Scourge Release Info
Posted on Thursday, July 26, 2007 at 5:21 pm
(Cross-posted from the forum thread. Please leave comments/questions there.)
Alright, guys, here’s the deal. Most of you, if you have half a brain, should probably have been expecting something like this for awhile. But it’s not as bad as you may think.
By now it has probably become obvious that Scourge is no longer one of my priorities. There are many reasons for this, but there are two that are most important. First, I simply don’t have all that much free time anymore, and what free time I do have, I’d quite honestly rather spend it doing other things. And second, the game – both developing and playing – is simply not fun for me anymore. The whole reason I created DK, and later Scourge, is because at the time I wanted to have fun playing a web game but couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. So I made my own. But it’s just no longer fun. And the whole reason for making a game is to have fun with it. When it is no longer fun, it no longer has a purpose.
That being said, I have spent a LOT of time working on it, and y’all have spent a LOT of time playing it, doing mods for the previous game, waiting for the release of this one, etc. So I don’t want to waste all that time and effort. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few weeks debating what exactly I should do. I could kill it altogether. I could force myself to finish it, charge people for it, and still probably decide I’m sick of it in a few months anyway. I could relinquish all rights to it, toss it into the public domain, and let people have their way with it. None of those are really the right way to go about it, though.
So here’s my decision.
I’m going to package up what I have, and release Scourge as it currently exists, for free. It will be under the same license terms I planned for it all along, and all or part of lib.php will be encrypted to prevent people from changing/deleting the copyright. There will be no installer except for a standard-issue .SQL file, nor will there be a control panel. Those up to the challenge will be able to install it, mod it, do whatever they want to it. I will even provide some sort of support/help for it here, if you have any questions about how things work under Scourge. Finally, I will make a Scourge version of the DK Mod Index, where those who do manage to make mods/fixes for the game can release them.
I reserve the right to possibly revisit or revive Scourge in the future, though that seems pretty unlikely at this point. If I ever get laid off and have nothing better to do, you never know. And if I do ever manage to make it any more complete than it is, I also reserve the right to start charging money for it. I’m going to release what I have under the “beta” version heading, so it’ll basically mean “maybe not free forever, but at least free for the foreseeable future.”
Ok, that’s all I got for you. I’ll be working on getting the package together this weekend, probably, and getting everything all ready to go. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’ll answer what I can.
1 Comment
Harry Potter spoiler alert!!!!111one
Posted on Wednesday, July 18, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I haven’t read the book. I have no interest in reading the book. Something about post-pubescent young people running around with wands generally makes me afraid I’m going to end up meeting Chris Hansen or something. But damn, do I want to spoil it for everyone else. So here is my highly enlightened guess about what’s going to happen.
Harry will shoot Ron, then Ron will shoot Harry.
Then Voldemort will enter and get shot by Ron.
Then Hermione will come in and get shot by Harry, Ron and Voldemort multiple times.
P.S. Then two cops will read the book and shoot each other.
I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going to happen.
7 Comments
New theme. Finally.
Posted on Saturday, July 7, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I’m pretty sure that was the longest I’ve ever gone without changing themes on the site. According to the last “new theme” post it was June 17, 2006 when I released Twist. So it’s been coming up on 13 months with one theme. Simply amazing!
But now I’m releasing my new one onto the world, entitled “Purgatorio.” This has been rolled out on both the blog and the forums simultaneously. Not only that, but I also upgraded Threads to 7.1.1 at the same time. Damn, I’m good!
And… um… that’s pretty much it.
7 Comments
The Alienware Case: Thoughts on Installation
Posted on Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Another day, another $400 spent on a case that I may or may not actually need. But hey, at least it’s gorgeous.
So now that I actually have the thing in my possession, and have put things into it, I’ve got a few thoughts on how the whole process went.
