Posts by Thrik

  • John Romero plays Doom with Double Fine dev

    Haha, I know what you mean. I just watched the first video, and holy shit that guy has a massive problem with silence or something. Even when John's clearly gathering his thoughts and is about to share some sweet-ass Doom development fact, he jumps in and finishes his sentence for him. He must be a nightmare on dates.

  • ITT: Post maps/scenes that never saw the light of the day.

    That was it. If I remember correctly I stripped players of weapons and they had to find shovels awkwardly placed in the grass outside the walls to kill each other with. The fort had a ladder onto the top inside it with a pistol, but it took shitloads of hits on the fort's doors to get in.

    Just a stupid little deathmatch thing seeing as I could never get more substantial maps finished. Must have about 50+ maps at varying levels of completion on some hard drive somewhere. But I did get very good at optimisation and keeping dat r_speeds low, haha.

  • Best website host?

    Quote from Seldoon182

    The best hoster so far to me is Gandi.net (French company). Their slogan is no Bullshit which mean what it mean. I met them in Paris during a conference and they're very pro and such. And good for you they are running their business in UK since 2008.


    So Gandi "simple hosting" + Wordpress is the best way to start imho!


    PS: Wordpress is a better solution if you aim for something simple and scalable to evolve and such. Simple website host managers are very limited.


    This is incidentally what MapCore is hosted on. The performance (i.e. how fast it can pump out dynamic pages) is excellent. I've used a lot of hosts personally and professionally, and short of a finely tuned dedicated server (as in Nginx + MariaDB) I haven't found comparable speed. Mainly because the 'Simple Hosting' is actually a pre-configured virtual private server with dedicated resources, unlike most hosts in the price bracket.


    You do need to do everything yourself, but if you go the WordPress route with a nice premium theme (which I would recommend so that you're not tied to any particular company/host) it really is very straightforward, and there are billions of people who could help in the unlikely event you have installation problems.

  • Taylor's Tat

    That box sledge one is so awesome, watching the video was making me smile hearing how much fun people were having with it. While I guess that groups of friends might only play such games a relatively small number of times, you just can't beat the laughs they bring.

  • SPAM! Again!

    We do have that now, the anti-spam measures seem to be 100% effective, it's just that they stopped working for a day a little while back and the fuckers flooded in.

    That seems pretty sensible blackdog, I was going to do something similar but filter down to users with no posts registered around then. I've been very ill over Christmas and not on my computer (using iPad) so I'll sort it out when I feel better. Fortunately the number of bots has become minuscule now.

  • SPAM! Again!

    God, is Eastern Europe just comprised of spammers or something? Jesus.

    Seriously though, the spammers we're seeing are still ones who signed up during that day or so when the defences were down — I guess that they have a delayed activation thing to try to avoid detection. The amount has definitely lessened but I'll try to do some cleanup by identifying 'sleeper' bots and banning them.

  • Random Photo Thread

    Just got back from a weekend away at a forest lodge with my family, which provided a lot of great photo opportunities. I'm really looking forward to getting stuck into sorting them out over Christmas as it's been ages since I've gotten to have a good play, but I did find a little time to Lightroom the shit out of this one tonight (click for the 4K monster):

    [Blocked Image: https://ppcdn.500px.org/93482665/428fb93c73b790547f1451fbff063588514abe3b/2048.jpg]

    I think I went a bit overboard with the grading (LOL BLORANGE) and something about the framing bothers me, so I'll be revisiting this one when I do the full batch. But I'll tell you what, editing photos on a 5K screen is god damned excellent. I can't wait until every monitor ever is like this. It's also weird because to edit photos how they look at 100% on a normal monitor you have to use 200%. It's going to take me a while to get used to the implications viewing images this way has on sharpening — I hope I didn't get it too wrong here.

  • [Feature] MapCore's Quake 3 15th Anniversary Contest Winners

    Quote

    I have to say that our Quake 3 contest had an amazing run. During a period of 8 weeks we received 30 signups of which 16 submitted their map before the deadline. Making this one of the most successful Quake 3 contests in history.

    This couldn't have been such a success without all of you. From the the people who signed up to the contestants who submitted their maps. From giving feeding to the Core supporting the contest. It was a real community effort for which I'm very grateful. Thank you all!

    Needless to say, judging took a while due the large number of submissions but it's time to announce the winners.


    Read feature »

  • Minesoft...Microcraft...you decide

    I'm guessing that Notch is also thinking about the hot celebrities living in the area.

    Honestly, it's his money. IMO there's nothing worse than people telling other people how they should spend their money, regardless of amount. We have no idea what charitable contributions Notch may or may not make, and considering the astonishing amount of money he has, he can easily enjoy a lavish lifestyle while also being ethically wonderful.

  • HATRED

    While I'd hate for this game to be banned no matter how distasteful I find it due to the free speech implications, I do think that retailers have a right to decide what kind of entertainment they're willing to stock. Games are now reaching the point where certain kinds of them can justifiably be treated like porn.

    What we have here seems to be a terrorism/public massacre simulator. Seeing as the western world bizarrely finds violence a lot more palatable than sexuality, would anyone be remotely surprised to find that vendors such as Valve and the wider public don't particularly approve of the rape simulator games that are out there?

    We're only going to see more of these things coming along, and at a certain point we have to stop seeing decisions to not distribute such material as censorship, and instead as the gaming equivalent of Netflix not wishing to stream hardcore porn. Handling these editorial decisions will undoubtedly be challenging, but as more simulators come along catering to violent and sexual fantasies — and let's make no mistake about it, things like Oculus Rift are going to unleash an avalanche of these things — it's something that has to be done.

    I hate using terms like 'murder simulator' because I feel like I'm somehow channeling the ridiculousness of Jack Thompson, but we're no longer in an age where every game is acceptable for mainstream consumption and should be available in every store. Some of the stuff out there now is no Leisure Suit Larry or Grand Theft Auto, but it should always be available via the vendors that are OK with providing it.

  • Chat room broken?

    Thanks for your patience everyone, the anti-spam fortress was temporarily down and this allowed an onslaught of evil spam bots to breach our sacred lands. There will probably be a residual effect where bots that've already registered post some crap, but things should be mostly back to normal.