You have to listen to it at least till he talks about his bunghole. Hard to believe this is the President of the United States speaking.
Anyone else feel this way? I feel like everything I could say on my blog has been covered by my tweets.
I’m just sayin’
(this post will also serve as a test of WLW… thanks Garry!)
Work! Work! Work! We’ve been busy on the newest installment of Zinger! designed to be a contest entry for the Fretta Contest.
For those of you who played the original, there has been some changes to the gameplay. We haven’t discussed much of the gameplay in the contest thread, so let me go over what we changed and why:
Teams
In the original Zinger! it was 1 vs. all. This was fine and we had great fun with it, but most of the time people teamed or paired up and beat the crap out of other people. Which again was just fine, but it normally pissed said people off because they didn’t have a chance in hell of winning. The other problem was as much as everyone wanted to mutilate others with their weapon arsenal, they had to focus on getting to the cup first or they end up losing anyways. So now, with teams, you can work together by helping one guy get to the cup while you collect items to protect him.
Asynchronous Turns
Many of you are probably thinking “wtf does that mean?”. Basically it means everyone has a turn at the same time, you’re not waiting on each other. Once you hit your ball, the game waits for you to stop moving then its your turn again. You don’t have to wait in a queue for your entire team to go before its your turn again. Why did we do this? Simple answer: Speed. In the previous Zinger! you spent a lot of time waiting for your turn to come around, which led to a lot of down time. We wanted to remedy that. This accomplished two things: a) less waiting around doing nothing, and b) increased the speed of the game dramatically.
Rings
We wanted to give the mappers the ability to create a less linear hole. Instead of just 
starting at point A and trying to get to point B, we added in a feature to move the players around in all different directions. Basically there are a set amount of rings the mapper places on each hole; your team needs to go through each ring before you can finish the hole and sink the cup. This added in another element to the teamplay environment: working together to activate the rings as fast as possible while making progress toward the cup.
Randomizing
No longer do you have hole 1, hole 2, hole 3, and progress through in the same order each time you play a map. Now, all the holes are randomized and played in a different order. We’re also considering randomizing the rings, as in, let the mapper place 8 of them but only spawn 4 random ones.
Tee Off
The mapper also has the ability to create more than just 1 tee per hole; actually we’d prefer they make 2+ tees. 2 of the tees would be picked at random and assigned to each team. Once the hole starts, teams tee off player by player. Once the last player has teed off, the tee is removed.
This should shed some light on what we have planned. Remember, this is all preliminary and we reserve the right to change anything/everything before the official release.
I fucking hate them. They are the worst form of dog in my opinion. Really, they are borderline dog. I’ve seen cats that qualify for dog more than chihuahuas. Let’s go over the reasons why I hate them… specifically my wife’s chihuahua.
First of all… their name. What the shit is chihuahua? It sounds like a made up word a 2yr old with a speech impediment would say. Or like the tail end noise of someone trying to not sneeze, but sneezed, but didn’t want to get snot everywhere so they let the air out weird at the end… yea like that. Totally. And whoever decided to spell it that way is fucking dumb. Che-wah-wah. What’s this ‘hua’ thing? ‘Hua’ doesn’t sound like ‘wha’ it sounds like ‘wooah!’, like what a cowboy says when he takes off on his horse.
And then what’s up with the way they look? They look like someone took a rubber squeeze toy and squeezed the shit out of it and it got stuck that way. Like when god was molding them out of the clay of life he sneezed and clenched down too tight on the neck and the face swelled up and the eyes bulged out and he was like “FUCK I’M NOT STARTING OVER AGAIN!” and left it that way. Which probably explains the name because that’s the noise he made when he sneezed.
THEIR BARK! Oh man, oh god, oh man, oh god. They don’t woof like a normal dog. They have this high pitched piercing noise that goes on forrrevvver. Which is compounded by the fact they BARK AT EVERYTHING. Our dog will bark non stop whenever anyone knocks at our door. Its so embarrassing to have friends come over and during that initial “omg hiiiii how have you been” moment all you can hear is the ear shattering yelp from a piece of shit dog.
Not only do they bark at everything but they also have little dog syndrome. They think they’re big, tough shit and can fight off anything, when in reality they CAN’T DO SHIT ABOUT SHIT. My cat beats up our chihuahua. Every so often when the dog is acting stupid he just walks up to him and punks him across the face with a single bitch slap. IT. IS. AWESOME. The dog runs off with his little tail between his legs and I swear the cat smirks at me like, “lol did you see that shit? what a pussy”. Which is what I was thinking anyways.
Chihuahuas shake like a bitch. Seriously its non stop like someone who has Parkinson’s. I think the little fuckers are just nervous because, really, anything that fell or stepped on them would pretty much kill them. Which adds to the fact they piss everywhere. I lean down to pick up our dog and he pisses. Anything I do, he pisses. If I take him to piss… he don’t piss, but when I lock the door behind him after he’s been outside, the noise of the door locking makes him piss. WTF?
They’re high maintenance. They’re needy little twats that require you to baby them left and right. They need special food and special collars and special steps to get onto the couch and special this and that and this and ughhhhhhh! Can’t you be anything close to a normal fucking dog and just chill the fuck out. If our sprinklers have been on and our grass is wet, he walks across the grass like some stuck up bitch stepping in mud for the first time. I stand at the door and watch him and the only think I can say is “GOD DAMMIT JUST SHIT! JUST SHIIIIIIT. TAKE A DUMP YOU STUPID DOGGGGGG. UGGGHGHHHHH!”. And he looks at me with those bulging, creepy, rat-like eyes and his nose twitches back and forth like some diseased rodent and I close my eyes and dream of a hawk swooping dog and snatching him up and tearing him apart and feeding him to the baby hawks— err, you get the picture.
