Kart not pushk self!
I almost forgot to drop entrecards today! Yep, it's 8:45 and I literally just got done, I spent the entire day playing Team Fortress 2, and during the breaks I worked on re-doing our gaming community's website.
Many moons ago, my wife and I were addicted to an 2D platform-based MMORPG originating from Korea, called "MapleStory". I'm not even going to do them the service of linking to them, because if you're visiting my site and reading what I have to say, then I count you as a friend - and friends don't let friends play MapleStory. Nexon America, despite intermittent periods of trying really really hard, are basically a terrible game provider.
My wife and I have literally spent several thousands of dollars on imaginary shit over the years, and then finally the problem with cheating cost me some very powerful equipment. Basically, the cheaters were crashing channels in order to duplicate items, and under certain circumstances it can cause players to lose items. I lost some, and in the in-game marketplace it would cost me in excess of three hundred dollars to replace them. Nexon were absolutely zero help in getting it back, stating that they had no way of knowing if I'd just given them away and was lying about it.
Discounting the time we spent on this game - 16 hours a day wasn't uncommon through winter when there wasn't too much else to do, after I figured out how to use a controller with MapleStory - there's also the amount of money you can find yourself spending on NX.
The money we'd spent on imaginary items in MapleStory could have gone to any number of better things, so we stopped playing. Lately we've been playing games like TF2, because you buy it once and it doesn't cost you any more. Valve are also quite good at answering email if something doesn't work right. New content for TF2 comes out periodically, despite the fact Valve really doesn't receive any extra compensation for this (though I bet the free weekends and such don't hurt sales any).
Our MapleStory guild grew into quite a tight-knit group of friends, so today I decided to resuscitate the dying website and make it so it was no longer centered around MapleStory. We now have several sections, and I copied a few of my old Maple threads over and started hacking on things like templates and stuff. I'm really starting to learn my way around PHPBB3, which is awesome because it's actually not really that bad as far as "please hack me" software goes.
So yeah, that's what I did all day. :\
Team Fortress 2 - Heavy update
I really can't stress enough how good a game Team Fortress 2 is if you're into fun, laid-back PC first person shooters. Where games such as Counter Strike are very much skill and experience dependent - newer players are often thrown in the deep end and spend much of their time in spectator mode between rounds - Team Fortress 2 lends itself very well to beginners.
It can't be said in any uncertain terms: it's entirely possible to suck balls at TF2 and still have an immense amount of fun with it. TF2 is a really simplified game, but there are so many nuances with the classes that you're always uncovering new tricks. It's like a comic FPS equivalent of chess, hours to learn, years to master.
We were playing it for a little bit last night, Valve just released the Heavy update which came with new maps and an entirely new game mode. That's another thing I love about TF2, even after you bought it, Valve is still adding more crap to it. I'm actually surprised there was no free weekend to accompany this update.
But yeah, if you have Team Fortress 2, think about adding me to Steam friends. I don't play that often, but when I do, the more the merrier.
Trackmania Dedicated Server XMLRPC API
So yesterday we set up our second public dedicated server for Trackmania Nations Forever, using the tracks found in the Blue Campaign included with the game. It immediately became quite popular, and I realised that we could use a public server as an advertising vessel for our game hosting services.
So I sat down and tried to figure out how one writes a plugin for Trackmania servers (since I've been playing with writing Valve Server Plugins for Counterstrike: Source lately too), and after about an hour of research I decided just to download Aseco and look at it's makeup anyway.
Well, Aseco and other Trackmania "plugins" aren't really plugins at all. They're PHP scripts that just interact with the server via XMLRPC, and not much more. I didn't really feel like setting up MySQL-based stats just so I could toss in an advertisement, so I started looking at the remote control examples included in the trackmania server distribution.
Actually, once you spend about 5 minutes looking at it, the XMLRPC interface for it is really really simple. I'm considering building a simple control panel interface to go with our main Sabrienix control panel, that will allow customers to add/remove tracks, and change other settings on the fly through a web browser. It's really that easy.
If you're into TMNF, search for "Moodoo" in the server name, and check out our dedicated server. 
