As of today Tyka is offering the option for members to become Premium and thus directly support Tyka.


The reasons for becoming a Premium member are explained in more detail on the Premium membership pages, but here is already a short explanation.

Tyka is an application made entirely in our spare time and a lot of people contribute in various ways to make Tyka better all the time. There is a huge infrastructure required for Tyka, both in software and hardware. We have our own server in a datacenter, there is the hosting of the forum, the software licences, the bandwidth-consuming mod and track downloads and league races etc. Although all the work done for Tyka is offered for free by us, all of these other things cost money.

In the past we have relied on donations, but of course that doesn't offer a lot of fun for the donator. Therefore we are now giving advantages to those supporting Tyka financially. All of the benefits can be seen on the Premium member benefits page, which include getting a Premium icon next to your name on the forum, on the website and in the client, a full driver profile with your race history on Tyka, access to the Premium member forum, chances of winning exclusive prizes in the leagues, no ads on the website or forum, and more features that are in progress such as keeping all of your laptimes and replays driven on the Tyka practice servers.

As an example for the exclusive prizes, for the Enduracers league there is a 1/18 F1 Minichamps of your choice to be won amongst the Premium members!

We hope this will offer something great in return to those supporting Tyka. To make things even better, if you take a membership before the end of the year you will benefit from reduced membership rates. For example, taking a year's membership only costs 27 euros, i.e. only €2.25 per month. We think these are very affordable rates and you are doing Tyka a huge favour by ensuring we can continue to provide our leagues, the downloads, and that we can continue to improve Tyka all the time.

It has taken a while to get these memberships ready as we originally wanted to offer them after our 1 year anniversary event. As promised back then, all those participated in the event will receive a one month membership for free.

Everyone can become a Premium member now. Payments can be done easily using Paypal, while bank deposits are possible for those unable to use Paypal. You can renew your membership any time you want in the same way.

Additionally, it is now possible to log in on the website. There you can see your profile details, your current team, the teams managed by you, and your Premium account expiration date.

As a final note, the server is going to be restarted this evening around 21h40 CET. You can expect a downtime of approximately 10 minutes.

We hope you will enjoy these benefits and that many people will become a Premium member to support Tyka.

The Tyka team.

Hi guys,

I've got some big personal news, which in the end may influence Tyka a bit as well. As I wrote in an earlier post a few months ago I switched jobs and became an IT consultant. Recently I was approached for a long-term (2 to 3 years) position. So I went to the company and took some interviews. Last Thursday the news came that I was accepted and that I can start working there 1 September.

'So..?' you may wonder. Well, the thing is that the position is in the south of France nearby Cannes. As I currently live in Brussels I now have one month to find an appartment, move all my stuff 1200km south, get all affairs in order such as insurance, internet, phone and everything else that comes with it.

Of course this is a great opportunity for me and my soon-to-be wife, but where does it leave Tyka? To be honest, I have no idea yet :). The server will probably stay in Brussels as I rarely need physical access to it anyway and Tyka will definitely remain online. The league will continue as usual, but perhaps Cash or Veldt will take over some smaller duties like setting up the servers if I'm unavailable. Just don't expect any client updates in the nearby future unless they are important bug fixes. Once I get settled in France and I'm not overwhelmed by the job and the Mediterranean sea I can get started on doing some development again :)

I now have a lot of things to do, but I will continue to participate in the league (I might have to miss a race or two depending on my living situation and internet access) and I will visit the forum as usual.

Best regards,
Tygernoot.

Hi guys,

It seems we are having some problems with the rooms getting disconnected from Tyka every night. For the past few days the rooms are no longer showing up each morning. The server itself stays online, but it may be due to the switches going down or other connectivity problems in the datacenter.

I'm very sorry for this inconvenience, but unfortunately there's nothing I can do about this except for contacting the system admin to see whether this issue can be sorted out soon.

Best regards,
Tygernoot.

As you may have noticed, Tyka has been offline since yesterday evening. This is due to a shutdown of the server as the server room needed to be powered down due to maintenance. We're very sorry for the inconvenience, but nothing we could do about it. The server is back online again (but might still be rebooted once to install some updates) and the Tyka client will be back online this afternoon.

The qualifying session of Friday morning for the PSC 2008 league has been postponed to Saturday morning.

As some of you may already know, I'll be changing jobs soon. Starting March, I'm leaving the university as a researcher to work as consultant in the industry. It's time to take the next step in life with some new challenges. A new job, I'm getting married and I want to learn new things.

Due to these changes, I'll be cutting down my efforts into Tyka. Don't worry, this doesn't mean the end of Tyka. I've been working on it for too long and with too much dedication to simply call it quits. I will finish the higher priority things like finalizing the anti-cheat to make it available to the public and continue to support and improve the league system. Of course, the current PSC league will continue as usual and for sure we'll have another F1 summer season. However, with the new job and other things I want to do I will certainly have less time left to work on Tyka.

