I feel the shakes starting again. They never really left me. I try to put it out of my mind, but it is almost always there. An itch that yearns to be scratched. The anxiousness, the tension, the need to walk through the fields of Nagrand, to soar on a majestic Golden Gryphon, to curse at my pet whom I named "Retard".

Yes, if you have not already guessed or clicked on the above links I am referring to World of Warcraft. I have never felt such a deep sense of loss when I stopped playing that game. It's been six months give or take since I said my goodbyes. I guess living in a virtual world for six months straight will do that. I have never felt so drawn into a game world as much as I have in wow. With so much to see and do, I miss being there. Living it, loving it, hating it.

As I am writing this I can hear my brother playing wow in the next room. He has just recently renewed his account. He tells me he needs someone to play with, and to quest by his side. I can hear the clashing of swords, ogres grunting, steel blades impacting on shields.

But I hesitate, as much as I yearn to join him in glorious battle. To visit new places, and rejoin old friends, and guild mates. I know that if I renew my account, it will surely consume me. Countless hours will turn into days, then weeks, then months! I know I will only be be able to pull my self away just long enought to eat and sleep. My dreams will be full of ideas, places, and experiences that I will long to explore.

The new expantion pack Wrath of Lich King is drawing near. Should I or should I not renew my account. I find myself torn in two directions, between addiction and a sad emptyness.

Heaven help me! I have just clicked the complete purchase button ...

Having been programming computers for over two decades now I can't express enough just how frustrating it is to be playing a game for five hours and have it crash on me. Now the game crashing is not what pisses me off. The fact that the game does not have autosave functionality does.

The game I am talking about is Spore. My brother bought a copy and I decided to install it and give it a try. It is not really the type of game I am interested in but I thought I would check it out and see what the big deal was.

So here I was playing the game. I got to the space stage with a level 3 warp drive and was almost to the center of the galaxy when the game crashes. I threw my hands in the air and with a sense of dread and dispair realised that I may have just spent the last five hours building up my race for nothing. I carfully started up the game again and sure enough the game did not autosave my progress, and I sat there staring at the screen in utter disgust.

How in the fuck, in this day and age does a game like this, as vast and as big as a game like this, not have an autosave feature.  It is at that point I started shaking my head in the realization that I would no longer be playing Spore. Can you hear me EA? Any chance of me buying my own copy of this game just went from a possibility to no fucking chance in hell. It also reminds me of another game that does not have an autosave feature. Doom3. Right there in the game manual for doom 3 it states "Save and save often" WTF? Have these people never heard of autosave checkpoints before? Christ! even Super Mario World for the SNES has mid-level checkpoints!

I just don't know what else to say about it, other then it's just flabergasting to me that AAA titles like Spore don't have autosave functionality. So now that I have finished venting I am going to uninstall Spore and free up a few gigs of space on my harddrive.

And for those who are wondering, yes that is all it takes for me to dismiss a game as crap, no matter how much fun I may have had playing it up to that point. Maybe I just have a higher level of expectation, because of my programming background but if there is one thing I absolutely hate more than anything is having to go back and repeat myself. Heck I have Visual Studio setup to auto save every 60 seconds. Yeah that's how much I hate having to repeat my self.

I recently purchased the ID Super pack from steam and had a few problems getting dosbox to stop crashing upon startup and was attempting to edit the config files to no avail. But I now have them working perfectly. Make sure that if you have DEP (data execution prevention) enabled to add an exception for every dosbox.exe file for each game. It worked for me and now I can play doom, and commander keen without any problems.

I have just uploaded the third release of my still in progress Zider game engine for XNA. You can find the download on the Zider page.

Features or changes for R3

• Updated the xGameConsoleXNA library so commands now have an array of string arguments and a new "usedAsFunction" boolean parameter. usedAsFunction when set to true means that the command is being used as a function and allows the command logic to be aware of that.
• Added Actor support
• Added a SceneManager to the
• Added an abstracted "UserInputService" service (Work in progress)
  
• Full 360 controller support added. So virtually everything can be done using just a gamepad controller.
• Added layering support, so a map can have multiple layers.
• The zider project is no longer a standalong exe, it has been change into a class library.
• Added SMLOP: Heroes which is a game that is being developed by me that uses the zider engine to run it.
• The engine now makes use of the content pipeline for loading game files

I have ported over some more of my old content from the previous incarnations of the createdbyx.com website.

• Bubble Sort - Simple example and info about the bubble sort algorithim.
• Cures Equal Bankrupcy - A short article on the reasons drug companies are incapable of selling cures.
• Banking - The first 2 pages from the book titled "And the truth shall set you free" that describes the current banking system.
  
