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2001.10.31 - Wednesday
Weekly Hits, H&S Docs (10:25 PST)
Besides announcing the
NEW QBISM RELEASE, we've updated the
Hack and Slash Computer Game Documents. Also, we had 428 hits this week
(from 10 AM on the 24th to 10 AM today, for a total of 1,316)
- BFGalbraith
QBISM AS PROMISED!! (9:45 PST)
It looks like Qbism is the most amazing game to come from GPL Quake yet,
and they've got a new snap shot out today! Check out
Qbism's web page!!(See also
news on this page from the 1st and 2nd of this month.)
- BFGalbraith
Happy Birthday Serp. Lord (9:35 PST)
Halloween is allways a big deal to us, not just because it's the biggest role-playing
day of the year, but because it actually is the day on which The Serpent Lord was hatched.
It's appropriate that everyone celebrate this God's gift to man kind.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.30 - Tuesday
Evil Pumpkin = Tar Baby (20:40 PST)
Yesterday, Zancrus realeased an "Evil Pumpkin" at
his site. This Evil Pumpkin of his is
animated to replace the Quake 1 tar-baby model. Happy halloween!
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.29 - Monday
Pumpkins (20:30 PST)
More free stuff from Zancrus! Check out the pumpkin and "evil pumpkin"
at his site.
- Ulrich Galbraith
2001.10.27 - Saturday
Fire Ball (17:10 PST)
Zancrus, who FYI is Ulrich, has made some minor changes to
his site. He has also released a new
"fire ball" model. It is related to the fire bug in that we're using
the fire ball as the experimental missle weapon in Hack and Slash (couldn't
think of anything more generic that wouldn't require a special weapon to
use,) and the fire bug was originally an idea of his for the pick up
item to get the fire ball.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.26 - Friday
H&S Hand to Hand (23:00 PST)
The Serpent Lord has been swinking all day on the Hand to Hand combat play control for
Hack and Slash. It is now working the way we envisioned it, and it is good. The code
needs to be optimized. We've still got several more things to do before we release it
(like missle weapon play control and getting Hack and Slash running in Windows.)
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.25 - Thursday
Fire bug now available! (19:30 PST)
Zancrus has updated his site with, count'em, one new model.
The "fire bug" is available under public license, so have fun!
- Ulrich Galbraith
2001.10.24 - Wednesday
NEW CRYSTAL SPACE!! (23:30 PST)
A new version of the Crystal Space graphics engine
has just been released. It is much
improved over the last release. One of it's most important new features is that the
interface for code development is much more stable.
- BFGalbraith
Hits this week (10:05 PST)
We had 431 hits this week (for a total of 888 from 10 AM on the 10th
to 10 AM today.) That's 26 less then last week. Hmmm, mabey I should quit
being so negative... pretty stable anyhow. We're not really expecting a big
increase until after the Hack and Slash stand alone release, and then it should
be a gradual increase because 3D Files has been destroyed which will slow the
promotion of Hack and Slash considerably.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.23 - Tuesday
Play Control Progress (22:30 PST)
Today we worked on the play control of the new Hack and Slash game. Things are turning
out well, all though we are far from finished.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.22 - Monday
Makefile swinking (16:30 PST)
Today we've been working on the Hack and Slash makefile system. We also determined that we
need to add a "commit to CVS" section to our documentation. I've updated the
Hack and Slash documents accordingly. I've added a Key to
the front page of the documentation as well.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.20 - Saturday
Play Control Crisis (16:15 PST)
Zancrus played the X-box at the mall today. He played the new Odd World Game.
He said the graphics weren't bad, but that the play control was too slippery, to
the point that the game wasn't any fun. About it's anolog stick, he said "it felt like
it had no substance". He also said that the buttons were poorly placed and difficult to
use. Unfortunately, this comes as no suprise to us.
Lot's of people mention how it's a bad idea to fiddle with new kinds of play
control, totally ignoring how much play control on your average new game today sucks. With
our next Hack
and Slash release, we'll be demonstrating our idea of ideal play control that we've
been planning and designing over the last year. It's so simple I'm suprised it isn't the
industry standard now. (Sorry, no "strafe" controls required.)
