Hi everyone,

We've recently introduced an FPS limit to the game, which caused some controversy. So, I want to explain some more of the reasons why we added it, and what changes we'll be doing to it. First off, there was a report about being able to achieve extreme speeds by having high FPS (https://planbserver.com/forum/index.php?topic=7058.0). This caused us to start thinking about it, and what other bugs a very high FPS like that could introduce. The "normal" /fpslimit values for SAMP are between 20 and 90. The game was never designed to handle FPS much higher than that, as you can tell by swimming etc. with such high FPS. At first, we thought some of the other bugs with mods like the addon could also be caused by having high FPS. So, our aim with this was to limit the downsides of the addon, while not completely forbidding it, since it's a very common mod among SAMP players.

We also introduced a lower limit for FPS (< 5), this was to keep players on the Android version from playing. So no, this wasn't to punish people with a bad PC, as even with a bad PC, you won't continuously have less then 5 FPS (and I'm pretty sure no legit player was kicked for this). Players that play on the Android version, will always report 0 FPS, and will thus get kicked after a while. We've noticed the Android version comes with a ton of issues, so that's why we're kicking those players now.

Now, judging by the responses we've got to this, and what we've noticed ourselves, this might not have been the best approach. As we're seeing now, these limits are doing more bad than good. We've thought you could easily limit it with /fpslimit, but it turns out that's not working with some mods, causing people to have to resort to workarounds in order to make it work. Also, there's a lot more people that have these high FPS than we anticipated, so we were kicking a lot of new players as well. So, taking all of that into account, we've decided to get rid of the FPS limits. The kick for Android players will stay, but we'll turn that into a bit more of an elegant solution. To anyone that was impacted by this, our apologies.

Hi guys,

We've made a couple of changes and clarifications to the rules recently. Since that happened through a number of different topics, I'm going to summarize the changes here, so everyone is aware of this.

Mods
We have disallowed fastped.cs and skinchanger.cs. You can find the relevant discussions here (skinchanger.cs), here (fastped.cs), and here (general discussion). We are not going to ban straight away if you are using it. You will get warned to remove it first, if you refuse to do that, we'll move on to punishments. This discussion also pointed out a flaw in how we allow/disallow mods. In the past, it was usually just people asking us the question (in private, on the forums, ...), and us giving a simple answer. Now, this lead to a lot of confusion and unfairness, as only some people would be aware that some mods were allowed. To tackle this issue, we've created a new "Mods" board under the "Suggestions" section. This board should give you a clear overview of what mods are allowed and which ones are not. If the mod you're looking for is not there yet, feel free to make a new topic there (according to the format). Everyone is allowed to discuss and give their opinion there, or provide more information about it. This will be the only official way to ask about mods (even for admins).

Rule changes
We've also changed the rules regarding surfing on opposing teams vehicles. We added the 2 following rules (full discussion can be found here).

• If a team player is driving around with someone from the opposite team (non-civs), the person on top will be warned and pushed at first. Further incidents will be punished with a jail. We won't go further than a 10 min jail for this.


• If a civilian is actively engaged in a fight with a cop/terro, then subsequently escapes the fight with a teammate (of the person he's in a fight with), he'll be punished. With "actively engaged", we mean that the civ is involved in the fight, and is attacking and damaging the cop/terro as well.

In addition to this, we've also automated system to take care of the more blatant abuse:

• A civ surfing on a terro car, and attacking another terro (that is not in or on the same car) -> Your bullets will be disabled, so you can't do any damage


• A cop surfing on a terro car, and attacking another terro (that is not in or on the same car) -> Your bullets will be disabled, so you can't do any damage, and you'll be removed from the vehicle


• A civ surfing on a cop/SWAT car, and attacking another person of that team (Pres/Vice/Sec/Cop/Swat, that is not in or on the same car) -> Your bullets will be disabled, so you can't do any damage


• A terro surfing on a cop/SWAT car, and attacking another person of that team (Pres/Vice/Sec/Cop/Swat, that is not in or on the same car) -> Your bullets will be disabled, so you can't do any damage, and you'll be removed from the vehicle

