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ShrimpWorks

// why am I so n00b?

Hmmmmm, long time no update. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy recently.

Last month, we released “UnWheel R5”, which seems to have become the (hopefully) final release. I’m pretty happy with it at the moment, all the major bugs are gone, multiplayer is working wonderfully and the online record system is churning records around at a mean rate (and those records still need a monthly rotation system applied, so still some work to be done there). I still haven’t decided if I want to do this all again in Unreal Torunament 2007 or not :).

Elsewhere, I’ve been playing around with DynaBar, and it’s grown a lot. The plugin system has been tweaked to allow better customisation options from the developer side, as well as having options added to improve the user interaction side of things. There are a whole crapload of other options available as well, multiple layers (supporting PNG graphics with alpha transparency), different scanline styles, text prefixes and suffixes, better caching options, etc. In addition, you can choose to have the background be a gradient blending between any two colours, horizontal or vertical, and you can create “groups”, which is a bunch of userbars animated (with fading/blending between bars), and they all remain fully dynamic. Speaking of dynamic, I’ve also added a whole load of plugins, from XFire, to more Last.FM options, to Battlefield 2 and TrackMania, and even RSS headlines and live game server status via Qstat.

I’ve put up a test system here as a sort of sandbox, so feel free to try out all the options and plugins, and if you have any suggestions or ideas for plugins, please let me know. In addition to the designer, there’s a browser available, which lets you easily build the animated groups mentioned above. Also, it all works with Internet Explorer now, which I didn’t bother fixing with the previous version (wasn’t meant to be such a “big” project :)). Source code package will be available as soon as some more testing is done.

In addition, I’ve been re-writing my online Dosage-powered comic viewer - Injector

  • again, this time it’s going fully “Web 2.0” (ZOMG!), so everything’s quite nice and quick. This project still needs a bit of work on the administration and installation side of things before it can see a release.

Aside from all that, I’ve also been slowly building a new UnrealZA site, using the Python-powered Django framework. It really is a wonderful thing. Please excuse me for a minute while I run away from a horde of crazy, twisted, Nevow fans (among others). Anyway, I’ll happily recommend Django any day of the week to anyone looking for a Python web framework.

I’ve also decided I don’t like the look of this site anymore, so I guess that’s another thing to go on my to-do list for the near future.

How kewlies is that - UnWheel has taken it’s rightful place as the #1 voted driving mod of 2004 (across all games supported by modDB). Hehehehe.

Might as well list all UnWheel’s achievements to date for the fun of it ;)

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 2 (UT2003):

  • 1st place, Best Non-FPS Mod
  • 1st place, Best Vehicle
  • 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 3 (UT2004):

  • 3rd place, Best Non-FPS Mod
  • 2nd place, Best Vehicle
  • 1st place, Best use of Karma Physics

Make Something Unreal Contest - Phase 4:

  • 7th place, Best Non-FPS Mod (can’t win em all ;-))

Make Something Unreal Contest - Grand Finals:

  • Finalist (results pending)

Other accolades and awards:

  • Bundled as one of 11 mods in the retail Unreal Tournament 2004: Editor’s Choice Edition.
  • 1st place in ModDB’s Mod of the Year - Driving category.
  • Awarded PC Zone UK’s Essential Choice, and featured on cover DVD twice (Sept + Oct 2004).
  • Featured Mod on FilePlanet’s homepage (EC/MSU Phase 4 version).
  • Featured on several magazines’ cover disks throughout the world, including UK PC Gamer (Dec 2004).

Not too shabby, hey?