Hello, my Old Friend

A stable progress on my final paper project means I can steal my time working on stuffs I'd like to do on the fly. 3 out of 6 chapters are finished, while three shall be waiting, plus the development of the project itself. To spoil a little bit about what my final paper would be, it's an AI controller programmed in C++ for use with The Open Racing Car Simulator (TORCS), a racing simulator slash AI development platform, used by AI researchers through papers that details the process of AI developments using different algorithms, and also works as a competitive medium in AI research and the game's community circle.

While I might not going to dive into TORCS anytime soon, I have now returned to my roots. If you remember, I "retired" from Turbo Sliders after my Indianapolis release in order to focus on my final paper project which wasn't of the said topic back then. After a change of topic, things get clearer in perspective, and the progress went on until now. It wasn't until today that I started working with Turbo Sliders once again after watching the F1 World Championship highlights video made by Silva, teased by a spotter's guide posted on the game's Facebook page beforehand. The highlights video gave me an idea to randomly start working on my WIPs again, consisting of one track and one car (with a big restructuring) for now.

The New Era for RENDY'S BLOG, Yet Again!

"I'm sorry, the old RENDY'S BLOG can't come to the phone right now."

Ladies and gentlemen, after years of blogging, I present you the new RENDY'S BLOG, now with improved new look and better coloring, plus an additional feature to search for my posts! I know that I advertised this as "3.0." but looking back, I believe I am now at "4.1." - Super Falcon Punch was the 1.0., this blog was founded with this new url as the 2.0., then came GARAGE-R which made it 3.0., and finally the re-designed RENDY'S BLOG which made it 4.0., these changes vs. the first 4.0. justified the "4.1." in its name, which I would rather use than 5.0..

We Dig Giant Robots (Or We Didn't?)

A quick fan art I made for this post, from the screencaps of the actual video here, uploaded by MegaBots Inc.'s YouTube channel. All images featured here are screencaps from the same YT channel.

It's been a very long time I haven't had my post again here while I still actively post on my fandom blog. Prior to the last post, I've written my take on both Teen Choice Awards and Primetime Emmy Awards, two awfully different coins of award shows, as well as some SpoilerTV competitions. I was thinking about posting something related to SEGA's newly-announced game Sega World Drivers Championship which had its test event in June. The game is basically the arcade racer with a simcade feeling and Super GT license, featuring three GT500 race cars we know from Nissan, Honda, and Lexus, plus three different GT300 cars: two JAF-GT racers, namely the apr Prius GT300 and the Subaru BRZ GT300, and one Mother Chassis car the VivaC GT86. Unfortunately, as time passed and I focused on my final paper's proposal, I didn't have time, especially with the fact that my original intention was to showcase my new WIP TMUF skins of various GT500 cars available on the Carpark.

But finally I've found my light on the edge of the tunnel as I finished my proposal and having it accepted by both supervisors so that I could "green light" my topic by inputting all those stuffs in a computer system to have my supervision permit for my final paper (?) printed by Friday (in September) at the latest, allowing me to officially begin the endless sessions of revisions by the supervisors as soon as possible. This was just one step done, the next step would be harder as I only have six months to graduate from my college now. Right now, revisions are currently underway...

To "celebrate" it, I'm giving myself a go for a blog post here, with some kick of most recent offerings: giant robots. More particularly, a duel between giant robots. In case you missed it, a duel between USA's MegaBots and Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industries took place days ago. It was quite a hype when MegaBots challenged Suidobashi's own Kuratas two years ago which took internet by storm, and now with all preparations were done, the wait is finally over.

Going Three-dimensional, Don't Care the Poly Count!

In the future, replaying a Turbo Sliders race will be much more exciting than before! (Image: Mike Nike)

Originally, this would be a post dedicated to one tool that sparked my new way of interest on Turbo Sliders after a long time: the 3D TSR Replayer created by Mike Nike. But with doing 3D model on the fly as well for use with that tool once it's released, I delved deep to there.

