Last night saw Brian Gladman from DreamCatcher Games & Adrian Chmielarz of People Can fly in a nice Q&A over at GameSurge. The questions were mainly SinglePlayer focused, but when something about MP finally came up.. it got explained in quite a lot of detail.

[PCFAdrian] The code is completely new now. Its not updated, its not upgraded – its a brand new multiplayer code. Its so good, that I wanna run around naked screaming it ownz0rz, but some more rational people keep down to the ground and ask not to get anyones hopes too high 😉

Further more to this IRC interview, there was the first ever “Feel the Pain” episode from TsN, which you can find a fairly detailed summary of here.

The IRC log of the Q&A can be found here.

Last night, TsN brought us the first in their weekly look at MP 1v1; Feel The Pain, which primarily focused on PK. The show was presented by Stile, Liuokin, with special guest Toast.

Early on most of the TsN members, although not new to online gaming, confessed to being new to Painkiller, but despite this gave us an interesting and balanced discussion about the game.

The possible impact of the new netcode was discussed, which is clearly difficult, since theres been little or no solid indication about how much of an improvement the complete re-write of the netcode will be. The state of the existing netcode obviously merits change, although TsN expressed concern that the new netcode might be worse. It was pointed out that any new netcode may possibly bring with it some changes to the gameplay, but it was surmised that the pros could quickly adapt to these changes.

Next an overview of the maps was given, mainly detailing Psycho, Sacred, and Fallen2. TsN gave Sacred a high rating, were indifferent to Psycho, and unsure about the merits of Fallen2.

The discussion about Fallen2 brought them onto their next topic; the weapon balancing. Their main concern here seemed to be that the lightning gun was far too overpowered, and one of the reasons they gave for Fallen2 being a bad map for 1v1 was the domination of this weapon. The phrase sports game was used, referring to the activity in which the players would attempt to be the first to LG at the beginning of the game.

Following this the discussion moved to discussing the use of the rocket-jump binds from within PK. It was proposed that this was reserved for newbies, and would have no place in competitive 1v1 gameplay. The counter argument for this was given that it was part of the game, and people should not complain about something which was intended to be used by the makers of the game. The analogy drawn here was that of shield-use in Counterstrike, which is sometimes frowned apon. The conclusion to this discussion seemed to be that it should, and would, be up to the community to decide.

Next the use of powerups within 1v1 was discussed. Although some partial support for this was heard, the concensus was that this was a bad idea for duelling, since it gave such a large unbalanced advantage.

Finally, the evening was concluded by Toast playing Destrukt, with commentry by Stile.

(my apologies for any mistakes or omissions in this text)

TsN Central Website

Painkiller.euro 16 Player Invitational Tournament

Players:

1. Vo0 – confirmed
2. SteLam confirmed
3. Stermy – confirmed
4. Gellehsak – confirmed
5. impulse – confirmed
6. AphexTwin – confirmed
7. Ztrider – confirmed
8. zhrance – confirmed
9. CPLains – confirmed
10. razorb – confirmed
11. Forrest – confirmed
12. Burnie – confirmed
13. Hiten – confirmed
14. elpajuo – confirmed
15. Mad – confirmed
16. Sakh – confirmed

16 confirmed players – seeded
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Info:

The Painkiller.euro 16 player invitational tourney will be held on 6/11/2004. The tournament will feature 16 top european gamers (hopefully), not all exclusively proven to be good at Painkiller, but they will have their chance to prove that. We are providing this tournament to give the players a chance to experience a little taste of what they will see at The CPL, and also for the community.. to see what great spectator potential this game really has. The tourney will be straight knock-out format.

Rules:

* A legitimate copy of Painkiller with a valid cd-key is required to play in this tournament. Along with that, you will require the latest patch. (1.35) Mods such as “minimod” may be used also.

* Admins will call the players in turn to the server to play the matches. Players are to remain in the channel and not join the server unless requested to by an admin.

* At the end of the match, both players will leave the server and return to IRC.

* All matches will be played on pkeuro supplied servers. These will be based in the UK.

* Power-ups will be disabled.

* Forward Rocketjump will be disabled.

* Time-Limit will be 15 & Frag Limit will be 0.

* Brightskins will be on.

* WeaponStay will be off & Weapon Respawn will be 15.

* Best of 3 maps will be played. Each player will pick there own map, and the 3rd map out of the map list not chosen will be the 3rd map played.

Maps:

The maps to be used are:

* DM_Sacred
* DM_Psycho
* DM_Fallen2te (DM_Fallen2 tourney edition) – Can change to default Fallen2 if players want.

There is a new version of DM_Fallen2 available for download. The new version was tweaked by gellehsak, and features such changes as:

2 rls, 1 lg, 1 sg, 1 ga, 1 sa, 1 mega, 6 25 health, 2 small lg packs, 1 large rl pack, 1 small rl pack, 1 freezer ammo pack, 3 cg ammo packs, 3 shiruken ammo packs, 3 shotgun ammo packs, 3 stake gun packs, mega moved to the center platform in the old-ga room, mega from center “pillar” in lava is now a 25h bubble, lg has 30 ammo on pickup, and the ammo packs have 15 each.

Its a very good edit to the map, and will make for much more exciting games. Fallen2 originally is pretty boring, as its mostly all LG with no exact flow. Hopefully The CPL will take a look at this.. and use it in their upcoming $20,000 tournament.

You can download the map here.

*INSTALLATION*

Extract the DM_Fallen2te.pkm to Painkiller/Data.