Warning system
We also took this as an opportunity to expand our warning system with new warnings. The warning system keeps track of different rulebreaks, and punishes based on your warning level. So, when admins issue a warning for a certain rule, you'll be automatically punished based on your warning level. This is meant so every player would be punished in the same way, and we could easily keep track of things. We've made the warnings visible for everyone now, you can check them on the CP, on your dashboard (on the right hand side, below your name changes). The warning levels will look like this (hopefully a bit more empty than this example). A striped bar means that there is still a pending warning (one that was issued offline, so the next time you spawn ingame, the warning will be issued and you'll receive the punishment).


A little more detail about the different warnings, when they will be issued and what the different warning levels do:

1. Spawnshooting
These warnings will be issued when you're spawnshooting/spawnkilling. Now, since we have spawnzones, these warnings don't get issued a lot anymore. When you don't have spawn protection anymore, we won't consider it spawnshooting/spawnkilling. Exceptions to this are when you're intentionally pushing people out of the spawn to kill them, or ramming people with a plane while they're under spawn protection.

• 1st warning: Push (teleport to random location away from current position)


• 2nd warning: Push (teleport to random location away from current position)


• 3rd warning: 2 min jail


• 4th warning: 3 min jail


• 5th warning: 5 min jail


• 6th warning: Kick (warning level goes back to 0 after this)

2. Teamshooting
These warnings will be issued when you're teamshooting. Damaging a team vehicle, punching/sawing a teammate, throwing nades at a teammate all falls under this. This used to be an automated system (hence why the warnings are "looped" (they go back to 0 once you reach lvl 6). Since most teamshooting was made impossible, these warnings don't get issued that much anymore.

• 1st warning: Push (teleport to random location away from current position)


• 2nd warning: Push (teleport to random location away from current position)


• 3rd warning: 2 min jail


• 4th warning: 3 min jail


• 5th warning: 5 min jail


• 6th warning: Kick (warning level goes back to 0 after this)

3. Death evasion
This is another "old" warning, which won't get issued that much anymore these days. Since we have the actor system now, it's pretty much impossible to death evade anymore.

• 1st warning: 5 min jail


• 2nd warning: 3 day ban


• 3rd warning: 1 week ban


• 4th warning: 2 week ban


• 5th warning: 1 month ban

4. Teamblocking
Team blocking is a special kind of teamkilling, where you're working together with the enemy team to kill one of your own team. An example of teamblocking would be when you saw/spray a teammate, and let the other team kill them, hence why this kind of warnings has more severe punishments. If you're spraying/sawing them without the other team damaging or killing them, it will be considered teamshooting.

• 1st warning: warning message


• 2nd warning: 3 min jail


• 3rd warning: kick


• 4th warning: 3 day ban


• 5th warning: 1 week ban


• 6th warning: 2 week ban


• 7th warning: 1 month ban

5. Teamsurfing
The team surfing warning will be used in the following 2 cases:

• If a team player is driving around with someone from the opposite team (non-civs), the person on top will be warned and pushed at first. Further incidents will be punished with a jail. We won't go further than a 10 min jail for this.


• If a civilian is actively engaged in a fight with a cop/terro, then subsequently escapes the fight with a teammate (of the person he's in a fight with), he'll be punished. With "actively engaged", we mean that the civ is involved in the fight, and is attacking and damaging the cop/terro as well.

• 1st warning: warning message


• 2nd warning: 2 min jail


• 3rd warning: 5 min jail


• 4th warning: 10 min jail (every warning after this will also be a 10 min jail)

6. Animation abuse
This warning will be issued when using animations/commands to gain an advantage. Cases such as using /sync to get up earlier, or using an animation command to prevent fall damage, will be considered under this warning.

