Blaenk Denum

Wow, I haven’t written in a long time, other than the Musicaster Update but I was in a hurry with that. So what has happened, well, lot’s of things actually. Let’s start with the most recent cause I remember them the most.

Okay, so this is finals week and today my first ‘final’ class was AP Computer Science, but my teacher is out so we don’t have a final. Instead ’someone’ *cough* Someone that goes by ‘blank’ *cough* brought Open Arena to school on a USB Drive, gave it to another guy, and pretty soon everyone had it in the class, except for like 3 or 4 people. So we start up in LAN mode, man it was sweet, it was one of the greatest moments hahaha. We were all linked playing. At first I didn’t play because I insisted that it wrote things to the Application Data folder (I could fix this myself but people were anxious to play), but after watching lots of people play I was like, “Ah what the heck…, they can’t stop us all, haha.” So I put it in and we’re all playing. At first we’re playing Free For All, I make my name Blank (Oh noes!!11oneone, I gave it away!) with a blue B, my signature name, and start playing. Never having played Quake 3 in my entire life myself, I was pretty surprised to see me own everyone game after game, it was sweetness, hearing them say “Screw that blank!”, “Man Blank came out of nowhere!”, “Man someone kill that Blank!”, among other things. It was fun. Then after a while we decided to mix things up, we started playing capture the flag. I’m the one of the first in the server and join blue, but notice the teams are stacked (Like 1 to 4), so I switch to Red. Pretty soon I have all these Asian people on my team and apparently they have never played before, yet it was fun. In no time they got the hang of it and I wasn’t the only one doing the work anymore, in fact, I would hear them talking in Insert Asian Language Here with things like “… blah blah blah Blank blah blah blah!”, then I’d see them all come and protect me when I had the flag, then sometimes they would even jump in front of me and get shot instead of me, and sometimes even rockets, haha it was great, pretty soon we were owning everybody. We did this for ~2 Hours straight, it was the greatest thing ever. A.J. would come and ask me programming questions and since I didn’t want to ‘lose’, I was playing while helping him out then Sachl’s all like “Look at this guy, programming and playing at the same time!”, hahaha.

In December I ordered some Intel processor manuals (Like 6 of them) for free (Two orders actually, thinking the first one didn’t go through), they shipped them to me in the beginning of January and they were expected to arrive yesterday. Well, it was around 6 PMish and I go to the DHL Tracking site and I check, and it said that it had already arrived at 1:52 PM or something! Apparently I hadn’t, I checked everywhere around my house, even the mail box. which I knew wasn’t even big enough for the package. So I figure they maybe sent that one to the wrong place or something and check the other order, same exact thing! So I check the confirmation email I got from them and my address and everything is fine, I’m like, “What the heck happened here?”. I keep investigating, and keep thinking that the only possibility is that they sent it to the wrong place. After a while of looking at the page, I see some type of serial number and find what looks like my home street number, although it isn’t that. So I figure it’s just a coincidence that it kind of looks like it, but then I think, “What if the street number is part of that serial number, and since it’s different, that would explain why I haven’t received the books yet, because they took them to the other house!” It turns out that the number in the serial number was 23700, and my home number is 23780. So I’m like, “Hmm…”. I go to google maps and type in the address to see if it’s far away from me, after all, that’s 80 numbers off! It made sense now though, they probably mistook the 8 for a 0. Anyways, after typing it in it seems like it’s on my same street, so since Google Maps wasn’t very descriptive, I fired up Google Earth and typed in the address, and it found it and it turned out to be like 9 houses down (Each house on my street has a house number in increments of 10, for some reason, as you go up the hill.), so I call the DHL Tracking number, punch in the tracking number and the thing said “We have already delivered this package at 1:52 PM”, that’s all the proof I needed. So I leave the house, my dad’s like “Where are you going?”, “I’m gonna go get something”, I start walking down the street, 4…5…6.., then I get to the house and I see one of those ‘for sale’ signs, I’m like ’sweet’, cause it meant no one was there, there was no car parked or anything. So I run around the other side to the front door (Which is pretty hidden like in my house) and there they are, two packages on top of each other. I get them and walk back to my house, it was one of the greatest RL hacks I’ve ever done :’) Anyways, the manuals are really weird they’re not helpful at all, at least right now. There is one though, an optimization book, that goes over certain optimizations, it’s pretty nice. After all, it’s free!

The other day, I think it was last Wednesday, I don’t remember, I go on GameDev.Net after school, and see this post, “Someone help me with VCEE” or something, I’m like, ‘noob’, since those are the ones that usually ask that (I mean, the instructions are on the Microsoft site, and they’re pretty easy), then I read the question and find out he’s not, he’s actually just switching over from VC++ 6.0 and not used to the new version and what not. Anyways, I post, then while the page is loading I see that his location is “Diamond Bar, California, United States“, I’m like, “What the heck, must be this lag”, cause as far as I knew I was the only one from here, at least with the location there/public. So after the page reloads his location is the same, so I post and I’m like “Hey dude you live in Diamond Bar?! Me too, I live behind Ralph’s, you go to DBHS?”, he Private Messages me with his MSN info and I start talking to him on MSN and realize he really is from here, which is pretty cool. However, he goes to UCI, not High School. Anyways, it’s pretty cool that there’s someone else from here, seems like a nice person. Funny cause he’s all like “Man we’re proving the world wrong, you’re latino and I’m white”.

Before that, I don’t really remember, just that I’ve been working on the game a whole lot. We now have forums and a Wiki, which I’ve been working a lot on as well. I have been working on the game a lot, like I said. The new media is in the the old one is out. There’s a lot more maps, models, and things. I just have to iron out the bugs and finish adding things I’d like to add for version 0.6. Not to mention we FINALLY have a Mac OS X build! Thanks to Spideybry! So now we have builds for Linux, Mac, and Windows. I added a new cel-shading toggle which lets you play with the game cel-shaded, and an outline toggle, courtesy of Q3 Cel-Shading, of course I still have to work on this because mine doesn’t look to neat yet, although the white cel-shading option looks great. I also added a ‘dropflag’ command, as well as many other things. You can find a todo list for 0.6 here. We ask that if you like the game at all or would like to improve it, to please register at our forums, we could really use your help!

We now have two artists, Spideybry and Meonen, and I think two developers, Metalmodman and I (I don’t know if he’s still in, haven’t talked to him in a while). My goal is to add JK2-like physics to the game soon.

Anyways, I’ll see you guys later.