Category Archives: General

May
19
2013

Falling off the Soap Box (part 2 of that gamer rant)

Posted by

So, I made a very opinionated rant about eSports about a fortnight ago now (here’s the link to it) and I mentioned to some people that there’s a part 2. Mistake on my part, as my thoughts stopped dead in the water whilst life does its best (as usual) to present plenty of shiny things to distract me. In order to ensure that my rants stay in mind for me personally as they’re usually a good way for me to sit down and reason things out — and I won’t deny the educational value in being corrected by people who know better about their specialised fields; I’m writing smaller, sectioned rants. This one only contains a single point.

Before most of you begin reading this – you’ll probably ask, who the hell am I, and what makes me qualified to say all this stuff? To be honest – I’m not even in the eSports scene, I only dabble in it. But I am in the LAN party scene, although not originally of Australian origin (way back in the day, I was involved primarily in Quakecon, and my late fiance was involved in Dreamhack and E3) – most of my present work however, is based here in Australia through various events and teams I worked for (I’ve done over 150 events over the last 13 years). What makes me qualified? Nothing – I’m a grumpy old man who’s good at whinging and pointing out the wrongs. I’m also long-winded, but a few people who know me personally find it interesting to read about my often bumbling opinions :)

Part 2 actually doesn’t start out much with eSports organisers in mind – it’s more the LAN organisers I’m talking to here, and the notion of what’s wrong with what we currently do. Don’t worry, there’s enough here to make everyone have a bone to pick with me :D

As with part 1, this is written from my own perspective, as someone who is well known for having next to nothing to do with serious eSports stuff you’ll probably need the salt shaker for this one. I’d be happy to be corrected too by those more in the know.

Anyway, on with the ranting!

Continue reading →

May
07
2013

How pinteresting

Posted by

So, quick update today. Been racking my brain over some stuff at work today regarding a whole bunch of stuff I can’t talk about haha.

I looked at the pinterest site recently, to get inspiration for designs, coding techniques, cool industrial design gadgets etc. It’s kinda cool, I know everyone has that one rubbish site they visit on the internet where their brains can just gorge and feed on useless pap content. For most people, that would be sites like Reddit, 4Chan, imgur, failblog and many other sites that usually present a lot of graphical things.

Don’t get me wrong, I visit all the sites listed above (haha, I’m so productive) but sometimes, I need to unwind in a more concentrated direction. I found pinterest actually is pretty cool.

Give it a go sometime I guess. It’s great coffee table reading on your little nexus 7 or iPad device if you’re lounging around too, and you can do it in public at cool places like the cafe in the Four Seasons without looking like a weird creep.

 

Apr
22
2013

Guess who’s back *again*?!

Posted by

Ugh I really should keep this more up to date. There are so many projects going on, and so many things to look at and do.

MPU is now well underway, although it’s still a juggle between establishing our websites, and working on the business facets of the venture too. Luckily, our team has now been a bit more fleshed out with extra helpers who are generously donating their time and energy to us until we become something a bit more substantial.

And a new job! Oh lawdy. I started a new job too, and at the moment it’s the biggest priority for me. Let’s see how we do juggling a dozen balls in the air.

Dec
27
2012

A Hard Reset

Posted by

Well, as we rush to towards the new year, I’ve got a crunch mode going on. Hard Reset is the new LAN project that Ben’s working on under the Multiplayer United banner, and I’ve taken it upon myself to develop the website for him. Another notch on the belt so to speak.

But it’s brought to my attention a lot of various issues that I need to resolve in the way that I develop, and produce these sites. The scale and scope of these developments are so much larger than just a single website (a la SOGC or the MPU site) – in fact, it affects both those mentioned sites too.

A lot’s happened in a very very short few months towards the end of the year, and suffice to say – 2013 will need to be something spectacular to out-do the highs and the lows of 2012.

Back to how I was developing the sites though – a lot of the time, I just spit out several thousand lines of code/script that is iteratively written. That is, each page is done as necessary, bespoke and customised. Whilst there’s a market for that, it’s an inelegant solution to developing something of a ‘network’ – which the Hard Reset site will be (a part of at least).

So I’m faced with the already-solved-but-too-tiresome-conundrum of how to proceed with my code. Logic would dictate that Hard Reset requires something delivered ASAP, something functional to handle the influx of users that may potentially happen. Regardless, it’s a business and opportunity waits for no one.

I’ll have to develop the Hard Reset site iteratively first – and by all standards, this would be well and good enough for a single website. But it isn’t when the new MPU begins as well on January 1st, demanding everything from me really in terms of skill, and content creation. Life will be pretty crazy, pretty busy and pretty stressful come January 1st. And it’s only really dawning on me now the extent of the work required.

It’s exciting though :)

Dec
27
2012

Updated and back again

Posted by

This update to WordPress looks pretty shiny! It’s very minimalist, I kind of like it – and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll probably keep it as is. Rather dull, but at least it’ll force me to focus more on the content than on the site’s features. Stay tuned for more musings!

