Topics

121

General chat / Christmas lists

« on: December 11, 2009 »

What are you guys all hoping for this Christmas?

I feel that I have everything I need so there's nothing on my Christmas list. I just want my family and friends to have a great time this year. It would be cool to know what you are all hoping for though, it might give me some ideas

122

General chat / +10 Programs -10

« on: December 04, 2009 »

My new PC arrives tomorrow, for a bit of fun I want to make a list of 10 things I should and should not install on it.

Here's what I've come up with.

Things to install:

• Zero Hour Generals/Shockwave/Hamachi
• Visualstudio
• Freebasic
• Notepad++
• Ps2yabasic
• ICQ client
• AVG
• Irfanview
• Filezilla
• Firefox

---------------

Things not to install:

• Kaspersky Internet Security. (I've had enough of it!)
• Norton
• Mcaffee
• Windows live messenger
• Blitz Basic
• Cobra
• Fbide
• Devc
• Anything by Bits.
• Lavasoft adaware

123

General chat / Intro-Inferno gone :(

« on: December 04, 2009 »

I just went to hae a look and it's been taken offline, maybe Druid removed it or maybe there's another reason, all the subdomains of II are down too

124

General chat / Arcade score bug fixed

« on: December 03, 2009 »

I finally tracked down the broken query that was stopping the arcade scores from being saved, you can now play the arcade and save your scores.. Sorry it took a while, it was quite low on my list of things to do tbh.

125

General chat / UK online PC retailers

« on: November 29, 2009 »

I am interested in knowing what ones you trust, especially if you have used them and especially if they allow you to customise the specifications

126

General chat / Digital Main Event 1991

« on: November 20, 2009 »

Big thanks to NZO for pointing me at this link, it's footage of the Digital main event in 1991. Can you believe I was 18 years old then! I attended this party and it was great fun to see the video of it and see a lot of my old friends all looking really young

http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/The_Main_Event_%2791

If you go forward to about 22:46 into the video you'll see a very handsome young man in a white tee shirt (see attached shot), that's me that is!

Banger of the Punishers and Nuke of Anarchy are taking the piss out of one of my groupmates, Steinar of Sepultura who'd drunk about 12 bottles of newcastle brown ale in 3 hours and spent the rest of the party in the toilet talking to the hand dryer and vomiting.

The poor guy they grabbed and shoved in the cubicle was Hawkeye, a friend of mine who spent that night with me in Rotherham police station sleeping (trying to) in the waiting room.


[edit] - The gfx comp results on Exotica are wrong.. Watchman didn't get 4th place, it was me

127

General chat / Does anyone have this file?

« on: November 10, 2009 »

I have been looking for it for about 4 years.

It's Chris Huelsbecks' wonderful music for R-Type title screen on the Amiga... If anyone has the module that would be great, if not, the ADF would be fine and I'll dissassemble the fucker.

(I do have a copy of the original disk but it's totally corrupt after being kept in the garage for years!).

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBJ0bzB2_FU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBJ0bzB2_FU</a>

128

General chat / SMf 2.0 RC 2 is out

« on: November 09, 2009 »

I'll be upgrading the forum in the next couple of days, hopefully it will fix the bugs!

We may have to get rid of this theme if it's not supported by 2.0 though.

129

Challenges & Competitions / HALLOWEEN COMP 2009 VOTING!

« on: November 01, 2009 »

Halloween Challenge Voting!

Well, entries were a bit thin on the ground this time but we have enough to have a vote!

The demos were pretty cool actually so I think you'll have some troubles choosing your favourites. This time please choose your Two favourites. There's no point in having three votes this time, there aren't enough!

On a plus point, there's no excuse for not trying these four intros and choosing your favourite two.

Extended thanks go to those people who supported the challenge and also to everyone who will vote.

Voting Rules

• Please do not vote for yourself.
• You must choose two things.
• This poll runs for 6 days.
• If first place is tied there will be a vote-off

130

General chat / Happy Halloween!

« on: November 01, 2009 »

I hope everyone is having a great 31st of October.

I love this time of year, there are several birthdays in my family, there is usually a Halloween challenge going on here and Christmas is only just around the corner..

I've just had a real blast today, I spent the day playing Forza Motorsports 3 on the Xbox, watching the four great entries to the Halloween challenge and now I am watching some spooky film called Ghost Ship.

I remember watching the film a few years ago with my brother, it's a pretty sick film but it brings back nice memories.

ANyway, whatever you are doing, have a happy halloween!

131

Projects / Paradox Supremacy Remake

« on: October 25, 2009 »

I've given the code to Widowmaker too because he wanted to adapt it into something else so maybe you'll see this used in anger again

132

Challenges & Competitions / [SPOOKY] Spooky Castle

« on: October 20, 2009 »

Here's my entry for the Halloween challenge.

