Nothing much
I know I haven’t made a blog in a few days, big whoop. Nothing much has happened, anyway.
I had a meeting with the EXRP staff for the first time in a long long. We didn’t get much done besides a lot of arguing, but we laid down some plans for when I’m done, and that’s pretty much it. It was nice to get back together, though–some of us hadn’t seen each other for a while.
For your blogly scripting update: not too much. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking of how to do things, and some tweaking every now and then. I plan to code a lot during spring break (next week), if not get the script to a nearly complete state. I plan on leaving a couple things as “coming soon”, and leaving out some content (SWEPs, SENTs, jobs, etc…), then just updating it later. That way we have the full experience, then a series of updates later to keep people interested.
As for me, I’m a lot better now. The stomach bug has run it’s course, and all I have left are allergies. Seasonal, of course. Damn pollens. I’m really tired though–hopefully I can get well rested enough for my big coding spree on the break.
I’ve been playing a lot of games, lately. Mainly because I’m tired and I can’t do anything else, although I suck at the games since I’m tired. CoD4, SSBB, and a couple DS games. They’ve got some pretty addicting ones for the DS. My flash cart makes it a lot easier to play these games, as well, so I don’t have to worry about getting stuck with a crappy game.
Anyway, that’s it. I’m hoping for a launch sometime during the late spring break, but we’ll see how that goes. It all depends on how much sleep I get.
03.7.08Getting 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.
03.4.08I’m okay… I’m okay…
So I finally got rid of that stomach bug. I lost a lot of weight–maybe I should do this more often. However, after days of constipation, I retract that statement. Besides the sickness, my birthday was good. I didn’t do much, mainly because of my being ill, but I didn’t really feel like it anyway. I think I’ve grown out of the whole party stage, I don’t know. My parents wanted to take me to dinner, and I wanted to go to dinner, but of course I couldn’t. Maybe next weekend, I don’t know. I’ll hopefully be getting Super Smash Bro’s Brawl as a late birthday present, as my parents didn’t really know what game to get me. That’s fine–I would’ve said ‘Brawl anyway.
I’ve been working a bit for my dad again, which is good. A bit of income here and then, something to get my mind off of my own coding. Good good. Also some more smaller ’side stuff’, just to keep busy. Other than that, I’ve been playing around with a game called Evil Genius. Imagine an RTS where you play as a cartoony, cliche’d supervillain–that’s Evil Genius. Your home base is on a slightly inhabited tropical island of unknown whereabouts, and you have to work to become the world’s most notorious villain. It’s not too much of an RTS, as you can only control you and your head guard, but you get to create the base and everything like that as you please. Your source of income is sending your minions overseas to steal and squander for money, which is then sent back home, naturally. The authorities may sometimes kill off a few of your minions, though, and sometimes can wipe out your whole camp in that region. You can order your minions to start hiding to avoid this, as well as plotting to uncover missions. They usually don’t require much on your end except training the right types of minions and sending them to the mission site in great enough numbers to survive, but it’s pretty fun anyway. Every once and a while you get a criminal overlord from that region to bow to your superior notoriousness (at least in that region), and he’ll join your board of criminals. I haven’t gotten farther than two overlords, though, so this is as much as I know about the game. It’s really fun, though. The graphics aren’t anything spectacular, but they’re nice to look at. They really nailed it with the audio, though; the music sounds exactly like something out of a Bond film or The Incredibles. Don’t judge it by my crappy review or my shotty screenshot, just go play it, alright?
As for your blogly (a rad new word meaning, “occurring on every blog post”) EXRP update, it’s progressing. Not as quickly as I’d like it to, but it’s still moving along, which I’m sure is much better than no moving at all. Just like how I’ll settle for DSL if that’s the only thing I have access to–you get the idea, I’m sure. The business I mentioned above is keeping me a bit busy, but that’ll just make my mind fresher for once I’m done. When I get back to concentrating on EXRP-Script, it’ll be done in no time. I still don’t have an estimate on how long it’ll take, though. Too many things have been going on recently, so it’s kinda hard for me to guess about it until I get some stuff off my plate. I hope not too long, though. I’ve been itching to have a good Khan/Agency RP again. While I’m not coding or playing Evil Genius, I’m devising genius plans to reform things a bit. I use the term ‘reform’ very lightly, though. All I’m talking about are a couple minor things, like a rubric for staff that says what offenses are validly punishable under what methods. That way we completely eliminate any unnoticed abuse, although I haven’t had a problem with that before. It just makes us more organized, classy, and possibly more respected. That way one person doesn’t get singled out and become the “nice admin” that everyone cries to because he never bans people–we’re all equal. I’ll get back to this in later blog posts as to what exactly I mean, and possibly more devious schemes.
Yeah, maybe I have been playing too much Evil Genius…
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.
02.15.08New site!
For the longest time, I’ve been using Cutenews for my content management on this site. It’s clean, it works, and it allows me to make my own snazzy little site design that integrates perfectly with it, but it just didn’t cut the cake. Now that I’ve been blogging for a while, and now that people are actually visiting my blog (EXRP peoples), I felt that it’s time for change. Wordpress is known to be the best CMS for blogs, so why not use that here? I’ve managed to redo the way I’m listing all my films, scripts, and tutorials as well–it’s much better now. So yeah, definitely a step up. I’ve also managed to convert all my old blog content and whatnot using the RSS feed that I practically just made on Cutenews, so that’s a plus. It’d be a shame to lose all my random banter, wouldn’t it?
Other than that, my man cold seems to be going away, which is good. I’ll be able to go back to school on Monday. But damn, a whole week? Sounds more like a flu to me. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was…
So anyway, tell me what you think of the new site. I’ll be tweaking it for the next little while to get it to an even better standing, but overall, I like it more than what I had before.
Less cold, more code
My man cold is starting to let up, and thus, I’m starting to make more sense when I type. That can only mean one thing: It’s time to code!
I’ve been working on the RP menu’s “framework”–just a VGUI shell that I can fill in later with content. A screenshot is below.
As you can see, it’s really starting to come together. All that needs doing is the adding of content to these panels, and we’re good to go–err, for the RP menu at least. Besides the RP menu, I still have to make SENTs–which shouldn’t be too hard. Roggy is almost done the SWEPs; just some tweaking left to do, and then them SWEPs are good to go.
On a side note, Assassin’s Creed really pwns. I’ve finally had the chance to play around with it a bit more, and once you get to the real meat of the game–where you aren’t constricted by lame, linear tutorials–it’s extremely fun. I’m also really good at it, so that makes it even more fun.
And that’s pretty much it. Some of the release day preparations have begun, and hopefully we can get this out on schedule. Oh, riiiiiiight, I have a schedule now! I’m aiming for a February 29th release; my birthday, and EXRP-Script’s birthday now too. The gamemode’s currently marinating in it’s amniotic fluids of unorganized and partially dysfunctional code.
Wish me luck trying to get everything out by the 29th. Hopefully this won’t become a Duke Nukem Forever. 
Damnit
I still didn’t get too much done–it was my dad’s birthday today. Not that it’s a bad thing, but still. No coding this weekend. 
Hopefully I’m still sick tomorrow…. 
Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Everything else has been planning about the RP menu, so when the time finally comes to code it, I’ll be ready to do it all in one swift swoop. Just hold in a bit longer, guys, we’re almost here.
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