The Project page has some new content! With the addition of a Source Engine section, there's the map I've been working on recently, listed there. Pillar Wars! Complete with four pictures, just click on the photo gallery heading and you should see them. As always suggestions are welcome, just contact me!

Yah I know, this is pathetic, but I needed a color change, or at least that's what my friend Mike would have me believe. And so I changed it, It looks darker, and not as pristine in my opinion but hey at least I'm not as mono-cromatic as some other websites. I think I'm done for today...
If you'd like to see a different color sceme, suggest one, by contacting me. I'll give you credit and a cool web banner showing your achievement.

Over the three day weekend, or at least in the US with Memorial Day, I got to playing some Counter Strike: Source. Now normally I look for mod servers, ones with other game types other than the strict Counter Strike that is played normally. The one's I usually play on are the USMC servers. They're preatty current, have low ping, and they have some of the best admins around. I started with their Zombie server, Counter Terrists against zombie terrists on all the same maps with a night setting and fog. Then I played their RPG servers, and still am. I've been known to play on their Deathmatch server as well. I've also played some Warcraft servers, not seeing any for USMC. Where am I going with this? Well, I've recently showed an intrest in scripting since I've been playing these other servers. I thought I might as well learn the trade, as I'm already proficient in other programming languages.

Well anyways, needless to say, I've seen this perticular mod spring up, and I'm maddly addicted to it! Gun Game v3.0.11 is quote,

"A levelling mod for Counter Strike:Source. Everyone starts with a glock. You must get a kill with it to level up to level 2. You get better weapons the higher level you are, until the end. The last two levels are the hardest: hegrenade, then knife. It adds a new twist to how you play CS, and also helps clans to train with weapons they don't normally use." -CageMonkey

To keep track of these mods and more, please visit Mattie's Forums for Valve's Source Games . The number 1 source for script mods! If you need help, wanna run a mod server, or just keep track of the community, this is the place to go!

I added in a quick links area. As I reference other websites frequently or I think a site may be useful to the crowd that visits this website I will add certain sites to my quick links area just off to the left. Their are of yet only three, three that are worth mentioning in any case. First off is my del.icio.us account, just a webpage of quick links that I'm intrested in. If you're new to the whole del.icio.us thin then just go to their home page: del.icio.us It's basically a search engine run by the people for the people. Next up is the Mattie Mod website that I talked about in my previous post, if you haven't read it, do! Then finally the Web Monkey website. What is it? It's a website with helpful tips, cheatsheets, etc. to Web Developement in general. The site makes use of CSS examples, Javascript, HTML, and much more. It is a site I have used many a time and I owe the creation of this website to that site. I encourage you all to have a look at those websites, if nothing else to show your support.

I added a supporters area to the left, this is for links to associate websites. Yah it sounds alot like the links area, I'll see about blending the two, but the main problem is newgrounds offers a web button were the others don't. I really don't wanna have to make annimated buttons for them, but I will if I have to, and that's the way it's looking! Also go to the Projects page to hear about a new project hosted at Newgrounds ! Check it out!

Yep, that's right... another site redesign! It was tough and judging from the span of news posts I've been very busy with it! I tried getting rounded boxes within one big rounded box but it just wasn't working out. I went back to the original website where I got the rounded boxes in the first place (See News Post 1: Site redone and up). However how they got rounded boxes in other rounded boxes was using Javascript, CSS scripts, and more confusing things. All in all way to confusing for me when all I really wanted was a simple solution not a whole Site done from scratch. Also you'll notice that my Affiliates menu system is gone. I plan on puting in an affiliates page soon with sponsors, affiliates, etc. I may make it very much in the design of The Million Dollar Homepage . Of course I won't be charging for pixels like Alex did, just with the sponsors banners in place for free. Also since this is the 9th post in the News section so far, I plan on making an Archives Section soon, in effect as soon as I break the 10th post. I believe after that the home page looks cluttered.

