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16

General Discussion / BlockParty - personal updates & future of project

« on: November 04, 2016, 09:09:18 PM »

old thread's too old, so here we are
last post I made there:

well, little update
I recently got a job. a full-time one, this time, lol. it's only supposed to last six months, but that's a pretty long time
anyway it's taking a good chunk out of the time I can work on this. 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work (minimum), leaves just 8 more hours for anything else. which sounds like a lot, but I give myself about 2 hours to get ready for work and to get there (it's about half an hour away), and 1 hour for lunch isn't included in those 8 hours. so now we're just down to 5 hours a day. we can take out another half hour for the trip home, and any time I work over that 8 hours (seems to be between 30 minutes and an hour normally), plus time to eat dinner.........
yeah

but there are saturdays. on sundays I have D&D obligations but that doesn't consume 100% of the time that I spend playing, nor does it take the whole day. usually 4-6 hours. so yeah weekends. and I'll try to find time to work on it at, uh, work. my job is completely unrelated to programming, but I do have a decent amount of time where I don't really have much to do, and I could eat lunch at my desk while I work on it, or something. so it's not all doom and gloom really

but on the even brighter side I guess, for anyone who cares anyway, I've finally made a git repo for it, because I really need a way to keep changes synced between my laptop and desktop now
https://github.com/foxscotch/blockparty
if you visit this link within the next like 15 minutes you won't see much, just gimme a minute, the repo's gonna link to this post so I need to make the post lol all is well

edit: also on the super bright side $$$
regular income means an extended budget!!!! that doesn't mean a whole lot for this project but you can expect a few things, like for example a dedicated domain name (still have no clue what I'd pick though, like I said before blockparty.net/us/etc were all taken ;~;), which I simply wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. maybe an upgraded VPS, although the one I have right now is pretty nice, so we'll just have to see about that

so, to begin with, that job is no longer for six months, but in fact for the foreseeable future. the work is okay and the pay is good enough for now, so when my boss asked me to stick around, I figured why not. not really a big deal in relation to this project, cus I was pretty sure that was how it was gonna go down anyway

second, no longer doing D&D. unfortunately? maybe. I miss talking to the people I played it with but I guess I don't miss the time commitment

third, if anyone has been keeping an eye on that git repo (unlikely), you may have noticed a few commits in recent weeks. not much, but more than zero I guess

and finally, I've gotten some relatively big stuff going on in my life lately. having a now-permanent job has sorta woken me up to the fact that I should probably move out soon, especially because my boyfriend wants to live with me. for that reason, saving money has become significantly more important. again, little impact on the project


but what I've really made this thread for is to talk about the shaky future of it. some people seem to be into the idea, which is great, but... it's only a few people. a website like this would be utterly pointless with just a few members. it's especially discouraging to see the state that Clan Discussion is in. the oldest post on the front page is two months old. doesn't bode well for a site about clans
I'm not giving up, forever, or whatever, but I just think for now it'll be better for me to focus on other things. I'm sure that eventually I'll get another bout of inspiration, and by then, at least I'll have this, uh, decent, codebase to start from

also you can thank hawt for sending me a pm like half an hour ago that reminded me to post this. actually kind of weird because I was thinking about how I would explain all of this earlier today


apologies to anyone who's been genuinely excited about it. I was, too

17

Off Topic / Foxscotch's Userscript Depot - Extended Who's Online + Locked Topic Quotes

« on: January 21, 2016, 03:27:53 AM »

I've made a couple of userscripts for the forum, and I'm also currently working on another
warning: I'm about to start typing differently than usual so don't get 2 confused ok

The ones that I've already made don't really get much exposure, because... I never made a thread for it. I only posted them in the request threads that were asking for such a thing. Well, I did mention one of them here, but that thread didn't really go anywhere.


Extended Who's Online
Get it here



This userscript was requested by SWAT One.
To be clear, "extended" refers to the list itself, not any features involved. All it does is increase the size of the list, so that it includes everyone who's currently online.
By default, it adds a button near the top of the Who's Online page that, when clicked, clears the entire list, then begins adding more entries. You can also set it to do this as soon as the page loads, rather than when the button is clicked. Also by default, it does not include guests, but this can be changed too.
To change the settings, just change a couple of values near the top of the script. It explains what each of them are for above them.

Issues:

• Sometimes the times get out of order, not a big deal
• Unreliable on any pages other than the first, also not very important

Locked Topic Quotes
Get it here

Didn't know that.  Locking thread.

