Uranium - 235

I think the best thing you could do is simply go look at how moderation plugins for, say, Half-Life 2 works and rip it off as much as you can

Admining on my Natural Selection server was a glorious BREEZE. A simple command would spit back an easy-to-read format (this was default HL engine behavior, at any rate) to find their unique ID (steamID). I could simply use that and type in any manner of 'kick', 'ban', 'punish' commands. Other such commands involved spamming annoying text on their screen (ie: YOU'RE BEING WARNED FOR BEING AN ASSHAT) in big letters. It was literally no problem to ban people. The spectator system worked simple and intuitively. A third command would dump this to a log file, so that I could document it in our admin forum.

Battlefield just isn't anywhere nearly as slick as Half-Life made it. Granted the number of players will make it a bit more complicated, but it's just nowhere as easy, or effective. A simple feature to flash 'admin text' right in the middle of their screen in 72pt font would go a long way towards warning people, as global chat is really quite worthless.

Actually, I think I could write an entire college thesis on how to improve the entire Battlefield UI for far more user-friendliness and removing a lot of the annoyances.

I'll just touch on a couple briefly:

- Cramped, clogged, spam-filled server and player chat. 3 lines, even at 1920x1200, using an extremely hard to read font? Eugh.
- 'Slow' interface is just annoying (the main menus and all, having to 'fade out', take a second to load, then 'fade in'). This is especially annoying when you accidentally hit Esc.
- Last thing - unintuitive behavior. In every game, when a window is open (spawn screen), hitting Esc will close the first active window, and so forth for every strike. In 2142 / 2 / Vietnam / 1942 / whatever, hitting Esc will bring up the main menu, pretty much guaranteeing my death, especially since in 2142, with the 'fade in', 'load', 'fade out' delays, it takes no shorter than 5 seconds or so to get back in-game. This is just bad.

I'll also echo the comments on the ranking system.

__________________

[DICE]DwarfPr0n

I did my research on the DICE dev guys
Tell you what, this Sunday I'll go on the Tactical Gamer server. First person to get my dogtags and post an image here to prove it will get some kind of prize. Probably something like a game of your choice through EA Store, that way I don't have to snail mail it.

Rasta-GR

You are welcome!

Please read the BF2142 rules before engaging in combat.

TG is not the average pub server as we are focused on tactical objectives, following the chain of command and enforce teamwork gameplay.

I strongly suggest to join a squad with some TG tagged members and I am sure you are going to have a mindblowing experience.

I also suggest another thing.

Instead of giving this gift from EA to someone who just get your tags, why not give this gift to a fellow squad member that has performed exeptionaly during your game sessions here at TG?

Hope to see you soon.

__________________

Lorax74

A challenge! I'm sure there are many that will attempt to take you up on the offer.

A few words to those that are going for the tags, this is not an open invitation to go tag hunting on our server, if you are seen knifing everyone in sight with no regard for you team, you will be kicked for it. Posting screenshots of anyone's tag other than DwarPr0n's is forbidden (the winner(s) should be able to gloat, I mean prove it, after all). Reminder that single person locked squads are not allowed and you MUST join a squad within 90 seconds or you will get kicked by the kick script.

Heed the warnings and good hunting!

And yes, this person is from DICE .

__________________
TG-9th Lorax74

DanSaint

I don't play 2142 because it refuses to start on my Vista machine

It runs better on my Vista x64 system than on my XP x32 system... keep the faith bro

rage4order

Sorry a bit late to the party here. First of all Welcome to TG and thanks for poking your head out of the shadows. This is one of the few if not only community you can poke your head out and not get it removed by all the negitive banter. As others have said let us know if there is anything we can do to help test any future patches or BF games, its what we all love to do. Thanks for setting up a "mini" Dice dogtag challenge on Sunday, my guess is you are going to get stuck many many many times, should be good times. Once again, thanks for dropping in and we wont hold it against you that you know AAK, we keep him around here as a punching bag, its a great use for him.

__________________
|TG-8th|RAGE

daithi1

About he whole believability of Dwarfpr0n being from Dice, search for "Props EA Dice" on google.

This is what marketing and PR departments are for

__________________

fredgwynne

Like Spectrr said, I passed the thread along to someone at Dice as a friendly note to a (distant) coworker. The stuff I do is about as different from BF as you can get, but the global address book is a powerful tool and I thought they might appreciate all your kind words. I didn't really expect them to come check it out, but I think it goes to show that they've got love for you'uns.

Of course, Dwarf's visit could also be coincidence. Or an elaborate ploy by MG to distract TG long enough to seduce Lyra into joining up. Can you ever really be sure of anything in life?

__________________

jollermc

Ooo, I have a question for you. Are us Mac 2142 players ever going to see Northern Strike? Is there any chance of us at least getting the maps? Thanks.

__________________
|TG-Irr| Jollermc

ThaDoctah

Not ENTIRELY free of negative banter. Just...reduced. Like low-fat negative banter.

__________________

<Someone give me more training STAT!>

big-eye101

you are from europe - you will very likely meet some of the E1st as we play euro-friendly hours

Lets go for some awesome rounds!

__________________

rage4order

Dwarf was involved with us and Sir. and the testing of a product so he is legit, 2 legit 2 quit!

__________________
|TG-8th|RAGE

Sir. AAK625

Are you trying to scare them away, Rage? Good grief man.

__________________

Kebab-Kastike

Reminds me of them Turkish bag-trousers I thought were so funny when I was 5years old...

__________________
|TG-E1st| Kebab-Kastike reporting for duty.

ScratchMonkey

Step back to the turn of the millenium and check out Tribes 2. It had pretty decent scripting out of the box, so a number of very slick admin packages came from 3rd parties that provided similar features. I recall that just before T2 died, Evolution, descendant of Pizza, was a very nice admin mod. (My team still holds a periodic T2 pickup. PM me for info.) I haven't seen comparable scripting flexibility until WoW with its Lua-based system and its XML-based UI. But I was quite impressed with UT2004's event-driven UnrealScript that could do some quite interesting things, like serving an object-oriented web interface for server management.

__________________