Hey guys, your still at it i see!

[K]

Hows it going it has been a while haha. how are you Herm, Meat, Nameless. Is there still a player base for monster hunt? saw the server was still up.
Kort

[a nameless entity]

Hey! Hello there Kortnie Chan, welcome home!
A lot of the players from the old days have moved on, so it's always good to see an old friend make their way back here.

I'm sorry to say that I cannot tell you how busy the MHM server may happen to be. I don't have room for UT on this PC in its present configuration. But Herm will see your post soon, and can bring you up to speed on what has been happening around here and on the servers.

[Hook]

Yes, Hello again Kortnie Chan!
Actually I have seen quite a few old timers still in the game, but also some have come back lately also!
FYI, MEAT is no longer here he jumped ship and has fallen from grace as they say. however a lot of us still are enthusiastic about UT.
Hey, don't be a stranger - visit us often - and UT is better than ever.

[Hermskii]

I just saw this. MHM is a shell of it's former self. My wife and I had kids and that pretty much brought all good UT things from me to an end. I have left many this exactly as they were so it is like we left the light on for you.

I'm glad to see you are alive and well. Tell us your quick story. Family? Gaming? Work? Hopes and dreams?

HOOK is certainly carrying the torch for Redeemer Servers and I have a Chaos server for both UT99 and UT2K4. MHM is still alive and gets played. I have another couple of oddball servers too. I'm moving all of my stuff around and will be rebuilding my website soon enough. I'm 47 or 48 now and still married now for almost 15 years. I have a 10 year old and a 7 year old. My son destroys me in all things UT and he is often listed as the #1 player on many servers that keep score. His tag is Sunburn.

Get us up to date already. I'm thrilled we were still here for you and that you recalled your password and came back to say hi! Peace out!

[Nelsona]

I've been a bit busy to sort stuff for a demo MHv504 and to complete a mutator helper, as long as things goes well I have no reason to complain, XC_Engine does a good job. I found 41 MH servers ON-Line and aprox. 768 UT servers.

[EvilGrins]

I don't know you... but hi!

[Hermskii]

I know it may be hard to imagine now but back in the day {MHM} was the #1 MH server in world for a pretty long time.

"K" was a regular here back then and had a lot to do with why this place was so hopping and and bad to the bone.


{CG} also used to be a regular top 10 UT server in the world. It used to be awesome! A waiting line of players every night and it to did real good for about a year or two.

Both servers used to be pretty high-end as far as set up well to have cool little bells and whistles. High speed redirects were considered a plus back then. I used to be gung-ho and people enjoyed the people we had here. Then everything went to hell and it all became what it is now except that my servers don't have nearly the effort and time spent on them the others admins have spent on theirs and thus they get the players.

That is how it works really. if you play your own server and try real hard to please the masses you will be successful. I'd say it takes at least 1 hour a day for a year and you have to chat lots while in game. I don't have that kind of free time plus the burn-out factor and being old and grumpy and lazy. It is pretty safe to say I'm done but I keep hoping I'll hit the lotto and will have time to tinker with these servers again and play for that matter!

[Nelsona]

I know it may be hard to imagine now but back in the day {MHM} was the #1 MH server in world for a pretty long time.

Somehow I think it's still a good one. Yes, I'm serious, I'm talking about MonsterHunt not whatever SpamHunt as is now days. MonsterHunt has been morphed in crap all this time by ADMINS encouraging 0-SKILL-PLAY and what we have I can't call it MonsterHunt, you still have MonsterHunt.

Imagine through firsts questions about MHv5.04: Does it include Regen tools?
Answer: I won't ever personally include any such things into MH roots. That's stuff for MH2, MH3, MH4, addressing -10 skill player. Maybe you cannot understand how much I was working to develop game with Real Monster Skill as long as I did not see a big deal to play against them with 50 HP. For me it's amazing a default player feature "RESPAWNING". This is the most greatest ever advantage - I don't need more "help" because I consider my brain enough healthy to manage a MH fight without tools BUT neither 0 stuff into Level and monsters blocked - that's BarrelHunt.

Of course, no worries, I have some idea about a rewritten regen which won't screw Skaarj as original MH does, but I'm not interested to waste time with such things. Beside this, we already have regen tools so I don't need to reinvent the wheel (even if might be a different one).

[a nameless entity]

How many Monster Hunt servers on any random day are there in the server list now?

I can remember when you were lucky to find even one.

3's server which usually ran co-op, would once in a while run MH instead.

