Joshua a.k.a sigonasr2’s Blog

October 22, 2009

Z-Gamers V.3 Fundraising!

Let me start off this post by saying that Z-Gamers Version 3 is very epic. It has a very nice design, with a very nice layout, and all the pages are consistent and very nice-looking.

But there is an even more important task at hand than that. Michael Raines, the owner of the server has given me a task to attempt to raise $500 for a new server box. $500 is ALOT of money! I mean seriously, I don’t even think I can do it, but I need people to start donating! Even $5 or even $1 from various people will help contribute! And it’s not for a scam either, we really need a new server box before the hard drive fails and things start breaking down. The server will also run faster than it is currently running and thus will make pages come up faster and make my visitors and I very happy. Where can I donate and help? Go to http://z-gamers.net or http://www.chipin.com/contribute/id/72ec841e5b2f9b4c for direct pay to me. Just type in the value, fill out card/Bank info (Don’t worry, paypal is secure) and the money will not be used for anything other than what I told you above. Michael Raines will make sure of that. In addition, I hope somebody out there is nice enough to help out because frankly, we are small and don’t get much help but we are trying to go on with what we can.

Seriously, please think about donating for Z-Gamers, we really need help with the server and this is the only way…

(9:04:31 PM) sigonasr2: If I ever get money, I’ll be sure to donate it to the cause also lol
(9:04:40 PM) mikeyr71730: Yeah. I hate asking for money, but I have to do it this time before the system goes down.
(Later on in life…)
(6:00:26 PM) mikeyr71730: I’d hate for the server to go offline for good.

So After you donate or at least think about donating, click the more button to find out what I have been up to, because it’s a lot. :P

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August 4, 2009

Welcome to August…School…Yes…

So, this morning I promised to myself I would make a post. Yes, I’m still alive, living fairly well, and doing things on a daily basis, but haven’t gotten much chance (Or have been too lazy) to post on here. It’s usually easier for me to work from the most recent things to the furthest back events that are in my head, so it’s time to start.

First off, I have rejoined Fiesta for a third time. Sheesh, when am I gonna stop? But that’s beside the point, explained further below, Warinthestar has convinced me to start playing and doing things that I was doing 2 years ago. Man has it really been that long? Ah yeah, it has. So just yesterday, my cleric on Teva has reached Level 67, and I’m telling you, it doesn’t get easier. Joined guild SoulReaver, Warinthestar’s current guild, looks pretty fun, I’ll tell you that. So I guess I’m back to Fiesta.

Next up, as you may know, Warinthestar originally was an admin on the Twilight Server for the game BZFlag. Well guess what? I’m back to playing that too! (Now a third time also) So let’s see, Twilight has changed its global groups to TWILIGHT.SRADMIN, TWILIGHT.ADMIN, and TWILIGHT.COP, as in we’re in TWILIGHT.SRADMIN, and TWILIGHT.ADMIN is now for the original Jr. Admins. We’re trying to recruit old members from our past times playing Twilight, found Saber and boresnake who still get on every once in awhile. Twilight now runs 5 servers, 4 of them public including: Twilight Main Server, Party Time Server, Jumping Skillz Server, and BZSports Server. The private one is the Twilight Test Server. Also, we have started a new site on my http://sigonasr2.servegame.org server with my newfound web-designing skills I gained over the summer, we created a nice looking site and forum fairly easily. Check it out at http://twilight.servegame.org, and please join if you’re interested.

(Read onward for stuff that happened further back.)

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October 20, 2008

The Usual Fall Break

As normal, during my fall break I do nothing special, I just chill and relax and try not to think about school, because that’s obviously what you are supposed to do. I did work on a few things during fall break though.

Mostly Game Maker related, here are 3 projects I will definitely be slowly working on (Including Screenshots):

Elite Beat Agents Simulator

I have loved the game Elite Beat Agents and so I am recreating a version of it. The version I found on the Game Maker Community is such a crappy version, so I decided to remake it. Here’s a screenshot for now, it uses midi files to conserve space, and the notes are in sync. I have been working on a very good syncing system to keep the notes in time so you can enjoy the song and the game.

