Needs More Summertime
This graph reflects both the player count on my TF2 server and my level of happiness.
Summertime is over, which means several things. I'm back to classes at a hellish college, going for a degree that I'm slowly getting too lazy to care about. I'm lacking the time required to keep up with my own personal projects, and people are getting pissed at me for that (usually, followed by a stern "Suck my dick" from me). And, oh look, the TF2 server I manage is no longer populated by fourteen year olds and college-level geeks. What was that? Something about keeping the server alive with $18 donations monthly? Yea, that'd be nice if we could actually hold onto some people.
Boo hoo me, anyway, my current side projects and what you need to know (But not really).
- fro is (very slowly) getting an optimized renderer. I honestly should just switch to OpenGL or something, but I'm afraid that'd be more work than it's worth considering how the engine is set up. Honestly, I need a new game to work on. Something that's actually structured stronger. Buuuut, whatcha gunna do?
- Working on a new TF2 Server plugin. Gameplay changer. Except this one won't end up like the Freezetag fiasco and get released open source and abandoned mid-development. I'll be sure to keep this one in my pocket until it runs perfectly fine.
- Speaking of which, I'll probably be revisiting the freezetag thing again. I liked it, and I want to use it again. Except it needs to be trimmed way down. Also various other things I know were wrong, but didn't give a shit to fix.
- Might be starting a little project (or three) at the college. Or maybe not. I don't know, shit. But I do know that I just wrote some interesting data mining scripts that may or may not be related to a project I may or may not undertake in the near future.
I still want to do something with a one of those fancy browser-based 3D rendering APIs that rape my processor, but I'm totally lacking in project ideas. There's a good chance I'll just make some sort of... FPS with a marionette as your avatar, or something. There's also a "I got wood" joke in there somewhere, if you dig deep enough. If anyone has any ideas that I can steal for a simple, gimmicky game, throw me an email at chase@ the domain you're currently viewing. I'll be sure to accidentally lose your email and claim the idea as my own.
Dear Diary…
Today I was forced to survive in what appeared to be a mall. Armed with only a laser sighted SCAR, katana, pipe bomb, defibrillator, and a shot of adrenaline; I was ready to face the hoard of blood thirsty zombies coming towards me and my three allies. Between bouts of screaming LEROOOOYYYY, murderous rampaging zombies were cut down left and right. With this song playing on loop inside the mall (sometimes replaced by powerpuff-related audio), we were tearing off the heads of once-human beasts with our bullets in a mad dash to escape the hellish mall prison. But alas, our efforts were futile as we were quickly crushed by the might of smaller, oddly buff creatures that would ride on our heads, and other hooded beasts that look like they spawned inside a Hot Topic leaped onto us and slashed at our faces. If that wasn't enough: half-naked slack-jawed redneck women spewed hot acid at our feet, and large-armed creatures charged us to rapidly slam us against the floor until dead. Alas, it would not have been such a losing war if only one of each type attacked us at once. But no, there was never less than two or three. Constantly. The battle was lost, we were not experts at this. And sadly, we resorted to shooting each other to death in the safe room.
But then I came back later to a different world. One where two different colored teams of mercenaries destroyed one another in an endless war over control points and briefcases. Where the location of our epic struggles constantly changed. Between futuristic cyberpunk cities, and worlds where everyone equipped with a flamethrower was forced to deflect an onslaught of rockets into the mercenaries of the other team, we fought a deadly battle where no victory was ever certain. Aye, it was an utter blood bath. Agreeably, not as bloody as the earlier zombie slaughter, but still quite a mess.
Alas, I grew bored and tired of the constant team struggle; an event which I have noticed to occur more and more often these days. So I retired my rocket launcher and blood stained baseball bat, and returned to the peace of my own office.
Yet, there was no peace. Only work to be done. Requests were coming in that had to be filled, and deadlines were catching up quicker than expected. Feverishly, I worked into the late hours of the night; the hours which no normal person sees with open eyes, and is left only for the creeps or the drugged out club lurkers. I was determined to make progress on the dueling rules put into place in my work, and to further rid myself of nasty bugs that would scatter across my work more often than not.
But finally as the dust settled, and my day of war and work wrapped up; I fell into the comfort of my bed to regain the energy required to repeat the same pattern in the new day to come.
tl;dr: Got our asses handed to us on Left4Dead2 Hard Eight Mutation, played some dodgeball on TeamFortress2, did some bug fixes plus fleshed out the dueling system a bit more on fro, then crashed in bed.
in.sybolt.com Downtime
After Comcast screwed with my network, in.sybolt.com is no longer pointing to the correct address. I'll fix it tonight, and it should work again in 24 hours or so.
drm/fro has already been reconfigured to redirect users to Rizon. BAN TF2 Test Server, SVN, and FTP are all inaccessible.
If you really really need to access any other services, use 76.114.60.118 directly. However, this is not suggested and you should just wait till in.sybolt.com points to the proper address again.
Out of boredom spawns productivity
So around 3 AM I was dicking around TF2 with a friend when I thought "hey, wouldn't it be fun to replace demoman pipebombs with something that forces the hit players to rtd?" (For those of you in the dark, rtd = roll the dice, a mod that gives a random good/bad effect to a player who rolls). And so after some time, the mod was made and we spent a good 2 hours 1v1ing on with demomen, with him unfortunately constantly rolling god mode and health boosts. And so after that, I went to sleep, and decided to improve the plugin a bit, make it work for any situation, and then release to AlliedMods. And then I did, despite some hiccups while posting.
And then I fell asleep again, then woke up to write this, and now I'm going to watch Stargate: Universe. Which by the way, sucks pretty bad so far and I'm HOPING it'll improve eventually after they get through the "BAWW WE'RE TRAPPED AND CAN'T GET HOME AND SHIT IS BREAKING DOWN AND I'M GOING CRAZY" phase. I'm serious, if I end up sitting through a whole season of this bullshit, I'm going to be pissed.
MAZES EVERYWHERE
While digging through Sourcemod plugin requests, I noticed a thread that suggested some sort of maze map generating plugin. Now, I don't think the poster wanted a plugin that actually created the maze, but instead wanted something that would randomly move spawn points and maybe place sentries around. And thus, this gave me an idea. Why not have a plugin that randomly generates mazes? Empty, box map (Something I can actually do in Hammer!) and wall entities that are placed via an algorithm. I mean, it's not like I've never written maze algorithms in my spare time before, I have at least 3 variations laying around. So why can't this be done?
I'll tell you why, because I have no clue how to spawn entities (but I can surely learn that!) and can't make a simple wall entity (probably can learn that too!)... well, maybe I can't spawn too many entities (but I .. wait, what is the limit before lag?) Surely, this will be something I wish to test out in the near future. Turn it into something like randomly positioned control points or flags and we're in business. I don't know how fun it could be to play, but from a design standpoint, it sounds like a fun project.
(Note: Doesn't mean I'm actually undertaking this project... it was just something I'm theorizing. Or maybe it does mean I'm starting on this, who knows?)