First and foremost, there is no instruction manual to be found – despite the big (but completely empty) box-inside-a-box that (I’m guessing) is where Alienware normally hides the mouse/keyboard/etc when you buy a full system. Granted, anyone who even has to think twice about dropping the amount of cash this thing costs, probably won’t find this to be all that discouraging. If you actually have $400 to spend, and feel so inclined to spend it on a computer case, I’m guessing you’ve been down this road before. So you probably ought to be able to figure it out for your own damn self. But the complete lack of any sort of “this is how such-and-such connects to so-and-so” is marginally disconcerting at first. That being said, you’re not missing much.
Installation for this case is almost as painless as it can get. The hard drive cage has removable rails with fake screws – that is, chunks o’ metal that fit into the screw holes in your hard drives but don’t actually require any sort of twisting movement to put in. They just sort of fall into place with a moderate amount of force. Then you slide the hard drive into the slot, and the rail assembly snaps into place and you’re done. Almost the same deal with the optical drive installation, except the fake-screw rails aren’t removable – you simply push the entire drive backwards into the empty slot, and a spring-loaded rail in the drive cage snaps into place once the drive gets far enough back.
There was no removable motherboard tray, meaning the motherboard had to be mounted directly onto the chassis. Not a deal killer, really, as the case has enough room to move around relatively easily. But a removable tray would have been nice.
The biggest problem I found with the case was its included power supply. Like I said, it’s a 700 watt unit, which itself will run probably $150 on Newegg. The power supply itself isn’t that bad. I mean, so far as I can tell, I’m not having any problems with it actually delivering power to the individual components. It’s mostly with the plug strands coming out of it. It has four separate 6-pin PCIe strands coming out of it, which is thoroughly overkill IMHO since there are exactly 4 (that I know of) motherboards available that support four concurrent graphics cards. Again, not necessarily a deal killer by itself since that means it’s theoretically all the more future-proof. But it’s more the lack of other types of power strings that kills me.
It’s only got two strings of standard 4-pin Molex connectors (3 connectors on one string, 4 on the other, for a total of 7 available standard Molex power connections). Now, the two strings of Molex plugs are differently sized. I’m sure in theory this is suppposed to mean that the short one is for the optical drives up top, and the long one is for the hard drives down below. But the case also includes a little custom PCB at the bottom that powers all the case lighting, as well as three case fans – front intake, side intake, back exhaust – and none of them have pass-through power connectors. So once you plug a fan into one of the power ports, that’s all she wrote, end of story. You can’t daisy-chain the fans together like you can with almost every other case fan I’ve ever seen. If we assume the short string is meant for two optical drives up top, its one remaining plug can’t actually stretch to any PATA hard drive you may have, or to the front intake fan. It will go to the side intake fan, though, so (hopefully) no big deal. It’s the long power cable that causes problems. If we’ve already got the two optical drives plus the side fan plugged into the short cable, there is absolutely no way in hell the long cable will stretch from the back exhaust fan to the front intake fan, then to the lighting adapter at the bottom, plus also somehow manage to plug in a PATA hard drive. And to make matters worse, my motherboard (plus a great many other recent boards, I’m guessing) requires its own Molex power connection in addition to the regular 24+4 power configuration most motherboards already require. All told, 3 case fans plus 3 PATA drives plus the motherboard port plus the lighting adapter equals 8 required Molex connectors. Which is, you’ll note, one more than the included power supply actually supports. And “supports” says nothing of whether or not it’s physically possible to stretch the two strands into the places they’d need to be to support this configuration even if I did only need 7 ports.
[Correction: Above paragraph has been edited... it'd been a couple days since I actually built the thing when I wrote this. I miscounted the molex ports and forgot about the lighting deal on the bottom. Fixed now.]
Thankfully, I had a pretty good quantity of little short daisy-chain adapters from my previous power supply. So I was able to make the thing work, but it definitely isn’t ideal. I’m sure all the daisy-chaining and stretching things around is killing the air flow in the case. I’m probably going to have to just move some files around so I can get rid of the PATA hard drive and stick with the primary SATA drive. This should do a good job of freeing up the power strands.
All in all, this case is definitely worth it. Other than the weak power supply strand configuration, I’m pretty much in love with everything else about this case. The ease of installation, the lighting, everything, is just top notch. It’ll definitely make your friends jealous.
