In FF-related news:

I've been working on ff_push a bunch and it's comin' together quite nicely. I'm working with an old industrial theme at the moment (red brick and warehouse textures) and it's a nice little distraction. Depending on what we've got for this week's media update, I may polish up ff_spirit a bit more for your viewing pleasure.

The reaction to ff_bases has been extremely positive, so that's cool and what not, like that time Jon and I killed a hooker.

Joe Webloggs time.

After waiting 10 days on OCUK's returns service, they sent me the same RAM back, claimed there's nothing wrong with it and charged me ~£17 for the privilege. I've been keeping track of the OCUK forums and now know of several other Nforce2 motherboard users that have ordered the same RAM and had the same problems. The other person that had his RMA dealt with at the same time as me also got his memory back and was charged the same, too.

Now, if this was an incompatibility issue and the incompatibility was clearly stated on OCUK's website, I'd just suck it up, accept responsibility for the error and then move on. However, OCUK's site states:

"GSKILL 2-3-3-6SERIES Dual Channel Edition PC-3200 memory is specifically designed for high frequency operation on Intel 865/875 and Nvidia Nforce 2/Nforce 3/Nforce4chipset based motherboards. Through the use of G.SKILL"

.. and my old Crucial RAM runs fine through memtest, SuperPi, Prime95 and any other test you could care to throw at it (pretty sure my original instability was caused by a combination of heat and page thrashing when I had several applications open, not the actual RAM) so it's obviously not my system. So, yeah. OCUK are great... until you actually require some customer / technical support. I've always wondered what people were talkin' about when they slated OCUK, now I know. I'm now almost £100 down and still don't have working memory. Awesome. It's a real goddamn pain working with several applications open and only 512MB of memory. It's affecting my productivity a fair amount. It also takes forever to start up HL2 to test!

Wait, daddy, no, come on.. put it down. I didn't mean it, ok, it was just a goof.

So, where did jon go? I bet he went to that rootbeer orgy over there near the waterfall. That's just a guess though, because when I was at the "Orgy by the Falls 2005" I saw him playin' roulette.

Anywho, I know that you've all been hiring those damn paparazzi people to come chase me down so that you can get a glimpse of what I've been doing for the past few weeks, but let me just tell you that I found the cure all for my problems at the bottom of every empty beer can I've thrown away since sometime in early May.

If any of you from Texas found yourself floating down the Guadalupe over Memorial Day weekend.. I was the naked guy that was being arrested for trying to reenact that scene from... Well nevermind. Goin' down the river was always fun before, but it's so much more fun when your coolers are full of beer. So, what does this have to do with the progress of the maps Jon and I were working on? Good question, Aguado..

I won't be able to get back to working on them until next week when I find myself back on campus, but Jon has been working on them lately. We keep starting new maps and all of that, but the real problem is with all of the miscreants who keep trying to take my kids away because they seem to think I was serious when I wagered my family against their 14 kilos of cocaine on that crazy day of March poker fun.

Well... I've solved my bone problem. It turns out it was the max script file I was using to export the .max -> .smd and everything I was doing [minus the max script export thing] was correct (for the most part). After manually exporting, everything works fine. So, I've gone through and made some animations and such (pretty much exactly like Valve's floor turret) and all I have to do now is add code to make the Sentry Gun do what it was born to do.

I've been fiddling with Max UVMapping & Skinning for the last few days, making a prop and learning to compile props etc. Rebo helped me out some, and I now have a pipe with a photoshop-filter-tastic placeholder skin, which surprisingly looks ~okish. I need the prop before I can put bases screenshots up (as it's a prominent part of the bases yard); that's the only hold-up for a media update. I just need to compile & tweak it now :)

Well well... I see Defrag has taken a liking to his blog er I mean Dev Journals. :)

As for me, I haven't made any tangible progress this week or over the holiday weekend. I've been playing w/ the sentry gun model trying to get the bones set up and working correctly in game. Sev did have it set up somewhat but a couple of things were really messed up so it needed to be redone (sorry Sev!). So, here we are a week later and I'm still futzing around with the model in max. There's got to be some hidden setting somewhere as my bone system is set up EXACTLY like HL2's floor turret gun (the guns you get to drag around with you on the awesome ant lion levels) and I've got the weighting all set up perfect. The parent/child hierarchy is there too... it just... doesn't work.

I think what I'm going to have to end up doing is scrubbing sev's model ( :( ) and throwing Valve's floor turret in there for the time being because at least we know that works. That way, I can get all of the sg activities set up and then hopefully some day we'll have a weapon modeler who knows max better than I do (i.e., pretty much anybody who's ever messed with max before, heh) and he/she can get our sg boned (heh!) correctly.

Let's see. The only thing that is missing now are some weird spellings and a song lyric. I <3 you Defrag. Don't hate.

Oh, I hope I don't come off as hating on Sev because I love the guy. Sev, call me.