June 2005 in the Life of Ben (Blog)
GTA 2 Tutorial Updates (24th June 2005)
Chris “Pyro” Hockley and I have supplied a great many scripting tutorials for the tutorials, technical specifications and guides area of Project Cerbera. Today I finished formatting and editing a bunch of updates he made to the existing guides.
We have added a new one about building and coding mission garages and the objects list now has a description for every item.
20th Birthday (24th June 2005)
On 2005-06-27 I will be twenty years old. That’s a fifth of a century! I might be getting GTA San Andreas as one of my presents, so I have been trying to finish up as many of my other projects as possible before I get it. Hence the addition of Pyro’s tutorials at midnight and this morning.
CFG Studio (20th June 2005)
I have been working on a new program which can edit handling data from GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas. The program can already open these files, automatically detect which edition of GTA the file is for, read all the data lines regardless of the vehicle names used or the order of the lines, read all the special data regardless of the order it is given in and organise it into grids. It then lets the user edit this data like a spreadsheet and save it back to the file.
Several people have been testing the program in different editions of the game and have had no problems at all. I have taken great care to make sure the files CFG Studio generates meet the format GTA requires. You can take part in testing by visiting the CFG Studio development thread on GTAForums. You can downloading the latest pre-release version from my developments folder - the file will be called something like cfgstudio(0-0-0038).rar. If it has a bigger number at the end that means it is a newer version, so check back from time to time.
Tutorial Updates (20th June 2005)
I have been working with some other contributors on updating my GTA San Andreas Handling Definition to include their findings. Feel free to send your own findings so that this handling definition will become the best reference document for handling available on the Web. You could even use CFG Studio to edit the file while you are testing. c{8¬)
If you find any faults, ommissions, broken links, spelling and grammar errors, pages which do not pass the XHTML and CSS reports available from the bottom of the page or any problems in anything on the site, please send them in! All your e-mails are read and I always fix the problems.
MultiSlayer Railway (11th June 2005)
Pyro, the only known modifier to get trains working in user-made GTA 2 levels, received MultiSlayer 4.5 beta 4 from me yesterday (current public release of MultiSlayer) and will be adding the trains tomorrow. The railway is an underground subway which can be driven around a bit like in GTA 3. There is a single railway line with a pavement to the outside, so you can avoid the trains. The track is electrified so if you stand on it you will get killed but you can drive on it. Will be fun to race the trains between the stations!
I have tested beta 4 with Elypter and although you cannot see where you are going while in the tunnel it is still quite fun and makes for a dramatic escape route.
I Just <p>’ed Myself! (11th June 2005)
Rather than there being forests of <br /> tags in the pages forcing line breaks, I now use the paragraph element. I made the change using a series of multiple file replacement operations in my TextStudio editor and then checked the source code for a random sample of pages. There were some errors, so I ran some more multiple file operations, checked some more files and went through that cycle a few times. I expect there are still some errors but it takes a long time to check the 172 diverse pages currently on this site!
Accessify Forums (11th June 2005)
I recently registered at Accessify Forum, which is a community of web developers and enthusiasts dedicated to making better websites. So far the only topic I have made is Site Critiques > Project Cerbera and it has gotten pretty good reviews so far. Using the <p> element was one of the suggestions, as well as making the footer links contrast with their background more.
Recovered From Virus (1st June 2005)
I have now just about fully recovered from the nasty viral infection I caught a few days ago. Still having to drink lots of water to stop myself feeling dryed out but there’s no headaches or queasyness any more.
During the whole thing my Mum stood by me...on the other side of the toilet door while I was puking. Took me to the doctor’s, reminded me to take medicine and generally looked after me as a mother should. Awwww. *sniffle*
Project Cerbera Redesigned! (1st June 2005)
Unbelievably, converting the 171 pages which currently make up Project Cerbera took less than three days - I was expecting it to take months! The new design uses muted browns and rich reds to provide colours which do not tire the eye when reading. Main content is displayed as black text on a white background for best readability with sidebar and main links changing appearence slighty if they have been visited.
Returning From Retirement (1st June 2005)
Since GTA San Andreas will be released quite soon (around June 10th for the UK) I decided to come out of retirement and do some vehicle handling. Having done Fragdieb’s first Neural I decided that the new one he was making deserved handling. He has made a big development with the new car, called the Neuralite. It is a smaller size, extremely low and has a LOT of detail with fully modelled suspension and engine. You can get it from the GTA Vice City > Sports page.
Game Hunter Collaboration (1st June 2005)
Yesterday I started working with Sektor to create a new interface for his highly sucessful GTA 2 Game Hunter. You can keep track of our progress and give your own views via the development thread on G! Forums. Here is the first development screenshot of an interface I designed yesterday:
MultiSlayer v4.5 BETA (1st June 2005)
After a fair few weeks of private testing with a small group of dedicated gamers, I have released the beta edition of version 4.5 and so the MultiSlayer level for GTA 2 multiplayer is now available for public beta testing. The final public release should be somewhen this month, depending on how long it takes to finish the map poster for people for print off. A preliminary version of this is included with the beta in PNG format.