This patch was created to address a few minor issues prior to the next release of America’s Army.
FORCE CLASS
We have enabled Global Forceclassing (FC) on honor bearing servers. Individual FC can still be used but not on honor servers. Using a Global FC on everyone levels the playing field for all. When using Global FC, honor is accrued at less than normal rates due to the fact that old maps were created with specific weapon loadouts in mind. Forceclassed Servers will show up in MBS with an (FC) preceding their name for easy identification.
USERNAMES
Spaces in user account names are no longer permitted. If you have an old account with a space it has been replaced with an underscore character (_) or in the case of conflicts a number. You should have received an email to your address of record indicating the change. All of your other account information was retained.
BAN SYSTEM
Ban system again supports banning by IP, MAC, or Name/PBGUID (for PB servers banning by NAME will result in a PBGUID ban instead of a name ban). Ban system now supports console commands to list ban lists in sets of 20 (or so) to allow “scrolling” through the list to locate banned players. The Admin Command Post only supports showing the first 100 ban entries but now has a wider list to show all the ban details. The Banning system was rewritten and includes the preliminary ability to download a ban list from a web server on game server startup.
The following INI section can be added to support this:
[Engine.BanManagement]
BanListMasterServer=www.somedomain.com
BanListWebPath=/AA2831BanList
This will cause the game server to try to retrieve the “BanList.status” file from the web server using the URL:
www.somedomain.com/AA2831BanList/BanList.status (using the example above) which will be compared to the local version to see if the ban list file version matches.
The BanList.status file contains the following lines:
AABanListMasterServer
Version=
MD5=
If the version does not match (regardless as to whether it’s newer or older) the remote BanList.txt file is downloaded from the web server. It is not recommended to use this for large ban lists. It is anticipated this ban list management system will be expanded in future versions of America’s Army.
PLAYER ADMINS
Player Admin support has been rewritten to require player administrators to have passwords. The new AASM provides support for creating the appropriate format PlayerAdmin entries. For those wishing to manually edit their INI file the PlayerAdmin setting is now in the format “PlayerAdmin=, ” (e.g. “PlayerAdmin=Bob,mysecretpassword”). Player Admins wanting to join the server must join the server using either the MBS browser and right-clicking on the server name (with it selected) and choosing “Join As Player Admin” or by joining via the console using this format “open ?PAPassword=” (e.g. “open 192.168.0.1?PAPassword=mysecretpassword”). You must have logged into your account in order to use this functionality on any official or authorized server.
For those of you gamers who’ve been patiently waiting to get your hands on Epic’s upcoming frag-fest, Unreal Tournament 3, industry insiders are now stating a September 3rd release for the US and September 28 for Europe. The date for the release seemed to always be TBA 2007, so now that we have some solid dates keep an eye out of this sure-fire hit.