What are Ranks?

The Elaztek Studios website has a series of ranks you can unlock through participating in various ways in our community. Some great ways to rank up include:

• Creating new content, including forum topics, forum posts, comments, files, blog posts, and so on
• Receiving positive reactions on content

Be wary, though - receiving negative ratings or having content deleted or hidden may cause you to lose points.

What do these ranks do?

Currently, they're just for bragging rights. However, in the future we'd like to offer more tangible rewards (both on the website and within our various games) as a reward for participating.

What ranks are available?

The full list of ranks, their badges, and the amount of points required to reach each one is detailed in the table just below.

Rank Changes as of 6/4/2023

On June 4th, 2023, we significantly overhauled our ranking system, as well as made changes to display ranks more prominently. Previously, the only ranks available were Newbie, Member, and Advanced Member. These ranks were renamed to Recruit, Private, and Corporal respectively, in order to match the new military-inspired rank system. They were also given updated badges from the default badge used before - however, they are otherwise unchanged and have identical unlock requirements.

Emblem	Title	Points	Points from Previous
	Recruit (formerly Newbie)	0	+ 0
	Private (formerly Member)	10	+ 10
	Corporal (formerly Advanced Member)	30	+ 20
	Sergeant	60	+ 30
	Master Sergeant	100	+ 40
	Warrant Officer	150	+ 50
	First Lieutenant	250	+ 100
	Captain	400	+ 150
	Lt. Colonel	600	+ 200
	Colonel	800	+ 200
	Brigadier	1000	+ 200
	Major	1250	+ 250
	General	1500	+ 250
	Lt. Commander	1750	+ 250
	Commander	2000	+ 250
	Vice Admiral	2300	+ 300
	Admiral	2700	+ 400
	Field Marshall	3500	+ 800
	Hero	4500	+ 1000
	Legend	6000	+ 1500
	Mythic	7777	+ 1777

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Last Updated: 6/3/2023 at 11:29 AM CST

This page outlines a series of guidelines that apply to any and all team members working on one or more of our games, or game-related projects. It does NOT, however, apply to those working on the following projects, and team members working on these projects are subject to their own, separate guidelines:

• DonationStore

INTERNAL CONTENT AND NON-DISCLOSURE AGREEMENT

We don't want our internal content being discussed or leaked. Most of our game content is generally considered confidential. However, we don't think it's fair to permanently prohibit discussion or showcase of this content forever, either. Some folks often really get excited to see what our games look like during the development process, and like seeing the game transition into what they ultimately get their hands on. In a lot of cases, we'll make much of this public to begin with - however, in rare cases that we don't, the following guidelines cover how that content is to be handled - along with general information for how content is handled overall:

1. All content not visible on the public end of the website should be treated as if it were under Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA). Posting images, descriptions, videos, or any other content revealing the content under implied or true NDA will result in termination from the team, and in some cases, could result in legal action being taken
2. All modifications of official source code, game assets, textures, sound effects, and any other content used within Elaztek's website, games, software, or any other product/service should be documented and approved by each project's respective leader
3. Any and all source code within private Elaztek repositories, on either our own Gitlab, Github, or any other service or site where our source code is stored, is under a non-disclosure agreement. Releasing any part of this source code in the form of text, screenshots, videos, audio, or any other means will be seen as a violation of the NDA and will result in your immediate termination from the team and potential legal action
4. Certain aspects of projects may be freely discussed and considered to no longer be under an NDA, under the following circumstances:
   • Screenshots, videos, audio, and other content that does NOT include game assets or source code, may be revealed and game details may be freely discussed by FORMER TEAM MEMBERS if one of the following criteria are met:
     • The project has been unannounced to the public for more than 5 years from the time of the project's inception
     • The project has had no future communications, blog posts, or other information for more than 5 years from the last communication about the project
     • The project has been formally announced as cancelled, and is marked as "Cancelled" in the Project History page within the About Us section (this does NOT apply to projects marked as on "Indefinite Hold")
     • The project has been formally sunset and is no longer receiving future updates
     • The content is already included in a publicly-accessible alpha, beta, or other pre-release build
     • Express, written permission has been obtained to discuss the content in question from the company owner or project lead
   • Screenshots, videos, audio, and other content that does NOT include game assets or source code, may be revealed and game details may be freely discussed by CURRENT TEAM MEMBERS if one of the following criteria are met:
     • The project has had no internal development for more than 3 years, and there are no active plans to continue development
     • The project has been formally announced as cancelled, and is marked as "Cancelled" in the Project History page within the About Us section (this does NOT apply to projects marked as on "Indefinite Hold")
     • The project has been formally sunset and is no longer receiving future updates
     • The content is specifically part of alpha, beta, or other pre-release content and all content shown is either:
       • Already included in its final form within the final game
       • Is not intended to be reused in future updates or DLC
     • The content is already included in a publicly-accessible alpha, beta, or other pre-release build
     • Express, written permission has been obtained to discuss the content in question from the company owner or project lead
5. Game content, including source code, assets, and other content may be freely released and discussed ONLY if the following criteria are met:
   • The project is formally cancelled
   • The project's source code and assets are not being reused in other projects (ex, the Blamite Game Engine's source code would not be able to be released to the public, however game scripts that are only applicable to a specific project would likely be allowed to be released)
   • There are no significant security risks that would be opened up as a result of content being released to the public
   • There are no personal details or other sensitive information included within the content
   • Express, written permission from the company owner is given

PUBLIC RELATIONS

We want to encourage open and free discussion between both members of the community, as well as between the community and our team. In order to help maintain this communication and avoid things breaking down into angry shouting matches, we've got a few guidelines on how community communications are to be handled:

1. All interactions with the community should be handled with care and a basic level of maturity should be demonstrated. Acting in an immature manner could result in you being terminated from the team
2. In the case of a large amount of community backlash or outrage, the following actions should be taken:
   • Contact an administrator or the company Owner immediately
   • Do what you can to keep discussion calm, though we recognize that in some cases this may not be effective or possible
   • Do your best to maintain communication, though we understand that in the case of large events, this may not be feasible
   • If discussion reaches a point where it becomes hostile and overly heated, and users refuse to disengage and/or behave more respectfully, temporary muting of hostile users is considered appropriate
   • Avoid flaming, insulting, attacking, or harassing users during such an event. If you feel that you yourself are too stressed to deal with the situation, it is best to take a step back and disengage at that time
3. All other community guidelines should be followed at all times

BEHAVIOR INSIDE & OUTSIDE OF ELAZTEK STUDIOS

For the most part, we only really care about users behavior inside Elaztek Studios. Unless you're going out of your way to be a horrible person - we don't care one way or the other what you post in your free time. We believe that our team members should have the right to post what they choose on social media, and not have to worry about censoring themselves in order to "represent the business better" or anything like that. However, we do have a few guidelines on how you should behave inside Elaztek Studios, and things that we consider severe enough to take action on if it happens outside of Elaztek Studios, all of which are outlined below:

1. The following behaviors inside OR outside of Elaztek Studios are considered a violation and may result in termination:
   • Performing or encouraging any illegal activities
   • Cyberbullying, harassement, flaming, or otherwise attacking one or more people
   • Doxing or otherwise leaking personal information of one or more people
   • Threatening violence against one or more people in a manner that is clearly not intended as a joke or sarcasm
   • Repeated instances of clear and obvious racist or sexist behavior that is clearly not intended as a joke or sarcasm
2. The following are examples of content that would NOT be considered a violation:
   • Strong controversial political opinions, regardless of political leaning
   • Controversial posts or "hot takes"
   • Controversial posts that are accused of inciting violence, but that we deem are not doing so
   • Posting negative opinions on any of Elaztek Studios' projects, provided that no content or personal details are being leaked

MONETIZATION

Most games developed under Elaztek Studios will have some form of monetization - after all, the bills don't pay themselves. That being said, we do strive to ensure that monetization within our games is as far from predatory and exploitative as possible. We don't like FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) tactics, we don't like forcing players to spend money as the only way to get that cool helmet, and we especially don't like retroactively taking stuff people paid for out and making it impossible to use or obtain in the future. As such, the following guidelines describe how monetization may be implemented into any game developed by Elaztek Studios:

1. Game design and monetization should, generally, not seek to exploit the consumer or player (certain exceptions can be made in special circumstances, see below). Examples of what we consider to be exploitative monetization include, but are not limited to:
   • Gameplay altering microtransactions in a non-free game or product, where certain aspects of gameplay are locked behind a paywall
   • Pay-to-Win mechanics in a non-free game or product, where a player is encouraged or pressured into paying for additional benefits in order to gain a competitive advantage
   • Lootboxes or other related RNG-driven reward systems, when combined with the ability to purchase lootboxes either directly or indirectly
   • Any other similar tactics that are used as part of generating revenue and are not part of the genuine creative vision of Elaztek Studios
2. Microtransactions are generally permitted (provided they do not violate any other guidelines in this section), however there are several additional guidelines that apply to all types of microtransactions, cosmetic or otherwise:
   • Individual microtransactions (single items, not a group of items) should not exceed $10 USD in any circumstance, and "bundles" of multiple items should not exceed $20 USD
   • All microtransactions should have some mechanism for obtaining without requiring that the player spends real-world money. This can be achieved by having specific unlock criteria on a per-item basis, or by having microtransactions be purchasable using an in-game currency
3. An in-game virtual currency system is permitted, however it must also meet the following guidelines:
   •  In-game currency packs can be sold at any amount, including discount bundles
   • All items which can be obtained with a virtual currency must also be able to purchased directly, without requiring the use of the virtual currency
     • In the case of a technical reason why items could not be easily purchased directly, then an option to purchase an exact amount of in-game currency in order to obtain the item should be made available
   • Players must not be forced, under any circumstance, to purchase an excess of virtual currency in order to obtain an item
4. Microtransactions that are described as "exploitative" (see point 1) may be permitted ONLY under the following circumstances, as long as they meet all other criteria described in this section:
   • The game or product that they are implemented in is a free-to-play title, with no other financially feasible means of generating revenue
   • The specific implementation is approved in writing by the company owner
5. Expansions, DLC (Downloadable Content), and other forms of paid addon content (referred to henceforth as simply 'DLC') is permitted, as long as the following criteria are met:
   • The DLC is not retroactively prepared prior to launch and composed of already completed content previously intended to be part of the base game
   • Assets that are used purely for DLC content must not be included in the base title, and should be included as part of the DLC package instead. In other words, players disk space should not be consumed with content that they have not purchased
     • This rule can be waived by the company owner in special circumstances where technical limitations may require this, however this should be a last-resort, and this should be remedied in a future title or through an update
     • This rule does not apply to cases where base assets that are present within the base game are reused within DLC, and only applies to newly introduced assets that are only used within the specific DLC in question
   • DLC content should not at any point be removed from the game, and should remain purchasable and playable indefinitely
     • If keeping a DLC item purchasable were to ever become infeasible for any reason, the DLC should be fully included in the base game or otherwise made available free of charge to all players
6. The Battle Pass monetization model or other similar microtransaction models are permitted as long as the following criteria are met:
   • Previous seasons must remain purchasable and must be able to be completed at any point in the future, even after the release of newer seasons. This applies to both paid and free items within a season
   • Paid seasonal content (often referred to as a "Premium" Battle Pass) should have a mechanism of unlock that does not require the use of real-world money
   • All other guidelines within this section are met, as applicable
7. Existing projects which were compliant with these guidelines at the time of release, but became non-compliant through a future revision of the guidelines, are not obligated to adhere to the new guidelines UNLESS one of the following criteria are met:
   • The game is a "live-service" title and/or is intended to receive future updates for more than 1 year after the point where these guidelines were revised
   • The company owner makes an explicit order for a project to be updated to become compliant
   • Projects will have 6 months from the time of the guidelines being revised to become compliant, however time extensions may be given as necessary
8. Projects may have one or more of the above guidelines waived only with written and express permission from the company owner

TITLE UPDATES/LIVE SERVICE TITLES

In some cases, we'll release updates and patches for our games after their initial launch. Sometimes, these are nothing more than some bugfixes. Other times, however, updates may be used to introduce new content. These are commonly known as "live service" titles. However, in order to avoid some of the pitfalls and negative associations that come with live service games, we have some guidelines in place for how these updates are to be handled.

1. Updates generally should not remove or permanently lock content from the base game. This may be permitted in rare circumstances, with approval from studio administration
2. Updates may not be used as a means to complete base game features. If a title is likely to not have sufficient content by its release date, then the title should be delayed - as while delays are not ideal and can lead to disappointment, releasing a half-baked experience is often significantly worse
3. Features that are finalized or nearly finalized prior to release cannot be retroactively removed and locked behind a future game update

TEAM SIDE PROJECTS

In some instances, team members are permitted to initiate development of side projects under the Elaztek Studios name. Generally, these take the form as side projects that either a single or a small group of people. Note that these side projects are projects that are worked on during "company time", and take the place of a small period of time that would have otherwise been allocated to other official projects. They do NOT refer to projects that team members develop outside of work hours. If these projects are seen as having a good potential for success, they may be granted further attention and resources from Elaztek Studios. No matter the case, all of these side projects are subject to the following guidelines:

1. All side projects (including the content created for them, such as source code, game assets, etc) are recognized as being property of Elaztek Studios, and not under the ownership of the team members who create them, unless otherwise stated by the company owner
2. Elaztek Studios reserves the right to continue development of previously cancelled side projects at any point in the future
3. All side projects must be stored within the Elaztek Gitlab or another Elaztek-operated service
4. Team members working on side projects, unless otherwise specified, are not entitled to any permanent/ongoing royalties from the side project should be completed and released
5. All side projects are to be released under the Elaztek Studios name, and treated as a standard Elaztek Studios project

TERMINATION

It sucks, but sometimes we have to let people go from our team. While we generally try to avoid this as much as possible, there are certain scenarios where we have no choice. Note that the following section applies ONLY to volunteer team members, and may not necessarily apply to paid employees. The common conditions for this, as well as the protections for team members are described below:

