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| Because of this, my visit rate to Citos is anywhere near zero. The only occasion I would go there once again sometime is to taste a certain restaurant where it serves a wooden-fired pizza |
But with those bombshells came great things. Personal-wise, I've got to try some activities I was dying to join; Fandom March Madness from the Livejournal fame, which is none other than annual voting for your favorite television series characters. Despite that, the strong competition and wide scope of fans (because USA is a Fandom country!) makes it worth of joining.
Other good things also came for other things, either if it came last year, or is it a development from last year and is continuing up to this moment. Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 4 has invaded Indonesia with Puri Indah as its first destination, then Mall Kelapa Gading and then sporadically distributed to most malls in Jakarta, even other malls outside of Jakarta have their fair share of MT4. Despite the lateness and the fact that it runs on the exclusive Indonesian server (which means we can't race against drivers from Singapore, Malaysia, NZ, Australia, Philippines, and Hong Kong, but we have plenty of time to transfer our 3DX+ cards to our Banapassports, something which the international server no longer able to do) everyone is excited to have it on their nearby malls.
And then there are developments of two games that I play mostly: Turbo Sliders and GeneRally. With TS's new version is still under development and another developer's blog for GeneRally came to the net we shall see how these two games try to evolve themselves...
Updates from Turbo Sliders
Yup! It's a barrage of FIVE tracks! Due to the fact that I am months late to release those first two tracks, I decided to make three more to make it a fair trade. So what are those three new tracks beside the first two?
Snow Complex is yet another TSE-style track like no other; the starting section, if linked with the section just after the first corner, forms an oval course, but that's not it. As you traverse the forestry road, drive above the Abu Dhabi-style pit exit, and pass through a skating rink, Snow Complex offers challenging race in a snowy and lush forest backdrop.
Download Here
Grant Heights is a remake of what could be named as the most off-topic course released on TS: Grandview. Sure Grandview can be anything, but the inclusion of a certain TV series in its description proves that because that series's Grandview is actually a town, not a winding road. Set in an autumn season where leaves fall to the road, you can experience sliding your way through sharp turns of Grant Heights while stepping your wheels to the "leaves", whose effect is faithfully simulated. Also unique for this course is the fact that it uses a different kind of Nature tiles.
Download Here
Templedore is a latest addition to the family of default tracks, both in the TS world and mine. I was going to make a separate North/South configuration in addition to the main one, but I dropped that idea and leave it as it is. The course goes from passing the nearby lake, to a hairpin which leads to a parking area of a forest recreation center. That said, Templedore is set in a road where it links to an ecological park nearby (not seen, possibly on the left side of the parking area) with a semi technical characteristic.
Download Here
Also available are the previously shown tracks from a past blog post. One with the lighthouse, and one inspired by Japanese race courses like Suzuka and Tsukuba, and both tracks bear three configurations!
Download Monsoon Here (includes GP, National, and Short courses)
Download Nippon Highlands Here (includes GP, East, and West courses)
With those tracks already released, now it's time for the news from the game. The new version is under development but Ande, the game's developer, has announced that there are new features in the game. Among them are an increase of tracks' size up to 4000x4000, drafting, and tire wear. The drafting feature will enable players to gain speed by driving behind their opponent's car, and tire wear is... well, self-explanatory. Both these features however won't work with AIs, especially with drafting; AIs would "deny" their drafting against other racers according to what I read on the forum.
Here are some features revealed via its Facebook fanpage:
19.07.2013 v2.4.1b
- Added tyre wear support (read README-tyres.txt)
- Added drafting support (read README-drafting.txt)
- Track maximum size to 4000 by default
- Increased the max spectator count to 40
- Added car parameter 'rotations' (min 64, max 360). Max image width is 16384.
- Added GhostAlphaMode to sliders.ini, values 0-6, default: 3, (0 = invisible)
- Added command /listtracks <part_of_name>
- Added command /mute <player> <time_in_sec> (use 0 to unmute)
- Added command /muteall [0|1] (use 1 to mute all non-admins for this cup)
- Added command /startfueladmin.
- Added command /reloadcars [0|1], sets whether server reloads cars after cup
- Added command /sendinterval [1..20], default: 5 (to adjust server traffic)
- Added command /sayadmin <msg>, sends a message with different color
- Added command /aicar [<index> <car>], resets when a new cup is started
- ForceRaceMissiles is now public (set it to 1 to have missiles in races).
- MaxMissilesPerPlayer option now visible in help texts
- Fixed StartPos in racestats.log.
-When you use -p <n> as a command line parameter (target line of the sliders.exe shortcut), you can set up controls for all the n players (sliders.ini loses them if you don't use it every time).
***This means that TS will be the first game we know that can handle as many local players as you want. So, instead of 4, now you 'll be able to set even the full grid. ***
- Added /sayadminmono <msg>, sends an admin message with font data/font11dm.png
***This means that TS will get a new monospaced font designed to be used for the statistics. It will make stats aligned and looking much better.***
Speaking about the forum though, until this post, something happened to the game's official site. The last time I visited the site, it got "Account Suspended" page, but not sure why. The site underwent its maintenance since this is posted...
