Bouncyball

Hey Everyone,

It had to happen sooner or later, but valve update after valve update did a number on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. I especially noticed this trying to play Bouncyball on old retro hardware. What was once a fast smooth gameplay experience is now often below 60FPS for players playing at work and laptops. Mac players have graphical issues, Linux users crash if they do not do certain settings. And given HL2DM Co-op has always been a very resource intensive game to host at some point we have to question if this is the best way for our community to go...

So on this very special day i have decided to try something bold and new! A brand new experience suited to those players who have been asking for something fresh. Something that will allow that smooth fast high FPS gaming content again, with a fast paced combat, hundreds of new maps, in a different engine thats faster and hopefully more stable.

Introducing! The new Diet Co-op experience! Bouncyball, but for legacy PC's, Work PC's and people who want to try something different! Running on the Doom engine with a lot of Doom community map packs installed. Modernized custom gunplay taken from Quake Champions, with the Half-Life 1 & Half-Life 2 enemies we know you love to kill! And best of all everyone can participate since this game just like HL2DM in the beginning is entirely FREE!

How to Join the new Bouncyball on Windows?
To participate in this new experience you will need to obtain a properly configured copy of Zandronum 3.0 . For windows players i have made this as easy as possible, you can download our custom version from http://content.hl2dm.org/bb-zandronum.exe. With our version all you have to do is click ok to all prompts and you will be met with a server list. All the essentials are installed here and ready to go, simply search for Bouncyball in the search field to find our server which will then download the mods. If you have a copy of Doom 2 (Or Doom 3 BFG which includes it) you can place the DOOM2.WAD in the zandronum-data folder this version generates and it will be automatically converted to the correct version. This gives you the official Doom2 textures. If you do not have a copy of DOOM2 do not worry, Freedoom is included in the download so while it may look slightly different its entirely free to play with no setup required.

How to Join the new Bouncyball on Linux and Mac?
For the few of you using Linux and Mac you can go to the official Zandronum website to download a official Zandronum 3.0 package for your platform. The downside of this is that it won't come with Freedoom preinstalled so it requires a few manual steps that it should prompt you to do in order to get things going. Once you got it all setup everything should be the same from there, just make sure your using Doomseeker to join otherwise it will not automatically download the mods. You will also probably have to do some rebinding as unlike the bb-zandronum version i provide the default binds might be a bit foreign.

What will the future of Bouncyball be?
As you probably guessed this post is for our april fools event. The HL2DM server isn't going anywhere and will continue to receive updates like it always has been getting (Due to my ongoing health struggles this is at times i can put sufficient energy in contributing to the server, so while i continue to heal you will see periods where i am very active, and periods where i vanish from time to time).

This Doom server has been on my shelf for a while now and is basically a rebrand of a lan party i once did, with slight tweaks to lock the game to Half-Life enemies. Its sponsored to us by TSPG and should automatically remain online as long as its actively played on. It will likely be a one time event, so enjoy it while it lasts! If the demand is high enough i don't mind hosting it permanently, but expect that my focus will always be on Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.

I hope you all have a great time with this event!

Game On,
Henky!!