While I’ve been sick…

Published
by
brandon
on November 20, 2008
in Left 4 Dead
. 0 Comments

Yes. I’m sick again. Awesome huh?

Fuck no, shut up, it fucking sucks. I have two god damn ear infections, a god damn flu, and fucking pink eye!

Anyways. While I’ve been home sick I’ve been playing lots of Left 4 Dead and taking screenshots whenever I remember to.

I also set up some L4D dedicated servers. I didn’t want everyone and their retarded mother on the internet using them, so instead of putting a password on them (thus hiding them from the main menu screen where it’s easiest to click to connect) I just made a steam community group and made them exclusive to it. If you want to play on them, let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

P.S. Is that better Ed? I made it shorter just for you. Oh, and tell your mom I said hi.

T-Mobile G1… an epic tale of tales

Published
by
brandon
on November 10, 2008
in Other
. 5 Comments

So once upon a time…

Some of you might know I got my G1 about a week and a half ago. I was so excited about it! I had been waiting for it to arrive. Before I even opened the box I took my Blackberry and started adding all my phone numbers as contacts on my Gmail account (I should have done this before, but I’m lazy). WHRY? Simple: the G1 syncs all your Google account to your phone, including your Gmail contacts as phone numbers. So instead of looking from one phone to the next and converting them over, I took the easy route and did it on the computer.

So once I was done, I turned on my new phone. One of the first things you do is “touch the Android to get started”. So I push it and it didn’t do anything. Hmm… did I miss? So I try again, this time pushing it in a slightly different area. Wallah, that worked. (about now I’m thinking of my PDA and how you have to calibrate the screen… maybe that’s why I missed pressing it the first time)

So all is fine and dandy as I sync my Google account to my phone. It works seamlessly. One minute I have a brand new phone, the next its populated with all my Gmail emails and contacts… it even put me online with Gtalk automatically.

I start playing around with the home screen and occasionally I miss the icon I’m trying to click or drag. I remember the fact I haven’t calibrated my screen. So I start looking in settings and to my surprise there is no such thing. Oh well, I just have to get used to where to touch… no biggy!

As I’m downloading new apps from the Android Market I keep having touch screen problems. Even on the home screen when I try to move from one side to the other it fucks up and I get stuck in between two screen. WTF! I start researching online and to my surprise no one is having the same issue as me (as far as I can find). Granted, people are having problems of their own, but no one is having screen problems like mine.

It progressively gets worse and worse. To a point where I can’t use the screen anymore and I’m stuck using my trackball for everything! WHAT’S THE POINT OF A TOUCH SCREEN PHONE IF IT DON’T TOUCH SCREEN PROPERLY?!

Because it worked sometimes and didn’t work other times, I started assuming it was a software problem. C’mon Google! Fix it! There were some OTA updates being pushed to G1 users. There is no way to force the update (as far as Google/HTC/T-Mobile want to admit), so you just have to wait. But I was too frustrated and found a method for manually updating it. I gave that a shot and NOPE! STILL FUCKED.

What to do… what to do…?

I tried to do a master reset on it (which is no big deal because, once agan… all my contacts automatically resync) but to no avail. Okay now I’m pissed. I call Customer Service and they decided to send me a new phone… but its on back-order… of course!

So another week goes by and I’ve got my shitty phone that I’m really start to hate. I keep considering putting my SIM card back into my Blackberry and saying the hell with it all. But the idea of the Google phone is too awesome to give up on.

I stuck through it till my new phone arrive just a few days ago, and I can honestly say it was well worth the wait. Turns out I just had a defective phone (this is expected). I love my new phone. It does everything I need it to do and then some. And the apps you can install make it even better. People have complained about the battery life on it but I’ve had no issues with that considering I already calibrated my battery. I use the hell out of my phone too, so if the battery sucked that bad I would know it.

I’ve even set up a method for sharing the pictures I take. They all end up in my Picasa web album under Drop Box.

And they lived happily ever after. The End.

Left 4 Dead… Screenshots!