Jul
12
2012

Yay a start.

Posted by

I found some free graphics to use over at Lost Garden – so I’ve plonked it into some basic c# coding with Torque 2D.

Pretty handy! Managed to get a little sprite dude to move left/right with the arrow keys, and spacebar to jump!

 

Download the Game.zip file here (about 1.8mb)

May
23
2012

The Leap!

Posted by

This particular video demonstrates finer grained motion control than anything else I’ve ever seen! And rumour has it, that the product will only cost a mere $70 as opposed to something way more expensive (looking straight at you Wii, Kinect)

The possibilities with this are pretty awesome, and whilst I doubt I’d have the physical fortitude to waggle my arms at the screen for hours on end, perhaps that’s a good thing - probably much to the joy of the missus.

 

May
04
2012

Some thoughts about SOGC’s website

Posted by

I’ve been, for a long time, a tinkerer with the SOGC website. There’s never really been a single ‘version’ of the SOGC site that I’ve been wholly happy with, and admittedly I doubt there ever will be. But I’d venture so far as to say I’m nearing the point where I’m grudgingly satisfied. With the latest iteration of the site, ‘Sparda’, I’ve designed an SOGC site, and it’s got more clean code and usability than ever before, thanks to a changed philosophy of “integrating things that others have done much better than I could” over “WRITE ALL DE THINGS PROPRIETARY FTW!”

[box type="info"] Did you know? – Every single version of the SOGC website has been named after something in a video game that I was playing at one time or another during development![/box]

The previous version of the SOGC site, ‘Frosty Jensen’ was an incredible feat for me personally. It was a turning point in my approach to the SOGC, and one that many would call insane. I proposed free events by the SOGC, and threw myself into my work on the ideas that a free event would grow, and the community would support us. I applied a lot more effort to it, and developed what I consider, one of my better website design habits (stringent unified layout design).

[box type="info"] Did you know? - The current SOGC site is called ‘Sparda’ after a character in the Devil May Cry series. Whilst the previous version of the site was called ‘Frosty Jensen’ for its appearance, and in homage to the Deus Ex: Human Revolution protagonist, Adam Jensen.[/box]

I based the Frosty Jensen layout on something called the ‘960 Grid System‘ where the entirety of the site’s content fit within a 960-pixel wide column, allowing for optimum display on tablets, mobiles and any portrait style device, whilst still being effect on the common desktop screen (landscape styled). Sparda, follows that same Grid System, but with more refined, accurate spacing and layout considerations. In a way, a lot of Frosty Jensen’s layout tenets carry over as legacy parts of Sparda. Primarily the large, oversize Banner – designed to bring attention, and draw traffic to the event page itself; and the adaptive 3 column wrapper as the main content area of the site.

But I’d like to think that’s where the similarities end. Under the surface of Sparda, all the code has been written from the ground up. In fact, only the Blog, and Forum sections of the site are not original code. Coincidentally, these are the two key components of the site that I integrated with my new philosophy. Undoubtedly countless hours of time and effort have gone into these two applications – WordPress and phpBB respectively, that I had to sit down and consider what the SOGC’s members would use more. Bridging the two applications would certainly solve my issues quickly, but it was cumbersome, and actually quite a messy thing to do. So, instead the site was designed around requiring only the phpBB login for user authentication with event registrations, and forum posting. The rest of the site is now firmly integrated into Facebook, allowing for quick and easy commenting for all our participants (who probably have a Facebook account).

There’s a lot more to do on the site of course, and that’s probably something for a future update.

May
04
2012

Making that penguinny transition

Posted by

So, the last few days (and in fact, as I type this post…!) I’ve made the jump over to Ubuntu as my primary desktop for working on and some minor gaming (lol minecraft).

It’s actually proved to be quite valid so far; I haven’t been unable to do anything that I’m not normally able to on a Windows PC, short of firing up a game and playing it. Linux currently handles:

  • Everything website development related
  • Minecrafting
  • Day to day web browsing, media watching etc.

It even lets me access all my iPhone messages and stuff. I’m pretty impressed with ubuntu so far, and I think…that it’s not that far away a day – that a Linux OS may be a viable alternative to Windows. If only for people doing productive work. Valve’s plan to implement Steam at the end of the year does provide some serious incentive for people to more frequently consider Linux their primary OS.

 

Apr
23
2012

Out of the gates at a goodly pace

Posted by

So the LAN was a success I think. Sure there are things to fix, things to learn, and certainly more things to do. But as LANs go, this one was alright. As my last post said, back in the saddle. It felt good to be running an event again, even though this was one smaller than I’d have liked, I think it was a good deal for a first event.

Our venue was actually supportive! Which is amazing - one mistake that I made in the past with previous venues, was a lack of communication and dialogue with our venues. I do not wish to make the same mistake again, so come Monday, I’ll be calling them and talking to them and encouraging working with them.

We’ll be ready to really raise the bar for our next event. And more importantly, raise the bar at a guaranteed level of quality. Planning has already begun, and I think the crowd’s in for a real treat next event.