Puke Nuk3m turned five this week! Here's a story about how it all started.
Ten years ago, a Swedish JJ2 player named DanZeal was very excited about this game. And wanted to play JJ2 whenever possible. But he noticed that there were barely any servers online, especially in the late hours. Now that Monolith's Battle server had disappeared, players would often stare at an empty server list. They would want to host a server themselves, but it was such a struggle trying to get the ports configured. This is when DanZeal decided to do the community a favour and host his own dedicated servers: Zeal Alpha and Zeal Duels.
Things were going great! Players could count on online servers from now on and play matches or hang out in the servers. After a while, DanZeal upgraded his servers by hosting more servers with various game modes, like mini games, random 1 on 1 matches, HLRS, and so on. He also upgraded his servers physically by switching to shielded LAN from Wi-Fi and even hosted through Hamachi for those who had the 30 seconds CTO problem.
Later, people started to get more excited and wanted to host their dedicated servers as well. Servers like "The Server by Sfaizst", "Camel Duels" and "Steel Duels" were also online for a long time.
Five years ago, in 2013, there were tons of servers online and DanZeal decided to pass the stick to other players. He was planning on using his servers for HTPC purposes and quit hosting his Zeal servers.
I, ShakerNL, was the level list admin of the popular test server "Zeal Relaxer" and wanted that server to keep on living, since there was no other dedicated test server at that time. I had an old Pentium 4 PC laying around and decided to boot it up and configure it for a dedicated JJ2 server that could replace Zeal Relaxer.
On July 7 2013, I booted up the server and named it "Zael Relaxer".
The level list was identical to the one hosted by DanZeal. Later, I added a web page where people could submit their own levels to be hosted on the server. Within a few weeks, I decided to give the server an original name and named it after the Duke Nukem parody in the game: "Puke Nuk3m Tests" The last word would point out what kind of games were hosted on that server. The server got popular in no time and reached the maximum of 32 players quickly.
The original Zeal Relaxer server used to have a record keeping utility running, called Test Manager, which was made by SuPrem in 2011. It allowed players to set records based on time and compete with each other (Kind of like speedrunning). But SuPrem stopped developing Test Manager and it became incompatible with newer JJ2+ versions.
Then, ElecTRon was willing to recreate the old Test Manager and made a new and working utility called "Test Operator". Players could finally play ranked tests again and compete with each other. The downside of utilities like Test Manager and Test Operator were that they would often cause the server to crash.
JJ2+ started to support Angelscript and servers could run scripts to enhance the gameplay. Sir Ementaler, a.k.a. ' wrote a script for the server that could replace Test Operator.
The plus side of the script is that it would no longer cause the server to crash, but the downside is that players without the JJ2+ add-on could no longer join the server, since vanilla JJ2 does not support Angelscript.
I hosted a simple dedicated battle server, named "Puke Nuk3m Battle" for vanilla players and advertised JJ2+ through an automated chat bot, so that they would know how to access the test server.
In May of 2015, the server PC started to get defective, so it was time for me to replace it with a newer one. This PC was more powerful and could run the game easily.
In that same year, I noticed that players enjoyed playing in street fight maps again. Street fight was very popular around 2010 and people were active in making levels for that game mode. Thus, I decided to host a street fight server alongside with the othere servers. Although the server was filled with enthusiastic players, it never got as popular as the test or battle servers. I later decided to turn that server into one with various game modes which were switching automatically after all of the levels were cycled through.
Due to the decreasing popularity and the fact that there were too many dedicated servers which turned into ghost towns, I decided to shut down the "Puke Nuk3m Relaxer" and the "Puke Nuk3m Streetfight/Pestilence/Survivor" servers. And I hosted a new server instead, named "Puke Nuk3m Arena". This server gives players the freedom to choose any game mode and level they prefer to play into, which made most Puke Nuk3m servers obsolete.
Nowadays, the server is also used for hosting events, like JDC and Anniversary Bashes.
As for the future, I can't tell what will happen, as I can't predict the future. But one thing that I am sure about is that I currently do not have plans to stop hosting the servers. I enjoy hosting the servers and providing a place for the Jazz 2 community to play in. |
