Hey and we're back. I redesigned things, have you noticed? This is the... third? time I have redesigned my site. This go around I am just streamlining some things up front to look a lot nicer, I had kind of started to not care about the browser inconsistencies and other little minor problems with my preveious look. That and I learned a while ago that using text-in-images only is a pretty terrible idea, so I'm going for a much more web-friendly version. Look at the text!

I also spent a long time fixing up my back-end stuff. Have I ever said that I wrote my own CMS to manage my site? It's true. I don't like shit like php Nuke and whatever other options there might be out there, so when I opened my site like 4 years ago I had a very basic CMS backend. It has grown as I have grown both in terms of needs and knowledge, and now I'm on like v3.0 or something. I don't keep track, it's not like anybody is ever going to see it and/or care.

Well, a lot of things happened during my little down time.

I'll just go ahead and say it; 3D Realms. What the fuck. I watched things pretty close to the ground and I was all up in the 3DR boards and the community that shifted over to Duke4.net, and I read all about the lawsuit between Take Two and 3DR and blah blah blah. I don't really know what to say or think. What it looks like to me is that Take Two decided to let 3DR sink down where they would no longer be able to stay a float, and then try to sue the rights to DNF and/or the Duke IP entirely. 3DR publicly said that DNF was not canceled and that production has merely halted for the time being. Who knows what is going to happen I guess. Time will tell!

About a week ago, I just about literally shit my pants when I saw the Natural Selection 2 teaser. I have never enjoyed playing a single game as much as I enjoyed playing NS; it is the one and only game I ever have or ever would play competitively and I really enjoyed when I did playing with TheVille right around the time of release. I (of course) enjoyed playing Commander and I think that I was pretty adept at it. After my blood pressure went down some, I ragepurchased a private Natural Selection 1 server for use by me, my friends, and the web communities that I belong to.

Then someone told Penny Arcade, and some people on the forums there started using it. I have never posted over there before, I am very very vaugely familiar with it all, but after playing with a few dozen members I have to admit that, at least the ones I have played with, are pretty cool dudes. For anyone who cares and is reading this far still, here's the server information:

IP: 63.211.110.63:27015
Pass: msleeperdotcom

I'd also like to point out that my TF2 Sentry Heatmaps are getting pretty popular! Almost 1,000 hits at the time of writing this, that's not bad considering I haven't told too many people about it. I have been helping the HLStatsX: Community Edition team port over my code for use in their popular stat ranking system. I've given my code to them since I'm such a nice guy, and they were looking for some Heatmap code anyway. I'll post more when they release their stuff, they said it will be a while before it gets integrated.

That's awesome about the heatmap software!

Is it possible to release it standalone, while we're waiting?

You can talk to psychonic or someone else on the HLX:CE team, I know that at least one person is running some beta versions of things. I will also be releasing my full code at some point in the future over at Allied Modders, including the plugin code and the PHP code needed to generate the maps.

I don't actually have access to the HLX:CE stuff, they're making modifications on what I wrote to fit their needs.