Doug’s Blog

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Looks like we’re going to have some new Espionage Inc media real soon. Son’s pretty much finished up the first training map, and we’re going to be working on the second one real soon which is where the fun really begins. Bricks will be shat. As you can see from my Twitter ticker to the right, yesterday I set up the intro video for Dvondrake Studios, as well as the menu screen for the actual game. I’ve also put in the icons and everything–music too! I found some royalty free music that you can use for noncommercial things, and really it’s great.

Anyway: Twitter. I really hate the concept of using it for things like “12:32 AM – I took a shit” or “2:12 – I ate a cheeseburger” and whatnot (I can go on forever), but for development purposes I don’t think it’s that bad. We’ll see, I may or may not keep it. It’s useful for posting one-liner type things you wouldn’t bother making a whole blog post for, though, so chances are it’ll stay.

Stay tuned for some Espionage Inc media in the coming days/weeks. (I work on Valve time.)

Substantial ToH Progress

Lots of progress on ToH within the past couple days. I expect to get the basics of everything done by Thursday, but then of course there’s a lot of stuff to tweak, clean up, and a few new features to add. My main goal is to get the map editor in a working state before the weekend so Son can toy around with it a bit more. The editor hasn’t changed all that much since Sunday, but I don’t think I posted a screenshot of it then anyway so it’ll be something new to the majority of my readers here anyway. The main stuff that I’ve added is specific to the behind-the-scenes engine code and the game code, as we now have a player that can walk across the screen and some NPCs. We also have a collision layer that specifies whether you’re just completely blocked by a tile coordinate, or if you can still walk through it just slowly–like mud. Again: I haven’t really talked about the development until now (not sure why), but I have some screenshots from earlier versions that I’ll be posting just about now, and they’ll make more sense if you know what changed between them all.

Image Dump

I’ll be updating that with a couple screenshots pretty much every time I change something or add something that’ll have a visual impact that you can look at and see some progress on. Don’t mind the graphics right now, those are just some placeholders I found on the net by searching around a little bit. By the weekend they’ll turn into some appropriately themed Zelda graphics. My guess is that’s when things will start to get a bit more exciting. I have lots of cool new ideas that differ from our old method of doing things with ToH, for example: The ability to rotate tiles in the map editor, the ability to treat all sprites as entities and all sprite-based entities the same (NPCs, trees, animation tiles, etc…) and be able to place them in the map editor. Buncha stuff to think about. I had one really good idea about a checkbox but I forgot it in the shuffle. I do remember that it was going to be a really good idea, so that just adds to the shame of forgetting it.

Anyway, I’m really liking XNA and C#. It’s just so easy to do anything, and the syntax is a lot like a mix of Lua, VB, and C++ except that it makes sense. I think the biggest noticable difference between my usual Lua coding and this is just all the freedom you get. For the collisions, I’m pretty much moving the player where they want to go regardless if it’s inside a wall or not, then checking if they’re in a wall and moving them back if they are–you couldn’t do this in Lua. In C# (or any ‘non-dependent’ language like that) you can tell it exactly when to render the frame (at least, you can in XNA) and render after you’ve done all your calculations. With Lua, your code is essentially called after the ‘default’ code in C++ (in the instance of GMod) and since it’s compiled on runtime you get an extremely significant slowdown that can put you frames behind the actual game engine if you’re not careful. In fact, it always will no matter what, so if you want to do something like what I’m doing with the collisions in Lua, you’re SOL. Putting that specific example aside, I’m really enjoying this. It’s like I’ve been stuck in this little tiny box for the past two years, now I can finally get out and take a nice stretch; do whatever I want however I want. It’s really nice not to be restricted by other peoples’ code as well, in the case of both GMod and the “old” ToH (dubbed version 2, this new one I’m making is version 3) which was using someone else’s premade engine written in VB6 (and therefor using raw DX7, which was a pain in the ass I assure you.) Words cannot describe how great the feeling is while coding with so much room to do things your own way as I am now. Since I’m doing everything from scratch as well, it’s a lot easier to know exactly where everything is and how to change things that would otherwise be declared core gameplay mechanics with the slightest of ease. When you use an engine or platform someone else has made, you don’t really know where everything is and what everything does–at least, not in the grand scheme of things.

