Well it seems that Zor has allowed the hosting for dodplugins.net to expire. I would like to think this was just a mistake and is only going to be a temporary thing but I have a feeling that might not be the case. He has said many times over the past few years (with the most recent time being about a week ago) that he was thinking of getting rid of the forums and all, so it seems like its quite possible that this is final.
I had offered over and over again to move the forums to one of my servers and keep it online at no cost to him at all, but he never seemed interested in this. And now that the hosting expired its quite likely that the files, and more importantly the database, may be wiped out forever.
Its a sad day indeed for what remains of the dod modding community. While dodplugins.net has not been very active for some time now it was still a great resource for plugins and other dod related material... and more importantly it contained a wealth of knowledge that I would still occasionally have to reference (especially since my memory of amxx scripting isnt quite what it once was lol)..
I suppose over the next few days things could be restored, but my hopes are pretty low for that to be the case.
Today in AvaMods History -> AvaMods 4.o Failed Resurrection
It was on April 25th 2014 that AvaMods made the official announcement that we had returned... as the short-lived v4.o
Overall, it was a pretty weak attempt to resurrect AvaMods. I would say mostly due to the fact that I was in the midst of a drawn out ending to a 7+ year relationship, which also resulted in me moving back to New York and going through a pretty rough and chaotic time. While it was therapeutic for me at the time, AvaMods 4.o just wasn't meant to be.
I'm quite pleased that AvaMods 5.o has turned out much better (though as always, I have some significant doubts about it all haha!)
So the server might be working a little better now but AvaMods still took a severe blow from this latest patch. But at the same time the patch fixes the biggest security flaw in Half-Life that I have ever seen. Thanks to Russians exploiting a server-to-client command method in order to spread a trojan around and create a massive botnet of fake servers that spread the trojan around even more.
At the same time... having Valve close that security issue means they have blocked the usage of that method for anything else as well. Which is where the hit to AvaMods is made..
..so I'm not quite sure what actually is happening but it appears all of a sudden after some random patch-note-less update that the server is having some major issues. It might also be client side and not the server.
Connection problems such as various fatal errors, mostly complaining about map files being modified or not matching the server etc. I'm hoping they didnt decide to break all map-based entity mods as this would basically kill off AvaMods. I don't have time at the moment to dive into it at the moment but hopefully this weekend I can get a better idea of what is going on.
But it seems a possible *fix* is for clients to reinstall DoD. Which is fucking ridiculous to be honest.... Let us hope that things aren't as bad as they appear to be right now..
Today in AvaMods History -> 12th Anniversary of AvaMods 1.o
It was on February 1st back in 2007 when AvaMods 1.o was launched. The transition from team cdrive to AvaMods had begun earlier than this but I still wasn't quite certain where things were going.
It's pretty crazy to look back on all these years of being involved in Day of Defeat and seeing how everything was influenced by the things that came before it. Never could have imagined I would run a server, especially not one almost continuously for over a decade!
...so here we are, 12 years into the AvaMods experiment, and we are still going.. And by going I mean not really much happening at all.
