@Transformers PS3 Fans

Just a small announcement - DNS server for PS3 is changed yet again to 209.38.53.69. So don't forget to update it, in case it differs.

@Transformers PC fans (Since when do we have this role huh?)

Good day people.

Today we present to you yet another update. In this update:

• FOC PC 2013 balance patch
• The return of player numbers

FOC 2013 balance patch.

It’s finally here!

This patch concludes a 3 year story FOC balance changes, and from now on we would stay away from doing any changes to balance in FOC, keeping it in its questionable, but highly praised 2013 state.

Since the whole list of changes is too long to be put here I’ll put it here (This is a link, click it).

The patch is a culmination of work of Paka, Legion and Phoenix, with some moral support from Styx, and me, gluing it all together. And Sunbeam, for his work on FOC. Thanks, all of you, for putting your time and skills into this.

Patch is not only server side this time, so run the wh-updater to get the latest version and suffer a little less from Scrap gun.

The return of player numbers

~~They are almost here, I'm trying to patch last minute bug with discord stuff. But status is back!~~

<#1339894335314985011> is back!

Have fun, and until next time!

And now for the Grand Finale

Warehouse yearly report

Total players per title

21956 (+8475) - FOC (PC) 16911 (+6801) - WFC (PC) 9791 (+4818) - GHWT DE 4237 (+1145) - FOC (PS3) 3658 (+1309) - RotDS (PC) 2946 (+922) - WFC (PS3) 1773 (+547) - DotM 1588 (+553) - RoTF (PS3) 1505 (+403) - RoTF (PC) 1139 (+318) - Blur 754 (+201) - RotDS (PS3) 396 (+111) - GH3 (PC) 204 (+96) - DJ Hero 2 (PS3) 154 (+123) - Grid (PC) 82 (+32) - DJ Hero 1 33 (+11) - Singularity (PC) 15 (+2) - DJ Hero 2 (Wii)

Total: 67142 (+25712)

Misc Stats

• Discord server members: 31093 (+11226)
• DDOSes: 3 (+2)
• Commits done: 951 (+313)
• Bans in FOC PC: 144 (+104)

Gratitudes

• Warehouse staff and its support team, for dedicating their free time to this project.
• DJ Hero Fan Server people, for good deeds
• Alex, for being the best/worst project manager I’ve seen in recent times. Screw QoS
• GHWTDE team for being hardworking
• Reya, for dealing with me so long, which was hard
• Sana, for keeping his head up, no matter what
• Denarious and F.P.S for spending that much time on each ban case
• 404 and Tryp for being friends
• Phoenix, for stepping up
• E. and A. for their help with the WH website. It won’t happen if it wasn’t for you
• halvors, for everything
• and you!

Thank you, and see you next year.

6/6

What we want to see in 2025

While there are things we plan to do, there are also things we wish to happen. So I asked the team about their wishes for 2025.

Aibot

Rainbow Six Vegas 1 and 2 with working ranked! FOC dedicated server! (no, I won’t do it, but it would be really cool) FPS patches for FOC and WFC! FOC tournament! Cool graphs and more stats!

Sana

website stuffs ban notifications back ig More automated support stuffs

Halvors

no idea

Denarious

This year has been difficult and eventful. I wish everyone success and plans for the next year. Make 2025 better! Have a good time on these holidays! I also wish there were more cheaters so i could ban them haha

F.P.S

more active players for foc n wfc

5/6

Better work with communities around the games we host

I briefly touched it in the last post regarding DDoS and with the announcement of Phoenix as the Transformers guy,but it goes further.

With the gradually increasing number of games we support, we've lost any ability to support them like they deserve to.While working game servers is great news for any title,said titles need players and events to keep them alive,and we simply can’t provide this.

And so during this summer I sat down and reevaluated what we can do about it, to make the user experience while not on par during golden days of the games, but at least better. And so it resulted in a grand plan of major structural changes and the whole approach to how we run games.

To sum it up in basic terms, we switch our role to be a “service provider”.We write code, we run servers, write guides and tools and provide technical support, like we do now. But we’re stepping away from touching game balance, issue bans and micro-managing titles ourselves. Instead we seek people from the community, who are passionate about the titles we host, who would be in charge of the playerbase and titles itself. And providing all the necessary tools to them and directly communicating with the WH team.

So hey, if you want to be in charge of Grid or Guitar Hero 3 or even RotF for PS3,frequently play the game, and have a feeling like you want to host game nights from time to time and have something resembling a community to back you up (or not, this also works) - shoot me a message so we can discuss it further.

