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.
Sybolt Tracker Update
Due to getting roughly 50 bot spam submissions a day, I've shut down public access to the Sybolt Tracker, and it is now a staff-only utility. Throw an email at me for any bug submissions.
Also fro 1.2 is pretty much done, but I'm trying to sexify the login screen and map load screen. I'm just dealing with aesthetic stuff at the moment and have no intention to do some real code monkeying. School is pulling me down, yadda yadda.
Frozen fro – ‘FO REELZ
Rage and Rage Accessories
I'm putting a development freeze on drm/fro for a while. Reason being is that I'm too busy to dick with this crap, and I need to wrap my head around some things. I know I promised a 111 bug fix release, but I sorta botched that client with an attempt at improving the map xml structure, but got a headache halfway through and quit. And then spent a good few hours contemplating the complete removal of xml maps and using Lua as the primary language for structuring things, but then realized that's a stupid fucking idea.
Anyhow, blah blah blah, drm/fro is on development freeze for a bit. This also means I'm not adding (or re-adding) any additional maps. So I hope you enjoy the library and that theater that was up for like.. what, 15 hours? I could throw that back up, but who the fuck cares. Nobody leaves the library anyway.
Meanwhile, I won't be completely taking a break from this project, but I'm not writing any more gorram code. I've decided to work primarily on the Design Document, something that I attempted a while ago but never actually managed to do. At this point, I have a pretty damn good idea of exactly what I want and what I don't want. And I plan on putting those things on paper (well, digital paper) as clear and detailed as humanly possible, so that I stop having these blocks of "OH GOD WHAT DO I DO" bullshit that I keep getting.
I'm going to try to work with the folks who are already throwing ideas at me on fro, and maybe get input on certain parts of the document, but I swear to Server, if one more person says "LOL U SHULD ADD [insert pointless assed random feature, such as a card game]" I am going to fucking choke a bitch.
And there you go. Now I'm going to go read gorram Accelerando in an attempt to get over this headache, and thus create another headache. But one of awesome. Seriously, this book is amazing, but I barely ever get any time to read it between school and everything else. Speaking of which, Assembly language sucks ass. It truly does. Anyone who says they're "a hardcore programmer" by writing this crap is just a douchebag. Have fun not being productive, asshats.
Also as a side note, I think I've started using this blag to vent my frustration and general annoyances. I don't see the appeal to making this kind of thing into something accessible by the general public, seems like something better suited for a pink diary. But then again, I am a fan of open source.
What am I doing? Do you care? Maybe!
- Working on an Simple Machines theme for the Simple Machines Forum I'm about to set up for Sybolt's support and general forum-ness. The theme will also most likely be used throughout Sybolt pages, so I have to make sure it's implemented everywhere... somehow.
- Decided to use SMFs registration/login system as a global. I may have to change the way it saves passwords though, so I can support logging in from fro, without having to write extra encryption functions. Also need to learn how to write plugins, so I can implement a bunch of custom user settings that relates to fro and related projects.
- Got my new hardware all installed, it's beautiful. I'll probably be doing some more GAYMIN than usual, and plan to buy some L4D2 since now I can play it without lagging!
- Still working on that 111 bugfix release. I added a couple small community-request features too, nothing major. I WILL release it this weekend, even if I didn't get all the community-request stuff in.