Category: ShackTac

ShackTac turns seven

  • January 4, 2013

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the founding of Shack Tactical, my pride and joy. Thanks to everyone over the years who has helped to make us what we are today, as well as everyone who motivates us to keep on keepin’ on. 😀

You can find an image gallery of scenes from throughout the year here. Now’s also a good time to take a look at my 2012 in Review tribute video, below.

In other site news, I’ve added my TrackIR settings and profile to the TrackIR page for those who have asked for them.

On growth, principles, and power

  • November 13, 2012

I’d like to take a few minutes to address something that has come up several times in recent months on tumblr, in Youtube comments, replies to posts on my site, and in various other e-spaces.

The topic is that of ShackTac’s growth, or more specifically, the limitations I have placed on such growth.

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November 2012 Cycle

  • November 9, 2012

I have just sent out e-mails to the selectees for the November join cycle. Note that it is very likely that I will not run a join cycle for December, and will pick up again mid-January or possibly in February. Everyone is welcome to apply in the mean time, I just won’t act on anything until we get to the new year.

To those of you that didn’t make selection this month – please check out my post on The State of Things Going Forward for more on our current join process as well as alternative communities to look at. We can only accept a small number of people each month, and there are lots of quality people applying. It’s a tough thing to sit down and look at 60-70 really qualified people, knowing that you’ll only be taking maybe half or fewer of them at best.

Sorry to those that didn’t make it. Better luck next time!

The state of things going forward

  • October 28, 2012

Limitations

I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, but it’s hard to know exactly what to say about the situation. The short version is that the demand for ShackTac membership right now is extremely high, and our ability to bring in new people is constrained by factors beyond our control. We have had several thousand join requests this year so far, and receive hundreds of them every month.

The group right now stands at ~400 members all told. We have pushed ArmA’s netcode hard to try to find the max number of people we can get into a session. As it turns out, this is somewhere in the realm of 120-130 players currently – beyond that you start to run into crippling issues where even small amounts of packetloss from individual players can have catastrophic repercussions, to include freezing the netcode/server until any players with packetloss can be kicked.

This has become a very real blocking issue for us now. Pulling in significantly more people means that we will more frequently run into the >130 player network bugs. There’s nothing we can do to avoid this right now aside from throttling the number of new joins we’ll accept any given month.

Future Actions

Now, as to the future? I intend to continue to press this issue and take us to the highest sustainable single-server playercount possible. Right now that’s ~130 players. In the future it could be 200. This is in Bohemia’s hands and the best we can do to try to realize that future is to continue to show them that we are interested in it.

The best way to do that right now is to up-vote this ticket on the DevHeaven community issue tracker:

https://dev-heaven.net/issues/27001

Anyone can register on DevHeaven, go to that ticket, and click the green ‘thumb-up’ icon to give it a vote. BIS uses these votes to prioritize their community-related fixes, so your vote does and will make a difference. If you are looking to join ShackTac, and you happen to be one of the many people that get passed over simply because we can’t take many new joins on each month, you should definitely take a few minutes to register at DH, up-vote that, and try to influence BIS to make the change required to allow for higher-playercount ArmA.

More after the jump…
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October 2012 Cycle

  • October 4, 2012

The October selection has happened and the lucky ~30ish have received their e-mails by now. Note that September and October have not had DEP e-mails sent out, as I’m currently reevaluating the longer-term feasibility of DEP. I hope to accomplish that reevaluation this month.

Video TTPs Premiere

  • September 25, 2012

I’ve begun two training-oriented video projects recently – ‘Dslyecxi’s Art of Flight’ and ‘Dslyecxi’s Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures’. I intend to continue these far into the future, to include ArmA3 of course. There will also be a written/illustrated TTP3 to follow up to my existing TTP2, and work on that has been ongoing for a bit now.

If you’re interested in seeing more episodes of either the Art of Flight or TTP series, make sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel – I may not always post them to my site as news articles on time or at all.

Here’s the first of the TTP videos:

Crew Coordination

You can find the Art of Flight videos after the jump.  Continue reading

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