Keep in mind it’s all in the early stages of planning, so things will take a while to actually happen.

Rework of steam for FOC

While the current steam replacement for FOC is working, it was done by me without much prior experience, so it’s still a rather poor implementation, with a lot of spaghetti in its code and very questionable decisions from top to bottom.

Currently planned for Q2-Q3 of 2025, but who knows! 4/6

What’s next?

For the next year we have a lot planned. I even had to sit down and properly plan things to fit them in the schedule.

• WH website
• Better communications and integrations with communities around the games we host
• Rework of steam for FOC
• Proper installer
• Better linux support
• Another infrastructure change
• Rewrites of remaining Python stuff
• Wiki update
• Discord server rework
• Fixes
• More fixes

WH website

After 3 years, I feel like making a proper website for WH project is a must. It’s not like I never wanted to do it, but I’m a backend coder first, and frontend is just not for me. But I will overcome my hatred and finally do it. Main goals for the website are to move all registration to it from Discord, more info about currently online players and sessions and to highlight the communities for said games.

You can check out the current beta version over at https://beta.aiwarehouse.xyz/. It doesn’t have a registration yet, and won’t for a while. Just a barebone glimpse into the future of what I plan to do with it.

Currently, I plan to finish it around April of 2025, but it might take more time, since I really hate frontend.

3/6

There are now 31000 of us!

Which is a huge number, if you ask me. Never ever I expected that much of you here. Mentally, I’m still somewhere back in 2021, and expecting 2000 people tops. Maybe 5000. But not 30000. So thank you! To each of you. You’re the fuel to make us keep going forward.

With people's numbers aside. Let’s talk about what was done. To sum up this year in WH achievements, I would probably note 4 things.

Release of steam replacement for FOC

After 2 years of FOC being online, this thing finally allowed everyone to use a friend list and see peoples names. Whole development took a full year, 3 rewrites from scratch and learning maybe too much about the world of steam, windows libraries and FOC internals. Plus another 8 months of bug fixes.

Migration of the infrastructure from Python to Rust almost entirely.

This had happened without any huge announcements or talk, but it took the majority of this year. The sheer amount of work and testing that took such a monumental task is astonishing even to me. For you, a player, not much had changed, but in the background a lot of things now work differently, supported better and made better.

Tickets system

Thanks to Sana, we moved away from support chat that was hard to manage, and began using tickets, which helped us tremendously. So now the support team can aid people easier, and in case they can’t, it gets escalated to me, where I sort them out. Now Sana would probably say that I’m a very lazy individual and checking important tickets not as often as I probably should and would be right. But I will try to be better next year, promise!

Infrastructure rework

Me and halvors have done things that I would consider pure magic. From k8s clusters and esoteric iptable rules to kernel module firewall in rust to an army of load balancers during DDOS in December. Next year we want to outdo ourselves again and do something even cooler and even more resilient.

2/6

@everyone

Hi party people! **Happy new year to all of you!✨ **

And as a tradition, this will be another WH Yearly Report.

It’s been a fun year, with its ups and downs. And a lot of coding. Sometimes I wonder what I even have become, writing dll injections and detours in Rust, which is wildly different from a python backend developer I’ve been before for a major part of my coding hobby. It’s fun to look at everything we had achieved in the department of coding, while not being a programmer officially. Well, me, at least.

Warehouse project remains a beloved hobby for me and many other people, which we plan to continue until the end of times.

2010s happen to be a fun era in game development. And although not that much time has passed since, relatively speaking, a lot of games from this era are already abandoned and mostly forgotten by their developers and publishers, while still being remembered and cherished by the fans of those games.

Lucky for us, those titles and their networking are approachable for a single developer like me and other like-minded people, so we’re here, doing our noble cause of game preservation. To be honest, I’m afraid for the games of the 2020s since those might quite possibly never be preserved without way too much resources and work. But that’s a worry for another day.

Warehouse in 2024

Looking back at what was planned and what was done every year gives me a complicated feeling.

On one hand we had done so much and got this far and I’m really proud of it. On the other - we could always have done more. But I try not to be too judgmental of myself and constantly remind myself that this is just a hobby we are doing in our spare time for the love of it. At the end of the day, we’re not some kind of business profiting from it, but just 2 guys writing code, a bunch of people supporting them (and you) and you, players, having fun playing their favorite games.

But let’s get back to the report, shall we?

1/6

Hello once again,

We have released a hotfix that resolves an issue with a long "connecting" screen on FOC, you can download it here or use wh-updater program. (Or ignore this if you did not update your file in the last 9 hours)

Website

I feel like I promise to work on it every year, but I REALLY hate working with a frontend. But this time it’s different, since I actually commissioned designs for it, and made 3 total working pages.