• Die Book Man Die - Just a rant about books and reading.
• Quote list - Added a quote list to the articles page.
• Setup what map the player will enter into next - A quick warcraft 3 tutorial on setting up what map the player will enter into next.
• Secret Power - A custom Warcraft 3 Map created by me

I have also decided to re upload the numerous incarnations of my old websites. You can find some of them listed here ...

• http://www.createdbyx.com/oldsites/version1/
• http://www.createdbyx.com/oldsites/FF2D/
• http://www.createdbyx.com/oldsites/prevweb/
• http://www.createdbyx.com/oldsites/oldweb/
  

The contact page can now be found by hovering your mouse over the Home link at the top of the site.

Also fixed some minor spelling mistakes and formatting on various pages. A new XNA example project wa added as well called HealthBarProject. HealthBarProject demonstrates one way to display a health bar that floats above a desired object using the Viewport.Project method and 2D sprites rendered with a SpriteBatch object. The health bar also scales itself depending on the distance from the camera's position. View Screenshot

I have fixed the link to the XMLDOCContentProcessor content processor tool. It was giving a strange no access allowed error.

I also posted a new content pipeline tool called StringBuilderContentProcessors.

It seems XNA and GSE (Game Studio Express) does not ship with a simple string importer and/or processors, so you can use text files as a game asset. The TextFileContentProcessor library allows XNA developers to use regular text files as game assets using the xna content pipeline, and returns a StringBuilder object containing the text data.

I called the project TextFileContentProcessors because I intended to include StringCollection and string[] array support in subsequent releases.

I have also added a new game project I am working on called Kabombulator. It's still kind of in the prototyping phase.

Yet another xna based project that I have added to the XNA page is the XNAContentCode pre-build utility.

I am still working on release 3 of my Zider Game Engine. I have not written any code for it lately because I am taking time to think about how to proceed further with it's design and functionality, as well as taking some time to do some code refactoring.

I have just made public a new project that I have started called the Zider game engine. The Zider game engine will be a 2D/3D hybrid game engine focusing on 2D side scrolling, and top down game play styles.

Below lists the current status of the various features that are either currently working or on the drawing table.

Working features

1. Load/Save Maps in xml format
2. Edit map blocks with left and right mouse buttons
3. Can pan the map to expose other parts just by moving mouse near edges of screen or use WSAD keys on keyboard
4. Supports full screen and windowed modes
5. Basic, easy to use GUI system with anchoring support like in windows forms
6. Texture selection, and block selection so user can choose specific blocks to use for drawing with

Features on the drawing table

1. Layering. Currently Zider only supports one map layer.
2. Moving platforms (elevators, falling platforms)
3. Particle system using the Mercury Particle Engine
4. Ability to erase blocks
5. Characters, Actors, Items etc
6. Move over all sprite based drawing to full 3D geometry primitives.
7. Animation systems
8. Implement Farseer Physics Engine for physics, or develop custom phisics implementation. I may have come up with a superfast way of doing 2D Collision detection/response in the works.
9. Possibly an in game console. I already have one written but it's in VB.NET and MDX so it will have to be converted to C#.
10. Purchase a XNA creators club subscription and get code working on 360.
11. Keep all data files in xml format for easy of use and ease to editing. Notepad!

Wow it's been almost a month already since my last blog entry! I am still working, at my job. The local sawmill shutdown and I got hired on as a laborer pulling electrical wires and stripping them for the copper. The other day four of us stripped over 11,000 pounds of copper wire, in one day! Which earned out boss about $22,000 CAD dollars. But it looks like this Thursday is going to be my last day working there, so I should have more free time to do things like make blog posts!

Anyway I have been starting to play around with the Axiom Rendering Engine again these last few days, and it seems to be going good so far. I am actually finding that I can get the engine to work fairly easily as compared to my previous attempts at trying to get it to work. I am also thinking I might start posting some content on the Axiom wiki whne I find the time as it seems to be in need of user submissions.

Notice how I kinda stopped updating my site... you can blame CSS (Counter Strike Source) Now that I have torn myself away from it long enough to write this I will try to continue to update this site and add more content.

I have just released a new untility I have made for doom 3. It allows you to select the doom 3 folder, then perform a search for files within any of the *.pk4 files in the Doom3 folder. (or any folder for that matter). There are hundreads if not thousands of files that make up the doom3 game and this utility is very usefull for searching for tracking down cirtian file(s) you are interested in. As far as I know the Doom3 editor does not provide this functionality.

This utility may become one of a number of tool I may make for Doom3.

CBXDoom3Tools.zip <link to file missing>