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.19 - Friday
Public H&S Documentation (15:40 PST)
Well, we're publicly posting our Hack and Slash documents
we've been working on as we develop our Hack and Slash project. Hopefully they can give
interested folks insight into what we've been, are and are going to be doing. They are
largely there for our own convenience.
- BFGalbraith
Zancrus on Site (11:00 PST)
Zancrus is a Galbraith Games artist who made the Galbraith Games Logo, site navigation
graphics, Hack & Slash add banner, Hack & Slash Logos and a good part of the
Open Quartz and Hack & Slash computer game graphics, as well as other signifcant
contributions. He now has moved his web page to our
site. There's alot more to come on his page, but as is it may be worth your time to
check it out if you are a Zancrus fan.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.18 - Thursday
Page fine tuned (17:20 PST)
One of our computers that still works is a 160 megahertz pentium with a 14 inch
monitor running Corel Linux for it's operating system. It's web browser is Netscape.
The other day I checked out our whole page for bugs with that computer and found alot
of screwed up HTML and bad links, the worst of which was a link to an "adult" page.
Well, I have fixed all the problems I could find, please notify me of any glaring
errors you run into.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.17 - Wednesday
Pocket Pac-Man (10:20 PST)
Attention Game Developer Magazine readers: here's my favorite
portable "snake/Pac-Man" page.
- BFGalbraith
Hits this week (10:05 PST)
In these last few months (weeks?) before releasing a stand alone version
of Hack and Slash, we've been monitoring the official GameSpy hits to
our site so we will know how much the stand-alone release increases the
traffic on our site. We got 457 hits this week (from 10 AM on the 10th
to 10 AM today.)
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.16 - Tuesday
Game Developer offends (10:40 PST)
Unfortunately, I don't have time to write letters to the editor of Game Developer
magazine. Lately, they've been implying things in that mag that infuriate me.
The worst is this last issue, about portable technology. Regardless of the
intended content of the articles, the message they send is clear: "the best thing
you can play on anything from a cell phone to a pocket PC is Pac-Man."
Why wasn't Pocket Quake
mentioned anywhere in the issue? (Or if it was, why wasn't it mentioned more prominently?
Is or is not Pocket Quake + Hack and Slash the premier cutting edge portable gaming technology?)
Perhaps they think "open source" technology is only for "basement/garage wannabes."
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.15 - Monday
New Open Quartz Page! (16:30 PST)
Open Quartz has it's own page now at:
openquartz.sf.net. Source Forge has been supportive of numerous open source
game projects, including Open Quartz. Also we have updated the Free Game Arts page
accordingly, allthough that page is still in need of an overhaul.
Open Quartz does not link from our main page anymore because our site navigation
graphics are for navigating our site, not linking to other pages. We are by no
means abandoning Open Quartz. However, the Open Quartz team extends far beyond Galbraith
Games and non-Open Quartz FGA contributors, so we feel the site is best hosted at that
team's web location.
- BFGalbraith
Concerned Downloader (12:55 PST)
Today I got the following e-mail from someone:
"How come I have to pay for fileplanet personal servers to download a free model?
Can you please change this?" When you go to a File Planet download page, the 1st options to download are not free.
But later on down the page a little ways there is a list of "FilePlanet Public Servers"
where you can download the model (or whatever) for free.
As to the question "can you
please change this?", please see the news from this month on the 10th, and the 3rd, and from the
month of July the 7th and 9th. In all actuality, when 3D Files went down, I lost hope of
breaking off from Game Spy any time in the near future. Game Spy has been very
supportive of us over the years.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.11 - Thursday
Happy Birthday Lunz! (15:00 PST)
It's our GM's birthday today. We best observe! :)
- BFGalbraith
H&S RPS improvements (14:40 PST)
Once again I've updated the Hack and Slash Role-Playing System with
our latest and greatest rules. Basically we're just going back to
one hit point per one manuevering bonus (instead of one half.) Also,
we've gone back to requireing a full success level for full effect, and
success level 0 or 1/2 has 1/2 effect (or half damage in combat.)