The past week or so I’ve been thinking to myself about whether or not I really need a forum–again! It’s never really used besides for the occasional MistCMS question or help thread, and in cases like that people can just email me with the contact form I have on my site anyway, so there’s no real need for a forum then. I was thinking of making it more of a community thing by putting up some tutorials and whatnot, but I don’t think I’ll ever get around to that. If I do, why not just post it here on my blog? That brings up another something regarding my site that I’ve been thinking about lately: Do I really need to seperate my ’site’ from my blog? For the longest time I was just using my blog, then I switched when I made MistCMS to showcase and utilize my proud creation, but in most cases I don’t really see a need. Just have different categories for films, games, scripts, etc… and there you go. I do like the idea of keeping “Dvondrake Studios” something personal to only include myself and quite possibly the occasional Son, then anything else done in a bigger team (like Espionage Inc) I think everyone would be a lot more comfortable with our own studio name. Back to the whole ‘using a blog as a site’ prospect, I think that would make it a lot easier to substitute something for a forum: comments. Plus it’d make my blog more read surely, and now that I have a (finally) acceptable blog design… Ah well, let me know what you think. I’m tired, so much coding in such a little time span tends to do things to one’s mind, as you can probably tell by how unstructured this blog post probably is. My apologies, hopefully I’m more coherent once my sense of logic becomes more logical by figuring out exactly what the hell C#’s modulo operator is supposed to do. On the plus side, I apparently made no typos in this post. Also, I finally remembered to tag my post. Boo-yeah, awesome!

Edit: I remembered my brilliant idea. A checkbox to hide the map editor grid. Mind-beinding, ain’t it?!

Server switch

I can’t believe I haven’t made a blog post in so long, it amazes me. So much has been going on that would be blog worthy, yet I haven’t made a post–is it laziness or forgetfulness? In no particular order:

• Got Spore, played that for a long long long time and it pwns
• Tried the TFU demo, liked it but hated the targeting system
• Played GTA IV on XBL for a while with PP, XBL trial expired and I haven’t been arsed to renew it
• Got a new server, it’s amazingly fast, moved everything there
• Played the Battlefield: Heroes beta, enjoyed it
• Drooled over all the awesome new games coming out soon
• Finished EXRP Lite, put EXRP back up
• Redesigned sites (somewhat, still in progress)
• Couldn’t be arsed to reupload all my huge videos via FTP, rehosted them all on Vimeo
• Dropped the 18th century MMO idea for now, going with the sci-fi FPS
• Played a lot of games, enjoyed all of them except the crappy ones
• M3DS broke, using tape to fix it until I can get a new R4.

Changes and updates galore

I haven’t made a blog post in a while–I know! Stop bugging me about it, I know!! I should be like FPS_Doug: “YOU WANNA BLOG POST? YOU LIKE MY BLOG POST? YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH WWWWWWSSSSAAAAAADDDDDDDD”. Anyway, there’s a lot to cover, and I digress. First things first: School’s back. Huge bummer. Junior year seems a lot easier than Sophomore and Freshmen which is nice, but it’s still school so meh. Vacation was great though, but I’ll cover that later with pictures, videos, and other visual media to entice your puny insignificant brains. I kid.

I’m back on track with EXRP, although it’s on hold for about a week until I get a few last-minute things off my plate. I got that awesome quad core server that I wanted, except there are a few problems. I expected there to be a few problems when I first got it, but this is just rediculous. Apache, Dovecot, and PHP aren’t installed properly (probably because it’s 64bit), and the host insists that I can fix it from my control panel. Well, I probably can fix it from SSH, but that ain’t no control panel. I’m new to the whole dedicated server scene anyway, so it’s beyond my skill. They’re supposed to install it anyway, not me. I may just cancel my control panel subscription with them and get the actual control panel developers to install it for me–at least they’ll do it right without problem. As far as hosting games on it goes, I’ve figured out how to use WINE without a proper X11 server which is great, and CSS/TF2/L4D run natively on Linux so we’re fine with that.

