A Day in the Life of my Minecraft Server

I've never been a big fan of Minecraft, and I probably will never be, which is a little bit strange seeing as I run a Minecraft server. The game just never clicked for me, I always found it a bit, dull. Though I will admit I'm a little bit jealous when people go out and build some incredible stuff like a 8-bit computer or a 3d printer.

Destiny out of Stargate Universe - By Blade695

Watching that ship getting constructed was absolutely epic, it even has a gate on it! Only thing it doesn't do is jump to FTL. ;)

Star Destroyer out of Star Wars - By blade695

While I prefer the Destiny, you can't forget the good old Star Destroyer, it brings back memories.

Farm - By Cyphermonkey

Even with all the spaceships being built, some people can't leave the simple life behind.

Monster House - By Cyphermonkey

Even though I like this house, it reminds me of that really bad movie that looked more like cut scene out of a computer game than a film.

Resort - Water Thing

When you get the chance to build anything you want, some people create strange things, personally I think this person played way to much RollerCoaster Tycoon when they were growing up.

Castle - By Derme (Me)

This is where it shines that I'm not all that creative, all the earth-shattering stuff going on around me and I'm building a 4 walled castle. :P

Nyan Cat - By Kyza98

This has gotta be my personally favourite for today, not original, or creative, but it looks so colourful.

So there you have it, for those of you that are dedicated Minecrafters these creations were made;

• In Creative mode (With mobs on)
• Using NO mods of any sort
• All creations were made in 48 hours or less

Other than Minecraft, it's hard to imagine isn't it? I've been working on my HTML5 scrolling shooter which should hopefully be done within the next couple days.

Free Website Stumbling

Recently I went on an adventure to buy a domain name, rent a server and build my own website. After being with free hosting for the last couple of years, I was fed up with the MySQL database outages and DoS attacks on the servers. So it was finally time to move up to paid hosting. If you ever do want to have a crack at making your own website with a budget of $0 the best hosts/domains from my experience were;



- 000webhost - They are very reliable for a small website, but I did have a lot of trouble with the MySQL server though. They use a custom Cpanel that is very usable, with a couple ads for their parent company on it; your website though will have no ads on it though, which is very nice.


-x10hosting - They have full version of Cpanel 11 and have support for a lot more features than most low paid hosting. The catch is that they have penalties for overusing server resources, which seem unfairly low. The servers were fairly reliable; they did have a little downtime though. And like 000Webhosting, no ads.



Hosting is only half a website though; the other half is getting a domain name. I tried all the popular ones, like co.cc and the ones that x10 and 000 offer. But I managed to find some more decent and professional ones.


-uni.cc - They have a reliable little set up and I thought the domain name sounded semi-professional. They do ask that you put a small link to them on your website and that you get 10 visitors in 90 days. But you'll probably end up visiting your site that much by yourself. [EDIT (20/2/2012): Uni.cc have disappeared off the face of the Earth/Internet, I don't know what happened to them either, if you do know please leave a comment.]

-dot.tk - An amazing service, they offer you www.yourdomain.tk for free. Best bit about their service is that if you earn enough "points" by putting a small banner on your website, you can buy the domain for 2 years. The reason though that I didn't end up sticking with them was that I found their domain name control panel, spam e-mails and minimum hits a month a bit annoying. Though I believe they have improved immensely since then, so some of this might have changed.


Well that's the end of my list, but I have heard lots of goods things about other free hosts/domains like 110mb and many many more. You'll have trouble finding better services, than the ones I listed above, but I dare you to try. ;)

Next time, some mumblings on paid hosting...

Level 19 - Innoquous 4

NAL the creator of Mmm and MADDENING for iPhone recently released his newest title Innoqous 4 on PC. It's his first title in 3D and makes Innoquous 4 the best in the gravity-flipping series.

The first thing you'll probably notice is that it is his best looking game yet. Previous NAL games have focused on game play rather than graphics in the past. It also has a very nice soundtrack that blends nicely into the game play.

Now I have never really been a NALGames fan, I have always found his unique creations to be to very grinding, having to repeat levels over and over again without gain, and this is something that continues into I4. Especially with the challenge modes (How do you complete a level in 7s? I had trouble doing the level in a few minutes), but the thing for me was that this time I found the game just genuinely fun to play. This was because of some of the new features included in the game, how could you not like a game where the goal is to go "bunny hunting"?