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| Let's hope that Turbosliders.com will back online... |
Updates from GeneRally
From GeneRally side, the developer blog for the sequel has made another post of theirs. With its Kickstarter on the horizon, Kimmo, one of the crews of the sequel, showcased the video of carmaking in the GR's sequel. Initially, the cars would have 400 polies limit, but it is then reduced to 200 and texturing (read: skinning) would make carmaking in GR more complex, and potentially lose its roots, since the essence of the sequel is to not only improve anything but also keep its roots the first one had.
"Cars are the stars in GeneRally. So when designing the limits and parameters for the Sequel we have had to keep in mind what makes a GR car a GR car. For me, personally, that means simple yet recognisable appearance, simple colours, fun handling and spherical wheels. The last one is the most important as it really defines a GeneRally car.
The exterior level of detail, or polycount, is being increased (as many of you know). The original proposition of 400 polygons raised emotions and this shows how important the cars’ looks are to the community. We’ve since then experimented with different limits ranging from 100 to 400 and decided to cut back from 400 polygons (which really was unnecessarily high) to 200 and we now feel it’s a good limit for the goals we have in mind. We want to increase the recognisability and detail in the cars while still keeping them quite simple-looking. We also want to enable all cars to have a floor and wheel wells, so that they can be happily flipped over/rolled, without going invisible.
At the moment cars use a system similar to the original GeneRally’s: you can assign a material for each polygon that defines it’s color, shininess and other properties. Texturing is still under consideration, but I personally fear that enabling detailed liveries and decals might take a too long step away from being a GR car, and increase the complexity of creating cars significantly – this is one of the ideas we’ll be gathering feedback on in the weeks and months following Kickstarter." -Kimmo
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| Yup! The sequel will be better without sacrificing its roots! |
With how the tracks, objects, and cars will look like in the sequel, we are, not just me but you readers, surely looking forward for its Kickstarter funding to run. Go for gold, Curious Chickens!
Something I'd like to do this month...
With the NaNoWriMo community on Facebook announced that JaNoWriMo or January Novel Writing Month is in effect since its announcement on January, it is time for everyone to take the second chance of writing, revising, and publishing their stories, while I on the other hand will plan on finishing the whole draft of my crossover fan fiction project, and when I say "The Whole Draft", it means the chronology of the story, from start to end. Since what I'm making is a Super Robot Wars-esque crisis crossover and can't afford writing a pile of badly-written did-not-do-the-research crossover fic, I decided to study the fandoms I've planned to put in the story. The problem is that this is set in 2008 and thus uses fandoms that ran that year, but there's no such thing as "too late" on writing fan fictions, isn't it? I mean, look at how many people writing Buffy / Angel fan fictions on Livejournal despite their (the series) age.
While posting one post per month is much better than no posts at all, I still feel that I need more encouragement to have more blog posts. While last year's blog post count is better than another last year's, it's not pretty active at all. I remember when Mikasa Drawing Office, a Japanese MiniRacingOnline racer-run blog, always post his progresses often, and I followed his stuffs also. I've got links to my other social media and stuff networks but planned to make a button for each of them to make it more stylish. Even though this blog simple-looking, I want to keep it that way because it serves its purpose as a progress tracker of my stuffs and vents out of my Tumblr and Livejournal.
Not only this blog, [R]GARAGE site also needs a heavy goddamn update. I can't be bothered to be lazy in editing my site anymore, but somehow I dreamed of working in an environment where the PC I'm using has moderately high specs and good internet speed for such purpose. The "somehow hard" process would be on uploading the pictures as you need a reliable internet to avoid upload errors, and the fact that uploaded pictures don't render transparencies (like in some *.png files I uploaded there). And if I were to remake any of my site's elements, that would be layouts for separate track categories. i.e., My older tracks for Turbo Sliders are put below my newer tracks with an assumption they have their own slideshows beside them. And with "Other Games" tab is filled by the "Coming Soon" in the form of one of the Gundam models in a Ultimate Knight Windom XP game invading a Trackmania United Forever race between Super GT cars in a Coast environment track, I think it's time to split them, so you would get stuffs from my other games like TMUF skins and custom UKWXP pilots, not to mention others like GTR2 (SKINS!) and much more PC games that allows customization.
Lastly, updating my Tumblr and my Livejournal is totally mandatory because Fandom March Madness 2014 is on the horizon, just like twelfth-grade students with national exam (how they call it in Indonesia). The problem is I had a First World Problem moment when uploading gifs for my Tumblr where it always show "Error uploading file". However, tons of other Tumblr sites show how to make their gifs uploadable while sacrificing some colors. Livejournal-wise, I was too dependent on trying to blog a series. The last post would be my post about a certain Australian TV show featuring a strangling controversy (Got triggered yet?), and that I saw an LJ friend's post about her everyday life and the fact that I CAN post on mobile though with limited functionalities, I facepalmed myself, but this year I'll try to update myself! But with a catch that my Livejournal posts cannot be the same as this blog unless it's about Dr. Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd racing in Le Mans.
While this month would be a temporary stop for releases of TS tracks and finishing Al Dasein 2013 in exchange of drafting my fan fiction's storyline, I will write a blog post about other things in between my drafting activity. So the to-do list for this month includes releasing Turbo Sliders tracks while keeping a track of its site's maintenance (checked), finish Al Dasein 2013, and updating my site, my blog, and my social sites, with storyline drafting on the MAIN priority.
But not like they're my resolutions though as I don't want to have resolutions other than 1366x768...
~[R]
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