I’ve been starting a couple projects recently, mainly an 18th century online RPG and a sci-fi FPS. I’ve had the latter in the back of my mind for a while, but I’ve finally got the right approach so it’s finally something really original. The 18th century ORPG does have pirates in it, but I’d like to refer to it as an 18th century game instead of pirates–that way people try out different things like merchant, navy, sailor, etc… Instead of just saying “OHMAHGOD PIRATES I WANNA BE ONE PLZPLZPLZ” and completely ignoring any other activities in the game. Yes PotBC, I’m referring to you. Anyway, these things will keep me busy for a while, as well as some friends who’re working on it with me. I’ll talk about this more later.

Last but not least (at least for this blog post… damnit, I said least when I said it wasn’t least) I’m changing around my sites a bit. First off, Dvondrake Studios will become a more company-oriented site as opposed to the personal “hay look at mah stuffz” it is today. I’ll move my blog onto another domain, I’m not sure what yet–probably a .ca, they’re hawt. Since I’ve got that new server, I’ll be creating a gaming network as opposed to one server under one name, one under another, etc… EXRP will be ‘merged’ with this network, so the forums will be moved there. I don’t know whether to keep SMF, go with something more main-stream like vBulletin (only if I can afford it), or make my own forum software. I’ve been meaning to for a while, but I feel like I’m just now ready. Before I wasn’t near experienced enough. So EXRP’s forums will be moving to a new domain, yeah. I have a lot of redesigning to do. New blog, new gaming network site/forums, new design for Dvondrake Studios–gah. I also have a site to do for my dad that helps you keep track of laptops if someone steals it. I’ll be busy for a while, but there will still be time for GTA and TF2–no doubt. I’ll talk about my vacation and Battlefield: Heroes in my next blog posts.

Relaxing

You may have noticed that I haven’t been doing much lately–whether it be with EXRP or blog posts. Well, there’s a reason for that. And a good one, too! Well, not so much a good one, but if you consider the amount of effort I’ve been putting into things recently, you’d understand. I’m just relaxing. I’ve released MistCMS, I’ve made a new logging system called FireLog, and I’ve been administrating EXRP for the past year nonstop–whether that be coding or moderating. It’s about time for a break–and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been spending a lot of time playing CoD4, CSS, 1.6, and WolfET lately, and I must say, it’s good to be able to just get up in the morning and play something for once. Usually I have to deal with 20 things from EXRP and 10 things from work, but not lately. It’s a good feeling, although I think some people are starting to get the feeling I’m avoiding them. Well you know what? Forget them! I’ve been working my ass off 24/7 for them and get nothing in return, they should be the least bit grateful instead of giving me all the grief they always do.

I wanted to see The Dark Knight the other day, but everything was sold out except the latest showing, which I apparently would’ve had to wait 2 hours for to ensure I got a seat. Uh, no thanks. I’ll see it sometime during the week, then. I also went to a really nice sushi place this weekend. I love sushi, but I haven’t been able to find a decent place to eat some here until now. The only other place has the sushi coming in and out of the kitchen on a conveyer belt, which is cool, but you don’t know if anyone’s sneezed on it. Or how long it’s been rotating for. The waiter looked like Batman, which was cool. I didn’t tell him that of course, that would’ve been awkweird. “Do you like Batman? I like Batman.”

A friend of mine got Pirates of the Burning Sea a couple days ago, and he says it’s really good. The patch takes a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooong(cat) time to download, but it’s apparently worth it. I played the beta months ago and it was quite fun, but got old after a while. They’ve improved it a lot, except for the sword fighting. People say it’s a bit lame, but in that case I think the developer may change it sooner or later. They seem like the kind that care what their players want, unlike LucasArts and SWG’s combat upgrade. Boy, did everyone get screwed with that or what? Everyone agrees that PotBS suffers from one major thing besides lame sword fighting: It isn’t newbie friendly. People say that it doesn’t explain things very well when you’re new to the game, so you’ll get bored with it easily if you don’t have someone there to tell you what things are and what they do. However, if you can stick through the first couple days of newbness, people say it’s a great game. I think it’s worth a try, as I liked the beta, so I’m thinking I’ll get it sometime this week. Hopefully SOE doesn’t fuck it up like it does everything else.

