Several other thing(s)
Today, I realized several thing(s) (a-la TSoG). One, when you’re eating eggs you’re eating chicken douche. Two, ULX is crap and EXAM (Excel’s Admin Mod) is nearly finished. And three, I’ve spent nearly a whole semester making EXRP-Script. I’ve been coding since December ‘07, and we started our little hiatus in January ‘08. Good thing is that I’m close to being finished now. Today I finished all the ‘essentials’ for EXAM, my admin mod. It’s a lot like ULX, but without the suck and without the menus. To do:
- Radios
- 911 VGUI
- SWEPS and SENTs
- Classified
(Crap, same as before…) Anyway, that’s pretty much it. I’ll be adding in other things to EXAM like changing money, force-owning doors, and voting (map and custom). I’m pooped. ‘Night.
04.20.08My relief
As you most likely know, yesterday was the beginning of the ’semi-public’ testing of EXRP-Script. I say that because it’s passworded, but the password is on exrp.ca. I did this so that we don’t get random nubs going in complaining about how “lacking” the beta is. Yeah, nothing ever gets past them.
Anyway, point is, I’m greatly relieved. I thought that, due to lack of content, feedback would be a bit on the negative side. Worst case scenario: People hate EXRP-Script and the idea of ’serious’ character saving, and tell me to revert back to a revamped EXLRP. However, to my relief, feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The only ‘bad’ feedback I got was lack of police and a buy menu–but that’s on it’s way, so everything’s fine. In fact, I found myself in a fairly decent RP, and I’ve had reports of others having some really good RPs as well. Granted, half of the time I’ve been on the server I’ve been toying around with my 5-second SWEP “minge-gun”, but there was some RP as well. Hey, it’s a beta, it’s not for RPing; it’s for testing.
On the subject of testing, everything went fine–or at least, it’s fine now. I had a lot of trouble putting the gamemode onto a dedicated server, as I was testing it only on a listen before. A lot of the bindings for dedicated servers are different than that of a listen, and are a lot more ’strict’ or ‘option explicit’. It was just a matter of fixing all those qwerks and fixing a couple things I had added without testing, and now everything’s fine. However, there are two bugs that I don’t think I’ll be able to fix. The first one happens only when you have an obscene amount of money, and that causes subtracting to not work properly. I don’t know, it makes no sense–it has something to do with the way that networked integers work on dedicated servers. However it isn’t very exploitable and only happens if you have over 20 billion dollars, so I won’t worry about that. The second bug is that you can’t disable keyboard input if mouse input is enabled on a Derma VGUI–which makes no sense either. I’ve done it before, I know it, but it just doesn’t seem to want to work now.
What I’m thinking is instead of a dialpad, a window that pops up and asks you if you want to answer/dial, cancel/ignore, and has a little textbox for typing in a number–similar to that when you want to drop money off the radial menu–which opens when you left-click while you have the phone SWEP out. Other than the VGUI, PhoneMod works just fine, so I won’t bother rewriting the server part of it until I have time. (Or if I find that it’s absolutely neccesarry.)
All in all, we’re almost done. I have only x things to do, and for the most part, they’re pretty easy.
- Classifieds (easy)
- Create ’scripted’ companies (police, fire, ems, etc… easy)
- Create 911 menu (easy… aw hell, i might have to rewrite phm’s server code for this…)
- Buy menus (easy)
- SWEPs and SENTs (easy, but give me ideas. i need previously class-specific things, mostly)
- Inventory (not completely sure how i’ll do this yet)
The only thing I’m really ‘iffy’ about is the inventory–I’m not completely sure how to make it save things to a database. I’m thinking either a seperate table that has three rows, class and value, for the class (weapon_blah, prop_physics, etc…), value (prop_physics model, weapon ammo, etc…), and character ID; or a new row for each character that has the two things seperated by commas and spaces. How that’d work is that we’d have the first set of class and value, seperated by a space, and then the second set, seperated from the first set by a comma. That could work, but it may be a bit of a pain to remove things. On the other hand, the former option would be a lot more unstable and messy. Of course, if you have any ideas, let me know.
Right now I’m not too concerned with the specifics of that, in fact I’m thinking of cutting it from the launch. (Just like stocks are being cut.) Actually, my mind is elsewhere right now; I’m still dwelling on the feedback from yesterday’s tests. It’s just such an amazing relief. Of course, thank you for helping me find bugs and test and whatnot; and thanks for your feedback. From what little RPing I had done, it was great–and I can’t wait to launch and get back into the jist of things. Anyway, stay tuned, I’ll be sure to update my blog as much as possible. My estimation, at the rate I’m going at right now, is about a week. However, I might get distracted and slow down (like before), so take my estimation with a grain of salt (as always).