This one was... also requested by SWAT One.
It adds quote buttons to posts in locked topics, which add the quote for the respective post to a little text box at the bottom, so that you don't have to copy and paste them manually. This also preserves BBCode, which you wouldn't have access to if you did it manually!
Contrary to what I said in the request thread, it does work in Firefox. I just fixed it. It was, for the second time, because FF lacked a function that I didn't realize was nonstandard (element.insertAdjacentElement).

No issues that I'm aware of.



Blockland Userscript Framework for the Forum (WIP)
Does the name sound bad? Heck yeah it does. But I need it to sound good when shortened, and BLUFF will accomplish that until I come up with a name that's good on both fronts.
Help me with that plz.

The purpose of this userscript is not to add any "features" to forum pages, but instead to make it significantly easier/less mind-numbing to make userscripts that do add stuff.
It is intentional that there isn't a big link for this one. Because it is far from finished, and mostly useless in its current state. But if you are the sort of person who would want to look at it anyway, here's a link. I've mentioned this project twice (here, and here).
It doesn't really do a whole lot at the moment, aside from the page type and session ID stuff I mentioned in the first post I talked about it in. One noteworthy addition is that it now provides a class to represent a user. It only automatically creates an instance of this class when you're on the page for a person's profile, and it completely fails if they don't have an avatar. I'll fix that later.
When it reaches a more useful state, I'll write up some documentation and host it on my website. In the meantime, if you wanna know exactly what it does, you'd have to just read through the source code. Actually, I might go ahead and start writing the documentation, so I don't get overwhelmed later.



Minor scripts
Here's some small stuff I didn't feel deserved a big title.

Image Hider, for Emgiell. Hides all the images in posts or PMs, with a show/hide button. Includes a setting for including signatures on PM pages.


More userscripts:
Gyt's Userscript Plaza
Steve's userscripts (kind of old, plz let me know if there's a newer thread)

18

Forum Games / NEMO - Prologue: Everything happens for a reason! (including abandonment)

« on: June 26, 2015, 10:53:25 PM »

Prologue:
Everything happens for a reason!

Before anything else, I have some out-of-character (OOC) things to say.
First is that this is sort of another attempt at this... thing. However, that was a mess. I made up pretty much all of it on the fly, and I had absolutely no idea where I wanted to go with it. That's different this time.

Second, some details about the characters and the universe they're in have changed. The player character is mostly the same, except that his last name is Gideon, not Gribean (sry swat). His first name is still Theodore. Also, the planet he's from is now called "Balta," rather than "Incipium." Also the entire situation is completely different.

Lastly, after this section, any time I want to say something OOC, it'll either be in a chunk on its own, all italic, separated by a horizontal rule or two (that's the [hr] tag), OR, it will be inside in-character text, surrounded by parentheses, also all italic. (Like this.)
Unless I specifically state otherwise. For example, if an entire post is OOC, I'd probably just say so at the top of it, and not worry about italics.


You wake up in a bright, white room. You aren't really sure where you are. In fact, you can hardly even remember your name.

Oh wait, no, it's Theodore Gideon, and you know exactly where you are. You're on the Icosa. Your own personal cargo ship. You're not in your quarters, though, it looks like you fell asleep in the kitchen. No wonder you were confused. What time is it? After looking for your phone for a moment, you give up, and decide that the time doesn't really matter out here, anyway.
At the moment, your ship's traveling through Gideon hyperspace (Wikipedia's article on hyperspace). Nope, the name's not a coincidence, your great grandparents discovered it. But you're just a pilot; the science junk was never really your thing, unlike with most of your family.

You're on your way to your home planet, Balta, with a shipment of food from the planet Merit.
Hyperspace makes everything a lot quicker, but it still takes a while. This makes the fourth time you've woken up on this trip, and you've got at least six more sleep cycles ahead of you. Whenever you start to get bored, you just remind yourself what it would've been like without hyperspace.

You're also kinda hungry. But it might be a good idea to make sure one of your two crewmates is awake, too. The ship mostly flies itself, but it's generally considered good practice to have at least two pilots awake at any given time.
What do you wanna do?

19

General Discussion / BlockParty - upcoming website for managing and participating in Blockland clans

« on: January 24, 2015, 02:58:02 PM »

BlockParty
Even though I said I'll probably stick with this, if you do think of a nice name, feel free to mention it.

