[thumb]blog/armagetron.jpg[/thumb]
So I was sitting around in the Linux lab in uni wasting time between lectures as I normally do, reading [link=http://www.theregister.com/odds/bofh/]BOFH[/link]. When I spot 2 of my mates playing, what I instantly recognised as a Tron bike game… and it was multiplayer

Right, I’ve played the Tron 2.0 game that came out a few years ago and it was complete and utter tripe. But this looked pretty awesome, even though the graphics weren’t great. I tried to download and install the Linux binaries on the lab machine I was on, but could not. So I was stealing control of one of their laptops and played a few rounds. Thouroughly addictive

The game is called [link=http://armagetron.sf.net]Armagetron Advanced[/link] and not only does it have multiplayer it has a internet game browser list where you can join games with 20+ tron bikers, either in an all vs. all royal rumble, or various teamplay modes. Very cool. Although I do have one criticism, even though having a lower ping than most of the other guys on the server, it still feels very laggy. And a lot of the time, when I cut someone up and try to take them out, the game corrects itself after a second and it is the other player who was apparantly infront (???) and I end up totalling myself.

Oh well, still awesomely fun and pulling off life-saving manuevres between 2 bike trails is pretty awesome.

Right, now I gotta try get my house mates to play it once I get the server installed onto WOPR (our gaming server).

[thumb]blog/raziel.jpg[/thumb] [thumb]blog/cohraziel.jpg[/thumb]A few levels ago in CoH when I hit level 20, I had a new costume slot opened up (you get 4 in total by the time you reach level 50) and you also unlock the option to use capes in your costume. Anyway my normal costume looks a lot better without a cape so when I made my new costume I decided to go with something that would work well with a cape. And when I noticed some of the costume parts you can use closely resemble the main character out of one of my all-time favourite games, I decided to try and pull it off. Thus, I present: Raziel from Soul Reaver, now all I need is a power in CoH which would let me consume souls of my victims

Been working lots more on my website recently as well. Got a fully functional calendar now that can be used to find past blogs a lot easier . I thought it would of taken a lot more work that it actually did, fairly simple.

Also did something to my quake text generator that I should of done a long time ago. Added the last modified header information to the server side cached version’s last modified date. So now web browsers shouldn’t have to download every quake text image every single time the page is refreshed Runs significantly faster now heh.

I found this awesome java applet game ages ago but recently [link=http://www.stumbleupon.com/]StumbledUpon[/link] it again and remembered how addictive it is. It’s quite simple… It’s called the [link=http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/]Falling Sand Game[/link] and starts with 4 different substances falling from the top of the screen and a thing I like to called the squidgy. The four substances are Sand, Water, Salt and Oil.

Sand doesn’t do much as far as I can tell except block the squidgy.
Water makes plant and the squidgy grow.
Salt makes squidgy shrink/die.
Oil burns

There are also extra substances/materials that you can make in addition to these original substances.

Cera (which is wax), also burns but very slowly.
Wall, well it’s obvious what this does.
Plant, this behaves as mentioned above, also burns.
Spout generates water.
Fire burns stuff as mentioned above
Eraser, also obvious what this does.
And the mysterious ??? what just does crazy stuff.

The falling substances can be collected and redirected using walls and other materials. It’s just totally random and very addictive to play with, absolutely no real aim to the game… but I like collecting lots of salt then dumping it on the squidgy and watch it explode repeatedly [link=http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/]Go check it out![/link]

Grrr, getting annoyed with my laptop lately. I haven’t been using it as much ever since it started restarting itself (well… tries to restart but screen doesn’t come back on). I think it only does it when AC is in but I haven’t properly tested it yet (fucking Dell).

But Ben and Toby are doing a bit of Web-Dragon work and I decided to join them with my laptop. It’s behaving itself at the moment, but because I haven’t used it in a while I decided to do an update. 500meg of updates to emerge (Gentoo linux installation). Problem is, I get this really irratating thing happen when I try to update occasionally. Some of the updates can’t install because of some other installed packages need to updated first, and funnily enough, those packages can’t be updated until the previous is updated… resulting in update deadlock. I’m not sure if this is normal occurence for Gentoo cause it’s happened a lot, but its so ridiculous. I have to end up uninstalling the software completely and then reinstalling

Oh well… I guess I better get it started :/

 With the completion of the gallery system, I’m now trying to implement a bbCode style image insertion for my standard blog usage. Get some extra content going etc. so here goes.

First post after exams,

I was meaning to blog a lot sooner than this but I guess it just didn’t happen. Final exam was a bastard but I think I did ok…ish. Straight after exams in my week of nothing, quite a bit went on. Went to a Heroes & Villains themed party which was very cool, I went as “The Flash” and made myself an awesome Flash costume that took a lot of time to do. But it does look pretty sweet. Got lots of photos of it on Flickr, if you want a look just tell me what your Flickr ID is and I’ll add you to my friends list.

Also started playing City of Heroes / Villains as well (I guess it’s year of the Superheroes this year). Infact everyone in our house is playing it. Very cool game, we’ve started our own Supergroup called “The Comrade-Brotherhood” and our SG colours are very cool. We have all been working turns to get money for our SG so we can build a cool base.

Anyway, Mike is pestering me as we are a few mins late for lectures, so I gotta run. I’ll blog more later.

Toodles.

Last exam today and its Programming Languages, Principle & Paradigms.

Yes it is as boring as it sounds. I have to admit, I was wrong about Graphics, THIS is the hardest of the lot because its just too damn difficult to revise due to the unstructured content of the course… Ralph is a fucking idiot (Lecturer). Lets hope I can at least pass this.

As for Graphics, I was lucky yet again. This year papers seem to be in my favour, consisting of topics I have gone revised well. But I doubt this is the case for PLPP since theres so much. I think everyone is in the same boat for for this one. So wish us luck heh.

“Inmate walking the green mile!”

Well, today its friday and that means its the day for Graphics…

Yesterdays exam actually went quite well, it was a good paper and I revised a big scoring question the morning before the exam and it came up… word for word, value for value…>:D So that made me feel pretty good.

But THIS exam is the end of me… unbelievably hard Got just over 1 hour of possible revision time left and I am clueless about a lot of things. I’ll be lucky to get a decent grade on it, I’m just hoping my other grades are good enough to pull it up (also my Graphics coursework could help, I did pretty good job on that too).

Well, nice knowing you.

Well, Compilers went well yesterday, think I did pretty good.

Now it time for Database Systems :/ Very touch and go here, I could seriously screw this one up badly… never been too good with database theory Oh well…

Let’s see how this turns out.

Well, first day of my exams!

In 3 hours time I will be at the all nations centre, ready to take my first exam, Compilers. I think this exam should be my strongest one, I’ve done quite a bit of revision for it and it seems fairly straight forward. I just got to be careful on the wording of the questions. Its all basically text parsing and stuff, lots of diagrams and stuff… easy to score big points, etc.

Well wish me luck