1. Elaztek Studios reserves the right to remove any team member, for any reason. The most common reasons include, but are not limited to:
   • Failure to abide by the guidelines outlined in this document
   • Being inactive (ie, not communicating with team members and/or not making any contributions to projects) for an extended period of time, without prior notice
   • Any other reason deemed severe enough to warrant a removal from the team
2. Conspiring to get another team member terminated without valid reason may result in your termination from the team
3. Upon termination, you will lose the following:
   • Immediate removal of website rank and Discord role
   • Immediate removal of access to internal systems (Jenkins, private Gitlab repositories, Stratagem, Team Hub, Ivory Tower, Sentry)
   • Immediate removal of access to internal communication channels (Nextcloud, Mattermost, staff-only Discord channels, staff-only subforums)
4. If you commute on-location, you will have 14 days to collect any personal belongings. This may be extended at a manager's discretion. After this time, your keycard will no longer be valid and you will no longer be able to enter the building. If you have forgotten or lost any personal belongings, please contact a manager or other member of the team
5. Elaztek is not required to disclose the reasoning for any termination (but we usually will, and usually you will know in the first place)
6. You may not be terminated for race, religion, personal beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, or other discriminatory reason
7. Except in extreme cases (such as clear threats of violence or otherwise), team members may not be terminated for any content made on personal social media profiles
   • Some things that we DO consider significant enough for termination:
     • Continued, repeated harassment of one or more individuals
     • Threats of violence in a manner that is clearly not intended to be a joke of some sort
     • Repeated instances of clear and obvious racist or sexist behavior
   • Some things that we DO NOT consider significant enough for termination:
     • Strong controversial political opinions, regardless of political leaning
     • Controversial posts or "hot takes"
     • Controversial posts that are accused of inciting violence, but that we deem are not doing so
     • Posting negative opinions on any of Elaztek Studios' projects, provided that no content is being leaked

RESERVATION OF RIGHTS

Elaztek Studios reserves the right to modify, add to, remove from, or otherwise alter these terms, with sufficient notice. If you disagree with any changes made to these terms, you may contact a manager for questions or concerns. If you ultimately do not agree to the terms, you may no longer be permitted to continue working on Elaztek Studios projects.

QUESTIONS

If you have any questions on any of the above guidelines and/or feel that you need additional clarification, feel free to reach out to a manager or the Owner.

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Last Updated: 6/1/2023 at 6:57 AM CST

Considering applying to a volunteer or paid position here at Elaztek Studios? Awesome! We're always looking for new folks to join the team! Before you do, however, we encourage you to have a look over this page to get a sense of what we expect from our team members.

But first, a quick overview of the differences between our volunteer and paid team positions.

Volunteer Positions

These positions are where most of our work happens currently, since none of our projects are at any point of generating profit, and since we're really just a group of people working on stuff we find fun and exciting.

These positions generally have quite lax requirements on time and work invested, with no fixed quotas that must be met in either case. We typically just ask that you do something when you can, and let us know if you won't be able to for an extended period.

Paid Positions

Currently, we don't really have many (if any) of these - as currently, we don't really have any real funding coming in, from products or otherwise. In the future, however, we'd like for this to become the primary way we bring folks aboard.

These positions generally do come with slightly stricter expectations of time and work invested - but of course, you'll be getting paid in return for your contributions. At this early stage, most positions will be contract-based positions, and will likely not be the type of thing that you could live on alone (and as such, we won't ask for full-time hours either).

For all of our paid positions, the typical pay for the position will always be listed within the Job Portal. We won't ever hide that information from you, because after all, that's likely one of the most important things you'd want to know, right?

General Team Member Expectations

This is stuff we expect from all of our team members - volunteer or otherwise.

Communication

One of the most important parts of being part of our team, besides contributing to our projects, is maintaining communication with the rest of our team. Most often, this will take place on our Discord server. In rare circumstances, however, you may be asked to communicate via Mattermost or Nextcloud, as these allow for on-premises chat communication, and are preferable when discussing particularly confidential topics.

Primarily, however, we simply ask and expect that you maintain semi-regular communication with the team - and would prefer if you didn't drop off the face of the earth for weeks at a time. Don't worry though, you won't be forced to get into constant weekly meetings - after all, some things are better off as an email (or an instant message).

Time Off

For all of our positions, we do not have any fixed limit on the number of days that can be taken off. All time off is currently unpaid (for now), but you can have as much of it as you want (within reason). If there's an emergency within your family, if you've got a vacation planned, if you're busy with school or other obligations, or if you just need some time to step back for a little bit - we're happy to accomodate. Currently, no special action is required besides just informing a manager or administrator beforehand - just so that we know that you'll be gone for a bit, and we aren't sat wondering why you haven't been responding to messages.

Volunteer-Specific Expectations

These are the expectations we have for our volunteer team members.

Time Investments

For all of our volunteer positions, we do not have any fixed amounts of time that are required to be invested in any project. Your invested hours do not have to be tracked (though if you'd like to for personal reasons, go nuts), and you're free to generally do as much or as little as you like. We do ask that you make some amount of regular contributions, even if small. We primarily don't want to have you be gone and not have any progress made for months on end.

If you need to be absent for a long period of time, however, you'll just need to let us know beforehand - you won't be told no, and we'll still keep your seat warm for you. If you do end up stopping any and all progress for an extended period of time without notice, you could risk losing your position - though we'll usually try to reach out several times beforehand.

Employee-Specific Expectations

This is what we expect from our employees, contractors, or other financially compensated team members.

Time Investments

For paid positions, we do have varying amounts of required time investments. You'll also be expected to clock in and clock out using an online page. Since most paid positions are intended to be side-gigs and not the type of things you fully pay your bills on (believe us, we'd love to be able to - but we just aren't there yet), hourly requirements are generally quite small (often well under 10 hours a week), though this may vary by position. For the standard compensation and hourly requirements, you'll want to check the job details on the Job Portal.

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Many of our games are built from the ground up with mods and user-generated content in mind. The Blamite Game Engine itself is even designed around it. In addition to the engine having mod support built-in, we also offer a one-stop shop for mods and user content - accessible both within the website, as well as being able to manage, install, remove, and customize mods directly in each of our games.

Before creating and submitting any content to our Download Center, ensure you read over the following guidelines:

General Guidelines

• Content must not contain malware, viruses, telemetry, spyware, etc. - Content containing anything that may harm or give the user content they may not want, such as viruses, malware, spyware, ransomware, adware, telemetry, tracking, etc. will not be allowed and your access to the download center will be permanently revoked.
• Cheats and hacks will not be permitted - Content that contains cheats, hacks, aimbots, etc. will not be allowed and your file will be rejected.
• Content should be thoroughly tested - Bugs happen, we know that. No software is free of error. If your content is found to have damaging effects to gamesaves or cause other irreversible effects, your content will be displayed with a warning informing users of this fact until you are able to fix it.
• No racism/hate speech - Content that contains racism, in that  the content supports racist activities, will be rejected. If your content is centered around racism as political/social commentary, and is against racism in this portrayal, then your content will not be rejected (atleast not for this reason). Essentially, if your content supports racism, it will be rejected.
• No harassment/bullying - Content that is created as harassment towards Elaztek, its team, members of its community, or anyone else will be rejected. As with racism/hate speech, if your content makes commentary on this issue, it is permitted. It's when your content supports these actions that it becomes a problem.
• Rules on NSFW Content - Content which contains mild adult themes are perfectly fine and (usually) won't be subject to any restrictions. If your content contains any strong adult themes, your content will require additional age verification from users to be downloaded. Content that contains illegal materials (ie, pedophilia) will not be permitted.
• Your content must not contain stolen, ripped, or pirated assets - If your content contains assets that are not your own, is not public domain, and/or you do not have rights to use, it will be rejected.
• We reserve the right to include your ideas, characters, concepts, and software created for our future or current projects - Elaztek Studios was born out of community passion for a larger franchise, and in staying true to being community-focused and driven, we like to incorporate community ideas here and there into our games, whether they be in the form of technical improvements, storylines, characters, and so on. Should your content or ideas ever directly influence or find their way into any official projects, you will not go uncredited. We will do our best to reach out to you and give you a chance to have your full name provided for proper credit. If we are unable to contact you, your display name on the website will be used instead.

