April 2004 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
New Site Area (16th April 2004)
Over the past couple of days I have been putting together the beginnings of a links page. This is something I have wanted to do for a long, long time. I will only include sites which are made by actual game modifiers, instead of the glory-seeking kids that set up a site and harvest modifications made elsewhere just to be kewl. We have to take the power back from these leeches!
New Cars Soon! (11th April 2004)
I managed to catch Sin5k4 today and he gave me the download links and specifications for all the cars he has made since I last did the handling for him. I managed to do new setups for all these new cars but he has not yet had time to add the new handling to the released versions. Because of this, the cars are all listed in the Workshop section of the GTA Vice City area for now.
Car Pages Upgraded (11th April 2004)
In the modification areas for GTA 3 and Vice, I have now applied the named anchor method so that you can link directly to specific entries on each page. To retrieve a link for the Nismo Skyline GTR for GTA 3, you would go to the GTA 3 section, then click through to the Racing category. Scroll down to the Nismo Skyline GTR and you will see that its name is underlined. By clicking on this, the page will jump directly to this entry on the page and you can copy the URL from the address bar and give it to other people so they can be linked directly to this entry.
I am thinking that this will be very useful as it means websites which want to host files which are hosted here can simply use the link from the name of the car to direct people straight to it.
Additionally, I have re-sized all the images which were larger than the 1024×768 size and made new thumbnails so that the car pages look neater and so the level of detail you get from the pictures is consistent. Unfortunately, I lost the Impreza WRC screenshot for GTA 3 during this process!
Curveshire Progress Resumed! (7th April 2004)
Thanks to the recent addition of Jcab42 to the team, Curveshire has been given a new lease of life! The hour or two I am able to snatch on each week has been going into directing the efforts of the team to release a 0.01 beta type release, which will be playable but rather basic.
You can keep up to date with Curveshire by visiting the topic on GTAForums.com - if you are registered there, you can leave your own views, support and so on.
Forced Absence #3 (7th April 2004)
I have still not got regular computer time, as you can probably tell from the lack of updates and the complete standstill in the site upgrading I had planned. The situation is getting a little better as I have been tirelessly doing good deeds and keeping myself out of sight. Lots of lonely meals in my bedroom staring at the television…not how I want to live.
Other changes I have made are the complete removal of borders around images and I am testing out a new ways of displaying the information at the bottom of each page.
Site Updates (7th April 2004)
As we are now into the second quarter of 2004, I have added the new article collection page you are reading now. I will only add new areas once I actually have news to report in that new quarter, which is why the first article on this page is from the sixth and not the first of the month. You may also have noticed that I have updated the projects list in the news portal to reflect the reduced computer time and the increase in activity with Curveshire.