• 1st warning: warning message


• 2nd warning: 3 min jail


• 3rd warning: 5 min jail


• 4th warning: 10 min jail


• 5th warning: 1 day ban


• 6th warning: 3 day ban


• 7th warning: 1 week ban

7. Forcing map change
This warning will be issued when someone quits in order to force a map change.

• 1st warning: warning message


• 2nd warning: 3 min jail


• 3rd warning: 5 min jail


• 4th warning: 10 min jail


• 5th warning: 1 day ban


• 6th warning: 3 day ban


• 7th warning: 1 week ban

If you have any further questions or comments about this, feel free to discuss them here.

Hi guys,

Tonight (Saturday 16 May), we will be launching a new map on Plan B: Turquoise Islands. First of all, I'd like to thank Cobra, for being the driving force behind this and creating the map, and Carg, for setting up the vehicles, spawns and making sure it's ready for PTP. More information about the map is available
here. So, make sure you don't miss the launch tonight: Saturday 16 May at 20:00 CEST (UTC +2): https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Turquoise+Islands+Launch&iso=20200516T20&p1=48

Now, a short overview of the updates we've done since the last topic.

• Turquoise Islands


• With the new map, we've also changed the map rotation system. Simply put, the Turquoise Islands map will replace 50% of the NSA occurences. To explain in a little more detail, the map rotation system works is 'cycles', in which we'll play through all maps in a random order. Once we finished a cycle, a new cycle start, with again all of the maps in a different random order.


• Example: Cycle 1: RC > SF > LS > WV > NSA > LV > FC.
  Cycle 2: WV > LS > Turquoise Islands > SF > FC > RC > LV.
  All of this is randomized, so there will always be a random chance if NSA or Turquoise Islands will be played in the current cycle (which should add up to a 50/50 chance).


• Snipers and chainsaws will be disabled on this map. For snipers, we feel that the map is too small, as on some islands you'll have a sight on most players. For chainsaws, they simply didn't work on spawned objects, so they're unusable on this map.


• Any feedback and issues with the map are welcome in this topic.


• Discord


• We added echoing for the Discord server, so everything that's available in IRC, is now also available on Discord. If you want to chat ingame, you will have to get verified: https://planbserver.com/forum/index.php?topic=5974.0


• One issue we noticed is that Discord does not allow us to send as many messages as IRC does, so sometimes (when there's a lot of players ingame), the echoing might be delayed.


• Anti team surfing


• This is an issue that came up with some recent reports. Initially, we just wanted to clear the rule up, but that seemed to bring a lot more questions than it solved. For some perspective, this was our initial thought on clearing the rule up: team members wouldn't be allowed to surf on enemies vehicles (so terros with cops or vice versa). For civilians, it would depend. Were they not engaged in any fights with the team, it would be allowed. If you were engaged in a fight (with the same team of the person you're surfing on), it wouldn't be allowed. Now, I think this is already pretty in-depth, but then there would still be "gray zones", such as, when do you consider they're in a fight, should they be shooting back for it to be called a fight, when would you consider it ended, or what if he accidentally damaged someone on the team. And then we didn't even get to the part on how we would punish for it.
  
  So, instead of making such a rule, we went with a simpler solution, and just making it impossible to surf on a vehicle of the opposing team. Terros can't ride with cops and vice versa, civilians won't be able to ride with terros or cops (it's the same system as with getting in as a passenger). Everyone can still surf if a civilian is the driver. I know that it's not the best solution and will probably cause some frustration, but out of this and making a rule, I think this is the better one. This way, we just make it impossible to do, and admins don't have to interfere. But if you do have a better suggestion on how we can solve this, please let us know!


• Disabled the sniper object check (checked whether there was an object blocking the sniper shot, in response to this bug: https://planbserver.com/forum/index.php?topic=5412.0. The fix seemed to bring more bugs than it was fixing things, so we disabled it again: https://planbserver.com/forum/index.php?topic=5944.0


• Added support for placing races in interiors


• Fixed a bug with the class balancing (so it now calculates how the balance would be after you reclassed, instead of looking at the current balance)


• Fixed /monthscore, /topprotect, /topattack


• Added messages on chainsaw spawning

See you tonight!