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N3N1MlvVc4[/youtube]
No idea why I’m posting this (Mad World by Gary Jules), it’s just such a beautiful sounding song. Just like Speed of Sound by Coldplay. I don’t know why songs like this get me so much, I guess it’s just the relaxing feeling they give off when you listen to them. I still remember a GMod video that had a really great scene at the end of it using Speed of Sound, which was excellent in terms of cinematography. However, the rest of the movie sucked. What gives? They even had a really great scene with a Ravenholm map, but then they ruined it at the last second with GMan spazzing out. What drives people to do this? They make something so perfect, so talented, and then just ruin it in idiocity at the last possible second. Meh, here’s Speed of Sound. ‘Night.
[youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMOOHGhB_b4[/youtube]
04.19.08A very slight delay
No, don’t worry, we’ll still be testing tomorrow. Just a little bit later than what I had previously said. (noon)
I’ve managed to stumble upon a bug in GDatabase when you’re connected to multiple servers–the thread queue doesn’t process or remove old threads properly. For the last hour or so I’ve been trying to work it out with the creator of GDatabase (tomato3017), and he says he’s going to look at it in the morning. We know it’s a problem with the thread queue and we know it happens when you’re connected to multiple servers, so my guess is that we’ll still be able to test tomorrow. Either way, major kudos to tomato3017 for helping me.
Cross your fingers, lets hope we get this fixed. I know you’d really like to test tomorrow, and frankly, I’d like to too. Right now none of the MySQL connections are working properly, and sometimes not at all–definitely not fit for testing. I’ll keep you updated, hopefully I have something good to post tomorrow.
03.15.08DR. STILES!!?!1
I’ve been making major headway on EXRP-Script. I’ve finished the phonebook and inbox sections. I’m just touching up the latter, however. I’ve also started on the classifieds, as those are pretty important to the gamemode. There’s some neat new loading screens on the roleplay menu, which is nice, since you don’t have to stare at a blank screen wondering where the hell all your mail is. Too bad the inbox doesn’t receive all the usermessage packets sometimes, causing the “loading” window to never close… Ah well, at least you can close it manually.
As you might already know, the limit for usermessages (raw packets from the server to the client) is 256 bytes. That’s about 254 characters that you can fit in one of these packets. However, I don’t want to limit peoples’ mail to only 254 characters–you won’t be able to fit anything in there! So I’ve had to break up the body into several ‘packets’, and send them all in different usermessages. (And hope the client gets them…) Robbis_1 from Facepunch helped me a lot with this (in fact, he made me a nifty little function to split things for me), so great kudos to him. I can also do this with the letters system (once I get around to making it–it’s easy though), so there won’t be a limit as to how long a letter can be–except how much you can type in the chat or console. The latter is infinite as far as I know, however.
More tweaks to make things look nicer, function more optimally, etc… I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I *think* late spring break will be do-able. Just remember not to take too seriously to my estimations, you remember what happened last time. However, if I’m as pumped as I was yesterday and today, I’ll be able to do it. The problem is getting me pumped; I tend to have ‘coding streaks’, which are periods of time that range from a couple of days to a week or two, in which I don’t want to do anything but code. I’m currently in one of those now, but I don’t know how long it’ll last–so I’d best finish all I can within this time.
A week or two ago, Roggy sent me his SWEPs. Since I suck at figuring out the correct accuracy, recoil, damage, etc… for weapons (I’d probably make all the weapons feel exactly the same–and overpowered), I asked Roggy if he could configure them for me. Of course, he did. Yay for Roggy! I’ve been playing around with them a lot, and they look and feel a lot like CoD4 weapons. I don’t know what Roggy did, but he managed to stumble upon a glitch that changes the FoV on the weapon models, which makes them look more like CoD4 weapons for some reason. The ironsights help a lot, too. So anyway, thanks Roggy! I’m sorry I forgot to mention this before, but I was completely out of it the last couple weeks. I’m very happy with them, and I know everyone else will be, too. Realistic, yet not overpowering; perfect.