Adult/NSFW Content

Adult content featuring nudity and other such things are generally considered acceptable, though are subject to a couple other minor guidelines:

• Content which contains mild adult themes (and NO nudity) will be available as normal content.
• Content which contains nudity or strong adult themes will only be available to users who are 18 years of age or older, but is subject to no other restrictions and is permitted.
• Content which contains adult themes which are considered illegal (ie, non-consensual sexual behavior, sexual content depicting minors, etc) will not be permitted under any circumstance, and will likely result in a permanent account suspension.

Custom Tools and Applications

• Tools which enable online cheating are not allowed - Any tools which enable cheating or hacking in an online setting will not be allowed. Cheats which made available purely for offline or custom games are allowed, as cheating in these areas doesn't cause harm to other players. Tools which involve hacking and malware will not be permitted under any circumstance however.
• The application source must be provided either to Elaztek Studios, or the tool must be made open-source - We cannot under any circumstance allow malicious software onto our download center. The only way to guarantee this, unfortunately, is that we must have access to the source code of your tool. This includes any future updates to the tool. Only the Owner and Administrators will have access to this code if you choose to keep it closed-source, and we will never use your code for any purpose other than reviewing to ensure that the software is safe to use unless you grant us explicit, written permission. You may alternatively have your project open source on the Elaztek Gitlab, Github, or any other similar website instead.

If you are a mod author and are unsure if your content is permitted, just ask! You can message any of our staff on the website or Discord, or create a support ticket. More often than not, it'll be safe to upload - but if you feel your content is teetering on the edge - it's better safe than sorry.

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Excluding cases where uploaded content violates our submission guidelines or is otherwise deemed unacceptable within the Download Center, user-submitted content cannot and will not be removed later. In order to ensure that any mods which depend on other content remains playable, and to ensure that users can continue enjoying user-created content, we require that any submitted files are permanently available. This includes previous versions of files as well as the entirety of the file itself.

You may be wondering - why? Shouldn't the mod author be able to dictate what to do with their own content?

There have been cases where mods for other games on other platforms have been taken down by the author for various reasons - and as such, users must either seek out old downloads that other community members had lying around, or simply be unable to use their favorite mod anymore. Among other things, Elaztek Studios believes in preservation of content of all sorts. We believe that users should never be locked out of things they enjoy, or forced into a different user experience for no good reason. And while we do generally wish to place as much control as possible into the hands of the user, this is a special case where allowing mod authors to remove their own content is far more damaging than restricting this ability.

You don't have to continuously support or update your mods as an author - that's not what we're saying. You're entirely free to add a note to your file stating that you are no longer updating the content. However - we believe that people should still be able to use that old, unsupported version of the content - after all, there's nothing stopping them from just using an older build of the game, so there's not much to stop them.

The tl;dr - once your content is submitted, there's no take-backs. Once it's shared, its shared - and unless we end up removing it ourselves due to violating one of our guidelines, it can't be taken back offline later.

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Here, you can find a list of any old pages which have been replaced, removed, or are otherwise no longer being updated.

It is entirely possible that these links will break over time. If any of the links below fail to work for any reason, you are encouraged to submit a bug report. Chances are, the page still exists somewhere - we just moved it during some mass organization effort.

Homepages

• Initial Temporary Homepage (v0): https://elaztek.com/legacy/index-v0.html/
• Homepage v1: https://elaztek.com/legacy/index-v2.html/
• Homepage v2: https://elaztek.com/legacy/home_2019/
• Homepage v3: https://elaztek.com/legacy/index.html/

Error Pages

• 404: https://elaztek.com/legacy/404_legacy/
• 404 (Alternate, never finished): https://elaztek.com/error_pages/404/
• Soon™: https://elaztek.com/error_pages/soon/

Policies and Documents

• Community Guidelines: https://elaztek.com/legacy/community-guidelines/
• Raven Runner Privacy Policy: https://elaztek.com/legacy/rr_privacy/
• Raven Runner Terms of Service: https://elaztek.com/legacy/rr_tos/
• File Submission Guidelines: https://elaztek.com/legacy/submission-rules/
• Rank Information: https://elaztek.com/legacy/rankinfo/

Informational Pages

• About Elaztek Studios: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about-us/
• Early About Section
  • About Elaztek: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about/about_elaztek/
  • Careers: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about/careers/
  • Game History: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about/game_history/
  • Publications: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about/publications/
  • Style Guide: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about/style_guide/
• About Section v2 (Retired in 2023)
  • About: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about_v2/index/
  • Our Vision: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about_v2/vision/
  • Projects: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about_v2/projects/
  • Legacy Projects: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about_v2/projects_legacy/
  • History: https://elaztek.com/legacy/about_v2/history/
• Company Pages
  • Projects: https://elaztek.com/legacy/elaztek/projects/
  • Redeem Code: https://elaztek.com/legacy/elaztek/redeem/
  • Trademarks: https://elaztek.com/legacy/elaztek/trademarks/

Games and Projects

• Project: Infinity
  • Nameplates: https://elaztek.com/legacy/infinity/nameplates/
• Elaztek Launcher
  • Data Collection & Logging: https://elaztek.com/legacy/products/launcher/launcher_telemetry/
• Blamite Game Engine
  • Material Website
    • Homepage: https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/blamite_legacy/index.html/
    • Homepage (weird business license page thing): https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/blamite_legacy/index-business-unused.html/
    • Team Application: https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/blamite_legacy/team-join/
    • Version History: https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/blamite_legacy/versions/
    • About/Overview: https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/blamite_legacy/about/overview/
  • 2021 Website
    • Recent Commits: https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/commits_v1/
    • Homepage (v1): https://elaztek.com/projects/blamite/index_v1/

Databases

• Helpcenter
  • Under Maintenance Page: https://elaztek.com/legacy/helpcenter_ve/
  • Old Wrapper (now empty, made using Visual Editor): https://elaztek.com/legacy/helpcenter_new_ve/
  • Old Wrapper (now empty, has sidebar): https://elaztek.com/legacy/helpcenter/
• Product DB
  • Product Page Test: https://elaztek.com/legacy/products/generic/
  • Product List Test: https://elaztek.com/legacy/products/generic_list/
  • Product DB: https://elaztek.com/legacy/products/pdb/

Forms

• Blamite Team Application: https://elaztek.com/legacy/team-join-blamite/
• Application Portal: https://elaztek.com/legacy/team-join-hub/
• Project: Infinity Team Application: https://elaztek.com/legacy/team-join/

Miscellaneous Pages

• Official Downloads: https://elaztek.com/legacy/official_downloads/
• Chaotic United Landing Page: https://elaztek.com/legacy/cu_landing/
• Game History: https://elaztek.com/legacy/game_history/