- BFGalbraith
New Look (14:15 PST)
Well, we have a new site navigation graphics now. This is actually how
Zancrus wanted to do it originally, but we were pressed for time (yeah,
big suprise, I know.) But now Zancrus has purchased a copy of some
paint program and made his dream a reality, as you can clearly see.
More importantly we've released our new Hack and Slash logo (also by
Zancrus, who put it together several weeks ago,)as can be seen in our
new site navigation graphics and on other locations on this page.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.10 - Wednesday
FTP space for the poor? (11:10 PST)
I've attempted to contact "3D Downloads"
(Telefragged FTP page,) because Telefragged looks like our best
option yet for FTP space aside from Game Spy. The problem is that
we don't want to maintain Free Game Arts as an independant page,
we just want to have an alternative download site in addition to
file planet to ease the distribution of FGA material. Does
anyone know who I should contact at 3D Downloads? I've tried
"negative" with no response (isn't that ironic.)
- BFGalbraith
H&S Preparations (10:05 PST)
Besides working on the Hack and Slash stand alone code, we've been making other
preperations as well. We've got our new add banner for Game Spy ready, and we're
trying out an experimental counter on this page, to help us track the interest in
Hack and Slash by seeing how much the site's traffic increases after the stand
alone release.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.03 - Wednesday
What we've been doing about it (14:15 PST)
Besides moaning and groaning over the last months as File Planet has altered
thier download system to be, how shall we say, less "open source" friendly,
we have been working on some alternatives. We are planning eventually to have
our own server, but
that is at the soonest years from now. And even then we may not
use that server to host the web page, but rather just for file download and
hosting a hack and slash based game or two.
The immediate solution we've been working on is to have the FGA files available
through file sharing software. This way, volunteers will be able to make FGA
files publicly available as they wish. We aren't going to focus on this until after
the 1st stand alone public Hack and Slash release, but it's something that we've
been seriously contemplating. Hopefully someone will come forward with some alternative
FTP space instead. But that seems unlikely enough to us that our "plan A" is to
organize volunteers to make FGA files publicly available (in addition to file planet
available,) through file sharing software.
- BFGalbraith
Knock knock, anyone home? (10:45 PST)
Today I got an e-mail from a certain individual not able to use File Planet.
They wanted to know if we had an alternative download site for the FGA. Well,
that's what I want to know also. Well people, mutants, aliens, anderiods and undead,
do we have an alternative download site for the FGA?
We have actually gone so far as to try to set up the project at Source Forge, but
the FGA's various licenses are basically mostly not "open source" enough for sf.net.
I don't want suggestions, I want replies. If you have an idea about about who might
be interested in offering alternative download space for the FGA, well then
that's nice, good for you. But if you know that someone is interested in helping with
alternative download space, please contact me, BFGalbraith,
Galbraith Games Webmaster extrodinaire.
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.02 - Tuesday
Qbism Multi-part Model details (14:15 PST)
I asked a Qbism guy about some of the details concerning the Qbism Mult-part
Model effect and I found out a few details. 1st is that the individual
parts are made in MD2 format. Second is that the parts are individually
animated, and that the animation frames are still controlled in the Quake C.
Also, the network code had to be re-written in the engine to support mult-part
models. The parts are: head, tourso, legs, and weapon. I think that's a
great layout, it could theoretically work for just about anything. Reportedly,
there is no lag between individual peices.
Our first public release of Hack and Slash will not have this feature or
similar features. But I have allways said that this feature is essential if
you want to have the engine ideal for a wide variety of projects. Why?
Well, Diablo II, The Secret of Mana, Dark Stone and River City Ransom, (just for starters,)
that's why!!
- BFGalbraith
2001.10.01 - Monday
Qbism Progress (10:15 PST)
Qbism is making strong progress, and rumor has it that they are expecting
to have a new release out this month. Among numerous other advanced
features, they aparently have a "multi part model" system. That sounds very
exiting to me. Check out Qbism's web
page for available details.
- BFGalbraith
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