Actually, the low poly-style art in the 3D TSR Replayer triggered me for a couple of things; within the Eid al-Fitr festivity after observing a full month fasting of Ramadan, Steam Summer Sale commenced, and it ran until the 5th of July. Among the games sold with a nice discount, two got my attention, namely Mini Motor Racing EVO, which I bought first a couple of days after Eid while servicing my motorcycle, and Little Racers Street the next couple of days later. Both games were sold within the IDR 10,000 region (which is about three-quarter a buck in USD) and were the reason I had to buy Steam Wallet credits. I bought the former for the fact that it has a track editor which can be used to create stuffs you can think of, and the latter's reason was because of the art direction, but at the same time it started a fire in me to create some low-poly cars on Blender, the start of it all.

A Fandom's Path of Defiance

(Personal fan art created by yours truly)

Occasional ideas flow once again from the depths of Real Racing 3. I can't be more happier than this when I completed the final goal of the game's newest event "Path of Defiance" which pitted me to get one of the motorsports' icons: the Mazda 787B. Just what I needed to complete my race car collections. Right now, I've made my call to skip the XJR9 event in favor of the Porsche 962C one because I kinda want to make a Taisan Starcard 962C livery whenever possible. Back to the special event, the first days were normal until I reached the sixth day where things got intense in Catalunya. But, the last two days were more forgiving than the day in question despite having a far lower PR from the recommended number.

But knowing the event's name "Path of Defiance" reminds me of something that qualified as such. No, it's not something motorsport-related sadly, but this time it's related to fandoms: there was a story where a TV show nobody would heard of blazed its way to the victory in a fandom competition, going as far as defeating 63 of the "usual suspects" in process, even managed to topple the reigning champions. To embrace such a story, one has to flashback months ago where the mentioned miracle took place: the 2017 edition of E!Online's TV's Top Couple competition.

Le Mans' Bizarre Adventures

Image by Jayson Fong, part of the #24ofLM24 project. You can replay his live stream on these arts here, while you can support him by buying all the prints of this project on his site!

Just when I thought that this year's Le Mans would be as crazy as last year, the craziness level went to the roof this year, cranked up to eleven, maybe twelve? Yes, we have the same LMP1 winning: Porsche, which is effectively its third hattrick since its return in 2014, and yes, Toyota failed Le Mans again, but outside that, there's plenty of crazy for this year's race that's worth talking about here.

The 83rd running of 24 Hours of Le Mans featured Porsche and Toyota fighting head-to-head for the outright victory in the LMP1 category (poor ByKolles though), with the abundant entry of LMP2 featuring Orecas and friends with Gibson engines for everyone in contention for the win, five works teams with attitude in the GTE Pro class were ready to give their all, and then we have the GTE Am class. Throughout the span of 24 hours, going from the broad daylight to the darkness of night time and day again, teams combined not only speed, but consistency, clean racing, teamwork, and of course reliability to succeed.

Mobile Race Cars (and some Dilemma Involved)

My recent mobile gaming venture seemed to center around racing-themed games lately. Everything came to a full circle as Real Racing 3's update featuring Koenigsegg One:1 and Nissan Skyline GT-R R32 came out which triggered my desire to return to the game, after one successful attempt at rooting my device just to enable the phone to store app data to the SD card, something I have envisioned by a mile at that time though with no time to execute it.

From that point on, what started as an effort to avoid cluttering my internal memory's lack of space turned out to be a profitable end, though not without facing a dilemma that I will explain later on. Furthermore, another big-name title also joins my collection list after a Google Play Store sale which had such a title available for free, while it had a price to pay normally.

A Little Update

Greetings! It's been months without activity on this blog due to several things which also includes working on my final paper. While I have been active on my other blog, posting stuffs about various fandom polling competitions, there hasn't been any activity I could blog on here unfortunately, especially after leaving PC games I usually play which impacted on halted projects of mine. That goes to my pages [R]GARAGE as well as there hasn't been any activity and update for the past months. My last promise World Tournament (spoiler alert: it's actually a working title now!) hasn't been executed nicely since I ended up tweaking more things than I intended (although there are already two chapters released on my other blog), and I might restart the fic albeit in a different platform, perhaps AO3.

