a purple future

reminds me of a program we had in school in like 1990 or something that was a solar system simulator where you could alter orbital paths and the like. basically we would just make jupiter go 500% faster and adjust the angle so that it homeruns all the other planets off into nothingness. as amusing as it seems, i'm not sure the 15 minutes of bouncing the moon off of middle america or hurling venus into the sun that i would get out of it warrants a $10 purchase

of course it won't, because notch is programming it himself

that's a "fake" nether that's part of the server tools Tabacco uses. the "real" nether is being implemented into the next update, and i'm sure they're not compatible.

so apparently 1.6 will have working Nether in multiplayer. so i'm sure that will break some stuff.

i haven't played the co-op yet and i'm unemployed so i'm good with pretty much any timeframe should someone need a partner.

yes, if only...

i think the malware thing is from the anti-copy stuff they had on cds for a while? the hardware is when they had a firmware update for ps3 that broke functionality for some third party peripherals.

also if one of you jerks feels like helping me this is taking forever

yeah i totally wrecked your garden. IN THE NAME OF PROGRESS

i already knocked down as much of the wheat field as I could (spawn protected). actually to even build in that area we're going to need an admin because one of the corners is off limits. also nobody really gave any ideas on design. the dropdown idea is cool but maybe impractical. regardless, i'd be willing to work on a skyscraper and we could figure things out from there. except i have the flu and a fever. when i feel good enough to get out of bed i can start working on it.

those screenshots are making my eyes bleed but it sounds interesting enough. i'll give it a shot update: i accidentally killed my mentor thinking my mouse was stuck. the game has crashed twice. i can't read the text. sorry, but no thanks

yeah it wasn't working for me earlier either.

god i hope so. I mean I know there are probably plenty of things going on behind the scenes that plebes like us wouldn't understand, but the lackadaisical approach to doing anything kind of stopped being a viable strategy once they quit their day jobs and formed a company. it's like "thanks for funding some other projects we wanted to do, we might finish the thing you actually payed for at some point down the road." if the mod stuff IS also server-side, I won't have much to complain about anymore

i don't buy the reason why pistons aren't in yet- saying they're trying to work out bugs. i don't care! it seems like they work pretty well already. if they don't crash the game, that's good enough for me.

because how useful is it then? i'm not going to carry around 6 maps. just like how nobody uses the stupid clock or compass because they're not very useful

PS3 friend code exchange thread coming up!

well squid division and i found out some pretty neat things about carts and powered tracks. i think the best place for a central station would be to tear out the unused wheat farm near spawn, there's a perfect area there to build a tower. as for how to make the trains work from there, squid devised a pretty clever track/chute system. i'm not clever enough to try to implement that kind of thing but i'll help build it this could end up being pretty cool. i'll be on later tonight to putz around if anybody wants to do some planning/building

that reminds me, i re-did the train from spawn to new haven using powered rails. it's now super reliable and as far as i can tell, just about as fast as the previous version. as far as making a large central station, that spawn station would be a pretty reasonable location. there's plenty of room to excavate if memory serves, and the kind of launcher i used there takes up practically zero space. the area on the ground literally behind spawn wouldn't be a bad place either. we should probably just get acclimated to the fact that train travel is somewhat impractical for fast travel and should be used for scenic routes or short trips. the nether network works better for long distance.

i actually didn't notice the ultimately those are pretty minor points but in a game made by folks pretty much known for creating near-perfect games, they kind of stand out. I also agree about the load screens. there was at least one point where I ended up cutting GLaDOS off mid-sentence by accident by triggering a loading screen and that strikes me as some kind of failure. it'll be interesting to see if Valve ultimately patches some of the things people complain about like the static loading screens or the lack of a proper level select (why on earth can't you save while playing with the commentary on? that makes no damn sense to me). I hope they do

you can't put tracks on the inside of a portal. as for maybe launching one into the portal and landing on the other side, i have no idea.

from what i understand

i've started building a nether train to it. i've dug out the path and it takes just about a minute to walk the distance. next time i'm on i'll build the terminals and lay the track. i think ultimately it will take 30-45 seconds to travel by train. the start of the tunnel is roughly between the stargate and mysterious desert gates in the nether, there's a sign

as far as i've been able to tell, you can't get achievements in commentary mode. even worse than that, there's no saving so you have to do entire chapters at a time and if you die you have to go back to the beginning of a level (not chapter) instead of a checkpoint. also there's not that many commentary nodes and even then half of them aren't very interesting.

i open it with winrar and save terrain.png to my desktop. takes like 15 seconds. after that i open that and my outdated custom terrain.png and copy and paste whatever has been changed. save it, drop it in the custom texture folder, overwriting the last version, and go. it's like 5 minutes tops unless i decide to change any of the new textures.

ah see my only real exposure to him is through Extras and the Gervais podcast so he hadn't really worn thin on me.