So I remember when I made it a redirection topic that people said they missed seeing the news bit on the forum portal. I wanted the blog to get a bit more use until we made our own forum software but as we're so busy I decided instead to just make read-only topics to the blogs and you can reply here. Therefore you guys get your precious news board on the forum and I get use out of my blog.
The forum is having 2 new addons added to it:
1) Allow TAB in Posts.
We all hate tab not working (at least I sure as hell do) so now you will actually be able to use tab in post layouts for whatever reason you need - coding seems like an obvious one and a fair few of us do it. So why the hell not?
2) Good Post/Bad Post Mod.
The bad part will probably be disabled (unless by popular demand.) Basically you can +1 a post - like an agree. This addon didn't exist last time I looked for it but after Andy 2.0 (andym1) said I decided to take a second look and eventually found it.
Am going to install them now so by the time you read this it should be active.
Edit: The second mod will have to be manually installed so will be done later as a file is having issues when I try and use the built in install feature on SMF. Mod 1 should be active though.
It should work in the 3 main browsers. To get it working in Chrome I had to right click->reload before due to possibly the theme being cached.
Edit 2: It has now been installed.
Emma. <3
The forum is having 2 new addons added to it:
1) Allow TAB in Posts.
We all hate tab not working (at least I sure as hell do) so now you will actually be able to use tab in post layouts for whatever reason you need - coding seems like an obvious one and a fair few of us do it. So why the hell not?
2) Good Post/Bad Post Mod.
The bad part will probably be disabled (unless by popular demand.) Basically you can +1 a post - like an agree. This addon didn't exist last time I looked for it but after Andy 2.0 (andym1) said I decided to take a second look and eventually found it.
Am going to install them now so by the time you read this it should be active.
Edit: The second mod will have to be manually installed so will be done later as a file is having issues when I try and use the built in install feature on SMF. Mod 1 should be active though.
It should work in the 3 main browsers. To get it working in Chrome I had to right click->reload before due to possibly the theme being cached.
Edit 2: It has now been installed.
Emma. <3
Now, thanks to Icipher, you can track your killer's IP address with the simple click of a button!
It is serious business and is amazing in its HCI design. Bravo.
If you have no idea what on earth we're on about then feel free to watch these short educational videos of CSI and their amazingly technologically minded staff:
Icipher: NOW WITH THE HANDY CSI IP TRACKING INTERFACE, YOU TOO CAN BE A CSI AND HUNT DOWN KILLERS
Download Icipher's amazing "IP TRACKING INTERFACE" here!
It is serious business and is amazing in its HCI design. Bravo.
If you have no idea what on earth we're on about then feel free to watch these short educational videos of CSI and their amazingly technologically minded staff:
Icipher: NOW WITH THE HANDY CSI IP TRACKING INTERFACE, YOU TOO CAN BE A CSI AND HUNT DOWN KILLERS
Download Icipher's amazing "IP TRACKING INTERFACE" here!
Happy Christmas y'all.
I hope you all get what you're after (if you were after anything, I know a few like Darkfire didn't know what they wanted lol.)
I think I finally got boots (my old ones got worn so much that the soles in them died. D:)
---
As a ... Ever so tiny note. I think I need to mention this. The next person who lies about us "raiding" will be completely blocked from this domain and that includes Sam's website which we're hosting for him.
We do not raid. We're older than 12.
I hope you all get what you're after (if you were after anything, I know a few like Darkfire didn't know what they wanted lol.)
I think I finally got boots (my old ones got worn so much that the soles in them died. D:)
---
As a ... Ever so tiny note. I think I need to mention this. The next person who lies about us "raiding" will be completely blocked from this domain and that includes Sam's website which we're hosting for him.
We do not raid. We're older than 12.
My second official map review. This time taking on a somewhat smaller map but still immensely lacking in any kind of mapping skill. This map isn’t in fact on the fortwars server anymore due to lua error spammage, so yah, this map sounds pretty bad. Let’s take a look…
Brushwork
The use of carve is incredibly obvious wherever you look, the guy must have used it to cut out every single hole he made, the result is a complete mess of unnecessary brushes littering the walls. There’s a small attempt at making the area seem less blocky by putting slopes on almost all the edges but alas, it still looks incredibly bland. The two pipes at the spawn look really not-round. They each have only 8 sides, it would be much preferable to have 16 for this large a tube, it would look far smoother, better yet make a subdivided tube of displacements for it to be extra smooth. Now I take a moment to /facepalm. There’s a hollow box around the entire map. This means that the excessive carving resulted in a leak and, being too incompetent to fix it he simply covered the whole thing in a box to stop the leaking, Fool!
Texturing
It’s a complete nightmare. Every single texture in this god-forsaken map is stretched and distorted out of proportion. It’s like the mapper pressed the ‘fit’ button for every face of the map and left it like that (the fit button makes the texture expand in both directions to stretch over the face it’s on). There is also quite a lack of cubemaps which are kinda needed for this map since it uses a lot of reflective metal textures. So instead we are left with this orange horizon sky reflection all over a completely indoor map.
Lighting
Is pretty lazy. To light the spawn area he used a texture light and lined it along the edges of the ceiling. Both the tunnels underneath and the vents are just randomly spammed with light entities. Both these areas use only completely white lights which make it look really bright and ugly. You should always give your lights even the slightest of tint (unless it’s meant to look kinda weird). There are no light fixtures for these lights making it seem incredibly unrealistic.
Entity work
This ladder is impossible, it’s almost completely broken. Getting to a top is a fight with source’s physics where source is the 10 foot tall school bully and you’re the scrawny little nerd boy.
Verdict
A horribly broken and badly thought out map with atrocious texturing and bland white lighting. Whoever made it seriously needs to rethink the visual design of this map and start again from scratch. This is a mess.