I must admit, I wasn't entirely honest in leading you in believing I was busy all that time, just for a site redesign. No in fact my friend Mike sent me a 10 day free trial of World of Warcraft! The greatest thing was it would self terminate, meaning it wouldn't start charging me at the end of my 10 days until I canceled it. It was fun and ended way to early(not really, just hypotheticly). I got my full 10 days, from start to finish down to the hour, which just happened to be around 3:00 pm on June 30th. World of Warcraft, for those of you that don't know, is a MMORPG, standing for Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. This means that in one area you can have anywhere from a couple of players to the hundreds, all controlled by actuall people on the other end! World of Warcraft is set in the Warcraft Universe and as always does alot with low grade grafics cards and other hardware, mainly using creative skinning(ex. The shading already on the skin for the model). If you wish to know, I played all over untill settling finally on the Dentarg server playing on the Horde side as a Troll Priest. I got to level 12 before my subscription finally pandered out. While playing I befriended two individuals from the clan Hidden, they kept me company and showed me around the vast world of warcraft leading me to all the major cities from all the races on the Horde side, all during the final hours of my 10 day trial and as such I would like to thank both of them for that! Also during my 10 day trial I was recruited for the Clan Chaos Knights . A small clan just getting it's feet it seems with only the recent addition of the website, and the search for a Ventrilo Server!

I myself have dabled in Ventrilo and think it's great all though I dislike their lack of support for the Mac OS. Ventrilo, for those of you that don't know, is a program where you and friends, clan members, etc. can all connect to and speak to each other using a microphone. The coolest thing is it has support for channels. Say you have a clan that is for more than one game. You can have a channel for Counter Strike, another for Counter Strike: Source, another for Warcraft III, and yet another for World of Warcraft! There is no limit on how many channels you may have... at least none that I know of. It also supports instant message chat. The whole point of this is that you can speak even in different games, and locations, even if that game doesn't support it, ex. World of Warcraft. The sound quality is quite good, all though it will, most probably, require some fine adjustments, as there is quite an array of fine adjustments.

Since my 10 day trial in World of Warcraft has expired, I've just started to try my hand at another MMORPG, Silkroad . So far I'm not impressed as it seems to be painstakingly long, overrun servers and with so much crowding. It is free however, so I'm willing to give it more of a chance, but if you deside to play expect the first couple of hours of moving back and forth between point A and point B for no real reason.

Also in other news, I've gotten back into the mod game, Natural Selection. Natural Selection is a mod for the original Half Life engine, pitting you as a Space Marine against Aliens, both sides having a mix of Real Time Stradegy(RTS), mixed in. It is now hillariously fun and seems to have grown even more since I last played, when if you were a newb you were hated with the utmost hatred and kicked from most servers more often then not. Now if you're a newb you might here sly remarks from those with microphones saying such witty comments as "Newb down!" when you get killed. If you wish to get into it and haven't already you can download the latest from Unknown Worlds Entertainment .

If any fans of this website, or just video game players in general are intrested in playing with me I hope to have updated the About page with a personal profile giving you certain information about me... at least in my gaming status, my profile name for certain games, and what games I play.

Finally, this is officially my longest post up to date so Huzzah!

Edit: I forgot to mention this but I also beat Half Life 2... on easy. Let's just say Ravenholm scared the crap outta me. Anyways I look forward to buying and playing Half Life 2: Episode 1 very soon.

Yep that's right, with the coming of the 10th news post of this website, previous entry's have been moved to the Archives section. From now on only the posts in the same week will apear on the home page. Come take a look and check out the Archives page.

P.S. I just got Futurama: Volume One from Best Buy for $15, that's like stealing it and giving money to charity!

Now you're probably wondering what the title is all about. It all has to do with Futurama! You see I finished wathcing all of Volume one(which is Season 1), and started to watch the season over again with the commentary. It was intresting to find that they spend so much time going in to make a whole bunch of tiny nuances to keep geeks intreged! One of them was Bender's appartment number, which is in a robot appartment complex, that is served in the form of a binary number! Lisening through the commentary you'll learn that translating it into the ascii value character is a hidden secret as an appropriate symbol for Bender. This got me intrested in learning binary, since I was already familiar with Ascii. Using my best Batman voice I could muster I yelled, "To the Internet" and hence went forth. I poked around a bit and eventually found a meaning I could understand and started decoding. Thus it seemed like an appropriate title code for others due to my recent, triumphic, finish to watching Futurama a second time with the comentary... Now to my third!