There were levels were you would just watch the ball jump around at high speed, and the level would just finish without any user interaction (This is going to be hard for some players). To me it was just fun, having a quick cut scene that you could chill for a few moments and grab that cup of coffee between the brutal levels.

The game also demonstrates the new power of GameMaker's increased 3D functionality, I had no lag what so ever. The graphics in general look very nice, simple, yet professional. The only trouble I had was with the gravity arrows, where the place that you could touch them to effect a change was a bit hard to work out.


Overall the game is a great-time waster, but it does lack a story, which would of made a very good addition, even if it had been something simple enough to make it worth repeating those bitterly hard levels. Other than that, it is for sure my favourite NAL game yet, and for the price of $0.00 how could you go past trying it?

Innoqous 4 on YoYoGames

Game Maker 8.1 Lite

GameMaker 8.1 (Single word now) has received mixed reviews on the GMC (Game Maker Community), while a lot of members have given it thumbs up, many are upset that it has broken their code and is not compatible with certain extensions/DILS. Personally though not only does it run all my games perfectly, it also runs them a lot faster than Game Maker 8.0 (Two Words).

YYG (YoYoGames) made lots of noise about the new ZOOM feature in the room editor, while this is great (bit buggy though), the big thing new feature for me has to be the upgraded FONT rendering! Now all my games have sharp as crystal text. When Mike Dailly first brought up the whole font improvement, I just didn't get it, I couldn't even tell the difference between the two images he put up comparing the new and the old. But now I get it and I am going to rush out and buy the standard edition tomorrow (Literally). ;)

The second thing that I was personally looking forward to was the ability to name execute code statements. Like this;

Execute a piece of code

----Becomes-----

Draw Menu

Simply by adding a single comment line at the start of the code.

///Draw the menu
//rest of your code here

Cool, Huh? So this makes you life much easier when your trouble shooting.

Indenting code with the TAB key really makes it that much quicker to indent a selection of code. Something which is just awesome... :D

Finally the ZOOM in the room editor, while one of the more visual changes they have made to GameMaker, I really didn't feel that excited about it. Though now that I have used it, I'll never go back to GM 8.0. :)

So that’s it for GM Lite, overall I'd give it 4.5/5 Neurons, while it has improved GameMaker greatly , the release felt "rushed" and there was a couple of really obvious bugs. I sure though with the new Auto-Updater these errors will be fixed over the coming days.

Till Next Time folks,
-Derme out!

Photo (GameMaker 8.1): YoYoGames Glog

Howdy!

Its been a while, hasn't it? I've tried to do a blog a few times now, but haven't been able to keep it going. So here goes attempt 3!


Alright onto the good stuff! Other than this blog, I've been busy working on a very cool new game, Operation Torchlight. At the moment it is still in early dev, but it is already shaping up to be very cool. Currently is looks like this:

• Our first game to feature a 1024x768 res
• 14 unlockable aircraft
• 21 Unique Locations
• "Real" Physics

The sharp new res really makes the game look nice, especially on the bigger screens. The only problem we have had with this though is with older Netbook computers that have a maximum res of 1024x600. We are currently looking in what we can do to fix this issue.

The HD textures (pictured) really give the game a nice feel. We have also fixed the physics issues that were seen in the last game. The next thing on the list to fix is the "control bar" and in-game menu. Both which currently make the game feel un-professional.

The game will also see the implementation of out auto-updater, somthing that we plan to bring to every game we now release. Also a new Online High Score system (Top 100?), we havn't picked one yet, I 've had some trouble previously and don't want one that is open to bugs/spammers.

The local high scores is somthing that really annoyed me in the precious game, it just felt so cheap, so we are looking at ways of improving that as well.

Somthing that I have on my wish-list for Operation Torchlight is a custom built soundtrack, somthing that could be hard to do, but would definatly be worth it.

So there you go a brief summary of what we hope Operation: Torchlight to be, while your waiting why not check out the previous game, and tell us what we can improve.

Independence Da...
Added: 01 February 2010
By: Starwing

Photo (Apollo): Photo PD edited by Derme
Photo (Operation Torchlight): This image is for promotional use only and does not represent the final product.