Speaking of publishing giants that fuck things up, I bought Mass Effect this weekend for the PC. Although I’d just use a crack once this comes up for me, someone at EA thought it was an amazing idea to only let their customers install the game 3 times–then you can’t install or play the game again. A crack can get around this, as I’ve said before, but who’s bright idea was that? How daft do you have to be to think of a scheme as mentally handicapped as that? Oh well, it’s still a good game. I don’t really need to tell you about the game it’s self–everyone’s played it, I’m sure of that. Long cutscenes are long. (Cat? Perhaps not.)

Anyway, that’s all that’s up with me. I’m still in the process of redesigning Dvondrake.com, so don’t think anything is final yet. I like the general theme, I’m just thinking about changing the banner once Roggy sends me the logo he’s making me. Roggy pwns, especially because he hasn’t gone apeshit about us calling him ROJJAYYYYYYYYYY yet. I’m unsure about what to put on the front page, though. Something about what’s new or coming soon would be good, but I’m unsure about how to word it. Oh well, I’ll think of something sooner or later. Right now, I have PotC music to listen to.

Remodelling

So you might have noticed how funky everything’s been the past couple days on dvondrake.com, and there’s a reason for that: I’m redesigning my site again. Wordpress will no longer be used for the whole site, just the blog in it’s new subdirectory blog.dvondrake.com. For the root of the site, I’ll be using a custom-made CMS called MistCMS. I’ve been working on that the past couple of days, and it really owns. Really, you’ve never seen a CMS like this before. It’s painfully easy to integrate it with your site design; MistCMS works around your design, not the other way around. You just use PHP tags to include things like menus, content, titles, etc… Which can all be formatted in the options menu of the admin panel. As for the inner workings, it supports friendly-URLs out of the box (in fact it doesn’t support unfriendly-URLs, mean bastards), has a “folder” system (categories), and comes bundled with TinyMCE. (A WYSIWYG editor) I’ve finished coding MistCMS, so I’ll now begin designing my new site. After I’ve used MistCMS for a while and all the bugs have been worked out, it’ll be ready for a release. You won’t be disappointed.

Anyway, if you find any broken links, let me know. If any of my links are broken in off-site wiki’s and stuff, please change them for me. However, they won’t be broken for long–I’ll try to use the same folder structures for my new site. (films/blah, scripts/blah, etc…) Just wait a little longer, it’ll all come together soon. Nothing much to say about other/real life stuff, since all I’ve been doing is coding. I still want an iMac, though, and the possibility of vacationing later this month is quite high.

No more Feedburner

Not too much has been going on the past couple days. My spring break is over, so I’m back in school; I’m having the whole tired/depressed thing you get whenever you come back from a vacation, which sucks. Since I play on a Eurpoean SWG server, nobody’s ever on when I am, so I guess the game’s best when you have someone in a similar timezone to play with you, or it’s a weekend. Unfortionately, PP’s internet is down. Makes for a good opportunity to code, though. Speaking of which, I haven’t done too much in the past couple days. Just more tweaking and planning, I’m afraid. I still do want to launch it quite soon, though. I’ve started listening to the same playlist I used on the radio, and that’s got me pretty pumped. I can’t wait to be RPing to epic music like this again.

Oh, also, I got a joystick for space battles in SWG. It’s awesome. There’s a little throttle on the side of it, so it actually feels like I’m pushing a ship’s throttle whenever I wanna go faster or whatnot. It’s a Logitech Attack 3, so the keys weren’t bound properly ingame (no roll axis), so that just took a couple minutes and pestering of Foo to fix, but it’s still much better. Much easier to control.

Anyway, today was basically just a bunch of mooping around being tired from all those late nights during the break and going to school and whatnot. I watched a buncha videos on GameTrailers, and one that caught my eye was the Star Wars Retrospective. I’ve played nearly all of the more recent Star Wars games, so it started getting really good for me near the end of the second episode, where the nostalgia kicked in. Pretty cool, even if I haven’t played most of them. I can’t wait for the next episodes, as they’ll have games I’ve actually played and remember in detail.

