com/2011/09/27/lfoc/feed/ 3 Premature Announciation http://pubcomp.com/2011/09/25/premature-announciation/ http://pubcomp.com/2011/09/25/premature-announciation/#comments Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:11:34 +0000 Parable http://pubcomp.com/?p=365 Continue reading →]]> Many coders suffer from it, but don’t like to talk about it.

I’m afraid that I got a little worked up this weekend, what with that sexy ESEA LAN happening, and was SURE that I could get this thing pumped out. Turned out a piece I thought I could do without for the launch (namely Barncow’s spectacular tf2logs parser) is required after all for us to go live

The good news is that I put over 20 hours of coding in this weekend, and with all those little cleanups out of the way, we’re damn sure gonna get a release out soon.

To avoid any further embarassment from Premature Announciation (this never happens to me, I swear!), I’m going to refrain from specifying a date.

Sheepishly yours,
Parable

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