What is it?
It's not really much, right now. But it will be a website that should make it easier for people who own Blockland clans, or are in them, to manage these clans, participate in them, and apply for them.

Wanna help me out?
The best way for you to help is by giving input. If you'd like to do anything from just voting in the polls here to suggesting features you want to see, please do. This is for the community, so the community being part of its development is really important to me.

If you wanna contact me privately, use steam or telegram:
Steam: Foxscotch
Telegram: @foxscotch
Private messages on the forum are also an option, though I'd prefer one of the others.

20

General Discussion / Would people like to see a save-sharing website?

« on: January 16, 2015, 09:31:41 PM »

I've been thinking about making a site in PHP for sharing blockland saves. but that wouldn't be a small amount of work, so first I'd like to know if people are actually interested in the idea
describing it right now doesn't really need a lot of detail, because it's mostly a concept. I did start working on a visual layout for the site using bootstrap, but it's not even close to functional yet. and I don't wanna get truly started unless it's gonna be worth it

sooo would you use it?? if you're actually interested, feel free to suggest any extra features you'd like to see (knowing that kinda stuff before getting into it would be helpful)
if you aren't interested, however, it would be cool if you could tell me why. for that matter, it would be nice to know why even if you were interested

see this post
poll results if you're curious

furthermore, if you'd rather see an entirely different kind of site, let me know about that, too
for example, for a while I was thinking about a sort of clan management thing, where you could create a clan on the site (or make one for a clan that already exists, of course), and from there you'd be able to do things like apply to a clan, control who is in your clan, and so on. needless to say, the site wouldn't be able to edit your post on the forum, but hypothetically it could have features like a bulletin board code generator for a member list to make it a little bit easier
something else I considered for a moment was a site for viewing servers and rating them. that's not entirely feasible, however, because I don't know how I'd get information from the master server, so it'd have to have servers input manually by users, and it wouldn't be super convenient given the fact that I have no idea how to write torquescript (and have no intention to learn), so it would entirely be on a website

21

Music / Foxscotch's Loops

« on: October 06, 2014, 06:57:33 PM »

I've been making some loops recently so I guess I should share them
after every link to a loop there's a link to a little mp3 preview of it, where it loops three times. hopefully it'll play in your browser
the .ogg files might also play in your browser, if that happens just right-click and hit "save as"

Coalescence - Preview
this is one of the songs from the Risk of Rain soundtrack

Girlfriend (Long) - Preview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcahvqflMZc

Girlfriend (Short) - Preview
shorter version of the above loop

Horse Steppin - Preview
one of my favorite songs from the Hotline Miami soundtrack

Obake Yashiki - Preview
I think I actually made a topic for this before. it's from My Neighbor Totoro

The Block - Preview
from the soundtrack from Attack the Block

Echos - Preview
some weird song I found on my computer a long time ago. mrkitkat asked me to loop it

zip file with all of them: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8odot1ojslyexuo/Loops.zip?dl=1

22

Off Topic / I really like looking at pictures that remind me how big everything is

« on: October 04, 2014, 04:34:24 AM »

like, this picture, for example



that's what we can see of our galaxy from the surface of our planet. and we know almost nothing about it. like, that's just our galaxy. and we only really know of, like, a couple thousand planets in it. but there's at least 8 billion, apparently? and that's just counting possibly habitable ones. 2000 is only 0.0025% of 8 billion. that is so much. that is an absurd amount of planets. can you believe there are so many? and we only know of a few. and that's still just our galaxy

that picture is nothing compared to the hubble deep field



more specifically, that image is the hubble ultra-deep field
everything in that image is an entire galaxy. even the tiniest little dots. if you don't already know how absolutely incredible the hubble deep field is, watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAVjF_7ensg

and it still gets even deeper than that

it's kinda depressing, sometimes, to think about how little I'll ever know about any of those galaxies, or even about any of the stars you can see in the first picture

23

Off Topic / can someone help me figure out where a couple of songs came from?

« on: September 29, 2014, 02:23:49 PM »

the first one is this
http://foxscotch.us/sound/Sad_Piano.ogg
which is a blockland loop, clearly, but I wanna know what song it was made from

and then there's this one
http://foxscotch.us/sound/Echos.mp3
this one is ridiculous. I have no idea where it's from. I found it on my computer one day, but I can't really find anything about it
the title was already "Echoes" spelled wrong when I found it. it was actually Echos.wav but when you go to the url for a wav file it downloads it. hopefully, with most browsers, it'll just play the mp3 in your browser. that's what chrome does, at least

anyway, I did at one point find a version of the file hosted on hostr, but I can't find it anymore

24

Off Topic / Does anyone know how to work with C++ kinda well?

