20th may, 2009 (22:41pm) - posted by james

wow, what's with the sudden burst of popularity? unfortunately the number of people downloading / playing today overwhelmed my rather puny webserver for a few hours. sorry!

27th january, 2006 (4:54pm) - posted by james

no news is good news! lightbikes2 still seems to be going strong, with a hundred or so downloads every day, and there seem to be steadily more and more people playing online. lack of demand however means it's unlikely there will be a linux version.
anyway, i'll post again when there's something interesting to report.

1st july, 2005 (1:26pm) - posted by james

apologies for the downtime of the master server, meaning no internet play for the last twenty-four hours. this was due to unexpected problems with a DNS change. should be working again within the next eight hours or so if it isn't already.

2nd june, 2005 (11:50am) - posted by james

internet play seems to be going well so far. the server logs show that there are quite a few people playing every day, and about one hundred downloads a day of the game itself (which is pretty good considering it's about three years since i attempted to do any advertising). no new features planned for the immediate future, although the linux version is still promised eventually. haven't had much demand for it recently though, so it's not a priority.

15th april, 2005 (6:02pm) - posted by james

lightbikes v2.1 now available
there hasn't been as much testing due to the server not being online for the last few weeks, but let me know how you get on. i'll be trying to keep the master server online as much as possible, but any problems connecting to games or creating servers for online play, let me know. REMEMBER TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS IN THE TEXT FILE FOR SETUP DETAILS.

19th march, 2005 (4:58pm) - posted by james

LIGHTBIKES v2.1: RELEASE DATE 15th APRIL 2005
new features: internet play. oh yes indeed.

18th march, 2005 (22:55pm) - posted by james

first ever internet gameplay test successful!

18th march, 2005 (15:53pm) - posted by james

okay - the majority of the work on the internet playable version is done. i'll be doing testing and improvements over the next two weeks, then about a week after that i'll be releasing it, along with the latest version of the source code (once i have a source control thingy set up).
in order to play over the internet, two things will need to be true:

you need either a direct connection to the internet with your own IP address, or UDP port 29755 needs to be forwarded to your machine.

you need to have a direct port 80 web connection. if you're behind a web-proxy of some sort, you won't be able to play.

now, if both of those conditions are okay, email me (jamesp (at) eidolon.co.uk) if you want to help out with some testing over the next few weeks.

15th march, 2005 (22:15pm) - posted by james

hmm. internet conversion of lb2 is going pretty well. i'm currently doing stack protection, because buffer overruns are all the rage these days, and the network stack in lb2 is pretty damn vulnerable as is. this is pretty new to me, so i might get someone to check over the network code once i'm done.
other news: because this is hacked on internet support of a local network game, there will be a few limitations. it's not going to work properly through web proxies (because i'm using http to communicate with the master server). if you're behind a NAT network, you'll have to use port forwarding to get the lb2 data to your machine. this shouldn't be too much of a problem for most people, but let me know if you think it'll be trouble...

14th march, 2005 (02:09pm) - posted by james

first up: notice the new address for this site. lightbikes2.com will stop working at some point in the future, replaced by lb2.eidolon.co.uk.
secondly: i'm going to be closing the door to the lightbikes chapter of my life soon. no lightbikes 3, and no more updates. however, i am intending to finish up lightbikes 2 to some extent - this means adding some form of internet play, and finally releasing the linux version. don't hold your breath, but both of these should happen relatively soon.
and: it's the tenth aniversary of lightbikes! it's ten years since "litebikes" first took the 386's of the computer lab of a certain north england school by storm. oh happy days.
lastly: new project rumoured! having spent the last month or so searching for a strategy game perfect for me, i've given up looking and i'm going to write my own. more news within a year from now, guaranteed!

18th may, 2004 (01:55pm) - posted by james

new version of lightbikes2 available here. this might fix the server-crashing problems. however, as it's a problem that only occurs when more than six or so players join the game, i've had a hard time tracking down what it might be - i don't have access to that many computers for testing.

so let me know how it goes. if you still get problems, it would be very helpful if you could send me the log file that LB2 generates for both the client and the server machine. thanks muchly!

20th february, 2004 (01:55pm) - posted by james

i've finally spent a bit of time working out what the problem with the server code was, which causes it to crash when the fifth or so player joins. i'll have an updated version for download shortly... thanks for being patient, everyone.

also - to anyone having trouble compiling the source code: make sure the network lib/source and debug lib/source directories are listed as include directories for the main project. otherwise windows will pick up a different version of network.h which will generate hundreds of error messages.

31st december, 2003 (08:15am) - posted by james

happy new year all! linux version should be around sometime soon, really! oh yes indeed...

30th may, 2003 (08:15am) - posted by james

finally got round to reproducing the pc-gamer and edge articles from last year, take a look:
[edge - issue 103, page 21] [pc-gamer - december 2001 issue, page 104]
apologies for the utterly crap quality, don't have a scanner at the moment so used my digi-cam.