Well, I don't know about anybody else, but it sure seems very quiet around here on snarkpit these days, there are cob webs all over the snarkpit logo, look closely and you will seem them too.

It seems that I am the oldest active snarkpit member and that's a scary thought, very scary.

It seems as though all the admins have died, I never see Gwil, Reno or Fishy ever, not even on steam any more, and all the awesome members have vanished, I would name them but there are too many to type out.

So, I think that we need to reunite as a community, here are some of my fresh new ideas to try and liven up the community:

• We start a chess competition again, but actually go through with it
• We have a really simile mapping competition that ANYBODY can easily enter, both source mappers and goldsource mappers
• We have other competitions such as drawing competitions or "make a desktop wallpaper in photoshop" competition
• I create another desktop pictures thread (jokes )
• We have a thread where we post awesome youtube movies
• We create a snarkpit hamachi group

... and I'm all out of ideas for now..

However, the first thing I think we should do is take attendance, all the remaining members need to make a post (just a "yeah, I'm here" will do) so that we acknowledge the fact that you are still here, feel free to toss in some ideas on how to freshen up the snarkpit aswell or feel free to toss anything in actually .

Oh... and when are we going to use the new snarkpit?


Where have all the members gone?

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Aaron's Stuff

I'm going to the mountains for some time!Check the calendar for an aswer:I'ts the summer hollydays!Every body is going somewhere to get away from home,to have a rest...
SCHOOL SUX!
SCHOOL SUX!
SCHOOL SUX!
That's the second reazon everybody want's a rest.

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Never think about bad things!
TNKqwe:The New Killer qwe
[img]http://images.quiz.wegame.com/production/personalities/22/badge.jpg[/img]
I am Engineer - Play Free Online Games
[img]http://media.moddb.com/images/global/moddb_88x31_v12.png[/img]
Citizen Arms

Since the place isn't being used as much, can we use the extra bandwidth to quit compressing map images to the point of artifacts and distortion?

I am wondering where people are as well, though. Yes, HL1 mapping is probably about dead. But what about Source mapping? And Unreal mapping? Is it that most of us were HL1 mappers, and either quit mapping or didn't move on to a new engine?

Where else are people going in terms of resources for Source mapping? Is HL2/Source mapping sort of dead already? I'm wondering if I should just skip it and move on to Unreal and Maya work now.

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Action Half-Life - <A HREF="http://distraction-mod.com" TARGET="_blank">Distrac

Agood question is WHERE THE HELL IS Leperous???The creator of The SnarkPit hasn't been visiting his site since Dec 8th 2007.
WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU Leperous???

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Never think about bad things!
TNKqwe:The New Killer qwe
[img]http://images.quiz.wegame.com/production/personalities/22/badge.jpg[/img]
I am Engineer - Play Free Online Games
[img]http://media.moddb.com/images/global/moddb_88x31_v12.png[/img]
Citizen Arms

Jinx said:
Where else are people going in terms of resources for Source mapping? Is HL2/Source mapping sort of dead already?

Well, I still know heaps of people that work in the source engine (I know I am working on something that I am going to present on snarkpit maybe later this month :biggrin: ), I think that source is still very strong but probably not as strong as I remember it, I know that the Unreal 3 engine is a big thing though, lots of people are working with it and there are lots of folks into modeling.

As far as Half-life 1 goes, TWHL is still an extremely strong Half-life 1 community and we have a few active members that are making stuff for Goldsource.

tnkqwe said:
Agood question is WHERE THE HELL IS Leperous???The creator of The SnarkPit hasn't been visiting his site since Dec 8th 2007.
WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU Leperous???

Ah yes, I have asked this question before as well, at first I was convinced that he secretly visits us every now and then, but now, I think he really never visits. And Dec 8th 2007 is his last post, he hasn't been an active member for years, I remember that the first ever thread I made on this website, leprous replied in and everybody was like "OMG, nice to see you again".

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Aaron's Stuff

I think if anyone wants to make a competition they should go ahead and post it. Unless it's something completely absurd or inappropriate I don't think anyone will complain. I have no authority though so I could be wrong.