WORLD TOURNAMENT - A March Madness-style Simulated Competition with a Fandom Twist

Over my other blog, I've always wanted to create my own March Madness-styled tournament, involving characters from television series and movies, and some other stuffs. I pitched a couple of ideas along the way, triggering my necessity to make March Madness brackets on Excel just to waste time, to the point that I even made one for last year's SpoilerTV's Favorite TV Series competition (and will be used for future competitions on the site) like this one. Eventually, I stumbled into this World Cup simulation on Excel that uses VBA Macro functions and an idea flowed to my mind: How about making a March Madness competition with characters from TV, movie, and all other stuffs, but with a twist of World Cup-esque qualifiers? There will be eight categories in my tournament, and these will act as "confederations" just as World Cup Qualifiers do (and by the way, we're in the middle of the 2018 World Cup Qualifiers too!).

So many TV series and movie titles exist, with a handful of them win awards for quality, another handful for its loyal fandom, but sometimes it's hard to determine which one is the best of all. Because of this a tournament was conceived to determine the best of the best: the "World Tournament." It's not a good name to boot actually, but I believe this is the best name chosen in order to clear up the confusion whenever I either name this "insert a word here March Madness" or "insert a word here World Cup," which are oft-used I believe.

A Mega-Crossover Fighting Project

MUGEN, a game that enables you to create your own fighting games, in action (Image: Uptodown)

So it's been on my mind that I wanted to make a mega crossover fighting game involving TV and movie characters recently...

At a time where I reconciled with soccer, I had downloaded some Winning Eleven games on PSX, with an initial intention to rip the soundtracks (which eventually made their way here), but got into further: gameplay mechanics, to the point that I ended up playing them. I take another PSX soccer title I played in the past called Super Shot Soccer (Bakuretsu Soccer in Japan), a.k.a. Shaolin Soccer's World Cup-centric son (the roster is based on 2002 World Cup participants, albeit all unlicensed in terms of player names obviously) and Inazuma Eleven's grandson, then googled another title with the same premise as the previous game but on PS2 called Red Card, featuring even animals playing soccer, among other things. Then a question came out of my mind: What if I make a fighting game whose gameplay mechanics loosely borrow the last mentioned two games and had an older Winning Eleven title vibe on it? Would be possible, in a million years, but hey, "Fighting Game" is the keyword here.

High Speed Grounds - My First 4K in TS is Indianapolis!

Welcome to 2017! Well, it's my first post of the year, usually I'd post something about not believing in New Year Resolutions like last, last year, but with that in mind, it means that it's all about jumping into the action, and this is the said action.

Out of countless 4K WIPs I have, one apparently has finally finished. NO! Not any of the existing WIPs that I've shown here on my blog throughout a series of all Turbo Sliders posts from the first time the ability to make 4000x4000 tracks became officially possible (in 2.0.0, you would use a mod to do so), until now where my first ever 4K track is finally released to public! This marks another release after Park Avenue and Autumn Peak which I released last year in May.

That's right! Indianapolis Motor Speedway is alive in top-down style!

Enter Indianapolis Motor Speedway, one of USA's legendary High Speed Grounds and home to the legendary Indy 500 race! After a long battle against demotivation, I have managed to finish this track out, which apparently also includes some interior work which required me to spin my heads the moment I revisited this WIP. Being a track promised to replace the previous Indianapolis in SCARTS (with an addition of road course configurations suitable enough for additional SCARTS races) and promised myself that I could finish it by January this year, there's absolutely no other way than finishing this one ASAP. Plus, the track will also be confirmed to be included in a SCARTS race mid-season (as Burnout told me on Skype), so pretty much is there a reason why I had to finish this one quick, in addition to another reason I will reveal within the next set of paragraphs.