Test Pages

• 404 Random Phrase JS Test: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/404_jstest.html/
• Answers DB (broken): https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/answers/
• Articles (default with Pages/IP.Content): https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/articles.html/
• IP.Chat Unavailable Page: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/ipc-err/
• IP.Chat Test Page: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/ipc-test/
• Music Test: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/musictest/
• Release Notes: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/release-notes/
• UI Demo: https://elaztek.com/legacy/test/ui_demo/

Data Files

• Launcher (NTClient)
  • Changelog (ntclient_versions.json): https://elaztek.com/external/launcher_helpers/ntclient_versions.json
  • Latest News Post Data (update.html): https://elaztek.com/external/launcher_helpers/update.html
• Foundation Mod Manager
  • Source Info (fmm_src_info.json): https://elaztek.com/external/platform_data/fmm_src_info.json
  • Mod List (mods.json): https://elaztek.com/external/platform_data/mods.json

Forum Archives: https://elaztek.com/forums/forum/63-archive/

View full topic

In the interest of ensuring that users that enjoy our games can keep doing so tomorrow, next year, and decades from now, the following policy has been put in place and is effective for the duration of the lifetime of Elaztek Studios.

Last modified: 1/20/2021

The TL;DR (for your everyday joe):

Any official downloads should always be available. Users should always be able to choose what version of our games they play. They should always be able to tinker with them, create content for them, and modify them to their heart's content.

If we decide that we want to move forward and leave a previous project behind, we must honor that project's legacy and history. Any downloads made for it must remain available, users must be able to keep submitting new content, and if the game requires online servers to function, those servers should be placed into the hands of the community to keep them going in our place.

In the event that we are no longer able to do business (and we can't just revert to being a hobbyist group), everything we've ever made should be released to the public. If we cannot continue operation, we must take all steps possible to ensure that our work and legacy don't die with us - to ensure that the community can, if desired, carry the torch forward.

Preserving the past is a key part of what we do, it's been a key part of the operation of Chaotic United for many years, and too many other studios neglect to maintain their legacy projects - eventually resulting in them fading away to time. We aren't about that.

If you're just a member of the community scrolling by - hey there. Make sure you hold us accountable if we ever steer too far from these guidelines.

If you're part of the company, the full detailed policy can be found below.

The Nitty-Gritty (required reading for team members and applicants):

Dedicated Multiplayer Servers

• Whenever possible, any games which contain a multiplayer component should include (either with the game content or as a free download on the website) user-operated dedicated server software. This software should be able to be used by any user to host a 24/7 private server.
• Whenever possible, any games which contain a multiplayer component should include a Server Browser, which allows the user to browse through these self-hosted servers.
• User-hosted servers shall not be blacklisted or removed from the server list, excluding only cases where the server host is in direct violation with any of our policies or any licenses that are part of the game (ie, the game's EULA).
• The user should be able to, at any time, download outdated server versions for use with outdated game clients.

Post-Launch Updates and Patches

• Post launch updates should be offered through the game client and/or launcher, as well as a separate download on the website if possible.
• The user should be able to, at any time, choose to remove these patches or install an outdated game version.
• Outdated game versions should be blocked from public matchmaking, but should be allowed to connect to community-hosted servers of the equivalent version.
• Updates should, whenever possible, be minimal in filesize and be able to be applied as a patch on top of the previous game version.

User Generated Content

• User submitted content must remain available, even if their account becomes suspended. Only user content which itself violates policy can be removed. Removed content should remain accessible to company and site administrators for potential future review and restoration if desired.
• In the event of user content removal, the user must be allowed to submit an appeal and have the appeal heard and considered.

End-of-Life/End-of-Support

• All game or engine downloads must remain available for download. This includes the Blamite Editing Kit, patch/version history, server software, and any other software needed to play and create content for the game.
• All existing game or engine licenses should be honored indefinitely, or all downloads must become free to all registered users on the Elaztek Studios website.
• Any user content submitted that depends on a specific game or engine version must remain available for download, and new content must be able to be submitted.
• In the event of a version of Blamite reaching end-of-life:
  • All engine documentation must remain available. At minimum, a download archive of the documentation must be available. Alternatively, a download can be omitted if Elaztek-hosted documentation remains online. In the event that Elaztek-hosted documentation becomes broken, unusable, or goes offline, a complete offline download must be made available.

Online-Only Services

• Games which cannot operate without a connection to an online server should be avoided whenever possible. The following guidelines exist in the event that a creative vision requires the presence of an online-only component.
• No game content should be retroactively locked after its release. In the event that a game's content demands become too great, all possible efforts should be first made to remedy these technical burdens without removing content. In the event that content must be removed, it should be removed in such a way that allows for the user to re-download it separately in order to continue playing the content.
• Major content expansions should not be removed from any download or purchase mechanism.
• The following procedures should be followed towards the end of the game's life-cycle:
  • Online servers should remain online as long as possible.
  • If the need to terminate online servers becomes required, the server software must be released to the public. Additionally, a final update/patch must be released to allow the game to easily connect to 3rd-party servers.
  • All game content must remain purchasable and/or downloadable.
  • Content creation tools should be released to the community. In games developed with Blamite, the full Blamite Editing Kit should be released, with no restrictions on functionality and no crucial tools omitted.

Contingency Plan

The following is a fallback plan to try and execute as effectively as is feasible in the event that Elaztek Studios were to ever be unable to continue business operation. Unlike other parts of the policy, it does not need to be followed to the letter - because there is the likelihood that, should the company reach this stage, it may simply be impossible to meet the requirements. However, if possible, as much of the following should be completed as possible. An incomplete execution of the following plan is better than having all of our hard work turn to dust and fade away.
 

• Should the company fall on hard times and be unable to continue business operations, efforts should first be made into downscaling into a volunteer operation, similar to how it started. This means that the CEO(s) or upper management at the time take it upon themselves to continue hosting services out-of-pocket, funding them through means such as an alternative job elsewhere.
• Every effort to preserve the company should be taken and pursued, except in cases which would compromise the company's integrity or core values. The ultimate determination on how to proceed in such a circumstance falls on the company Founder, or the highest ranking CEO at the time in the event the Founder is no longer overseeing the company. Feedback should be considered from all existing employees.
• In the event that the company is determined to be unable to continue operating in any capacity, business or otherwise, and the company is decided to be permanently shutting down:
  • All possible efforts must be made to ensure that all intellectual property, software source code, software binaries (including outdated versions), documentation, and game content are released to the public under the most permissive licenses possible.
  • All possible efforts must be made to ensure that any and all FREE community-created content is released to the public. In the case of PAID content, the decision on how this content is to be released should fall to the content author. In the event that the author cannot be contacted, their paid content should be treated as free content under the assumption that the author has stopped maintaining their content.
  • A webpage providing access to all of the above should remain online for 1 year at minimum, with at least 90 days notice before permanent shutdown. Every effort should be made to instruct users on where to locate the content after that date.
  • If a community operation arises with the goal of continuing to offer Elaztek software downloads and/or support, every effort should be made to ensure that they follow the guidelines specified within this document, and that they are in possession in all released materials before permanent shutdown.
  • All existing forum and website content should be preserved using a read-only website for as long as possible. In the event that hosting existing web content can no longer be performed, existing topics, users, and polls must be preserved through one of the following two methods:
    • A Specific Community Preservation Group
      • In the event that you wish to exchange the data with a single, trusted, and respected member of the Elaztek community for the purposes of preserving forum content, the content may remain unaltered, including hidden and staff-only content, except as desired. All public content must remain unaltered and intact.
    • The General Public
      • In the event that data cannot be handed off to a specific group, the following content and SQL tables should be released to the public:
        • Forum Topics
        • Forum Posts
        • Forums and Forum Categories
        • Polls
        • Downloads Categories
        • Downloads Files
        • Downloads Reviews and Comments
        • Website Themes
        • Pages Databases
        • Pages Records
        • Any other tables or data that is part of a public-facing webpage or content
      • Before releasing the data to the public, care should be taken to ensure the following are REMOVED:
        • IP addresses
        • Email Addresses
        • Payment and Billing Information (if applicable)
        • Street Addresses (if applicable)
        • Other personal information (if applicable)
        • Hidden and Staff-only Content