- Evil Scotsman
Brushwork
The use of carve is incredibly obvious wherever you look, the guy must have used it to cut out every single hole he made, the result is a complete mess of unnecessary brushes littering the walls. There’s a small attempt at making the area seem less blocky by putting slopes on almost all the edges but alas, it still looks incredibly bland. The two pipes at the spawn look really not-round. They each have only 8 sides, it would be much preferable to have 16 for this large a tube, it would look far smoother, better yet make a subdivided tube of displacements for it to be extra smooth. Now I take a moment to /facepalm. There’s a hollow box around the entire map. This means that the excessive carving resulted in a leak and, being too incompetent to fix it he simply covered the whole thing in a box to stop the leaking, Fool!
Texturing
It’s a complete nightmare. Every single texture in this god-forsaken map is stretched and distorted out of proportion. It’s like the mapper pressed the ‘fit’ button for every face of the map and left it like that (the fit button makes the texture expand in both directions to stretch over the face it’s on). There is also quite a lack of cubemaps which are kinda needed for this map since it uses a lot of reflective metal textures. So instead we are left with this orange horizon sky reflection all over a completely indoor map.
Lighting
Is pretty lazy. To light the spawn area he used a texture light and lined it along the edges of the ceiling. Both the tunnels underneath and the vents are just randomly spammed with light entities. Both these areas use only completely white lights which make it look really bright and ugly. You should always give your lights even the slightest of tint (unless it’s meant to look kinda weird). There are no light fixtures for these lights making it seem incredibly unrealistic.
Entity work
This ladder is impossible, it’s almost completely broken. Getting to a top is a fight with source’s physics where source is the 10 foot tall school bully and you’re the scrawny little nerd boy.
Verdict
A horribly broken and badly thought out map with atrocious texturing and bland white lighting. Whoever made it seriously needs to rethink the visual design of this map and start again from scratch. This is a mess.
- Evil Scotsman
So I was a tool last night and accidentally deleted the original article with this title that I posted. It just missed the 12 hour backup which would have been able to restore it. D:
So anyway, I will re-type the general gist of it but shorter as last time it was a bit long. :O
Firstly, do not use RapidSwitch for co-locating your server. The only decent thing about their service is the speed they reply to tickets. They do not care about their customers and if you try and cancel they make your life an annoyance for a few months afterwards (as both me, Andy and Icipher can certainly tell you.) I hope that anyone who reads this heeds our warning.
If you're a random stranger who found this on Google or just curious about more check the link on Digg: Digg Link
In other news whilst me and Andy have been to busy to do Lua. I have been neatening my Snow Accumulation demo that some of you will remember from ~May. I am almost done now the last thing (before I deem it portfolio worthy for a job) is finishing off the tools tab.
Here is an image of its progress:
Note: This is a birds eye view. It may be hard to tell as there is no shadowing in this project.
The last tools needed are a snowball thrower and foot print maker (cause they would be bawse) which will need some camera picking to find the closest face on the mesh (which is generated via a heightmap texture made by Andy. <3) The textures for the model are courtesy of Darkfire. It is a huge texture and is about 30MB! Lol.
And finally. Me and Thorgal finally spoke like adults and are for now friendly again (and hopefully it'll stay that way!) And so we've both decided to do separate things for now and might both re-collaborate one day for Atomic but for now wish to just leave it was a learning experience. :)
However, I am putting up a new board soon for an RPG-ish game, which will collect ideas and produce a proper GDD. Once I then get the time this game will be developed.
Ostarara is helping me write the story, so story ideas will have to be approved by us to ensure consistency but otherwise there is no "ideas guy" so any idea is possibly feasible so just let your mind go nuts! Currently only admins/devs can view it but sometime today/soon it'll be made viewable by members with x amount of posts once Ostarara has finished a rough story draft of what we have so far up and posted.
I failed at making this second attempt any shorter. D:
Lol.
-Emz
<3
So anyway, I will re-type the general gist of it but shorter as last time it was a bit long. :O
Firstly, do not use RapidSwitch for co-locating your server. The only decent thing about their service is the speed they reply to tickets. They do not care about their customers and if you try and cancel they make your life an annoyance for a few months afterwards (as both me, Andy and Icipher can certainly tell you.) I hope that anyone who reads this heeds our warning.
If you're a random stranger who found this on Google or just curious about more check the link on Digg: Digg Link
In other news whilst me and Andy have been to busy to do Lua. I have been neatening my Snow Accumulation demo that some of you will remember from ~May. I am almost done now the last thing (before I deem it portfolio worthy for a job) is finishing off the tools tab.
Here is an image of its progress:
Note: This is a birds eye view. It may be hard to tell as there is no shadowing in this project.
The last tools needed are a snowball thrower and foot print maker (cause they would be bawse) which will need some camera picking to find the closest face on the mesh (which is generated via a heightmap texture made by Andy. <3) The textures for the model are courtesy of Darkfire. It is a huge texture and is about 30MB! Lol.
And finally. Me and Thorgal finally spoke like adults and are for now friendly again (and hopefully it'll stay that way!) And so we've both decided to do separate things for now and might both re-collaborate one day for Atomic but for now wish to just leave it was a learning experience. :)
However, I am putting up a new board soon for an RPG-ish game, which will collect ideas and produce a proper GDD. Once I then get the time this game will be developed.
Ostarara is helping me write the story, so story ideas will have to be approved by us to ensure consistency but otherwise there is no "ideas guy" so any idea is possibly feasible so just let your mind go nuts! Currently only admins/devs can view it but sometime today/soon it'll be made viewable by members with x amount of posts once Ostarara has finished a rough story draft of what we have so far up and posted.
I failed at making this second attempt any shorter. D:
Lol.
-Emz
<3