HOMEBASE :: WELCOME TO ROCK'EM HARD
Welcome to the Rock'em Hard UT Demo Servers specializing in Morpheus Rocket Arenas for over 24 years! Bring your skills, bring your questions, and bring a beer, but leave the attitudes at home. Questions or comments, drop by the community or you can email me the janitor at rockhard@rockemhard.com.
06/19/24 - Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the site is once again alive!
OK, maybe not that exciting, but the site is back up after a slight outage. And by slight, I mean several months... and then before that, several other lengthy outages. But, all in all, we've maintained an 18.7% uptime. How's that for 'serving the community'! So what's new with you? More importantly, why the hell are you here? I don't even know why I am here! It's funny to see the last post I made; the onset of COVID-19. JFC, how everything changed since that post. Thankfully, the noobeater was not affected by the virus and remains vigilantly at his post, ready to snack on those with poor balance or directional skills. But honestly, he's lost a bit of weight given the fact that the UT servers have been down for a couple of years, so no fresh meat. The reason for that is some a-hole out there had nothing better to do than DDoS the poor servers. Imagine working from home and all of a sudden your internet connection goes to shit. And after pulling cables to computers and VMware hosts, you narrow it down to a single VM - the UT server. Wireshark showed just a mass amount of calls to the server on port 7777 from random IP addresses. I shut the servers down for a week or so, the a-hole went away for a few weeks, then they started again. THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS! I dunno why they were picking on the poor little UT servers. My guess is some jerk that never could make the first jump. Soooooo, servers are down indefinitely, not that they were used much anyway. But it was neat to occasionally see someone in there messing around, despite their terrible ping. Anyway, dunno what's next. Toyed with the idea of standing up another forum, but I am not sure I want to go through the effort of keeping PHP, Apache, and MySQL patched all the time. Anyway, hope life is treating you well. I do hear from several people occasionally, but I miss talking to all the OGs. All the kids are grown men and women now... with families of their own. Amazing. My email is up there somewhere, or hit me up on Google Chat (netwarefan@gmail.com). Talk soon, Kevin
03/03/20 - Community Spread!
Coronavirus is upon us and I'm doing my part in helping to slow the spread by taking the community forum down! Well, not really, but the forum is down indefinitely. The site and forum were running on ancient, tho beloved, Windows 2003 which is well out of the MS support lifecycle (read: no OS patches!) and the only thing older than the OS was the version of phpBB and mySQL. I’ve successfully ported over the website from IIS to apache, but the forum is a whole other project. I need to get a new version of phpBB, mySQL, and PHP engine installed on this linux box, import the old forum, and pray it works. This may not sound like a lot of work, but to a mere mortal like myself, with the limited amount of free time I have, it’s a mountain of work. And to make matters worse, the site doesn’t have an SSL certificate assigned so eventually browsers are going to bark about it, and then eventually they just won’t let you connect. I’ll either have to invest in a wildcard certificate (as I have the old RWS and THC sites running too) for the rockemhard.com domain, or move the site to a hosting provider and let them deal with the cert. Anyway, it was critical that I get the old Windows OS off the internet before the bad guys took advantage of my laziness. Not sure when I will get back to the forum, but I’ll keep you posted on any progress here. If anyone out there is good with php/phpbb/mysql drop me a line at rockhard@rockemhard.com and I might need to pick your brain. I’ll give it the ole college effort first, but just in case, let me know if you got the skillz I need. Until we meet again, rock’em hard baby! -RH
11/18/19 - Noobeater is 20 years old!
Wow, where does the time go? It seems just yesterday that the noobeater emerged from its shell ready to devour anyone that happened to miss that first jump. But alas, it was not yesterday, but exactly 20 years ago! That's right, on a cold windy evening, the first ReH rocket arena made its debut on that MasterServer listings forever etching itself in a little piece of UT99 history. Since then I have developed an ample supply of grey hairs, not doubt in part by having a kid in college. Gone are the days of when she'd sit on my lap watching me tar and feather n00bs, or get tar and feathered myself by the veterans that lurked in the shadows. Servers are still running, but not sure how much longer I will keep the forum. It's running on ancient PHPBB and I have very little desire to figure out how to migrate it and the database to newer code. I probably would if it saw more traffic, but the reality is most have moved on to the FaceBook group, or just moved on in general. What will probably happen is I will put the forum in read-only mode for those that just lurk and leave it at that. Anyway, here's to another 20 years... I'll keep the servers running so long as NT4 runs on VMware :)
01/2016 - Notice anything different?