Failure to abide by this policy may result in termination from the company. Each and every policy listed does not have any limitation. Every policy listed should be considered as effective from the date of introduction for the duration of the company's lifespan.

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Hey, everyone!

Not much to actually write here, but we've just uploaded a YouTube video going over the current state of the Blamite Game Engine. We plan to create more of these as time goes along and the engine continues to grow and evolve. We can't say how often they'll be produced, but we want to start showing off new features as they get developed. Sometimes they'll just be simpler stuff without too much visual flare, other times it might be something a bit more exciting.

This first video was uploaded yesterday and was recorded by yours truly. It's a fairly in-depth one as I was both somewhat sleep-deprived, as well as the video being entirely unscripted. So, if you want to check it out, bundle up, grab some popcorn, and give it a watch.

Elaztek Studios' roots can be traced all the way back to 2013, when the founder of the company first created a "company" named Haloman Development - abbreviated as HMD. Galactiminer and Project: Infinity can both be traced back to those origins, though very little real development wouldn't come until many years later.

Unlike Elaztek or Chaotic United's modern websites, which are more or less custom built - that is, run on a proper webserver with full control over site content and applications - these older websites were created using Webs (webs.com), which is an easy-to-use site builder service. They offer very limited control over what you can do, but are intended to make it so that those without the knowledge or experience to operate their own webserver were able to create a basic website.

Those websites got very little development and were officially retired once Elaztek Studios was launched. The websites have since only been maintained enough to ensure they continue to exist (in other words, periodically logging into the Webs account to ensure they weren't automatically removed).

However, on November 11, 2020, Webs announced that they would be shutting their doors and migrating all content over to Vistaprint - the parent company of Webs. However, only Premium Webs customers would have their content migrated over. Those who didn't have premium websites were told that their site would no longer be viewable or editable:

Quote

As of March 31, 2021, you will no longer be able to edit or view the published version of your free website hosted with Webs. We are so sorry for the inconvenience to you and would love to continue serving you as our customer under the Vistaprint brand,where our packages start at just $5 per month. We also offer design services to move your site to Vistaprint or create a brand new site for you.

In order to preserve the old websites (as awful as they are, seeing as they were made by a 13 year old), the websites were mirrored using WinHTTrack and will be hosted on our own webserver going forward. You can find all 6 Webs sites that were previously operated by haloman30 below, though not all of them were related to Elaztek. Additionally, a 7th site that was part of CU's history but wasn't hosted by haloman30 was also archived - and is also linked below.

Please keep in mind that, again, the quality of the websites are terrible. They were made by a 13 year old and, as such, contain some pretty dumb stuff and weird claims - and have been unaltered from those early iterations. Additionally, keep in mind that these websites are read-only. Several of them used to contain account and forum functionality, but these are dependent on Webs' backend systems - which are not available for these archives. As such, logging in, registering, or any other user content will simply do nothing. Think Wayback Machine.

Enjoy - if you can.

Elaztek Studios

Haloman Development

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/halomandev.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://halomandev.webs.com/ 

Galactiminer

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/galactiminer.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://galactiminer.webs.com/ 

Project: Infinity

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/infinityproject.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://infinityproject.webs.com/ 

Chaotic United

Chaotic United

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/chaoticunitedserver.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://chaoticunitedserver.webs.com/ 

United Alycraft

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/unitedalycraft.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://unitedalycraft.webs.com/ 

Hurricane Gaming (HurricaneCraft) (not owned by haloman30)

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/hurricanegaming.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://hurricanegaming.webs.com/ 

Other

HaloFanZone

• Archive URL: http://haloman30.com/archives/webs.com/halofanzone.webs.com/index.html
• Original Webs.com URL: https://halofanzone.webs.com/ 

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Howdy, folks!

You may have noticed that the forums were offline for a bit today. That's because today was the day of... The Big Move™. And by that, I mean that today was the day we migrated away from InMotion Hosting.

But why? Why the sudden webhost migration? Well, if you've been active on the Discord - you'll know this wasn't sudden at all. This has been the plan since earlier this year. It just took until fairly recently for it to become feasible - or at least, seemingly feasible.

Why We Moved

As great as InMotion has been considering how much we paid for it, they've become increasingly frustrating to work with. On more than one occasion, I would get an email in my inbox telling me to remove a handful of .zip files. You see, according to their ToS, you aren't allowed to use the webhost for anything other than a website and email. Hosting files or other content that isn't explicitly part of a website doesn't fall into that category. I was at first unaware of this - because let's be real, nobody reads the ToS. Luckily, they don't just instantly shut your account off if they detect zip files. You get 48 hours to remove the files and only if you fail to do so afterwards are you at any risk of account termination.

At first, this was still a pretty fair thing. It wasn't every single zip file, rather it was just a handful of larger ones - usually world archives. By the time this started to come up, I'd already had a subscription to OpenDrive, which gives me unlimited cloud storage for a mere $100 a year. So - I just moved everything over there, and while it took a while (especially to upload), it was done and things were good.

But of course, if that's where it ended, we wouldn't be putting up a topic saying we'd moved away from them, would we? No - this continued to become more and more of a problem. What started as requests to remove 20-50GB archives later turned into 100-300MB archives, and later did in fact turn into every single .zip archive on the entire host.

The last email I got about excessive "backup content" was one listing 196 different files, many of which were only a few megabytes in size. A select few were larger - but some of them were so small that they were even less than 1MB.

This wasn't the only issue I'd had with them. Additionally, performance had become a recurring problem. Now in fairness - this is undoubtedly in part due to poor optimizations on my part. There's likely stuff I could do to improve things. For a while, the banner images you'd see on most pages were at 4k resolution, and in PNG format. Many of those were later downscaled to 1080p JPEGs, which somewhat helped.

However, one of the biggest factors with the performance of the host happened to not be large images used in various places - but rather, resource limitations on the host itself. Not disk or storage limits, mind you - one of the best things about InMotion was the unlimited everything. Turns out, the CPU usage even during a single page load was being maxed out. The poor response times were a result of the machine itself being stressed and strained.

Now, you might be wondering - why not just make a ticket? I could've theoretically made a ticket with them, because it's entirely possible the CPU usage had little to do with my own site. And this comes into the other issues with InMotion - it was a shared host.