Anyway, WH official website/web app is coming somewhere in Q2-Q3 of 2025. For FOC it would mean that WHS friends would be finally manageable via a gui for humans, and not discord chat commands. Plus list of current sessions with actual map and current players info.

In a bigger picture it means that registration, keys, new, and guides will move to the website.

And that’s it for now! Expect a traditional new year eve post with a yearly report on the 31st of December. And maybe something for PS3 players? And have a great day!

Say hi to @Phoenix (again)

Guess who's back, but this time as “Transformers Branch Department VP”?

After rather short negotiations in September, Phoenix is back to ruling Transformers domain. Hooray.

For now his power is rather limited, since our plans for onboarding were disrupted, buuut you should see and hear more of him in upcoming months.

FOC balance

We ceased our development of further patches for titles where we were providing them, namely FOC (and WFC with a grand total of zero patches), to focus more on infrastructure, game support, players support and bug fixing.

But!

With Phoenix in the picture and me, wanting to put a nice ending to the whole FOC balancing endeavor, it would be done a little differently.

2013 Balance Patch

Back in April WH Balance Team @old man and @Paca did a tremendous amount of work, documenting every change done in the 2013 patch and what exact values it changed with their in-game name for me to work on.

During that time I was working on writing tools to alter game values though the code, which is required to bring that patch back. I succeeded, and so now I have tools to actually do it.

And so, after 1.5 years of toying with FOC game balance we will finally leave it alone as it was intended - with balance values of 2013.

When?

Q1 of 2025

What is after it for balance stuff?

No idea! After I released the 2013 patch It’s up to Phoenix.

2/3

Good news #2 - the future of TF games

A while ago I promised to talk about Transformers and its future. Original version of this post was drafted in late August and initially planned to drop somewhere in early September, but it was scrapped.

It’s a rather interesting choice to talk about any future plans amid things not working properly and being ddosed, but I feel like radio silence is more deafening than anything else.

Since the last major update with WHS for FOC nothing has happened around here. Balance patches dried out, due to personal reasons and me losing interest to work on them. But while I was slacking off I was thinking a lot about how to improve things around here and where we’re heading in our 3rd year of existence.

A year ago I decided that Warehouse has enough resources and motivation to take care of in-game micromanagement in the form of patches, bans, content and events, which never happen. It worked out for a while with various levels of success, but at this point in time I guess it’s safe to admit that we, and primarily me, have lost will to continue to support this noble cause. Whole deal becomes too time consuming, while we’re swarmed with a fair share of user support tasks and I don’t feel enough motivation to spend time on it.

So, our approach didn’t work out, and I was thinking about what can be done to find a way out of this situation, where we have finite number of people in the Warehouse team, and a lot of titles to provide proper support for.

And so after thinking,planning, thinking again and asking people around, I come up a plan, which can be roughly described as:

• we don’t manage games ourselves and focus on technical side of things
• we find people from the community and ask them nicely to do this, giving them power to set rules, ban, change balance, run events

If you have been there since the very beginning you might think that it’s exactly how we started with Warehouse, and you would be right. Funny how it works!

1/3

@Transformers PC fans

Good day Transformers tribe!

I have good news and good-but-generally-me-talking-about-transformers-future news.

Good news numero uno

I made a brand new update for FOC PC, which makes the game to not not work.

Just run your updater or grab it from here and manually replace steam_api.dll

If y'all are seeing this in chat DO NOT CLICK IT, it is evil and malicious

I see that probably not everyone has read the announcement above.

All PRG errors (The server is offline / multiplayer does not work) can currently only be caused by DDoS attacks

All you have to do is just wait until the server is up again!

@Transformers PC fans

Also an important announcement! So that the players do not have thoughts that something is not working because of them.

If you see this error when starting the game, it means: The server is offline (multiplayer does not work)
at the moment, this error can only be due to DDoS attacks

All you have to do is just wait until the server is up again!

@Transformers PC fans

Good day people!

Bad news: DDOS is still going and games are affected. Good news: There is a small fix for FOC which might make things better.

• Fixed bug with hanging up on startup is
• Fixed bug on exit, that would anger a lot of debuggers
• General stability improvements to enhance the user's experience

Just run your updater or grab it from here and manually replace steam_api.dll

DDOS. Online may not work from time to time

WFC is up!

<a:alert:1067556469588889701> DDOS is still going on plus due to technical reasons, online still won't work for a while