In other news, I recently tryed out Sven Co-op . I've heard of this mod for quite some time, I just never delved into it due to the fact that I had no good idea of what it was. I still don't quite know what it is, but my best interpritation is that it's like playing Dungeons and Dragons and Half Life mixed together. In other words you have a quest with boss fights, assasins, etc. You work with other human players and occasionally a NPC. All your enemies are NPCs, not humans at all. The mod is already quite huge, with 300+ missions, with most beaing user created, to choose from. The objective based idea and enemie AI is the best. In fact the AI is the best I've seen! The fact that most of the enemies have more hitpoints and abilities than you makes it even more astounding! The major problem that the game suffers from is the grafics. Although an improvement, it doesn't look like it, especially with such an outdated HUD(Heads Up Display), or GUI(Graphic User Interface) as some may call it. It just seems to lack the professional look of other mods, such as Natural Selection. The textures are all the same from the original Half Life and the level design still looks very angular. A minor problem that almost all mods of this freedom attract, are the idiots and jerks that inhabit that freedom. This means that you'll always find at least one guy that looks for ways of killing fellow teammates(friendly fire is off but switching portals to end up right over pools of acid still gets it done), or just goof off in general resulting in the eventual death of teammates.

After playing through a couple of levels I wanted to go back and play some Natural Selection, after all it almost seems as a requirement to have a microphone in that game and actually not be a jerk. I soon found out though that my online adventure was to be squelched upon the foulest of problems... an error to communicate with the Steam ID servers. I'm not much in the habit of repeating myself, so instead I'll let you read the report I sent to Valve , after checking both Valve's Tech Support page and FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions) section as well as Sven Co-op's, as I believed at the time, could have possibly been at fault.

I just recently installed the third party mod, Sven Co-op, for the original Half Life. I played on that for a while then wanted to return to other original Half life mods like Natural Selection. It was then I noticed that I could not get into any game! I tried with all the games, even the original Counter Strike and could not play! Every time I would either get an error message saying, client dropped from server, or could not verify Steam ID. I think it was an error 31 on the Steam ID. I immediately thought that Sven Co-op was to blame since I had not previously had any problem, so I then proceaded to unistall Sven Co-op. I did so with no problems and unistalled everything to do with Sven Co-op. I then restarted Steam and tryed to play the Half Life game mods, and the original Counter Strike, but to no avail! It had all the same problems as before! I then checked my Half Life 2 games, by playing Half Life 2: Death match. I got the same errors as before! Please help!

As you might believe, I am pretty mad. I do not blame Sven Co-op as I believe it to be a problem with the Valve Steam Servers. I do however recognize the quincidence between the the time of this event and the installation of Sven Co-op. My main fear is that while playing Sven Co-op I might have damaged my own Steam ID by playing on a particular server (i.e. registring as cheating when I wasn't) due to the inheriently weird plugins and abilities on some servers. If anyone has heard of this problem before, and has any information or know's how to solve it, I'd appreciate any corospondence between them. You may reach me by going to my Contact page . Thank you, in advance.

Edit: I just changed the link style, now new links are in white, old ones in a slight grey, and an underline when you rollover them with your mouse. Enjoy!

Valve®, developer of the blockbuster series Half-Life® and Counter-StrikeTM, unveiled Team Fortress® 2 and Portal, two new games to be included in its next release, Half-Life® 2: Episode Two. In addition, the studio announced its plans to deliver these products, plus enhanced versions of Half-Life 2 and Episode One, in one tremendous package for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

As you can tell from the picture, Team Fortress 2 looks to be a bit cartoony. However, consulting "Half Life 2: Raising the Bar", Team Fortress 2 is supposed to be aiming for a more gritty look, deviating from the original Team Fortress's cartoony look. However, as it does look as an early build, and not a final product, I hope it is cartoony, and looks very similar to the picture. Let's be honest, are you honestly gonna have a medic, a spy, an engineer, and a pyro all on the same battlefield? I think the cartoon look will act as a benifit to the game, rather than a determent.

No news on Portal, as of yet. However Valve had this to say:

Portal is a new type of single player game that changes how players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment in a manner similar to how the Gravity Gun changed our approach to how an object may be leveraged in any given situation.