For smaller or simpler websites, there's absolutely nothing wrong with shared hosting. All the hard management stuff is taken care for you out of sight - all you worry about is the content itself and that's it. Things just work - and that's the beauty of it. It worked for us for a while too, and it perhaps could've continued to do so going forward. However, when running under shared hosting, if someone else is hitting the CPU hard for whatever reason, that'll start to affect you, too. It's all under the same machine - hence the term, "shared" hosting. You can get dedicated hosting to work around this, but this tends to be much more costly.

The common thread interleaved between these issues all center around one thing - ownership and control. And that's precisely what this move was designed to fix.

Our New Home

So, where did we move? What hosting company did we go with? If you're active on Discord you already know the answer, but if not... nobody. We aren't hosted with any 3rd party company. For the first time in CU's history since 2015, one of our services is running off of owned hardware. That's to say, hardware that is itself entirely under ownership and control of CU.

I've upgraded my home internet to a business plan with faster speeds (at virtually no increased cost), rebuilt my old AMD FX-8370 desktop, hooked it up to my TV, and went out and bought a single-user cPanel/WHM license and got everything set up. The only stipulation with that single-user license is that it runs in a virtual environment - which it does. However, I am in full control of this virtual environment and it's got plenty of breathing room to work with - so any performance/latency losses from virtualization should be negligible.

The system is setup to have automated backups, and I'll be getting it setup to periodically upload them to OpenDrive as well for added peace of mind, as the website is one of those things that we've been negligent to back up regularly. Along with that, it's got two 2TB hard drives that are mirrored - so it's also safe from any potential hard drive failures as well.

Now - full disclosure, this is partially an experiment in a way. It took a lot of tinkering and many days of slamming my face into my desk to work out some of the kinks with the whole setup - but things should be running smoothly now. Even so, I fully expect bugs to crop up just because of the fairly different system being run. Along with that, I'm also in the middle of sorting out stability issues with the FX board itself. But don't panic - I've got a backup board/CPU if it turns out that the FX (or the board it's on) are faulty. The issue at this time appears to be a faulty RAM stick - which has since been removed and the server has been stable ever since, but we won't know for sure for another week or so. If the site does happen to go offline, I can assure you it'll come right back online as soon as possible. And, in the worst case scenario - if running this stuff off of local hardware turns out to be completely infeasible and just isn't working out, I'll be holding onto the InMotion host for a while still - so that if we ever have to move back over, we can.

But, as of now - everything seems solid. DNS works, Email works, the forums and website both work, everything seems to finally just work. If you find something that goes against that - don't hesitate to report it on the bug tracker. If the site happens to go offline for an extended period of time, ping me or DM me on Discord and I'll get it back online once I see it (likely after doing some hardware maintenance if it turns out the machine froze again).

Oh, and be sure to let us know if the site is any faster than before. It should be a little faster, but there's still one more hardware upgrade that the machine needs - so it won't be running at full speed until then.

Otherwise, if no issues arise - that's it. We're moved onto what will hopefully be the new home of the Chaotic United, Elaztek, and any other websites for the foreseeable future. And this time, there's nobody to tell us what content we can or can't have on the site. No arbitrary rules on zip files or having too large of files. The only one who has any say in what we do with the CU website, is us.

And damn does that feel good.

Just as a sidenote, I'm not intending to throw any shade at InMotion. They gave us pretty decent hosting for 13 bucks a month. Unlimited disk space, addon domains, email accounts, and so on. The performance wasn't great - but even then, when it's that cheap, it's hard to argue with it too much. If you happen to be wanting to host a site of your own, don't let my words against shared hosting scare you off of it. For simpler stuff or for people just getting started, shared hosting is affordable and relatively easy to use. It served ourselves, Nuclear District, and the old CU well for many years - we've just decided we want to take things into our own hands now.

Anywho, that's all we've got for this one folks! Apologies for the downtime - though to be honest, it didn't last nearly as long as I was expecting. Overall, the migration went about as smooth as I could've asked for. Be sure to let us know if you run into any issues on the site.

Hey, everyone! It's been a little bit, and we've got some news to share!

Gitlab Migration

First off: we've once again migrated the Gitlab, except this time we didn't break LFS data. The new and updated Gitlab can be found at the Gitlab's original URL: https://gitlab.elaztek.com. As a result, if you have any repositories cloned you will need to update the origin push/pull URL's to point to gitlab.elaztek.com instead of newgitlab.elaztek.com. Since all the old data (accounts, repositories, etc.) is still present, no other adjustments should need to be made to those URL's. You may need to log-in again if you use a GUI application for interacting with Git, and if your repositories utilize webhooks those may need to be adjusted as well (though this depends on the hooks themselves typically).

The old URL (ironically named https://newgitlab.elaztek.com) has been set to redirect automatically to the new URL. As a sidenote, the Gitlab has not exchanged hands during this migration. Seeing as internally I've mentioned moving things to my own hosting a few times (and I suppose it's possible that such information may have slipped out potentially), I figure its worth mentioning. The main purpose behind this migration is to reduce the sheer number of servers that have been in use by Errite (the studio that hosts Gitlab as well as assists with other server-management-stuffs with Elaztek and CU), as it became more costly than made sense.

Blamite Game Engine

You didn't think we've been sitting alone doing nothing the past few months, have you? If you did think that - you'd be entirely justified because there's been a lot of that before. But today, we've got some goods to show off. For most of you, it'll be more boring stuff - but while it isn't much on the surface, it's actually a much bigger deal under the hood - and I'll try to make that clear as best as I can.

Engine Architecture Changes

The game engine has, up until now, been a standalone executable. No libraries or anything crazy like that, just a simple blam.exe and that's it. However, as time went on it became clear that this wasn't gonna work out long-term. The engine's core has to be used outside of just the game - Sapien will need to use it, our UI editing tool that has yet to be named needs to use it, and our planned unified editor for Blamite will of course need to use it as well. So, we had to perform some adjustments to migrate the engine from being a standalone application to a DLL, or Dynamic Link Library. In layman's terms, this means the engine can be utilized by other applications without having to bake the engine's runtime into each and every development tool by hand.

We aren't done with that migration, as the migration has revealed a couple real issues - namely that the engine doesn't have a very clean startup and shutdown routine. There's a lot of data that "persists" through restarts erroneously, that was previously given no thought since that data would just be lost on exit. However, this mainly refers to trying to do things like stop/start the engine from those external tools - initial startup works just fine.

Documentation

Along with this, we've started to build up a documentation website for Blamite. Or, rather, a "Guides" section. We have automated source documentation built via Doxygen, but this is presently kept behind lock and key - as it includes many of the source code files for the engine. What isn't being kept behind lock and key is this new Guides section, which is derived from the Blamite repository's Wiki section. The new documentation is crisp, clean, and much easier to use than Gitlab's built-in Wiki (especially for what we're using it for). Keep in mind - absolutely nothing on these guides should be relied upon for any amount of real guidance at the moment. Since the engine is only in its infancy at the moment, a lot of things are undocumented. What is documented are, in many cases, old feature plans by 16-year-old-me back when I had no real clue how to do anything with a game engine, or even C++ for that matter. You will see a few pages marked with a notice like this:

Usually it will contain a message about me harshly criticizing my past self and stating that the page exists for archival purposes only. Most of these pages are kept in the 'Deprecated' category.