« on: September 16, 2014, 12:58:42 AM »

I found this thing which seems like it would be REALLY USEFUL for some people in this community if it works
but I can't get it to work. I tried copying and pasting all the code files into files in Visual Studio but I couldn't get it to work. I don't even know if it's supposed to be a console program or just a Win32 program or what because the Google Code page for it gives you hardly any information

so I'm just wondering if there's anyone here with enough C++ experience to be able to get this working right

25

Off Topic / Prequel - buy one get one half off

« on: September 14, 2014, 12:15:47 AM »

The webcomic about a Khajiit named Katia Managan from Hammerfell.
A Khajiit. From Hammerfell.
If, somehow, there was a member of this forum who still hasn't at least heard of Prequel or Katia Managan, then I guess I better accommodate for that, just in case.

Prequel is objectively the best thing on the internet a webcomic created by someone named Kazerad. It's about Katia Managan, a member of the Khajiit race in The Elder Scrolls. She used to live in Hammerfell, but her life there wasn't entirely good (by that I mean it was really bad), so she decided to move to Cyrodiil and start over. It didn't go very well, however. She still suffered from issues from her past, like alcoholism and nightmares about royalty. She did actually manage to find a friend, who seems to believe in her, even though she has a habit of failing... at everything.

If you're already interested, and just wanna go straight to the beginning, click this link:
http://www.prequeladventure.com/2011/03/prequel-begin/

If you'd rather go to the main site, you can click here, or just click the logo at the top.
http://www.prequeladventure.com/

There's also the section of the site dedicated to fanart, if you wanna see some of it, or have something to upload yourself.
http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/

26

Music / Obake Yashiki

« on: August 26, 2014, 02:09:49 PM »

this song was in My Neighbor Totoro and I liked it a ton so I made a loop out of it

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4s9eqzfxc7t5vj3/Obake_Yashiki.ogg?dl=1

it loops perfectly. idk why. I've never been able to do that before. I guess I got lucky
I think "obake yashiki" is japanese for "haunted house"

also here's the song on youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySYh1YXAfOw
the loop I made starts at around 0:18 and ends around 0:32

27

Forum Games / Nemo - Prologue: Finding the representative!

« on: August 20, 2014, 04:31:47 PM »

You're on the planet known as Pride.
But you aren't actually from here. You are, however, from the planet Incipium, which means you're a tall reptilian being. More specifically, you're from the south, where the stronger and slower Incipian race is from.

Anyway, you're in a restaurant in the middle of Cobalt, the capital of Pride.
Which is the capital of the Nexus Federation.

You're here to, uh... Well, you've never been good at the whole memory thing.
You get out your phone to check your notes for the one you made to remind you what you were gonna do, but first you decide to check your messages, just in case you've gotten any.
Nope. As always, the only one you see is one you sent to yourself a while back as a reminder for something else, before realizing you could just write notes for stuff.
Resuming the original mission, you tap the icon for the "Notes" software, and the most recent one is already shown:
"I'm on Pride to speak to an Incipian representative, and convince them to send some resources to Incipium to help out after a recent natural disaster."
Ah, so that's it. How does someone find a representative? Despite not having any new messages, you do have a few numbers saved on your phone:
"Cobalt Info," which is a number anyone can use to find information about the city. Numbers like these are often added automatically to someone's phone whenever they visit certain places.
"Boss," which is, well, your boss.
and "Joel," a coworker who came to Pride with you, but he left to goof off before long. He's so irresponsible.

So, what are you gonna do?
And by the way, what was the name shown for that message you sent to yourself?

28

Forum Games / How do you feel about text-only adventures?

