Transcendence

http://www.neurohack.com/downloads/Trans106.zip

I am proud to present the Officially Patched version of Transcendence version 1.05; version 1.06 (alpha)! Its not a mod, its added directly into the TDB through the magic of hex-editors. (We only just got the actual go-head from George yesterday, even though I had been toying around with fully integrating the mod into the tdb for quite some time, so he had no time to give us the TDB-compiling capable version of transdata. Since I've already studied the TDB, I was able to make the modifications easily.)
Its actually just a very early alpha of the official patch version, and contains only the following changes:
-gaian cannon now has 80 charges, uses 10MW of power, and does and additional 32 HP of damage on average
-lazarus now has 72HP, enough to not fall to the iocrym disintegration, and uses 750MW of power - in a future version, we're hoping to have George set things up so that the idle power draw will be much less than half of 750MW, which is the current idle power for all shields at the moment.
-Teratons will buy high level military shields now, (level 8+), but at their usual low buy margins.
-Ares plasma cannon now has more range (~90ls from my calculations). It also accepts the speedloader, and uses 250MW.
-Worldship plate is now disintegration-immune.
-A number of small balance tweaks to the following: Tritium cannon, behemoth cannon, IM90, longzhu, uranium rod,

We also added a very simple framework tutorial system to the beginning of the game: the tutorial is still completely absent, and its really just an experiment; it may not even be present in the final version of 1.06. For now I just stuck in a version of the old Heretic from .99c, but without the radiation field & ICS [It has a centauri raider instead guarding the gate]. Use a helium 3 fuel rod to activate the gate. Yeah, I was lazy.

In the upcoming releases, expect to see an actual tutorial in the tutorial system, as well as other balance fixes. For now though, I'd just like to get people's input on the balance changes.

Also, next release, Ttech has requested that I pre-pack a settings file containing the config for sending stats to his stats server.

(on second thought, we need to get a better naming scheme that doesn't interfere with George's, so as to differentiate actual engine-improvement releases from our xml-improvement releases. like 1.05.1 or something.)

Sergeant Jomn wrote:You guys were lucky, over at Data Realms, the makers of Cortex Command, some Russian hacker took over.

Duh102 wrote:Alright everyone, here's the lowdown on what happened today.
Long story short, we did a pretty lame April Fools and then it happened for real.

Early today, TLB backed up the entire forum, then wiped it clean of topics and posts as our April Fool's prank for the year.
This lasted until around 6PM EST, when a Russian hacker interfered with TLB's backup restore and corrupted the primary backup. We didn't know it at the time, so TLB attempted to fix it thinking it was a minor data corruption problem.

From there, things started to get out of hand with posters being changed, and messages from the hacker being edited in to messages. He also compromised the accounts of several admins and moderators (mine included) and began posting as us (most notably as Data for his ultimatum).

As far as we can tell, his only goal was to take over the forum and cause as much chaos as possible, though he could have been serious about remaking the forum in his image (this was stated in his ultimatum).

However, right around 8:30 EST, TLB managed to wrest control from him and shut down the forum, as well as temporarily ban his IP from contacting the DRL server. I then contacted the Russian police with his IP, which they were able to track further. I'm still on the phone with them as I type this, but they're investigating the apartment the attack originated from after they shut off his internet connection.
TLB thankfully kept backups on his local machine, and just restored them.

I'll post more as it comes to me, but it sounds like it'll take a while to get anything more, they've put me on hold.

Update (9:30 EST): The Russian police have made an arrest but promptly hung up on me, so that's the end of that I suppose.