The new Outspark.com portal is now available, giving members of the Outspark community powerful new tools to express yourself and connect with your friends.
Visit Outspark.com now to create your profile and start building your friends lists! Be sure to check out the Outspark Blog to learn how to get the most out of the new Outspark portal.
Have any feedback on the new Outspark.com? Let us know what you think in the Outspark Portal Feedback thread in the Outspark forums.
Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3.1 can be followed at the Firefox 3.1 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #shiretoko.
New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:
Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties
A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to
Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search
Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications.
Everquest II is releasing a very large update to the game today. EQ2 GU49, titled “Raising the Banner”, includes continuation in a series of special World Events, guild halls, multi-core support, housing changes, and more.
As I’m nearing completion on a set of templates (one being for Wordpress), the Web Design Center and Templates areas will be available. These will be FREE under the GNU GPL license.
Though I don’t have much time to make many, all of the templates and website themes will be of high quality. None of that 5-minute crap that I see everywhere. One of my highlights includes a psuedo- Windows Vista experience. Professional designs for free. How’s that sound?
Soon after, premium templates and layouts will be available. Most premiums will be unique, meaning once you buy it, nobody else can. Premiums will include the Adobe Photoshop PSD files, while free may or may not include any.
Among the addition to those, there will be many more changes, such as graphics designs, Photoshop tips/tricks, and quick resources for anyone to use without restriction. The release of a few of my applications will be available. Among them include the analog clock app for your TI-83, TI-83+, TI-84, or TI-84+ series calculators. I’ve had this sitting on my calculator for quite a few years now, and I’m too lazy to put it up on TI-calc.org.The code will be free / open source under GPL. There’s a few other apps, but they aren’t nearly as interesting.
Lo and behold. Adam Sessler from G4TV finally lashes out after the crazies complain about how Diablo III doesn’t look exactly like Diablo II.
“At what point do we need to accept that change is inevitable? In this week’s Sessler’s Soapbox, Adam tackles the recent criticism over Blizzard’s bright and colorful art scheme for the highly anticipated Diablo III.”
From now until the end of CBT, Counter-strike: Source servers have been made to prepare you for Blackshot!
Opening first is the Reg server. Play all the classic maps - including ones used in gaming leagues and tournaments.
Second to open will be the GunGame 4 server. This is more of a casual server where the games are quick and it’s more-so a frenzied fight.
The GunGame server will be unlocked soon. When opened to the public this will be a permanent server.
See the Blackshot CS:S site here!
The server information will be available there, as well as the map lists and any quick announcements that may be needed.
If anyone has any questions or issues dealing with the server (hacking, server stability, etc), please let me know and I’ll deal with it as soon as I’m available. (ie, not at a work emergency or in college classes).
I’ll pop in from time to time. If the server is full too often, I will raise the player capacity up or open the gungame early. If nobody is in there when you come, you’ll be able to engage combat with auto-joining/auto-vacating bots. Careful, though: the bot difficulty is set to “pwn”.
The Shadow Odyssey is an all-in-one compilation of Everquest II, and will be sold in stores and for Digital Download at USD $39.99. It is expected to be released on November 18, 2008.
Please note these details are WIP (work in progress). Visit Outspark.com to stay up-to-date.
Cap Raise to Level 89
3 New Maps
New Kingdom Quest
Town Warp Gate
Wedding Feature
Quest Overhaul
Added Character Skills to each class
Guild member cap increase
Monarchy System
Bugfixes
Warm up for the competitive edge on the Counter-Strike: Source game servers for Outspark’s (www.outspark.com) new FPS game, Blackshot!
Depending on the amount of concurrent users, there will be one or two servers.
Play the GunGame-modded for some fast, quake-like action! Or, if you’re feeling more tactical, play the Reg server. All of the standard maps will be in rotation, starting off with de_dust2.
Plenty of GunGame maps will be available!
Come back in a few days to witness the launch of the promo website!
The newest addition to the Outspark family is Blackshot, a fresh tactical FPS.
“We’re thrilled to add an innovative, free-to-play FPS game to our lineup,” says Susan Choe, Outspark CEO.
“[It] offers fast-paced action for casual gamers interested in a quick shootout, while hardcore players will love innovative features like the game’s player-versus-environment mode.”
Blackshot will be released later this summer. You can sign up for the beta at www.playblackshot.com.
Project Powder, a snowboard sim, is the newest addition to the Outspark Free to Play library. It will be entering Closed Beta Test phase 1 soon, so make sure you sign up at http://projectpowder.outspark.com/ today!
There will also be prizes for contestants of the CBT including free Sparkcash, as well as a cool CBT hooded sweatshirt only given to users who achieve level 5 in the first test phase.
The event was a great success, and there was a high turnout. Ten lucky winners got a random Dragon mount, and five lucky winners received a 2X Exp Card. Each of the prizes are currently unreleased, as a bonus.
I had noticed that the GDLib functions were installed, yet the images would not generate the correct output. This is due to the change in some of the functions, such as imgpng();, which had an alteration of parameter handling, and is much more restrictive. bool imagepng ( resource $image [, string $filename [, int $quality [, int $filters ]]] )
Let’s say we had called imagepng(); like we could in PHP4: imagepng($image,”,90);
PHP4 didn’t complain when using it like that, as it was a bit more lenient on parameters. When using PHP5, you have to either output images as: imagepng($image);
Or, you can use the full-blown
imagepng($image,NULL,90,NULL);
and it should work again. I haven’t tested the latter (though it should work), but I changed all of my GD programs and projects to imagepng($image);.
If you are having a problem getting GDLib to work and you have all of the modules installed correctly, check your phpinfo(); and/or gd_info();.
If all of those claim to be working, yet your results are now URL paths to the image, well, they are working - you are just using a deprecated method of using imagepng(); or imagejpeg();.
TWCOM now has a GMOD11 dedicated server - unfortunately, it’s private and access is restricted to a select few for now. Because Garry has not written any *nix binaries, you have to run Wine to run the server. Luckily, if set up right, it won’t take up much space, as it doesn’t emulate Windows, but rather run. It was mainly set up for personal use (experimenting with Lua).
Because I went through a lot of troubles, I’m sure I can whip up a nice wall o’ text over the next few days for some problems that I hardly saw answers to (if there even were any).
I’m not much of an artist when it comes to painting - digital, even. However, I had fun doing this for the first time. Blame the stray marks on my laptop touchpad.
Today on Memorial Day, our TWCOM server is getting a massive upgrade, and the server will be taken down at around 10:30am CDT. Up till then, you may see some more-than-usual server lag, as everything is being backed up.
The current server is lacking a few processor functions required for srcds, and is plainly unable to keep up with the demand of gdlib, Ventrilo, and Wordpress for a fast load.
You’ll enjoy the sweet server upgrade, and might see a counter-strike or GMod server in the future.
I finally got around to making the loop from “Stronger” by Kanye West, featuring Daft Punk.
The only difference from the one in “Stronger” is the thicker bass drum beats and a little more synthesizing action.
Finally upgraded the software transfer from my old, crappy programming, to WordPress, finished writing my own layout, added a few plugins (such as the auto-upgrade), and updated anti-spam with Akismet to the current version.
