Stairs I made in Counter Strike Global Offensive

A few months ago I finished off this map that I was working on. Find the map here.. take a moment and look at it :

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=265113640

But in the map I made a stairway, you can see it below:

My Counter Strike Global Offensive stairway

Now, this weekend I was up in Belfast and right there beside the Titanic museum I spied a building with this stairway as a fire escape going up the side of it. I was quite chuffed with myself. The stairway I designed above was from my imagination of what a good stairway should be.

My stairway is wider than this one because in game mechanics I want the player to have plenty of space to run up and down without getting stuck. Of course, when I look at it, a real play would get stuck on this stairway too, look at the barrier at the bottom of the stairway!

One Direction is the best in the world.

(Now the band one direction that is - I mean my new one aim!)

Hi there, I am back after how long? Look, I meant to keep writing this blog all the time, every day but I find that pretty difficult. Anyway, in the mean time what have I been up to? Well I have lost my job, not my fault, the company I was in had to downsize and I ended up on the street as it were. What else, I don't know. I'm fine though.

game, computer game, development, computer, design, free, paid

I have been thinking. What is the new direction that I want my blog to go into? The I figured out what everyone else knows that is successful at writing anything, write what you know about. I guess that to a point I was already doing this in that I was writing my blog about my day and that is what I know best, me. Anyway, gotta stay on topic here. Basically, I am going to write about me make a game!

Yeah! Me making a game!I am going to make a computer game and attempt to get anyone that I do not know do download it. That is my aim. Get anyone to download it. Do I want to get money for it? Of course! Will I get money for it... hmm, I do not think so. I am not negabombing myself or anything it is just that I know what my first game is going to be and I know that there is no way that I could free right about charging people for it.

So that is my new aim.

Ever hear of mailinator? It's great - if you need it.

In work I have the situation where I need to create email addresses all the time but then not necessarily use them again afterwards. A colleague told me about Mailinator as a solution to my problem of having to mail my own email accounts for work business.

I tested mailinaor like this, I went into mailinator.com and created a username and then went to my gmail and mailed my new mailinator account. I checked mailinator.com second later and the mail was there.

For my second test I simply mailed myself to a just make up address like carraroeisgreat@mailinator.com using my gmail account and checked mailinator by putting in the name carraroeisgreat and the test mail was there.

Excellent.

Why am I telling you all this? Well you know sometimes you might need a link to be sent to you from a website you are signing up to and you do not want to use your "proper" email address or you know what, there are a million reasons. I suggest you have a look.

http://mailinator.com/

20 - Indian Summer and SteamOS

Hello there world. Beautiful day today. Seriously nice. They say it is an Indian Summer. We drove to the beach in Tuismean down a long winding road where I eventually came across a car that paused in front of me. So I reversed around 150 meters until I found a place where I could pull in. I didn't mind doing it at all really because some people do not feel as confident as I do reversing. I mention this because when I finally reached the point where I came across this car in the first place I realised that around 5 meters behind her was a huge place to pull in! :) But again, I did not mind, I just wonder what kind of misery some people go through when they do have to reverse and hate doing it.

Túisméan Lake.. beautiful if not a bit eery!

Enough about all that however. Did you hear what Valve have announced. All the gaming that we have ever known was really on a console or on a PC. Like an IBM compatible to be more exact. Apple have always had games on its operating system and today Apple have more games than ever but lets face it, the huge majority of games are on the Windows PC if they are not on Console, with an honorable mention to Linux of course which has a healthy body of games (again Apples OS is really a Linux distro).

SteamOS from Valve. 

All that is definately about to change however with the announcement yesterday from Valve that they are about to release SteamOS. That is an operating system from Valve that is specifically made to play game and it is running Linux and is free to download.

Suck it down all the rest of everyone else, free to use! Free. There will be simply loads more to say on this in times to come and eventually everyone will be talking about it, but if you want to be ahead of the curve pay attention now, I believe it is going to be amazing for games.

More on this fantastical here http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

2012 - Day 74 - Lovely Ubuntu + Anonymous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group) 

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I didn't tell you or did I? I few days ago I got a laptop that had Microsoft Windows on it and I overwrote the operating system with a Unix - well Linux rather - operating system. In my case the new Linux operating system is Ubuntu. The version of Ubuntu that I have is 11.10. The version is relevant because Ubuntu has come into its own with it own look and an interface called Unity that is kinda like the scroll bar that you find on the bottom of Mac OS screens where you can pick programs from really quickly. But there are a million reasons to go with Ubuntu over Windows. First off they way that computers are going, with phone and tablets the actually dependancy that people had on Microsoft Windows is not as strong. I am not saying that Microsoft is obsolete! I am not saying that. What I am saying is that once there were many operating systems, then for a while there was really just  Microsoft with Apple and Unix getting honorable mentions. Now if you want something to run your device you can go with:

Windows
Android
Lumia
Apple OS
Ubuntu (of various versions of Linux)
Blackberry
Sony

The reason I mention all of these is because there are reasons in the past where if all you wanted was to surf the internet, check mail, play some computer games, look at YouTube, Facebook etc the regular end user would have simply needed Windows or Apple. That has definately changed now. The future is definately bright because if the past has taught us one thing it is that where there is competition there is innovation. And with competition and innovation there is always one big winner. You - the end user.

So why am I on Ubuntu? Becasue I can. I downloaded it free and apart from games (there are some there but games are simply not Linux's strong point) it has everything. For games I use my beautiful xbox360. For everything else I can use my beautiful Ubuntu.