Wings3D OBJ to GML Converter

As another note, the current type of OBJ file converter does not work for Vista users, and is always quite complicated. All this will do is take a Wings3D OBJ file and converts it into GML code automatically with just the file needed for user input so that you can just paste into your 3D game as a model of points to use.

Why Wings3D only? Well, first of all, Wings3D is a very powerful program itself, so that statement itself should let you understand why I’m restricting the file format to just that. If you want to use this once I finish it, you should simply get used to using Wings3D now to create nice models for Game Maker, which is our goal with this program.

Super Mario RPG Game (Possibly a Sequel)

The game is based off the super popular Super Mario RPG game from the SNES. Although the game is quite vague to most people for Mario games and got a low amount of sales, it is a very good game with lots of challenge. As an isometric RPG, it had lots of cool features and I want to make a possible sequel for the game with great implementation. Right now I have finished the jumping engine, there IS a z variable for this game and jumping makes Mario go “higher”. I have allowed Mario to walk in all 8 directions and given Mario the ability to jump in all 8 directions. Now I am going to start importing platforms into the game and then start working on the battle engine, it’ll be fun! (Screenshot below shows Mario jumping SW)

As you can see, I have got quite an amount of projects going, all of them should keep me busy until I get close to finishing them, in which I stop. Tune into this blog for all the latest info on all three of these promising games!

In addition to Game Maker, I have started learning some Visual Basic, a minor thing that I may never get enough experience to make advanced programs in yet. Hopefully I can find it useful in the near future.

We also went to ASU on Saturday, 10/18/08 to perform for our marching band competition. Buena got an Excellent rating, and I think we deserve exactly that. (I’m sure all of the other Buena members would agree) We will be working hard in the next week or so to hopefully do better at the Ironwood Ridge competition. Good luck to me and all the Buena Band members, let’s work hard to go to state!!!

I also surprisingly started playing Fiesta. Now, if you’re read previously, I also started playing BZFlag again. I must say, I am going back to all my fun games I used to play, and I like it. So I’ve started playing again (I’m glad I never gave away my account items even though I wanted to), so now I’m continuing my slow trek to level 60 as a cleric. I have had some help from Lanowar_Elf (Charles from previous posts) to gain about 20% while helping him level to 78 on his archer, so he’s still much higher in level than I am.

That sums up all that’s been happening during this week.

