Category Archives: News

The July Hiatus

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Treetops

Has it really been an entire month since I’ve posted here?  it honestly doesn’t seem like it.  I’ve visited the blog frequently (every day), and though I’ve had a lot of ideas for things I’ve wanted to post, and have even written a fair amount of half-finished articles, I never got around to posting much of it all.

I guess I’ve been a bit busy.  Not enough to completely excuse me from my absence here, but pretty busy.  Since I feel like I owe an explanation to anyone who’s been visiting the site and wondering what happened to me, I’ll briefly run through everything I’ve been up to.

To kick things off, I got myself a new bike a little over a month ago.  My girlfriend and I have enjoyed going for walks on the roads and trails near our apartment since we moved here, and we both thought it would be fun to have bikes to better take advantage of the bike paths, as well as for a simple form of local transportation.  So far, it’s been a lot of fun to be able to hop on a bike and jet around the area for a bit, and it’s also been a good amount of exercise.  So long as the weather stays reasonable, I’m sure we’ll be doing this for many months to come this year (if not the entire year).

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BlizzCon 2009 is Go!

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BlizzCon 2009

After missing out on the first round of tickets a few weeks ago, I’m happy to report that I was able to swoop in and grab a pair of BlizzCon tickets this past weekend!

My brother, Spencer, and I had been planning on attending BlizzCon this year, but during the first round of ticket sales, neither of us was able to get to a computer in time to get some tickets.  I had just returned from a short vacation in Arizona, and was on the road the same day for another short trip to Lake Tahoe.  I had a lot of fun that weekend.  Spencer had to go to work in the morning.

To fill in for our absence, we armed my dad with my brother’s credit card and all the relevant information needed to make the purchase, but demand was high, and by the time he got in the ticket queue, he was about 25,000 people behind.  When he got to the front of the line, the tickets were sold out.

This last weekend, Spencer was again not able to stand by for ticket-buying, but I was, so I set my alarm for 9:00 AM, got up and played around a bit, and then logged into the Blizzard Store and waited patiently for the clock to strike 10.  At 10:58 I began refreshing the page every 10-15 seconds, and at exactly 10 o’clock, the drop-down box appeared for ticket purchase.  I fumbled for a second, selected the wrong number of tickets, backed out and fixed the error, and proceeded to get in line.  I was approximately number 250 in line.

A few seconds later, I was in front.  I proceeded with the purchase, and it all went very smoothly.  Much more smoothly than last year, where the store continually broke, and left a lot of unhappy people out there.  I was pleased that I had remembered to log into the Blizzard Store the night before and update my credit card / contact information, so I didn’t have to worry about changing it at purchase time.

Directly after I finished with everything, a friend of mine who had gotten tickets during the first round logged in just to see how long the line was; in about a minute’s time, the line had grown to over 31,000 people!

So I guess I am pretty lucky to have been able to get BlizzCon tickets again.  I expected things to be a bit slower this year, with the economy and all, but I guess it’s true that during hard financial times, people are always looking for entertainment – a way to escape from the troubles of life for a while.

Hopefully this year’s show is just as much fun as the last.  It’s not until August, but If it’s anything like last year, it should be worth the wait.

Team Fortress 2 Update – Sniper… and Spy?

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Man, I go away for a small vacation and I miss the next big TF2 announcement from Valve!  Not a big deal, really – I did have quite a good time on my trip, so a TF2 update kinda takes a back seat in terms of awesomeness…  but more on that later.  Valve’s got a new update page set up for the next TF2 update, and it looks like it’s going to be another sweet addition to the game.

So far, they’ve announced The Huntsman, a bow and arrow for the Sniper that can stick enemies to walls, Payload Race, a new game mode that’s kind of like a two-way Gold Rush, and another item for the Sniper, The Razorback; a back-mounted shield that keeps the Spy from stabbing him.  Oh, and speaking of the Spy, he’s also snuck in for some update goodness; he’ll be getting The “Dead Ringer” Spy Watch and The “Cloak and Dagger” Spy Watch, which will let him fake death and stay cloaked forever respectively.

Like the other updates Valve has brought to TF2, these will change play considerably, but also seem very well thought out, so hope fully balance will not be hurt too much.  I haven’t played TF2 in a month or two and I’m pretty excited about all this…  hopefully this will be the push I need to come back to the game, as it is one of the more fun experiences I’ve had in online gaming.

Anyway, maybe I’ll see you there – and hopefully I’ll see you back here soon as well, as I write a bit about my recent vacation.  Thanks for reading!

Fire With Particles Example / Tutorial, Site Updates

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Fire Example

Well, this isn’t nearly as controversial as my recent rant about proprietary Mac hardware or the problems with piracy, but I’d like to announce that I have updated the Examples & Tutorials page, and added a new example / tutorial to boot.

The new addition, an example / tutorial (perhaps an ‘examporial’?  ‘tutample’?  okay, I’ll stop) shows how to create a somewhat realistic fire effect using Game Maker’s particle system, and takes you through the entire process, from sprite creation to tweaking the final effect for perfection.  You can check out the write-up and download the example files here.

And as mentioned above, I’ve also re-tooled the Examples / Tutorials page, so all the ugly boxes are gone, and everything is much cleaner and better organized.  You’ll also find a partially re-written tutorial for 3D model importing / UV mapping in there, though I’d like to completely re-write this in the future, as my methods have changed a bit since I wrote the original.  I’ll probably be adding my completely unfinished competition project to the open source / abandoned section soon, too.

If you have any suggestions for examples you’d like me to make, let’s hear it.

I Got God Damned Malware

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Aw, snap!

And I’m almost ashamed to admit it.  My various Win XP installs have been virus free for about 7 years now, but now the streak has finally been broken.  The strange thing is, I’m still not entirely sure how, or where, my computer got infected.

I’ve looked back on the events that have led up to this unfortunate incident, and I have pieced together what I think has happened, which I present to you below.

Two nights ago I was browsing the net with Google’s Chrome.  I had a few tabs open, and I was bouncing back and forth between them.  In one of them I was working on downloading a file from a file-sharing site, kind of like RapidShare, but not quite as official (if you can call RapidShare “official” by any stretch).  I had jumped through all the rings, skipping two ads and waiting 60 seconds for the download link to appear.  Once the link was ready, I began downloading (it was a RAR file).

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