As for my personal life, as if anyone cares, I didn’t get too much done today. My grandma is still ‘recovering’ from the move, as her house still has a lot of boxes lying around, her TV’s not set up properly, random hanging of pictures to be done, etc… It’s coming together nicely, though. So today we went there, me bringing my laptop in hopes of catching some coding and/or playing Ashen Empires, but of course, we (I say ‘we’ loosely) randomly returned the DSL modem without telling anyone. (I say ‘anyone’ loosely as well.) [On a slightly related note, I oughtta' make an SVN for myself so I can code away from my desktop.] I was forced to watch the Disney channel in Spanish, listen to SSBB music on my Zen, and play all the DS games I had on my flash cart. The latter two weren’t so bad, of course. I didn’t notice how many good DS games there were out there–Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center, Advance Wars, Star Fox… I can’t believe how I had missed all these before. They’re possibly some of the best games for the DS, although I hate randomly hearing “DR. STILES!!?!1″ being blasted out of my DS speakers. I swear they’ll break someday if not just because of that.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Not too much sleep this weekend (so far), but hopefully I’m still pumped tomorrow–and of course the week after that. Really, it seems as if I have more will to code if I’m tired. Weird. Since I’ve pretty much already figured out how to finish everything off in EXRP-Script, I’m starting to think about my other projects some more. The game about Excel, Khan, and The Agency, mainly. Tony and I have some really good ideas up our sleeves for that game–story-wise, of course. I can hardly wait to play it myself.
(WARNING: punctuation cluster ahead) Time to test my theory on “not sleeping giving me more will-power to code”–hopefully it doesn’t work; ‘night.
02.28.08Owwww
Owww. Yes, owww. I had some kind of stomach flu today, so I got nothing done. Luckily I had a half day at school, so I could go home and rest. Lots of vomiting though, lots of headache. I finally found a good solution though: Coca Cola. That’s what it was made for, anyway. My mum’s soup also made things better.
I say ‘owww’ because of two things. My stomach flu today, which is now going away, and people complaining about the delay. Really, people; I do this for nothing at all. I’m not selling this or anything–It’s just a hobby. The only satisfaction I get is that of a fun roleplay with my friends. Sure, I get the occasional gold membership donation, but that goes towards the server bill. Plus, which would you rather have: An unfinished gamemode that sucks horribly, or a nicely polished one that’ll make the launch day really epic? I hope the latter. So before you complain again, just remember that there’s no reason I should be doing this in the first place. I can stop whenever I please, and really, it’d be nice to actually play games for once instead of coding them.
Also, update: I was playing around with the EP2 particle engine today. We still don’t have the OB SDK, so I can’t make my own particles, but I can still use pre-existing ones. Thanks to the particle emitter STOOLs on FP, I’ve figured out how to do this. I’ll be using the snow effect from the TV in White Forest with the Borealis, and the rain from the particle benchmark. I’ve already gotten a bit of a chance to play around with it, and it looks great. It’s just a matter of placing the emitter properly. For example, if you’re inside, you still want it to be raining outside. The emitters are relatively lag-free, at least on my system, so I might be able to put them all over the map to create a nice effect. Not literally all over the map–even that’d lag–but I mean more like multiple emitters around the player. I’ll also work on a better system for detecting if we’re indoors or outdoors; before, I was firing a trace up out of the player’s head, and if it hits something, it stops the emitter from being rendered. That was pretty laggy anyway–the new particle emitters can loop; that way I don’t need to keep creating them to continue the raining. Now I’ll just make one emitter, loop it, and use the same trace idea, but only if it hits the skybox it’ll render the emitter. Much better that way–then it won’t rain inside tall buildings.
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. My birthday is tomorrow, though I keep forgetting. I need more sleep.
02.19.08The future is a scary thing
I don’t know, I’ve just been really tired lately. Getting school off for a week and then trying to get back into the routine tends to do that I guess. As you might’ve guessed, I haven’t done much coding today. Just chilling around, listening to Lunar, playing Phun, and half-playing Ashen Empires. To be honest, I’m afraid I might not make it on time. I can make it really close for sure, off by a couple days at most, but I’m not completely sure if it can go gold on the date I mentioned before.
I’ve been thinking a lot, though. Not just about the internal mechanics of things, like I usually do, but more so of the future. Will EXRP flourish once again? How will people like my new script–I’ve put a lot of time and effort into it, I surely wouldn’t want to disappoint. What about the GMod RP community–is it down the tubes forever? Maybe I can help save it? I don’t know, it’s mostly just philosophical type stuff. When I think about myself coding and what I’ve done at such an early age, it makes me wonder about the future. Will coding just stay as a hobby, or will I make it a profession? Or will I go into a completely different field, like law or something? Will I even have a job? I should probably just keep to the time at hand, however. I think that’s what I’ll do.