They have separation anxiety. If we lock him up because we’re leaving (because if we don’t lock him up he’ll piss and shit all over our house) he starts yelping and crying and shit. Seriously. Its truly pathetic. The purpose of a dog is to be a companion; not a parasitic, shit expelling demon that needs assistance in every aspect of life. They can’t even be an outside dog. Put aside their size and their wuss-like behavior; but their entire life revolves around their owner doing everything for them and they know it!
Don’t get me wrong. I’m an animal lover and I really like dogs. But the key element is that a dog acts like A DOG. Eat grass, chase birds, roll around in dirt and lick your own balls and ass. THAT’S what being a dog is all about.
I’m swamped. Arcadium Software is working on a commercial project that has absorbed a metric fuckton of my time. No its not a game but we’re working on a web application for a big ass company. Its sorta weird how it came all about:
A few years ago my dad was using a really archaic method for keeping track of what vehicles he was in charge of. Like… where they were stationed. He wrote the vehicle number down on a magnet and placed it on a white board and moved them from square to square depending on where the vehicle got shipped. So I wrote him a digital version of that and since he struggles with computers, I totally mimicked the look of a board with magnets on it. Except you could double-click any “magnet” and open up extended information and tools on it. Needless to say this worked many times faster and he instantly fell in love with it. I spent loads of time in the UI so it was extremely user friendly.
Well he has since left that company and moved on to bigger and better things. Little did I know he continued to use that program and one day his boss saw him using it and one thing lead to another… next thing I know I’m in a meeting talking business for writing this company a custom software tool. So a lot of our time is being dedicated to that…
BUT THEN…
Garry decides that he wants to start a Fretta gamemode contest with some high dollar incentives. So now we’re working on THAT at the same time. Our goal is to submit two gamemodes so we really gotta bust ass on everything. We’re not going to sacrifice quality though, so its just time dedication.
BUT THEN…
All these new games have come out/are coming out and ahhhhhhhhhh. I’m deep into Fallout 3 right now, I’ve got Borderlands to focus on, Left 4 Dead 2 soon… Modern Warfare 2– fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu–
AND NOW FOR SOME COMPLETELY UNRELATED MEDIA
Awesome:
Baaaad. I dunno how it got so bad, but my cough is so harsh my stomach and back muscles are actually sore from coughing so much. The doctor prescribed me a bunch of medicine and put me off work for a week. There’s no way I’m taking a week off though 
Also some bonus pics of my cat sleeping where I least expected a cat to sleep:
Since I’ve been working on the Arcadium Software Forums, I’ve found a few things that I wanted to modify about SMF but couldn’t find a working mod to accomplish it. This is my first release. Basically it changes the users group name into whatever color their group has been designated. Simple. Easy. Nice.
Before:
After:
Release: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=2225
Let me know of any problems!
I guess my invoices got lost in my spam box… we’re back 
I wonder how many emails I missed?
What can I say? I’m a hobbyist. I like working on anything related to games. Even if I don’t finish a project per-say; I still enjoy the journey.
Modulus Software… Bakburner Etc… Arcadium Software. What’s up with all the name changes? Its just a branding really… nothing official. And to be honest they’re all 100% pointless. I’m pretty sure Arcadium Software is where we’ll stop, though. I’m confident in that because its the one that really means something to us; not just a name we invented just for the sake of having a name. We started out writing stuff for The Arcadium and all of our projects have evolved from that. It fits.
We’ve had our ups and downs as far as projects go. Those of you who’ve followed us from PGM to GATM until now have seen some interesting shit come and go. Successes? PGM+gNIX, Hoverboard, Firebox and MuseX, The Zinger Gamemode… plus Chad’s numerous useful modules. Failures and disappointments? GATM+Gear, Gadget, Zahmbeez!, The Zinger XNA Game/Arclyte, etc, etc, etc… lets not dwell on those; what we take away and learn from them is more important.
What have we learned? LOTS!
Chad and I both have what we’ve come to refer to as Developers A.D.D.! We really have a hard time focusing on projects. Its not a lack of commitment, its just we often find other things of interest that detours us from— holy shit that cat has a big nutsack!
Secondly, we’re also O.C.D.-ish perfectionists. Which is why we “start over from scratch” oh too often.
And finally… although we both retain the ability to do all sorts of extravagant stuff, including writing a game engine from scratch, what we’re really best at is developing for Garry’s Mod. Why? Its simple: its where our roots are at. And as a couple of programmers, using all the already existing content of Garry’s Mod makes our work so much easier. When we try to do standalone projects we find ourselves like a couple of bums wandering around town begging for content… “maps for the poor? a few models please? just spare me a texture or two? no I won’t buy alcohol with it… ninjas kidnapped my family I need assets to buy kung-fu lessons”.
So whats Arcadium Software up to these days? Surprisingly to most of you… LOADS. We don’t talk about our projects much anymore. We’ve learned that hype isn’t really something you need at the start. Sure, once you have something to show… something worth showing… then you can start fishing for interest and find yourself some followers to get decent feedback.
On my days off when I’m in my garage (because the rest of the family is sleeping) I’ve started working on the Arcadium Software website from my laptop. I’m trying to manage my time better. So instead of working on the website stuff during the day (when I have access to my desktop computer), I work on whatever project I’m currently occupied with. I’m maximizing my time! A concept new to me 
If you know what we’re up to, you sneaky bastard! If not… patience. Because we are up to stuff 
I’d like to invite you all the rejoin the forums and tinker with them; let us know of anything that needs to be fixed. (read this thread as to why you need to rejoin the forums)