I finally got around to adding a favicon for exrp’s site. It took me a while, but I finally realized that we didn’t have one when Firefox randomly gave it Facepunch’s icon. Eww. So yeah, It’s a big “ex” using the same font as the logo, which is kinda neat. My April Fools prank was changing the default forum theme to a really crappy one, which was fun. Some people didn’t seem to understand and thought I was being serious, which was even more fun. I pity the foo’. Not Foo, though.

The Wordpress 2.5 update finally showed up for me today, maybe just because I haven’t checked my admin panel for a couple days, so I’ve installed that. The admin panel looks and functions a lot better, which is nice. I don’t think I’ll need some of the plugins I had before, either, like the Youtube or MP3 ones. I’ll experiment with this later, but I see ‘add video’ and ‘add music’ buttons. Either way, this brings me upon a dilemma. As you might already know, I was trying out Feedburner to manage my RSS and whatnot. It’s pretty useful, as it tells me a couple neat things like how many people are subscribing, but there are Wordpress plugins that already do that. The only thing I can’t do locally is email subscriptions, but nobody uses them anyway–so I’m getting rid of Feedburner. If you’re currently subscribed to Feedburner’s RSS feed for my blog, please resubscribe to this link. I’ve also reset all the other RSS links on the site, and I’ve put my Feedburner in ‘redirection mode’, so be sure to resubscribe! My Feedburner account will close in 30 days once it’s redirection mode thing is expired.

Well, that’s about it. ‘Night!

Progress

I’ve got to say, I’m getting quite close to getting done. I did a lot of testing earlier today with a buncha people from EXRP, and everyone liked it. We had a few problems at first, but I fixed them–of course, this is what testing is for. So far, everything is done except for…

• Companies
• Classifieds
• Buy menus
• Stocks (I may do this after the launch)
• Banking (I may do this after the launch)
• Newspaper articles (I may do this after the launch)

As you can see, there’s not much else to do. I’ve decided to go with the second option from the poll yesterday; I’ll launch the ‘base’ script with all things needed to roleplay, but then add in all the ‘extras’ like stocks, banking, newspaper articles, and other classes/SWEPs/SENTs later in a series of updates. That is to say, the only classes we’ll start out with will be cop and mayor, as cops are needed to keep roleplays in line and a mayor is needed for the function of a couple things in the script.

I want to get this thing up and ready to go on the server sometime within this spring break. Looking at the list above, I think it may be possible. Of course, I have a couple minor things to do that I didn’t include on the list, such as character saving, the ‘deathcam’, and a cop radio, but I’ll get around to those eventually.

As I go around trying to mod things and clean them up for use on the server, I then wonder: Why am I using this? Why don’t I just make my own version of <whatever it is>? Well, that’s what I’ve decided to do; I’m making my own admin mod. ULX was nice because of it’s chat commands, but it was too bloated and buggy. ASSMod was nice because of it’s menu and frontend’s simplicity, but it had limited access control and no chat commands. Citrus (AKA ServerSecure) was nice because of it’s vast configurability, but it was way too bloated and bogged the server down a lot. In my admin mod, EXAM (Excel’s Admin Mod), I’ll be combining “the best of three worlds” to create the ultimate admin mod. Chat commands a-la ULX, a nice Derma menu a-la ASSMod, and a hell of a lot of configurability a-la Citrus. I hated how ASSMod only had user and admin–we need mods! More info on this later.

In addition to the above ‘EXAM’, I remade EXCAC (Excel’s Anti-Cheat) the other day as EXAC (Excel’s Anti-Cheat), just to make the name be similar to all the others. (EXAM, EXRP, EXGM [gamemode, wip title], etc…) Changing the files to remove the ‘C’ lead to fixing a couple lines of code, which escelated to fixing some other things, which somehow turned out to remaking the whole script. The definitions are new, it actually scans for cheats now, and it bans people with cheats that are considered ‘malicious’. There are also a lot of new fail-safes and such so things don’t screw up like they did before with false positives and whatnot.