My plans for EXRP are as follows. I finish the script, then take a break from GMod–or computers, for that matter–and then just play Assassin’s Creed or something all day for like a week; until everything is settled down and I’ve had time to relax more. Then I’ll come back and have fun RPing on my new script with my good ol’ friends, of course. I want EXRP-Script to make a difference with GMod RP. Right now, because of DarkRP, a lot of people new to RP think it’s all about running around and DMing. I think that’s horrible. Hopefully EXRP-Script can start a new breed of RPers–more serious, imaginative ones. I’ve provided the necessary tools to start you off, now use your imagination and… Well, roleplay! I don’t know how big a difference it’ll make–especially if we stay a ’smaller’ community and don’t grow as big is Melonbrew or Taco and Banana (although I’d hate to try to maintain a server that massive). Maybe I should make my own basic RP script like DarkRP, except one that promotes good RP, and release it on Facepunch? Maybe that’ll make things a bit better?
I don’t know. I don’t even know why I’m full of so many rhetorical philosophical questions today, either. Maybe I’m just tired. Yeah, I think I’m tired. ‘Night.
02.13.08Weathermod 2.0 is go & RSS
I’ve just finished the beta of the new version of Weathermod. I call it a beta since there’s no weather–just time, which includes a day/night cycle. I’ll get around to the weather later; when Garry finally integrates the new Ep2 particle engine into GMod Lua.
As for the day/night cycle, it ROCKS HEAVY. The old one would’ve been like, “neener neeener neeenerrrr”. This one’s like, “YAAAAH YA YA YA YA YA YAAAAAHHHHHHHH”. There’s just no other way to create a good metaphoric example for this. There’s just no other way….
My point is, it’s amazing. Instead of using a rectangular HUD overlay, it changes some settings in the ColorMod module built into GMod Lua. But wait, it doesn’t stop there! No, for the price of one day/night cycle, you also get tweening! I don’t really know any other word to describe it, but basically, instead of just suddenly changing between dark and light like in the old one, it progressively changes from dark to light. Noon being the lightest, and midnight being the darkest. It just keeps on looping. Even though it doesn’t look as nice as the “real” day/night cycle script posted on FP with dynamic shadows, skyboxes, and suns, WM’s still looks pretty damn nice. It’s not very easy to find a difference, actually. It doesn’t get as dark when it’s night, mainly because I didn’t want to make it too dark (then you’d all complain when it’s night), but it’s still recognizable as night. (As opposed to fog in the old one.)
Overall, I’m very pleased with it. The code behind the ‘tweening’ is really confusing, though. I had to get my dad to help me with the logic, as I couldn’t figure it out myself. 24-hour clocks confuse me a lot.
Anyway, as for my man cold, as if anyone reading this cares about anything other than the progress on the gamemode, I’m not completely sure what it is. I went to a doctor today and he diagnosed it as strep-throat, and is treating me as so, but it’s weird this time since my eyes are all gooey–as if I had really bad allergies. Really weird. I’m going to try some Visine later today.
That’s pretty much it for today. I’ve worked a bit on the RP menu some more, but mostly just adding in text for the help, rules, and about pages, as well as fixing up a couple things in the structure. I’ve also patched a couple of possible MySQL injection holes, so I’m sure we’d all be happy about that. Not worth making the script in the first place if someone could just go along and delete all our characters’ data, would it?
I’m still aiming for a February 29th launch. I figured launch was a better word to use than release. As I finish more and more of this stuff, the probability of me launching on-time to this date is becoming greater and greater. I think we’ll actually make it.
Also, I’ve enabled RSS for this blog. If anyone wants to take a look at it and feed it into your favorite RSS reader, it’s the little orange icon at the bottom left of the page.
‘Tootles
Internal stuffs
Just so people know I haven’t given up or anything…
This last weekend I’ve taken a break off of coding. It’s nice to just sit down and actually play some games for once. But for a guy like me, three days is too much, so I went back to coding today.