Enter the final phase: ReH 4.0... simply noobtastical. Let me to take a minute to thank an old friend, s3mi0tic. You see, s3mi sent me this new interface YEARS ago to look over and consider rolling into the site. Upon recieving the code, I knew it was a home run, but I'll be honest: the first thing I thought about was the arduous task of integrating the phpBB forum into the interface like we have been doing for years. But let's be clear: the guys roofing houses in Texas in the middle of July have a hard job; trying to reverse engineer some HTML code, in comparison, is not a hard job. But regardless, you have to be in a mood to scavenger-hunt all the little php pages that need to be modified, figure out competing code's CSS, bla bla bla. Needless to say, I didn't finish the interface. Like George RR Martin, I swore I'd get back to work on it, but days turned into weeks; weeks turned into months; months into years. Nothing to show for all that time that elapsed; I think I received the first revision sometime in March of 2012! The half-assed effort I made, I just parked it onto the dev site, and there it sat for years. Shameful.
But here we are in 2016. Armed with a fresh injection of determination to get this site on-line, I packed away my excuses and got my ass to work. The effort paid off and I present you with the NEW (old) Rock'em Hard website... including the integrated forum! :) Thank you s3mi for all the years of work you've put into giving our great community a virtual face. I can't ever repay you for your efforts, but know this place would be nothing without the fresh coats of paint you've brushed upon it. You.Da.Man! Dank je.
[RwS]RockHard
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Bots prefer'em hard, since 1999 The legacy of Rock'em Hard starts way back in the previous millennium, short after the launch of the demo version of the revolutionary game Unreal Tournament. With its superior graphics, gameplay, soundtrack, and offering the possibility to play the game online, demo servers soon arose like noobeaters in dark and creepy places. Just another guy, going around by the name RockHard, decided to set up two servers which would get into history as the Rock 'em Hard UT Demo Servers. Learn more about Unreal Tournament. 
What made these servers unique, was the dedication to Dave Ewing's low gravity map Morpheus, named after the legendary character played by Laurence Fishburne in the amazing science fiction movie The Matrix, which had appeared earlier that year. The official map description: "LMC knew they had found an excellent arena at the very top of a newly constructed Galaxyscraper SuperStructure. Thanks to the modern miracle of super tensile solids, these three buildings reach a staggering 12 miles high at their pinnacle. The thin atmosphere and reduced influence of Earth’s gravity provide an interesting test of the tournament athlete’s ability to adapt and conquer in extreme environment." In combination with the rocket launcher, this map seemed to offer it all, from building-to-building jump-tests to bullet-time rocket-dodging. Learn more about Dave Ewing. Learn more about Morpheus. What is the Matrix? 
The Rock 'em Hard Servers soon started to be crowded by a bunch of strange personalities, who seemed to be especially attracted to this low gravity MRA (Morpheus Rocket Arena) configuration. The first clan to appear on the servers was agt (agents of good technique), created by the inevitable Agent Smith. For quite a while, the agents were in total control of the noobs showing up on Morpheus. But, little by little, the noobs got stronger, resisted, and new clans were created to put an end to the domination of the agents. Typical MRA clans like RwS (Running with Scissors), THC (TetraHydroCannabinol), smiley, dP (digital Prophets), WTF (What The Fuck) and tlgm (the little green microbes) managed to balance the equation. Peace ruled supreme, and the Rock 'em Hard servers were soon known as a very colorful and challenging place to hang out. Learn more about our players on the Players page. Tell us about inappropriate language use on this site. 
While many UT Demo players and servers migrated to the retail version from the moment it became available, this did hardly happen with the Rock 'em Hard community. RockHard kept his servers demo, and even organized his own competition known as TOR (Tournament of Rockets), which had to determine the very best MRA player in an ever improving community. The first TOR took place in 2001, in which Catalyst dominated s3miOtic in the final. In 2002, it was Apocalypse who kicked Freddy's behind, though this result will forever be contested as it was Apocalypse himself who organized the tourney. In 2003, Freddy made his return and turned out stronger than s3miOtic, who lost his second final. Finally, in 2004, Catalyst was back on Morpheus to beat Freddy, and to set once and for all who is the best MRA player in the world, giving him the priceless honour of figuring on the highest podium spot in the interface of the Rock 'em Hard website. Learn more about our tourneys. Wait... once and for all? Now that is not entirely true! Rumor goes, that somewhere between now and 2019, there will be one final TOR, which will be remembered as the mother of all TORs. Yes, you read that right, one more TOR. So, have you secretly been working out? Have you been training with Ares or Dessloch? Do you think you have what it takes to beat the Cat? Or do you meanwhile have a bunch of kids who might have the right stuff? Or are you just in it for the fun and for old time's sake? Sure you are. Read more about it on our TOR page! Are you ready for TOR 5? |
The Rock'em Hard UT Demo servers Welcome to the Rock 'em Hard UT Demo Servers specializing in Morpheus Rocket Arena since 1999. Questions or comments, drop by the community or you can send us a mail. Downloads! Downloads! Downloads! System Requirements
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