I will be off to France for about 2 weeks, going to ski. :) I will be leaving tomorrow morning and will be back January 6.

Trace is now a BlackIntel moderator. We finally finished the new policy on recruiting moderators, and so we decided to use it right away. Expect other moderators to be recruited soon. He, as every other future moderator, will have a trial period of one month, in which we can more easily decide whether or not he will stay. I am sure he will giev us no reason why he should not though.

Trace, good luck and a lot of fun as a BlackIntel moderator!

Ghostshaw has improved the XWIS Query page a lot. It is now much faster and cached to make massive amounts of refreshes not flood the server. It also has fixed the bug where you would see only half of the server listings and where you would see only an empty list.

Have a look yourself at the XWIS Query page!

As you probably have noticed, the website style has been changed. There has been one IE bug yet, where IE would not render a page for some weird reason. I hope this has been fixed (it does not happen for me any more when I tested) but any (IE or non IE) user having problems please contact us or post at the forums. We are also interested in you opinion on the new look, positive or negative, but we hope you like it ofcourse! :)

Sorry for the long delay in news items. I hope it will be easier to write news in the future, as we have done some rather big changes in the way we are developing this project. Since october 31 we have been using Subversion. Subversion is a so called version control system, which means that it keeps track of all updates we do. We can easily roll back updates, share updates and keep logs on what has changed. This will be the first news post written based on the Subversion logs, I'm sure there are many more to come, and I hope this way it will be easier to write updates more often too.

Some big change we have done is that we started using Lazy C++ (http://www.lazycplusplus.com). This should make some common tasks in developing easier, and make the source code more clean. Currently we have only converted one file to see whether we like it first.

Even more important updates: our scripts.dll is now upgraded to version 2.9.2. Another thing which was made easier by Subversion. This update made our start button fix obsolete, as it was already included in 2.9.2. It has been removed from our sources. It also has a slightly better way of setting the player count, which we are using now.

Then we have fixed a lot of bugs, a crash bug and some spelling mistakes. Some features have been disabled for TK2 at their request. The pre join messages ("StealtEye is about to join" and "StealtEye decided not to join") have been disabled when the game is full, they serve no purpose then. Another small thing is that we disabled !stuck as it was abused by a lot of people. We were afraid that would happen but we decided to test it. An updated version may be made in the future which will then test whether the player really is stuck, and if he is teleport him directly.

The BlackIntel is pleased to announce that after instating Goztow as mod we have further improved or relations with The KOSs2 and now have an official partnership.
This means that The KOSs2 server will from now be running an altered version of BlackIntel mods and that they will use the nickname previously used by BlackIntel 3, a0000000c.

Note: Its not a merge. BlackIntel mods will not automatically become part of the Koss2 clan or anything like that. The BackIntel admins on the other hand will become a mod on The KOSs2 server.

Since Dealman1 is never around anymore we've decided to get him oof the moderator list. There is no use for him being a mod if he doesn't play renegade anymore, and doesn't show up in irc or on the website. We think it's a pitty that he stopped playing renegade because he was rather good at it ;).

I hope we'll see him somtime on irc or such.

As you can see we moved the site to its final place today. So no more bad free hosts as it is now run from our own machine. This machine is also running BlackIntel1 and BlackIntel2. Depending on the load we might change some things to the configuration, so we are closely watching the server behaveour at this time.

A nice peak at the server usage:

Gozy, AKA goztow, has become a mod on our server