September 27, 2008

Rincon High School

As you may know from previous posts, I am in the marching band for our school and we go to football games to play and cheer on our football team. So yesterday we went up to Rincon High School. By now, we’ve had 3 games and I didn’t expect to see much of an improvement from our 0-3 win-loss record for our football team. We arrived at the high school, got into the bleachers on the visitors side and started our normal stuff. We got to march our pre-game show and I say it wasn’t the best, but decent. Pretty soon (I think it was 4 or 5 minutes into the first quarter), we make a touchdown! Well, this happened in our first game, but we ended up getting beat, so we were like, ok that’s great, now let’s see what happens. So we wait and wait, and I think 3 minutes before the first quarter ended, we make yet another touchdown. The kick gets blocked, but that still has the score at 13-0. So the game continues into second quarter, near half time, Rincon gets their first touchdown and kick. So score is 13-7. We then got to watch Rincon’s half-time show, which I must say is pretty dang impressive. Although I did watch their off-step’ness happen here and there (They wore black pants compared to our white pants so being off-step isn’t as major for them), but other than that, they created some impressive sets. The fast follow-the-leader move at the beginning of the show was great, and near the end they got into a perfectly made diamond. I noticed there were a lot of gaps, but other than that they did impressive. Afterward, they played their fight song which was also one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen, not just the quality of the song, but what they did during it. They bobbed up and down, turned left and right, moved here and there, and was just all-out fun. I do not think any other band has ever done something as spectacular as this before. But this wasn’t the only thing that made this day probably the best football game I’ve ever been to. It’s also when we got to meet them. Rincon has about the same amount of band students as we do (A Division One band just like us) and we got to meet and greet them. These people were great, I couldn’t believe how exciting they were, how they felt about everything, and most of the Alto Saxophone’s names were short 3-5 letter names (Like Sam), which I found kind of funny. We got to make a crazy train of people and about 100 kids all ran around the tennis courts we were at turning this way and that with others grabbing on to the end, it was crazy fun, probably the most active group of band students I’ve ever seen. After that, we got to watch the rest of the game, and only from the third-fourth quarter did I notice their band in the bleachers and got to see exactly what they did. During some of their songs, they would start doing little dances in the bleachers, the trombones would duck while every other trombone turned to the left or the right, and they’d alternate this throughout the song. The tubas turned left and right and it was very noticeable as the bells were very large. And all the other sections also did nifty things in the stands. We were in awe at everything they did to make their band look so fun. (Even makes me think about joining them XD) They even got to play the Mortal Kombat Theme Song, which was amazing. And as if it couldn’t get any better, our football team won 13-7 and making our win:loss record 1:3. Go Buena!

Oh man, I just wrote such a long passage on that, but this is a moment I’ll probably remember for the rest of my life. I do not think I will ever forget yesterday. So, want to know what else is going on? Some less-exciting things (In my opinion) including that we’re gonna be joining in on this 3-month YoYoGames competition. The Z-Gamers are going to try to win money if we can and we’re gonna create hopefully what’s gonna be a great game. (For more information on this, see http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/competition04) This is going to be called Project GLOBE for us, since the competition needs to be based on Saving the Planet in some way or form. (From Natural Phenomenon, not Alien Invasions) So that’s something to think about.

I also have never talked about a neat little desktop-viewing program I found called TeamViewer. (http://www.teamviewer.com/) What is this program you ask? Well, it lets you easily view another person’s screen by just giving them a 9-digit ID and 4-digit password. You may think this is a little insecure, but who would really need to view someone else’s desktop and guessing could still take forever. Anyways, I can’t tell you how easy this program works. As a very convenient feature, you can simply run the program from the installer, and not even install the program! This is great for just trying it out and I installed the program thereafter. This program also easily passes a firewall, so you don’t have to sit around wondering why you cannot connect. The reason why this happens is because it authenticates through another server, so your computer won’t bother blocking out that connection in which a user can pass through. By default, the user that connects with you can interact with your desktop (As in move your mouse around) and type things, not just watching. If you do not want to do that, you simply go to the Options menu before connecting, and change what you want to let them control. I also like how it’s easy to simply switch to the other person’s monitor, this makes it so that you don’t have to restart the program and give out a new id and password. Also as a final note, your id will always stay the same, so you just have to give out a new password!

What else has been happening? (As if that’s not enough reading already!) I started playing BZFlag again! I think it’s kind of a bored-sense thing, but I’m back now, and I introduced to myself to the players that still played. It’s still pretty fun, and I still have my servers I run and everything. Warinthestar wants me to rebuild Twilight, but I don’t think I’m ready for that yet. :P I just wanna play for now. One thing I want to create is a large randomly generated BZFlag maze, where there are different colored teleporters so that you can distinguish if you’ve been through a path already. This will hopefully be nice once I complete it, and there will be I think 400 different “squares” in the teleporter maze. This will make for a pretty challenging teleporter maze, and I’ll probably let it rotate mazes every once in awhile. (I may make an added challenge where you must find the flag, then the base!) This’ll be a fun Bash Script to create!

Hmm…Is there anything else I have to discuss? I think that’s it for now! This is the longest post I have made so far, but I think it covers 2-week’s worth of missing posts, so that should do it.

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