February 2004 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
Trying to Schedule Tasks (24th February 2004)
As my PC time is still quite limited most of my directly GTA projects have been on hold whilst I soldier on with the forum skin. Happy to report that although it has had a bumpy ride with some critics, I have had a fair body of favourable to indifferent responses which is encouraging. A recent turn-up is that Azkoyen was secretly riding the optimisations bandwagon along with me so GTAForums already has a reduced “lite” skin variant.
Here is a rough little list of the projects I have and defintily intend to start, continue and complete:-
- GrandTheftAuto skin
- London 1969 skin
- Keep the MTA:VC gang headquarters map which I run updated.
- Continue to keep the recently revived progress on Curveshire going. I think that trying to secure one or two reliable, able team members would help greately. Cactus will hopefully be one of these.
- Maintain the GTAForums gang I share the leadership with, The Crisp Brothers, during our current rejuvination.
- Increasing the activity of Serious Street Racers members, perhaps take on someone to recruit new members or assign this to an existing member.
- Fixing the problem I am getting with my re-installs of Myriad corrupting, preventing me from working on that.
- Working out a final design for the lots I am designing for Myriad, especially the Kyte Solicitors' structure for Snow Racer.
- Creating/converting the handling for the GTA: Liberty City mod, which has been transplanting the whole GTA 3 environment into Vice with much sucess.
- Get myself back into the handling setups routine, which I have currently suspended whilst I get other projects sorted.
- Develop amazing new car-based stunts, which I have made rapid progress with but which I cannot treat as a priority.
- FlagStudio IV - also making a French version of this, thanks to a translation by Akado.
As you can see, there really are a lot of commitments I have made and I shall not make any more until I can really start ticking some of the smaller tasks off.
Addition to Homepage (24th February 2004)
I have added an About the Site section to the homepage, just giving an overview of how my online campaign has grown over the years. It also gives you some insight into how the site works and why I decided to make it how I have. Probably not the most rivetting read but if you are bored then you might as well, hmm?
Minor Site Revisions (20th February 2004)
Because this site uses .css files to hold the styles, rather than having the style section in the HTML, I have now added a link in the credits section of each page so you can download and view the classes I use. This will enable people to steal colours and border styles from my site, which is no bad thing to my mind.
Additionally, there are lots of little refinements in the way the site works. The CSS has been further optimised, the GTA 1 page colour scheme has been revised to suit the style I have been developing with the GrandTheftAuto forum skin, the drop-down list in the News areas will display the current page you are on rather than the default option and it will not let you navigate to the page you are already on. The GTA 3 page has had its colour scheme re-built from scratch during these revisions!
FlagStudio IV in French (20th February 2004)
A lovely Frenchman offered to translate the text from FlagStudio into French. I gave him a text file which contained all the messages in the program and he has already translated them. I am now applying these changed to FlagStudio, to be released in a new French Version. The upgrade from III to IV comes from the addition of the mysterious final flag, which is only applied to flying vehicles.
I am not sure when these two new releases will be completed but it should be soon. Once they are done, they will be added to the Vice section in the Related category.
No Time for Modifying (17th February 2004)
Due to my current sleep pattern being offset somewhat and as I now have to get off the PC at about 5pm, I have hardly any time on the computer at all. I have not had time to try and fix my install of Myriad islands, which has corrupted on three of three re-installs now. I have not had chance to keep up to date with Opius and Viperman on the progress of Curveshire, there are a whole bunch of cars which I want to do handling for but cannot. I recently offered to help the GTA: Liberty City project by converting their path data and handling setups but I have not had the time to install the mod and so I have not done this EITHER! c{X¬(
GTAForums Skin Progress (17th February 2004)
I have been putting in the occasional half hour on this and it is very slowly coming together. It is just about ready for an initial colour scheme to be applied, I am thinking of making it into the new Old School for GTAForums. After that I intend to make it into a skin which can be released for people to use with any Invision v1.3 forum.
Illspirit created a test forum where I am currently testing the skin. It is set as the default so you can browse without registering. If you registered before January 2004 you will be able to sign into the test board and check the user control panel and so on. This forum thread is where you can leave comments, criticisms and suggestions about the skin.