It's kind of simple but it was good fun.

Code: Shockwave
GFX + Animation : Shockwave
Music : Psyco and Diablo
Font : Rack

Enjoy!

133

General chat / Another reason to dislike microsoft.

« on: October 13, 2009 »

An Email I got today from our hosts basically showing the lack of support Microsoft offer it's (shit) products, how insecure they are and finally don't worry we don't use frontpage extensions for anything here.

Dear Nick,

We constantly review the software offered on our hosting packages to ensure our hosting platform remains secure.

When new software is released, we are often able to upgrade without any impact to the sites that you host. This ensures that we are able to patch any bug fixes identified by the software vendor.

Unfortunately, FrontPage Extensions have not been updated since June 2006. This was the date that Microsoft officially discontinued support for the software.

In the last 12 months, the number of sites that have been defaced (alternative content uploaded to a site by an unknown third party) on a global level has increased considerably. This concerns us as there are no updates that can be applied to combat this.

We are therefore proposing the removal of FrontPage Extensions from our shared, reseller and premium hosting servers in January 2010. We have posted on the community forum asking for comments from our customers.

If you are using FrontPage Extensions, we would ask that you register and post on the thread so that we can help further. There are alternative options which have been explained on the forum.

Any customers not using FrontPage Extensions will not be affected by the removal of the software.

Yours sincerely,
XILO

134

GFX & sound / Halloween backdrop

« on: October 11, 2009 »

I worked on a silhouette for my Halloween deme, decided to do something slightly different for it so here it is if anyone wants it.

135

Challenges & Competitions / HALLOWEEN COMP 2009!

« on: October 03, 2009 »

HALLOWEEN COMPETITION 2009

!TIME TO MAKE SOMETHING SPOOKY!

Soon it will be Halloween again and it has become a little bit of a tradition on this forum to run a halloween challenge.. You can take your inspiration from all kinds of things like horror movies, ghost stories, haunted houses and even pagan traditions.

There's tons of this stuff out there to be inspired by.

So this time the challenge is to make a demo or intro with a Halloween theme and the good news is that thanks to the generous sponsorship of the forums by some of our members that there is a cash prize on offer this time too!


So time to get inspired, watch some old dracular films, listen to thriller, read some HP Lovecraft, run around the house with a white sheet over your head, Halloween is almost here again so make something spooky!

  Here are the rules!     

• Your Demo must be associated with some element of Halloween.
• You can use any platform that is compatible with windows XP+Vista.
• You may write something for web browsers as long as it works in IE7 or Chrome or FF3 (or all!)
• Wild (Video / Animated) entries are allowed.
• Procedural graphics entries are allowed as long as it is one single file <16kb no animations allowed, file must not permanently write on hard drive.
• The following emulators are welcome: Vice, Winuae, Saint, PS2 Yabasic
• Please give credit if you use ripped sound/gfx, or even better credit the original artist.
• Please write something new for the challenge, no previously released stuff.
• Do not use ripped routines. (dlls, libs, fmod, sdl, frameworks etc are fine but say what you used please!).
• One entry per person maximum.
• Entries to be posted in this forum please with the title [SPOOKY] entry name
• Entries may be posted between NOW and Midnight of [30th October 2009]
• The winner [S?] will be decided by a poll of forum users
• If 1st place is tied there will be a vote-off to decide the winner.
• Late entries will not be counted for voting.
• Please PM any correspondance regarding rules to me, don't discuss them here such posts will be removed and not answered.
• Please include a screenshot of your entry in your post.
• Please only post finished work, if you update your entry the final one will be voted on.
• After the submission deadline You may NOT post ANY further attachments to final or other versions of your entry ANYWHERE on this forum until voting has closed.
• You may post a video of the entry along with the binaries (useful if you use shaders etc).
• Prize money is by Paypal only. No other forms will be discussed.

Here are the prizes! 

• 1st Place  £20 - Sig - 15 Karma
• 2nd Place - £10 - Sig - 10 Karma
• 3rd Place -  Sig - 5 Karma
• All entries get 1 Karma

  Good Luck! 

136

General chat / Showcase, please read this :)

« on: September 26, 2009 »

I have nearly completely restored the files for the showcase, there are just eight missing files, here are the eight we need to completely restore the showcase;


Wire - Hellfire (need full version)
Ledmania - Ninogenio
Plasmagirls - Optimus
Low Strez by Praecor (Need Final version)

Led Cubes - Hellfire
Led Tronic - Vain
golden_clock - rbz
perlinraytracedsphere - optimus
time_bend - hellfire
0.17% - Low-streZ - Praecor

The sooner we have these files, the sooner the showcase can come back and we can get the challenges started again!

