Recent posts

#1
Darkstorm News / Leadership Changes
Last post by Bryantdl7 - September 28, 2023, 10:53:36 AM
Quick leadership update as we navigate into the colder months of the year.


First off, Hish will be stepping down from manager for the time being per his request, so he will now be listed as retired staff. Per my conversation with him he's just too busy right now, so that's why he requested to be set to retired staff. He's leaving on good terms, just real life responsibilities come first.

Next up we have Derek going to retired from the co-owner role as he's also pretty busy with irl stuff. He's also retiring on good terms and just isn't online a lot lately. We're working to keep all active leadership rosters filled with people who are on frequently. Hopefully this change helps with that.

Now, onto some good news. Our prior manager Gundam is returning from retirement to take Hish's vacancy! This change is effective immediately, and as always if anyone needs help you can reach out to anyone on staff for assistance.

For our last piece of good news, the longtime staff member of over 9 years Sparky has not only returned from retirement, but also accepted a position as one of the co-owners. Sparky has been around since the beginning of Darkstorm, and has a proven track record of caring about the community and always being fun to be around. It is our hope as leaders of Darkstorm to make sure everyone in charge is very approachable, and I hope that this change aides in that.

Make sure to congratulate these two for coming back and be sure to hang out with them next time you see them on!

Oh yeah, and one last thing. If any of you reading this would even be interested in being staff we are always looking to get more people on our administrative team. If you are interested definitely reach out to us!

Current leadership can be found here:
https://darkstorm.cc/leadership/
#2
CWRP Server / Re: Basic Rules for Clone Wars...
Last post by [DSTM] Brock Obamna - July 13, 2023, 05:59:29 AM
1+1=3
#3
CWRP Server / Basic Rules for Clone Wars RP ...
Last post by [DSTM] Bond - May 17, 2023, 05:19:23 PM
1. No Racism, Rudeness, Discrimination, and Bullying of any kind
2. Respect rankings as well as staff rankings
3. No RDM
4. Serious RP when Defcon 5, Downtime can break RP minorly
5. Any player who has a main character of a Jedi, Senate Commando, Navy, or Senate will be required to have a trooper second life (highest rank is SSGT)
6. Download the content pack to maximize gameplay.
7. All staff are required to stay in discord
8. No Spamming
9. No FailRP (Staff will let you know if you are fail RPing or not)
10. No lying, especially anyone who is applying for a staff position (no age requirement)
11. Please respect the rules that are given and everyone will have a fun time.
12. No mass promotion unless 3 members of staff approves
13. No Mic Spam
14. No sitting on players
15. No teleporting to players unless given permission or is an emergency (staff only)
16. No DDOS
17. Must request permission to take off if you are not the highest rank, if you are the highest rank just inform of take off (/comms This is Anakin Skywalker taking off in a LAAT from the MHB | /comms This is CT PVT PILOT 1738 Bond requesting permission to take off in LAAT from MHB)
18. Must stay in areas your clearance card allows it or you will be AOS
19. No Rocket Boosters in side unless we are in an event
20. Jedi's cannot ignite sabers at clones, if they do it is considered treason and jedi will be AOS and punishment will be decided by highest Jedi
21. Respect the ranking system you call any NCO + Sir, and salute to anyone who is 2ndLt +
#4
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 29, 2023, 02:00:54 PM
The main build server is moved over and staying put, I canceled the old server just now after I got all the mounts and stuff prepped for next reboot.

There's still many more servers to move over this weekend, but I had to start with the big guns first. I also adjusted some other stuff, but you can see that over in the change log on the main site.

For now, I continue to have a crazy busy week and then hopefully on Saturday have time to work the rest of the servers into the mix.
#5
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 29, 2023, 08:31:41 AM
After much testing and fighting, we are in the final phase of prep work. The build server has been rebranded to 2.0 to signify the massive growth in performance, and it is live. The hostname is still the same and can be found below in my signature.

I still need to go through and mount all the games like css, tf2, etc. but that will come very, very, soon. The important part is getting us online on this massively powerful hardware.
#6
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 28, 2023, 09:01:23 AM
An hour was way too optimistic, we started having connection issues once it got there. My friend lives 45 minutes from me in a major metropolitan area, thus the fast internet.

I'm driving down there today to do dome hands on troubleshooting as the remote desktop won't even connect right now. I made things a little too secure and now only my master password gets people in, and I don't want to just willingly hand that out.

Tuesdays are extremely busy for me, so this is a bit of a challenge, but hopefully I can figure this out today.
#7
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 27, 2023, 05:09:36 PM
Initial testing was a success, the server is on route to my friends house with gigabit fiber optic internet. Hopefully within the hour it will be booted up and I can migrate over the build server, and then the rest of the servers soon after that.
#8
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 27, 2023, 12:46:36 PM
I am beginning moving over most of the game files now for things like data, maps, and addons. This will be a good test to see how much better things run before we fully switch over to the new system.

Screenshot 2023-03-27 124333.png


This process is usually fairly tedious, as a lot of these files are around 5 kb, and it spends more time indexing for the files than actually downloading them, due to their small size.

I am definitely getting to do this a lot faster than normally though, most servers you rent out, are called headless, where you can't actually log into the thing with something like remote desktop, and that is a huge pain, because essentially you have to do three steps of copying the files to your local computer from the old server, and then uploading them to the new server at that point. I am able to directly download the files from one server to the other thanks to being able to run filezilla natively on this machine.


One thing I have come up with while going through all of this, is the servers will hold the name "Darkstorm Build 2.0" signifying the massive improvement in performance and power available. We really are going to be gaining over 50% performance making this leap, so I think it is finally worthy of making that change.


Another thing I have been tracking for a fairly long time, is one of our custom addons, coroner, may be too resource intensive to continue using. Basically what the addon does is it takes all of your kills and deaths and holds onto them permanently so next time you load in you can see your score. It is a cool idea, but when you are holding onto 60,000 peoples kills and deaths, and having to use up precious server resources (since gmod is a single core application) we may want to dedicate that performance to things more important, like the server not lagging to death every time it syncs the player info. I'm not 100% on this, but we'll have to do some testing internally before we really commit to anything on that.
#9
Darkstorm News / Re: The 2.0 Server Journey / R...
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 27, 2023, 09:37:12 AM
Another issue I am running into is the BIOS won't let me save disabling SMT, which is AMD's equivalent to hyper threading. People claim it's not that big of a difference and I shouldn't need to, but idk how I feel about that.

If anyone has any thoughts on how to disable SMT on a gigabyte b650 elite board let me know on discord...
#10
Darkstorm News / Re: 2.0 Server Status
Last post by Bryantdl7 - March 26, 2023, 03:59:17 PM
I also got HTTPs working on the new rcon panel, and also got it to renew automatically with certbot. I tried using the couldflare https -> nginx http proxy -> game server but the latency was just too ridiculous. Taking out cloudflare sped things up a lot.


We still use cloudflare for our traditional DNS records because they roll out a million times faster, just their "protected" setup is really quite obnoxious at times, and I don't run it on anything currently. I might run it on something like the loading screen one day, but I just don't see a need currently.