Mostly everything I’ve done has been internal. I’ve tweaked with ASSmod some more, and I really, really like it! Much better than ULX for sure. Much simpler, easier on resources, and easier to mod. Much more stable, too. Less room for exploits. I’ve also been working on a good SQL solution. Before, we were just using the a vanilla gm_mysql module to handle all the database traffic. While it is really good, it isn’t threaded. Meaning, it halts the server waiting to get a response from a query. I have the SQL server hosted on the same server as my websites, so that makes a tad bit of latency whenever EXRP’s Gmod server queries the SQL server for some information–mainly bans. When the Gmod server requests this information, it defines it right there and then as the query function, which returns the database results. If I’m doing that, however, it pauses the whole server waiting for those results. The threaded way to do it is to just call the query function, but to reference a callback function to give the results to. That way it does the query, and when it gets the results, it forwards them to another function which then does whatever I want to do with them. This is what caused 99% of all the freezing in the old server. GM_mysql has a way to do threaded queries, but it takes a lot of code, and quite frankly, it’s quite confusing. I don’t have the time for that. However, I just found an addon called GDatabase today which takes gm_mysql’s threading and puts it in a neat little function for you. A lot easier and less confusing than trying to do it on your own. I’ve updated our ban system and put it on the server, so hopefully that works nicely. Let me know about any bugs you may find if you ever happen to be banned.
Tomorrow Hopefully tomorrow I can start on the RP menu. It’s a really big project, and it really controls every single aspect of the gamemode. It’ll be quite a monster to tackle, indeed. Wish me luck.
On a side note, why does it take 20+ hours for some videos on DivX Stage6 to publish? It’s not like it has to convert it to the FLV format like Youtube does; I’ve already converted it to a .divx file–I’ve already done all the converting! What the hell are you waiting for, Stage6?!
Update grief, new logo
I won’t elaborate on it too much, as I really can’t be arsed after complaining about the exact same thing several thousand times on exrp.ca, so I’ll just make it short and sweet: Gmod’s latest update screwed everyone over. Massively. Almost everything broke–including EXRP’s roleplay script. I’ve been remaking it for a couple weeks before, but it was really simple at the time, and not really playable. Then out of nowhere, here’s the update! Oh, wait, no. It’s broken. And again. And again. AND AGAIN. How many times does it take you to get something right, Valve? You updated at least 4 times that day. As I was saying, though, EXRP has a new script. It’s cleaner, nicer, sleeker, and better. It’s kinda basic right now, but I personally think it’s already better than the last. Of course, DM minges don’t really agree with my point of view, and the majority of the staff doesn’t quite seem to care. But meh, what’s it to ya?
Anyway, Dvondrake Studios has a new logo, as you might’ve already seen. I got tired of the crappy crescent I made years ago, as it was… Well, crappy. I didn’t really know what I was doing back then, to be honest. I still love the text, however, but I just changed the glow to a neon-y blue colour. I love it. My only complaint about my new logo is that I found it hard to get the penguin to ‘fit’. If I made it too bright, it looked out of place. If I made it too dark, you couldn’t even see it. The plasma-esque glow seemed to pull it off alright, though. We’ll see how it goes.
That’s pretty much it. I’ve reorganized my DivX a little bit; made a channel for Dvondrake Studios. I’ll be uploading a lot more stuff there sometime, as I slowly get back into the machinima groove. I have a lot of footage on my hard drives, and it’s just taking up space there, not being used. This stuff is pure gold, though. It needs to be used. It talks to me in my sleep saying, “Dooooooouuuug, DOOOOOOOOUUUUUUG, USE ME IN A FILM! UUUUUUUSSSSSSEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!”
As you can see, I’m tired. I think that’ll be all for tonight…
Character Selection Screen Progress
I hope the title doesn’t stretch the page…
Anyway, I’ve been making progress on the character selection screen. Today: the new character screen! It’s still experimental (of course), and as you can see from the screenshot, my GMod’s spawnicons look weird. It looks like everyone has one of those upper lip deformities, whatever they’re called. Back on topic; It uses spawnicons for the models, which was real fun to make. I feel like I’m almost ready to tackle the RP menu now.
For whatever reason, I can’t get the biography box to be multiline. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s possible–so I may have to cut that from the release. Other than that, everything is go. What’s next to do for the character selection screen is make the screen where you’ve selected a character and you can play as or delete him, and add in all the MySQL goodness. ATM the “create new character” button does nothing, and the three characters being listed are hard-coded in. Shouldn’t be too hard to make it actually do stuff, though.
One thing that I like about 07 is the new Derma controls. In GM10, it was a bit difficult, frustrating, and such a chore to make VGUI. Of course, I didn’t really know what I was doing back then, so that could’ve contributed to it, but it just seems so much easier now. It looks so much better, too.
Garry’s mentioned that GM07 will release as a GM10 patch through Steam this Wednesday, and if not, next Wednesday. That means I’ve gotta get hurrying, since I want to get this out the door at around the same time that GM07 releases.
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