Published
by
brandon
on November 6, 2008
in Left 4 Dead
. 1 Comment

Thanks to Chad, I’ve got my demo screenshots automatically uploading!!

http://www.foszor.com/dump/screenshots/l4d_demo/

Not as many as I hoped, but its hard reminding myself to take screenshots when I’m busy shooting zombies in their ugly faces! I’ll take more later but now I need some sleep before work.

Left 4 Dead!

Published
by
brandon
on November 6, 2008
in Left 4 Dead
. 1 Comment

Bam! Its here! All the waiting and waiting and BAM! Its awesome! I had to take a break to create a dedicated server since everyone is fucking retarded and won’t make one. Always gotta do shit yourself…

If anyone is curious how to setup a dedicated server for the Left 4 Dead Demo, just use your HldsUpdateTool:

HldsUpdateTool.exe -command update -dir . -game left4dead

P.S. Thanks Barri!

Here’s a taste of what I’m seeing!

Obama won

Published
by
brandon
on November 4, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

To be honest, whoever steps into office has a shit storm of problems to deal with… and most people knew this. I think both parties had to dig from the bottom of the barrel to find anyone who would agree to run… both candidates sucked in my opinion. Oh well, lets see how he does.

Worst part is that not only does he have to deal with all the problems of our economy, global warming, Iraq, Iran, foreign relations, etc… but he has to deal with the race card. Lets hope at least a majority of our nation can ignore the latter and move on to fixing these issues.

Also the first “Obama won” link I found on Google news was this page and it made me laugh:

GATM?

Published
by
brandon
on October 30, 2008
in Other
. 8 Comments

When I changed my webhosts I neglected to move over gatmhq.com. WHRY WOULD I DO THAT?!? Because I was trying to prepare and design a new site prior to the big move. Anyways, I did a complete website backup, including all MySQL information on Oct 17th… that was the last time I did it.

Then my old webhost got mad I didn’t pay them and suspended my account on the 28th, which is almost 2 weeks of lost forum data. I tried desperately to convince them (without paying them for another year) to give me access to my cPanel or at least send me the latest GATM forum database. They weren’t having any of it… it doesn’t help when your main domain is already pointing to a new webhost service :P

Anyways, that was sort of the straw the broke the camels back… so to say.

GATM has been a frustration over the last 6 months. Its been a constant uphill battle trying to keep things running. Toward the end none of the members got along, the admins bickered and fought between themselves and our servers were usually empty.

Sandbox servers are the biggest pain in the ass to keep maintained. Every addon fucks up another addon, one thing breaks another, people want this… they hate that… add this… remove that… this map sucks… add that map… ARGGH!!

I had considered developing some custom games for the community and eventually shutdown the Sandbox server (or make it a lot more simple, easier to maintain) but then someone stole all our custom games and that sorta ended that idea. Plus, every time I tried to sit down and work on a new custom gamemode, I couldn’t focus on it because there was thread after thread with lists of the most minor bullshit they wanted fixed on the server… but 90% of them were issues because addons broke other shit and it wasn’t anything I could fix unless I just rewrote the entire addon myself.

Chad and I have been severely exhausted trying to keep up with everything and eventually we’ve just ran out of fuel. Scripting for gmod is extremely boring and monotonous now… we can’t find anything that keeps our attention. It used to be fun and exciting developing new stuff, but the recent versions have added such tremendous problems that we have to come up with three workarounds to fix one feature we want to add, but then it isn’t stable and it turns out being shit compared to what we had planned. We miss gmod9 :(

People kept trying to offer to help but it seems no one had the technical skills to really take any of the workload off. We had to maintain the server hardware and system configuration, maintain and develop the website and forums, maintain and develop custom Lua scripts for The Arcadium and all Garry’s Mod servers, setting up and running other game servers (CSS, TF2, etc) and then deal with all the problems in between.

So after long consideration I’ve decided not to bring gatmhq.com back up, nor do we have any plans on supporting the server. I guess it will keep running, but its up to the less-than-active admins to keep that going.