As for my inactivity on this site, I've been in college for game art/design for the past year, and this summer my concentration has been on on learning to paint. I am however tossing around the idea of resurrecting one of my maps this fall/winter, dm_ozone (if anyone remembers it :razz: ) with a new layout and more thorough plan for all the custom art assets.

I think many of the old members drop in from time to time (/me waves at Jinx) to see whats new, whether or not they make any posts.

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o

Heya, Baron! Where are you going to school? Thinking about going myself some time in the next year or so. What game engines and modeling programs are they using?

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Action Half-Life - <A HREF="http://distraction-mod.com" TARGET="_blank">Distrac

I never see Gwil

I was in Wales for a week! Back today! I'll give larchy a tap about when we go live, don't worry. Even the massively underworked like me have to take holidays every now and again!

Oh I'm just lurking around, I do visit every now and then but seldom bother posting. Plus I don't have as much free time as I used to...

I'm still here! I check the Pit about every day or ever other day, but I can never think of anything worthy of posting about. I'm currently reworking my Portal map so that it runs on everyone's computer and have also been contemplating hosting a mini competition like we did a while back; something really small.

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Yea ummmm im here for anyone that knows who i am. Currently working on college as well and doing some mapping/3dsmax work. Just got my hands on the new 3dsmax 9 which is pretty handy for those down right crazy realistic vray renders ive been looking at. So yea im all for it get some stuff going m8 so Im a

The test site I just put up to weed out bugs... hopefully thats been prettymuch done as its been up a while and ppl have been using it fine, so I would assume there aren't any real issues with going live with it. Obviously I'm still here to sort out any issues that do come up... as for the future the way everything is written has been kept as simple as possible, and the different parts of the site are modular so it should be easy to modify/add to the site in the future if needed.

When is just up to Gwil really... just lemme know when :smile:

This site will be down for a while when it happens as I need to make some big changes to the database... most of it has been normalised as much as possible and it should be a bit more robust now. Hopefully thats the only thing that will need sorting though :smile:

Could you ask globat if they could get their arses round to upgrading to php5? It doesn't really matter as I've written the new site to work on php4 too, but since you're gonna be changing everything it would be an opportune time to do it and would be better if its possible.

Yo guys, I'm still around, but real busy with work at the moment and not really doing the forums rounds in my spare time as much as I used to. Not planning on disappearing for good any time soon though

Good to see there's still a fair few of old-guard waiting in the wings, even if we are awfully quiet about it :P

Et voila

I'm still around, just getting drunk too much to be able to properly reply without it reading like a 3 year old thumped the keyboard.
I'm currently working on a remake of CS_MANSION, trying to get it to be 64 player.

Ooh, new site looks alright.

I've been lurking for ages. Very busy with uni and such.

Hey guys. I still visit very often and I'm happy that the site is getting reconstructed. I'm a bit lost but I guess I'll get used to it. A thing I also noticed.. I tried downloading about 5 HL1 maps and the links seem to be broken so they could be not working.

I've been rather busy too, but I think by the end of September I'll have time on my hands.

There was a small error with the mirror links when changes were made to the database - this should now be corrected and the links working again.

Ah, the new layout and stuff. Looks pretty good, nice little touches here and there. Good job on the site larchy!

I'm visiting now and then, just don't have a lot of time to do much mapping. Full-time game-programming, with some spare game-devving while I'm not at work or in church.

I did find an awesome art program recently though. Art Rage 2. Pretty good for painting paint-esque textures or scenes.

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Create-ivity - a game development blog

Yeah, site is great, good job larchy!

yesm loving the speediness and clean layout.

A bit sad to see the map comments are gone... for good or are they part of a continual upgrade?

Yeah, I was wondering about that, it looks like you can't make comments either.

Is it just me or does the site lag some? It takes forever for pages to load.. I also noticed that some of my messages get extra characters I did not type in them like //// those things?

I have tried the page in 4 browsers with the same results in each..

Opera, IE 8.0, Firefox, and Flock.

I love the new look and feel.. I am still learning all its little quirks, and gizmos. but it is a major improvement over the last version. Would like it to be a little less laggy though.. maybe its because I am in Hell Paso Texas it laggs.