The past few weeks I've already been taking it easy on Tyka's development, only doing minor changes for the league management. I've been working on Tyka (and before on F1RST3) for more than 3.5 years now. And I can say that at times it has really worn me out. Although it may not always seem like it from the outside, with only some client updates and new features every once in a while, you can probably not imagine the time and effort that takes place behind the scenes. I have spent mindless hours working on the client, often until the deep hours of the night while having to go to work the next day and sacrificing a huge amount of my spare time to the project. In the end these things take their toll, which has been proved many times before with Relay, F1RST or Tyka admins and developers quitting as they couldn't find the energy anymore to work on it.

I think I'm starting to reach this threshold as well. Lately I've had a difficult time finding the energy to start on new features for Tyka. For the league implementation I pushed myself very hard for several months in order to get everything ready in time for the first race. I then needed my vacation badly to recover and I pretty much slept 12 hours a night for more than a week :). Originally (during F1RST3 times) I was only working on the client and helping in league disputes, but now for Tyka I'm also doing the website, database, admin panel, administration, server maintenance... on top of the client development. It's just been getting too much lately and I need to drop some tasks. Therefore I'll be putting most of the client development on hold and only perform the essential tasks for now.

I'm always being told by CasH to take it easy in order not to end up as the other admins who had to step out. However, it's something that you cannot just resist. When starting on Tyka I really wanted to create a new client that didn't have the flaws of the predecessors and to make it as good as it possibly could be.

Now, 2.5 years after I wrote the first line of code for Tyka, I realise it will never be as good as it can be or as good as I can make it. Doing all the programming of both the client and the website by myself, there's only so much I can do. I still have numerous huge ideas on how to improve the client and make it 10 times better than it already is - at least, I hope it's good since after working on it for so long you just don't know anymore :). Unfortunately, it's impossible to realise all of the goals unless you have a team of programmers available to work on it full time for at least three or four months.

I have started to look into other projects as well. I just bought a book on programming for the Mac and the iPhone to learn how development on those platforms work. I didn't have a lot of knowledge about Windows programming when I started on Tyka and had to learn most of it on the go. I've been wanting to learn the Mac platform for a while now but was never able to take the time for it due to always working on Tyka. So now I've cut the knot and decided to give it a go. I must say it's great fun so far and it's nice to learn something completely new. So keep on the lookout for Tyka in the iPhone app store ;).

So this was a bit of a heads-up on my personal life. But since Tyka is part of my life, I thought I'd share this with the rest of you. Despite my reduced input in Tyka, it will continue to live on.

Last but not least, I want to thank my fellow admins for all of their work on Tyka as well. My personal friends CasH and Veldt000 spend countless hours doing all of the league management, disputes, support... in their spare time and without them Tyka would have never been able to progress.

And of course a big thanks to all others (past and present) that helped to improve Tyka: Taurus for creating the great mods and helping to find sponsors; Timon for his time as admin and developer for F1RST3; Steve (dude) who created F1RST(2); all the league admins and marshals; and all of the others!

Best regards,
Tygernoot.

This morning the client was updated to version 0.994. Because of the changes in the client and in preparation for the leagues the server module had to be restarted, thereby kicking out the servers. As always I try to keep the server module updates to a minimum, but sometimes they have to be done in order to get some new features :).

The update includes a lot of fixes and some features that have been requested, like the extra GTR2 menus. I didn't have the chance to test the client update properly as I'm on a really tight time span to get the Tyka leagues started. So if there are any problems, please report on the forum or drop me a mail.

Once the Tyka leagues are up and running, I'll start focusing on finally getting the anti-cheat reports up. Hopefully I can have it ready at the beginning of January, but don't be mad if I have to delay it a bit :)

Enjoy,
Tygernoot.

The new site is still a bit empty, lacks some layout, features and content. It was made in a bit of a hurry and with all the other things that needed to be done for the new leagues, this is the best I could do so far. Also keep in mind I'm not a webdeveloper, so don't expect miracles :). In the coming weeks you can expect continuous updates on the site. You can always report bugs or usability problems by posting on the forum.

Now, the most important news: our Fanatec Porsche Supercup 2008 league is go!

Once again you can win fantastic prizes, so be sure to participate. Read all about the new league and the prizes here. The first qualifying will open this Wednesday, so make sure you download the mod and track, and start racing! You can find a practice room in Tyka.

Attention for all users that have already downloaded the mod.
The mod has been updated to its ultimate final version, so please download the mod again to ensure you are using the latest version!

Tyka is using a totally new league system. Please read the new championship rules to understand how the system works, which will be up in one or two days. Keep in mind that not everything is finished yet. The team management pages will be coming before the qualifying finishes!
It's very well possible that problems arise over the course of the first race weekend. The system hasn't undergone proper testing yet, so the first race will be the big test. Tyka features a really advanced design which may not be visible to the naked eye, but be assured there's a huge system in the background to automate the entire league process. In the event of problems they will rectified manually. If you notice problems, you can always post them on the forum.