And there was a server in Japan. And that was pretty much all there was. It was the MH enthusiasts in Japan who built all of those weird, wonderful, insanely difficult, or really nice but just too darn short maps. I often thought that they must have had a mapping drive amoungst their members, which explained the short or often incomplete maps that were turned in and then run anyway. To put it bluntly, there was a lot of really, really, bad maps out there. But the lack of anything else meant that you played them anyway.

Then Jackie's server appeared just at the right time. He set up his own forum too. Nice!
More people than I realized at the time must have been visiting the original forum for Redeemer Arena and were seeing what we were talking about in MH, because the player numbers gradually increased.

Then Herm set up Monster Hunt Mayhem, and things really started to take off.
And Kudos to Chico in NL, who set up an MH server in Europe around the same time. (And kudos to NR2000 who talked Chico into trying the mod out! )

Eventually all of this activity caught the notice of some really fine mappers, and we were blessed with maps that were fun instead of frustrating to play on. And the health and ammo regenerator originally conceived by that group of Japanese players was improved a lot. And badly needed it was too, for play without it meant long periods of waiting for sometimes the only ammo pack in the whole map to regenerate. And ditto with the health packs. Sometimes there were only a few near the start of the map and you were constantly running back to the start to reload and refresh health.
So the regenerator was a blessing too.

Later on many people set up their own MH servers, featuring their own ideas of the best maps and weapons. I rather enjoyed experimenting with all of the different weapons and their capabilities. Sometimes those insane monster-spam maps would be fun to play on with a spam spewing rifle. Especially on Friday nights while drinking a beer or three.

If the game has moved on since I last played, I say that's great. Let it continue to morph forever! There's bound to be something out there for everyone. And we can all thank Herm and Chico for bringing it all together and getting the ball rolling in a big way more than 10 years ago.

[Nelsona]

Sometimes those insane monster-spam maps would be fun to play on with a spam spewing rifle. Especially on Friday nights while drinking a beer or three.

This occurs if server won't crash at garbage collection process also triggered by stupid MH codes and dumb stuff multiplied not fixed.
A few months ago I was in some server where I did not see anything great designed as original MH stuff, just cubes with annoying textures and "monsters" which weren't killable even with 10 redeemers. I can't get this style which is a crash-server lottery.
I prefer old stuff, usually those Krogaar type maps have configured properly inventories not like noobs are doing while they do feign mapping. And "regenerators" can be reworked different in relic style.
Personally if I'll want to do a MH map computing difficulty and watching later at some post speaking about that map as being too easy (happened to other one a few times) because of "stuff" used by "admin", I'll stop any work as long as this game is ruined correctly for years and all effort is pointless.
The concept MH map has already multiple directions confusing mapper about what to do. Here is hard, there is too easy, there crash, here player has lag, so what exactly people need ? All just goes to low quality.

[a nameless entity]

Yes, I agree that bad mapping and coding is a pain. It drove Herm nuts. MH was much worse than DM for some reason. Yesterday I read an old post of Herm's from the Redeemer Insanity archives where he spoke of using only 1 file maps to make fast download redirects much easier. That way if there was a problem then he knew immediately where the problem was and could fix it by removing the offending map, with no music or texture files to hunt down and get rid of also.

Map, monster, or weapon ideas that seem interesting but ultimately don't work out should be taken down too, rather than left up. And not made readily available to other server operators looking for maps for their servers either.

[Hermskii]

Lots of old memories coming to life in this discussion. I recall thinking how much harder MH servers were to run that DM servers. I recall testing and mandating the maps have only 1 file for my redeemer mod servers. Eventually it became impossible because all the new and good maps were multifile in both DM and MH. I recall when having a high speed redirect was everything for a server as far as live or die for that server. I recall those other servers nameless mentioned. Chico's was the bomb for a very long time. I never played 3's stuff but I did end up helping him later on with hosting.

I hosted lots of people's servers since they could afford the webspace and I had plenty. I tried to play other people's servers to help them get launched and stay around but really only wanted to play my own. Helping other so much helped everyone's servers but my own but Schwantz taught me that was the right thing to do. He gave me (mailed it to me) his Redeemer Insanity server so I would keep it going and I have. For me: HE STARTED IT ALL when he gave me his copy of the Redeemer Arena Mod.

More later maybe. I'm forgetting something I'm sure.

[Hook]

I remember somewhere I also stated that a Japanese group started MH, then somebody rudely corrected me saying it was somebody somewhere else.
I think they were wrong.
I also certainly remember going to Japanese sights for anything HM back in the beginning.

Yes, and Schwantz started it all with Redeemer Arena for sure, and it was carried to bigger heights when Hermskii took it over in the early years from Schwantz!
Now, redeemer arena is still among the top UT servers today!