The site is so slow because of the server this site is hosted on (Globex or something like that). Globex is quite slow and unreliable but its cheap. For memory, the web hosting has been paid up till some time next year, and either Leprous or Gwil paid for it.

And those extra characters are just a perk with the new website :P. Oooh Larrrrchyyyy...

Hey

whats up with the 200 word law it makes it hard to say that something is up with the map. And so if someone wants to post a quick reply of the map they have to search the whole of the forums just to find the map to talk about. That's because the search doesn't work, it could be just a Firefox error.

that's my say. Sorry if you didn't like it.

ULTRA_NINJA said:
whats up with the 200 word law it makes it hard to say that something is up with the map.

aaron_da_killa said:
Yeah, I was wondering about that, it looks like you can't make comments either.

On the original beta site there was a map commenting system which I believed was nice and accessible. You specifically argued that this should be removed and replaced with 200 word minimum reviews. Other members agreed and I made the change.

ULTRA_NINJA said:
That's because the search doesn't work

Apologies, some of the search libraries were PHP5 only. I have uploaded PHP4 versions so that they work on the current hosting.

Muhnay said:
Is it just me or does the site lag some? It takes forever for pages to load.. I also noticed that some of my messages get extra characters I did not type in them like //// those things?

The site has been pretty slow for a while, although it can be fast at times.

Since I updated the database it seems to be a bit more consistently quicker, although thats probably just coincidental. If you have a look at the beta site you can get an idea of what things should be like. However, the forum database is pretty enormous (there are over 150,000 posts IIRC) so that may have something to do with it too... just guessing though.

Could you please provide some more information with regards to the appearance of '/' characters? I fixed an issue yesterday to do with this server being configured a little differently, causing the functions which handle input text to behave differently. This cause '' characters to be added before quote marks when previewing a post.

As far as I know that is the only issue, so if you could please let me know exactly when the issue you describe is occurring (eg making a post, editing, previewing etc) then I'll be able to fix any problems that remain.

Thanks.

I think I know what he is talking about, earlier today, when i previewed a post, then went back to editing it, it will for some reason add "\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\" or whatever before every "'".

Example: That's. (After one hit of preview then back to edit)

Edit, just realized it does it to other symbols :S.

Sup yall. I still lurk, but I haven't mapped in a couple years. Relaunch looks good, but I'd like to see the map comments system (and old map comments) back.

After re-filling out my profile (the profile text box), I found that it likes to add the / (backslash) marks in there too. FYI

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

Cheers guys... obviously this isn't happening on the beta site or any local apache config I've tried, so not sure why its happening on the snarkpit web server. I'll fix things as soon as I can.

Am I missing something, or is it not possible to skip to first unread post in the forums?

OK, backslashes appearing after returning to editing a post after previewing should now be fixed, and the display of slashes in profiles.

If you spot this happening anywhere else just let me know - sorry there isn't a single quick fix for this, I've got to actually go through and add extra stuff in all the places the scripts handle output (the issue is occurring outside the normal text processing functions unfortunately, else I'd just be able to modify them and have done with it).

Added a memberlist link to the top right of the forum display.

The reason you can't sort by post is I was worried about the workload for the database as it would have to be done in such a way that would require a lot of queries/processing. I'll have a look into it and see what I can work out.

So far as map comments go thats something you'll just have to discuss amongst yourselves. I've done what's been asked... so if some members aren't happy, well, thats down to you guys.

I will look at moving over old map comments into the reviews system - thats something that has obviously been overlooked with the changeover.

Old map reviews moved over to the new review system.

Yeah, added a "sort by post" to the memberlist.. works fine locally and on the beta site, but on here the database just dies for a couple of minutes and the entire site is unusable until it eventually gives up.

There is a 'less good' way of doing it which should work.. I'll see about trying that.

Hmm sorted something out... see how it goes.

Wow larchy, beautiful work I see happening here. You seem very active and on top of everything. Hopefully The Snark Pit will soon be as lively as it was back a few years ago, and with you actively fixing all these little bits, it's all looking brighter for the future. Wonderful work! Keep it going!

oo, thanks

Theres always gonna be bugs, just gotta fix 'em all asap so ppl don't start getting annoyed. Hopefully its mostly gonna be little things