BnS Newsletter #20 - 1 year special edition
Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2013 11:20 pm
by silnius
This Newsletter we are going to do something a little different and highlight key events and milestones from the past 12 months.
November 2012
by MKU
We launched the site a few days after Jagex wipe the original forums and relaunched the new site requiring re-registration. We chose November 5th because it is a holiday in the UK and Jagex is UK based. And Chim wrote us a poem.
Remember, Remember
The fifth of November,
The free community plot.
I know of no reason
Why the Ace of Spades community
Should ever be forgot.
Also, in November Jagex announced they would no longer support the voxlap clients in December and would shutdown the master server in one month before the launch of the steam version. Knowing this we now had a very clear goal to achieve for December.
December 2012
Jagex's master server went offline and stack finished making our own just in time. Servers began to migrate to our master server and traffic began to rise to the site.
Traffic from Nov 5th 2012 and Nov 5th 2013
January 2013
We had our first big viral traffic push. Resulting is us needing to upgrade the server from a shared account to VPS.
Explanation of Push by CraftDinur
Push is a gamemode designed by danhezee. Both teams spawn on islands with their intel and must bridge across a chain of islands to their command post. All the while within shooting distance of the enemy team.
February 2013
Our first newsletter was released on Thursday February 7th, 2013. We have released a new edition of the newsletter every two weeks usually on Sunday since.
Several people from the community jumped on the Harlem Shake bandwagon and CraftDinur directed the video for us.
The concept of badges were introduced in February; they act as a way to recognize outstanding contributions within the community. Faultcheck designed the badges we currently use but we had a lot of good submissions for badges.
MKU: Sonarpulse:
- • v1
(This is just a template)
- • v1
Also in February we dedicated a section of the site to interesting projects, usually new games, that people in the community are working on. We call it
March 2013
We released the Build and Shoot Launcher because we wanted a way for the user to seamlessly transition from one version of Ace of Spades to another. The launcher will work with any version of the beta and soon it will be compatible with OpenSpades.
If you had troubles with adding 0.75 and 0.76 to the launcher before. The latest version is much more user friendly and will automatically install 0.75 and 0.76 with a push of a button. Get it here.
Last Stand was created by Influx. In Last Stand, the two teams are assigned to attack or defend. Attackers have an infinite amount of lives and choose whether they spawn north, south, east or west, while defenders have only one life. The goal of the attackers is to either kill all of the defenders or capture the defender's flag by standing near it before the time runs out. The longer it takes, the higher a score the defenders get. Once the match ends, the teams swap roles.
Aloha BuildCon 2013 after 10 hours
The first annual BuildCon was a great success. Many people attended and at peak hours it was almost impossible to join the server.
Blood Shot is a script written by BR, which shows blood splatter on the map when players get shot. It is great script to add to a Zombie server.
April 2013
Our first season of the BnS league started in April. The league is a way to play competitively with your friends and clansmen. The teams are 5 vs 5 and the gamemode is CTF. There are two parts to the season; the regular season which any team can schedule a match against another team and the the playoffs where the top 8 teams battle for the season champion. In the first season, SturmStaffel finished first in the regular season and Lines finish the playoffs in first.
May 2013
In May, Minit hosted a 1v1 tournament. It was invite only with 16 challengers and Tin ultimately winning the tournament.
June 2013
June we had to upgrade from a vps to a full blown dedicated machine for our webserver.
Faultcheck began working on league management software which turned into clan management software. Once it is released it will allow teams/clans a place to communicate both publicly and privately and organize and schedule matches.
BnS playercounts finally start surpassing the steam version
July 2013
Thepolm3 released King of the Hill, a gamemode where both teams fight over one control point. After one team holds the point long enough the round is over.
Season 2 of the leagues started in July and finished during the last week of September. SturmStaffel finished in first place again in the regular season and finished second in the playoffs. Komrades beat SturmStaffel and became the 2nd Season Champions.
August 2013
New record of 600 concurrent users on the forums
Offering new enhancements, features, and content, OpenSpades is an open source OpenGL-based alternative client of the original Voxlap Ace of Spades Classic 0.75 client. It's compatible with PySnip/pyspades, which means you can use it to play on all AoS 0.75/ 0.76 servers listed on BuildAndShoot.com. Runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
OpenSpades is currently in version 0.0.9
Official website: https://sites.google.com/a/yvt.jp/openspades
Download: https://sites.google.com/a/yvt.jp/openspades/downloads
Source: https://github.com/yvt/openspades
Join our discussion about OpenSpades with feedback from the developer: http://www.buildandshoot.com/viewforum.php?f=57
September 2013
Tin started his clan assistance thread. It is an advice thread for new clans to get help with anything they might need or want. Check it out here.
In September we made a few cosmetic changes such as new icons in the modding section of the site and a new header background image. We also surpassed 50,000 posts.
October 2013
We spent the month of October gearing up for the 1 year anniversary events, making sure they were compatible with 0.76, ironing out the quirks in the bns launcher and making it more user friendly.
Minit is going to run two TDM servers one to a 1000 kills and another faster paced 200 kills server with small maps.
Here's to another year of building and shooting