If you have any of these missing files, please reply and attach them.

Cheers.

137

General chat / To Hostpapa with love

« on: September 20, 2009 »

RE: www.nicksimpsonx.com

Dear Hostpapa,

I really loved the idea of your brand, the idea to let Papa take care of everything, the Green energy, the 99% uptime you promised, the unlimited storage space, unlimited databases. I was so impressed with all these marvellous things that you offered me that I was happy to hand over my money and also to trust you with my precious websites which had taken several years to build up.

Sure, they were not commercial websites, they were merely communities that were free of charge for everyone where new programmers could get a helping hand, I even told the members of the sites how great, helpful, fast and reliable our spiffy new green hosting was and how the lag we had experienced before on our old server was a thing of the past.

Everyone was so grateful towards you, nobody even seemed to mind when SQL crashed so often on your site, I did point this out to you of course and you told me that it was my scripts that were maxing out 15 simultanious connections, I wondered how difficult that must be to do and I estimated that I'd probably need several hundred people browsing my forums at once to cause the problem but Papa knows best of course and who knows, maybe my complete memberlist logged on to the site whenever I turned my back on it.

Even recently after all the downtime some of my members told me to give you a last chance and I did. That was before someone on the same server as me allegedly ran a script which went haywire and completely wiped out my websites.

I would like to congratulate you on the timely manner that you answered my politely worded support tickets, it was perfectly reasonable of you to make me wait 3 days for a response to such trifling requests as "my site is offline and I can't access anything, cpanel is showing no files", why would I be concerned anyway, my communities only took years to establish, it speaks volumes of your service that the directory structure was wiped out and I could not even put up a place holder page to reassure my visitors.. In fact, several weeks later the directory structure is still wiped out.

Your online chat needs a mention too, I've been on this planet for 37 years and I have never met such an inept bunch of technicians and I just wonder if there is actually a question that they know the right answer to. They fobbed me off at every opportunity, as did the feckless idiot that I spoke to on the phone.

You should be commended that at no point has anyone in your organisation offered an apology for the dataloss, nobody has offered me any help.

So, I am left to sum things up, I know that a refund is out of the question, I have google and I've read how you treat your customers so I will tell you what you have already been told no doubt a few thousand times by your customers.

Your service is terrible, your tech support people are stupid and do not care, you couldn't care less about your customers data, your servers are oversold, slow and uptime I would say is less than 90% (and you cant argue with this point because it is my true experience).

Thankfully I have taken my business elsewhere now so I invite you to take your environmentally friendly hosting, stick it on the end of a (green) pole and shove it so far up your asshole that you can clean your teeth with it.

You can take this as a request to cancel my plan (www.nicksimpsonx.com) and take this as an assurance that myself and at least some of the 1200 members of my two communities have a great opinion of your utterly unprofessional rabble and will be writing appropriate reviews to warn other unsuspectiong people away from you.

Yours Sincerely,

Nick Simpson

138

General chat / Plea for challenge winners..

« on: September 20, 2009 »

I am going to restore the showcase in the next fortnight, I'll be posting a list of missing challenge winners before I do so, I hope that any missing files can be clawed back from you guys

139

General chat / Cracktros Are Back.

« on: September 17, 2009 »

As was speculated a while ago by Widowmaker and Myself, there were rumours abound that Razor 1911 and Skid Row were two teams working on cracktros.

The speculation was that one day crack intros would again become part of the exe file on the PC.

This happened today, Skid Row released a game with a built in cracktro;

http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53849

To me this is utopia, I don't condone piracy but I do condone those lovely little intros because they formed part of my adolescence and it's good to know that some of the old guys can still remember the times of the C64 and Amiga and want to preserve old traditions.

Hats off to Skid Row.

140

General chat / Portal Is Partly Back

« on: September 16, 2009 »

Hey ho, well work continues on restoring the site.. I have partially restored the portal, mainly because I am sure that not having it there was hurting our page rank.

The portal was a large project, it had a content management system and many sections.
Even though the layout looks the same, it's been extensively re-written. The site as it was will not appear again.

I am deciding how best to impliment the showcase, this is quite a tricky part of the portal and then I need to make the content management system for admins to add things and administrate the shoutbox etc.

There are still a multitude of things that need fixing on this website, I am working through them, if you feel like I am ignoring your request, just keep reminding me and bully me into it.. The chances are that I have innocently forgotten your request with everything else that is going on right now.

Please put any bug reports in the bug thread, I will look at that every day.

And now, feel free to go to www.dbfinteractive.com and have a look at the new portal.

I still need to brighten the colours up a touch but what is there at the moment functions well.