Its ironic though… this Halloween would have been our 2 year anniversary. Oct 31st 2006 was the day I purchased the domain for PGM and made plans to start the community… which is what turned into GATM.

What’s next? Mostly enjoying playing games again… and overall having a good time instead of working on gmod shit non-stop. Chad and I have already started planning a new game… no not a gamemode, but our own game. We’ll keep you up to date.

The sickness ate my brain

Published
by
brandon
on October 27, 2008
in Uncategorized
. 4 Comments

Like the last 5 days I’ve been sick. I know how I got sick… its all this crazy weather. One day its like 60° F outside and the next its 90°!! I guess Al Gore was right :(

Anyhow… when I get sick like this my brain stops working. Its either the over abundance of sleep or the medicine that kills my ability to do complex shit. I haven’t really done… anything… at all… whatsoever.

I did manage to play video games though, that’s simple enough for weakened mind. I’ve been playing FarCry 2, which is pretty damn awesome. And I’ve been catching up on my GTA 4 single player, trying to finish the game and get some achievements.

Today I feel much better, I did some more webhost transferring. Hopefully tomorrow I can be back to my normal grind.

A look back

Published
by
brandon
on October 22, 2008
in Garry's Mod
. 0 Comments

As I’ve been slowly moving files over to my new webhost, I started cleaning out my file dump and I found some old shit that was interesting.

Sorta neat looking back and seeing what I’ve done and how I don’t even remember doing it. I made some tutorials for Garry’s Mod 9 for basic posing, some pretty crappy wallpapers, and even a few comics.

I didn’t save all the files… a lot of them were crap. I did find this picture which reminds me I need to update it to use the new Gecko binary module:

Server Logs: when XML and PHP have sex

Published
by
brandon
on October 21, 2008
in Website and php
. 0 Comments

My homey Chad has introduced me to the usage of XML. At first, I really didn’t know much about it besides the fact RSS feeds use it. But now the more I learn the more I love it.

When we wrote the logs for Gear, we had a couple of choices. We could bloat a MySQL database with tons of log events, write it all to a flat file, or devise something new. Which chose the latter and our answer was XML. With the ability to store attributes and content, have parents and all sorts of hierarchy… its easily one of the best decisions we’ve made.

But when we get back to the topic of having the website and game servers talk, we run into a hiccup. All our events are stored in different sub tables; which means the log has a tables like <chatlog> and <eventlog>. Yeah that’s all fine and dandy, and we love how it turned out… but what happens when people want to view said logs? They aren’t shuffled together in chronological order… they’re all separate. SHIT FUCK DAMN!

Putting them together in order wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Well actually I’m lying; it was easy once I figured out how to do it. That’s the thing about programming/scripting/developing custom shit: its not that the syntax or platform limits your ability to do something, or that it requires butt-loads of work… its being creative enough to figure out how to fucking do it. WHRY?!? Because not everything you want to do has been done by someone else in easy copypasta format.

When I started working on it I was looking for some PHP command that automagically did it for me, and I think that was my problem. When trolling the PHP manual website and furiously searching Google for “put my XML in order” was no help, I decided to do it on my own.

Basically it came down to putting all the data into an array, and then sorting said array with the usort function. SUCCESS!

The only thing left was to display the data in a readable format. So mix in a tad of HTML, add a pinch of CSS… blend until sexy and you’ve got a finished product!

Tinkering with characters and stuff

Published
by
brandon
on October 19, 2008
in Garry's Mod
. 1 Comment

I wrote this code up a few months ago. I will continue working on it but as of right now I have more important things to do (Gear, website, stuffs). So this is sorta on hold, but I mess with it on occasions… you know… make sure it knows I still love it.

I think the character creation turned out great. I spent a long time on it so… you know… it better be good or else I’d have to kick my cat. And we all know I love my cat.

There are actually many more animations or “actions” not shown in this video, and they are really easy to add. I basically created an animation class that does all the heavy lifting for me, so I just need to supply it with what sequence I want to use and other minor variables. Good shit!