Sounds to me, like they're gonna rip off Prey and allow you to walk on walls, and ceilings. Lets hope they do it better then Prey, if thats what they intend to do, and have ceilings, and walls that function coherently as well as mesh visually. I heard Prey felt and looked cool, but the whole walking on walls and ceilings didn't work well.

Anyways, we'll be seeing videos of these games, sometime next week. I'll update as soon as I find out!

Also annouced before this was the release of The Ship . I'd heard of it some time ago and checked it out, signed on their mailing list as well as their beta test, and thought very highly of it. I found out that their is a free mod, by the same name and group, for the original Half Life engine, but alas, I have not played it. I read on their website that they would offer a free version of it, multiplayer only, no singleplayer, but have yet to hear more.

Lastly, I wanna mention that Valve got back to me on my Steam issues (See Post 11, the one with teh binnary code). My problem seemed to have fixed itself before I got the response via e-mail, however I wished to see their answer should the problem arise again. Thank you Bob for responding!

Hello, To correct this issue, please exit from Steam and delete a file in your Steam directory called: ClientRegistry.blob This file would be in the location: C:\Valve\Steam\ClientRegistry.blob or C:\Program Files\Steam\ClientRegistry.blob (or the directory you installed Steam to). The next time you start Steam it will re-create this file, do a brief update, and then you should be able to connect and play.

» David

The Internet is a series of tubes... and these tubes get clogged, at least Senator Stevens tubes are clogged! Senator Stevens is in charge of the internet's case in the senate, but doesn't seem to understand the difference between e-mail and the internet itself. If you don't know about the whole Net Neutrality issue then this video should get you up to speed! Thanks, VG Cats for pointing that out!

In other news, I was wrong about Portal(see previous post). Thanks to Ctrl-Alt-Del for pointing this out also! You can see the movie below:



It's shaping up preatty nicely, it looks. I hope it's a strict 1st person puzzle experience rather than just a first person shooter with a cool element tacked on. However looking at it so far that's what it's shaping up to be. If Valve can pull those seamless transitions like in the video, I'd be impressed!

Well it looks like I found a Team Fortress 2 trailer! It showcases the red team very nicely! And it rest assures my earlier fears(see previous post). I hope they come up with a completly different team look for the blue team. Just like in the original. Well anyways, enjoy:



If you wanna catch the portal trailer in all it's glory, it's already been released to Steam under it's Media tab. However no such luck for the Team Fortress 2 trailer.

Edit: I appologize, it seems that the Team Fortress2 trailer is now on Steam, and available for download. Also I wanna appologize for any harsh feelings towards Valve's new game Portal in my previous post. I should have been more optimistic instead of pesimistic.

» David

I added a sponsors page to the site. Hopefully I'll be able to whip up some banners for others to post, as well as my own personal use. I'm still looking for some banners from other sites that I frequently visit. Mainly webcomic sites. If you have a webcomic site, I'm intrested in looking at it. If you'd e-mail me a link to your site and supply a banner image(please keep it the same size as the others, 88x31). I'll be happy to post the banner as a link on the sponsors page!

» David

It seems that with the projected success of the Zen of Sudoku . Unknown Worlds Entertainment has announced that they will go on to design Natural Selection: Source. It will be a stand alone game however, still using the source engine, and thus must be paid for. $20 is the expected price, however nothing is final yet, especially since a timeframe is not in existance. If you wish to have a look at the announcement you can get it here . And if you wanna give the free, original Natural Selection a try you can go here .

For the site, I've added another webcomic to the sponsors page . Goats is a comic strip written by Jonathan Rosenberg. If you want to know more I suggest you check it out for yourself. Thanks to Penny Arcade for directing me to that comic.

Finally in other news, Tim from Ctrl-Alt-Del pointed out this little trailer . I've been a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or at least the gritty version of it on the 4kids.tv network that runs on the Saturday morning cartoons block on Fox. Although Tim says it seems aimed towards kids, I cannot help but feel it's also targeting an older crowd with the new gritty visuals, amazing camera work, and slimed down characters. I'll keep my eye out for the movie, but as always with the trailers on Apple , I don't expect it for some time.

Oh by the way, I checked up on Google not to long ago. It seems that this page has moved up to the #1 ranking when searching for "David's Desktop". Before it was listed as #2.



» David