« on: July 31, 2014, 10:34:50 PM »

I'm not 100% sure this is the proper place to ask. but it feels right, so I'm gonna go with it

what I'm asking about is like, TEXT adventures. just text. cus I can't draw worth anything, but I wanna make one. for two reasons. one: because I just wanna make one, it seems fun. and two: I have started making a fictional world of my own and I wanna do something with it
so I just wanna know how receptive you Community Projects people are to such an idea. because I don't want to start one if nobody's gonna show any interest in it

29

General Discussion / A list of variable replacers for VCE! (still accepting help btw)

« on: July 28, 2014, 04:45:36 PM »

I put the list on my website!
http://foxscotch.us/vce_replacers.html
lots of thanks to kingdaro for helping me figure out how to style it

I intend to eventually have more VCE stuff on my site too. like maybe a tutorial for it, that would hopefully be more helpful than the one in the VCE manual (that you can't even normally access anyway)

old OP:

I have the default ones already

<var:brick:datablock> : The name of the brick's datablock
<var:brick:colorID> : The color ID of the brick
<var:brick:printcount> : The brick's print count
<var:brick:printname> : The name of the brick's print
<var:brick:name> : The name of the brick
<var:brick:colorFxID> : The color effect ID of the brick
<var:brick:printID> : The print ID of the brick
<var:brick:shapeFxID> : The brick's shape effect ID
<var:brick:ownerName> : The owner of the brick's name
<var:brick:ownerBL_ID> : The owner of the brick's Blockland ID

<var:client:bl_id> The client's Blockland ID
<var:client:name> : The client's name
<var:client:clanPrefix> : The client's clan tag shown before their name
<var:client:clanSuffix> : The client's clan tag shown after their name
<var:client:score> : The client's score
<var:client:lastmsg> : The client's last message
<var:client:lastteammsg> : The client's last team message
<var:client:isAdmin> : Checks if the client is any kind of admin (1 = True, 0 = False [Boolean])
<var:client:isSuperAdmin> : Checks if the client is a super admin (Boolean)
<var:client:isHost> : Checks if the client is the host (Boolean)
<var:client:brickcount> : The number of bricks planted by the client

<var:player:damage> : The amount of damage that has been done to the player
<var:player:health> : The amount of health the player has left
<var:player:maxHealth> : The most health the player can have
<var:player:velx> : The player's velocity on the global X axis
<var:player:velY> : The player's velocity on the global Y axis
<var:player:velZ> The player's velocity on the global Z axis
<var:player:crouching> : Checks if the player is crouching (Boolean)
<var:player:jumping> : Checks if the player is jumping (Boolean)
<var:player:jetting> : Checks if the player is jetting (Boolean)
<var:player:firing> : Checks if the player is firing/clicking (Boolean)
<var:player:sitting> : Checks if the player is sitting (Boolean)
<var:player:datablock> : The player's datablock name
<var:player:currentItem> : The UI name of the player's current item
<var:player:item*> : The UI name of the *th item in the player's inventory (1-5)
<var:player:energy> : The amount of energy the player has

<var:vehicle:datablock> : The name of the vehicle's datablock
<var:vehicle:health> : The amount of health the vehicle has
<var:vehicle:maxhealth> : The maximum amount of health the vehicle can have

<var:global:date> : The current date
<var:global:time> : The current time
<var:global:simtime> The current simulated time
<var:global:macintosh> : Checks if the user is on a Macintosh Computer (Boolean)
<var:global:windows> : Checks if the user is on a Windows Computer
<var:global:serverName> : The name of the server
<var:global:port> : The number of the port the user is accessing the server on
<var:global:maxPlayerCount> : The maximum number of players the server can have
<var:global:playerCount> : The number of players on the server
<var:global:brickcount> : The total number of bricks on the server

they're all from the VCE manual I'm pretty sure

and then I have some that jes00 made for a request in suggestions and requests

<var:global:numChests> - the number of chests on the server
<var:client:chestsFound> - the number of chests found by a player
<var:client:chestsLeft> - the number of chests not found by a player

but without RTB's easily navigated list of mods and descriptions for them, I've hit a snag

30

Off Topic / I guess Time Warner Cable has a terrible modem/router thing

« on: June 22, 2014, 10:06:01 PM »

we've recently moved from the outskirts of some tiny baby city in Alabama to Louisville, Kentucky
that means switching from terrible satellite internet and TV to better cable internet and TV, specifically, Time Warner
when we moved here, we ordered a router, because we thought we'd need one! cable companies generally give you a modem, but the router's on you. but it turns out, apparently, TWC has this weird modem and router combo thing
that seems pretty cool and convenient! the only problem is, the router bit is terrible

see this??

that's using the wifi that comes with the router

this, however

that's using an ethernet cable from the box to my computer

and I tested them like three times each, so it's not like it's just a coincidence
idk what we're gonna do exactly. I guess we're gonna use our own router, that we ordered before, plugged into the port on the modem/router thing?
hopefully it works out though. because that's annoying

also.... the router problem only seems to start happening sometime at night. most of the time, it's fine. idk what to think of that