As for random banter, I got Firefox 3 Beta 4 yesterday–and it’s amazing. It’s at least 6 times faster now, as I used to get 100-200kb/s download speeds, and now I get 700-800. I no longer need FasterFox to get to pages fast, FireFox is fast enough by default now. Lots of neat new features too, like the way that the tab bar scrolls when you have too many tabs, the new theme, etc… I also found some new addons while I was looking for updates to my old ones, and I found a neat one that turns the statusbar into one similar to Opera’s with the page load time and whatnot. That’s not the point, though; The point is: The new Firefox kicks ass.

Aaaaanyway, that’s it for now. More updates in the future, as always. I have FeedBurner now, so putting my RSS into your Firefox or whatever shouldn’t be a problem now. Just bare with me, this launch’ll come sooner than you think.

Burn baby burn

Disco inferno? Not really.

Not too much to report on today–I’m pretty much just filling my daily blog quota–although I rarely do anyway. I haven’t done too much today, I’m starting to get too tired to do anything again. Fortunately, my last day of school is Thursday, then I’m on spring break. Lots of time to sleep, lots of time to code, etc… etc… I’m still hoping to be done with EXRP-Script by mid to late spring break, as quite honestly, I’m tired of coding it. Everything to code now is just the same old stuff that I’ve done before, there’s nothing new and exciting or challenging to code anymore–all that’s left is the tedious, boring stuff.

Anyway, someone told be about a free service called FeedBurner, so I figured I might as well try it. It uses the RSS feed I had on the site before, except it generates stats and stuff for me. I don’t know if I’ll use it for long–for now I’m just testing. Anyway, if you had subscribed to the RSS feeds before, please resubscribe to the FeedBurner ones so I can give this a test run. One thing that I do like is the little ticker that I’ve put on exrp.ca, although it is a tad bit clunky. Ah well, I’ll give it a spin and if I don’t like it, I’ll just revert everything back. As you might’ve noticed, I have a FeedBurner icon where the RSS ones were, so you can use that to subscribe if you want. You can also use the RSS button, as I’ve changed that to go directly to FeedBurner’s XML feed.

Well, that’s pretty much it. I wish I had more to say, but today’s been really slow, being all tired and all. Lets leave things off with a poll: Do you like it when I post screenshots in this blog? (In general, whether they be screenshots of EXRP-Script or screencaps of other games or funny images)

[poll=2]

‘Tootles.

Getting back into it

I went to the doctor yesterday, and he said I have a bit of a more serious stomach flu. Some bacteria killed all the ‘good’ bacteria in my intestines that help me digest complex carbs, so I can only digest simple carbs right now. Kinda sucks, today being a pizza night and there being a slim chance of honouring that tradition and all.

If you haven’t gone to stage6.com in a while (which you undoubtedly haven’t since it’s shut-down), you’ll see that they’re now promoting ‘Veoh’ as an apparently decent Stage6 alternative. Veoh apparently supports .divx files now, which is the main point I think. It’s obviously not up to par with Stage6 in terms of picture quality, but it comes pretty damn close–much better than YouTube and all it’s cheap, community-less knockoffs.  I’m thinking about moving my videos to them, as hosting them here has already proven to be a bit of a bandwidth hog. We’ll see. I like having the control over it, though; no need to worry about it going down or anything. Well okay, there is a worry, but you catch my drift.

As for your blogly EXRP update, I’m getting back into the jist of things. These last two weeks were really hectic, leaving with me not much time or energy to code EXRP-Script. All of the exciting stuff is already done, and all that’s left is the boring, behind-the-scenes stuff that requires long hours of tedious code for even the most simple of things–I don’t think this helped, either.  Anyway, I’ve been taking a few breaks here and there, which is quite apparent, but I’ve been coding non-stop before–I deserve them. I’m in no way going to give up, though; I’ve already put countless hours into this, and I’m way too far in to put those hours to waste. I don’t know if we’ll be seeing EXRP-Script this month, but stay tuned. Don’t get discouraged by that, either–you know my estimations are nothing to live by.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I wish I had something more exciting to say, but I don’t. Just stay tuned for more EXRP-Script news as I get back into the routine of coding all the boring stuff.