Other pages are either out of date, incomplete, or in some cases may actually be complete if you're lucky. Don't expect anything too exciting on the guides for a while, though you may periodically get a glimpse under the hood in between announcements. The new guides section can be found at https://hub.elaztek.com/guides/latest.

Tags - The backbone of all Blamite content

For those of you at all familiar with Halo's game engine, you've surely heard of Tags before. In Bungie's engine, tags are used for the vast majority of all game content. And as of now, Blamite has full support for creating new tags and tag classes. Cache files (.map files) aren't implemented yet, and there are a few other things that need to be accounted for, but the bulk of the engine's tag/tagclass system is functional. Along with that, we've made a couple minor but, in my opinion, very key changes that will prove to be invaluable later on.

Each tag file stores the version under which it was created within its file. And while this may not seem like a huge deal, it means that we'll be able to actually know what exact version each tag was built with. This can be used for a number of things, particularly with backwards compatibility. We could either let the engine be aware of all previous tag formats - though this could prove to become very unwieldy, very fast. A more realistic implementation is having Guerilla facilitate tag upgrading. We could even make it so Guerilla can automatically download the appropriate plugin files for that tag and help the user migrate their tags forward.

No tag classes have actually been solidified yet. In fact, Guerilla hasn't even been upgraded to be able to handle proper tag files. But it's something that'll be happening sooner rather than later.

Screenshots

So, I've talked about a number of things in this post - but so far, I've not shown anything in the way of photos. Let's fix that. Below you can find some screenshots of the various engine tools. Each image will have a brief explanation below it.

Sapien

Guerilla

Blamite Engine

Unfortunately folks, that's all we've got - for now. Progress is always being made - and while not all of it is worth showing off, be rest assured we're always inching closer to having a fully functional engine on our hands. 3D rendering isn't being worked on yet - but we're very close to being there.

Until then, we'll see you all next time.

So, as many of you know, today marks the official EOL (end-of-life) date for Windows 7. There will be many who would try to tell you that running Windows 7 beyond this point is somehow an incredibly dangerous affair, and by doing so you put your system, personal information, and so on at serious risk. I'll come back to that in a bit - as I do have some things to say in regards to that.

Elaztek Software and Windows 7

The #1 thing I want to clear up is this: for the foreseeable future, our games and software will continue to support Windows 7. I can guarantee this for any project that I am the lead on - which, for now, means everything we do will have this functionality. I still run 7 and will continue to use Windows 7 as my main OS, and will continue to develop Blamite, its tools, and everything else on Windows 7. How long that will be doable, I can't say - but I have no plans to switch or upgrade anytime soon.

If you don't want to hear my thoughts about the idea that running 7 is a security risk, and the people who spread that idea, you can stop reading now. While some may consider this part to mostly be opinionated, I think it's a lot closer to reality than alternative.

The Windows 7 Doomsday-ers

A lot of people would try to convince you that you should upgrade to Windows 8 or 10 immediately. I'm sure as time goes on you'll see an increasing amount of people saying things like "Windows 7 is dead", "either upgrade to 10 or take your Windows 7 PC off the internet immediately", and so on.

When software reaches end-of-life, it stops receiving updates. Period. No security patches or feature updates. The primary point of concern are security updates. These are what are stopping with the end-of-life. For security-essential systems, this is a big deal. For folks who aren't nearly as tech-savvy, this is still a fairly big deal. For someone who knows how to safely browse the internet and isn't being actively targeted, I'd argue that, for the most part, it's not the end of the world.

Viruses do not appear on a system unprompted. They must be introduced to the system through some point of entry. If a system is offline and isn't networked to other devices, that's about as safe as you can get. You can run virtually any OS you want and be fine. The general population would agree with me there. However, what most people would tell you is that having a system networked or connected to the internet at all is a major security risk.

I can't help but laugh at this idea. People act as though, starting today, if you hook up a Windows 7 PC to the internet, it'll just magically get infected with WannaCry or some other awful virus. Like it'll just magically break without any human operation. Maybe that's not what people believe, but with the amount of "better unplug that ethernet cable" makes me wonder. If you're a big security guru then I'd love to hear your take on it if you disagree - I admit I am not the most knowledgeable when it comes to security, hence why I'm not the one who handles all that stuff.

If you have a variety of systems networked together, sure - maybe you're more vulnerable to a virus that spreads over LAN and infects various machines on it. These viruses do exist, no doubt about it. But the point still stands - they must be introduced somehow. One of those systems must be infected first. YOU have to introduce the virus to one of your computers for this to happen.

Antivirus exists. Avast is one I've used for a while, and it still supports all the way down to XP to this very day. Beyond that, if you know what you're doing online and you aren't actively being targeted by someone (which most people usually aren't), then chances are you won't have much issue. If you're seriously concerned, then by all means - upgrade. But please don't spread the argument that running an old OS online is this horribly dangerous idea - because it's not.

Why not upgrade?

So I suppose the big question is - why not upgrade? After all, Windows 10 is just great, isn't it?

Allow me to list off a few of the major issues that I personally have with 10:

• Lack of control over updates - all updates are forced onto the machine without 3rd party tools or registry/group policy manipulation, which isn't even possible unless you're running Windows 10 Professional or higher
• Lack of update Quality Control - several awful updates have been shoved out, breaking anything from drivers to software, or worst of all, deleting user's library folders and potentially irrecoverably deleting years of invaluable data
• Increased System Security - No, I'm not talking about virus protection or things of that nature. Rather, how the OS is becoming increasingly locked-down. Apps from the Microsoft Store will barely grant you read access with a lot of fighting, and now not even Linux is able to drive around the folder security like it was before. The idea of having folders/files on YOUR computer that YOU cannot access just... feels wrong
• Control Panel vs Settings App - System settings are spread out across two locations for seemingly no real reason.

Windows 10 has some nice features, but for me personally they aren't enough to warrant dealing with these hassles and more. I like to use 3rd party themes via stuff like UxStyle, and on 7 it works flawlessly. On 10, it barely works and if you install a theme for an incorrect version of Windows 10 your system will become unusable and require a total reinstallation.

If you like the new start menu, or you have games that require DX12, then sure - stick to 10 and enjoy those features. Me? I'll stick to 7 - and in the offchance anyone out there feels the same, fret not - our games will support 7 for as long as we can realistically do so.

Hey, everyone!

We've been doing some updates, upgrades, and general improvements to the Elaztek website! We've introduced new features as well as enhanced and improved old ones. Overall, the general theme is bringing more parity with CU's forums - with the eventual end goal being that the two forums move in lockstep when it comes to general community features.

Moods

These have been on Chaotic United's forums for quite some time, but we figured it was high time that they made their way over here. All the moods that are available on CU are available here. Along with that, we've fixed a few minor display issues with several moods (on both Elaztek and CU forums). Nothing too spectacular or out of the ordinary. Hit the smiley face in the top-left of the navbar to set your mood!

Awards

We've actually had a handful of awards set up for a while. Many of them were unused (and still are), and virtually none of the awards from CU's forums made their way over. Well, since part of CU's relaunch was its new awards setup, we've brought many of those awards over to Elaztek - excluding ones that don't really fit Elaztek.

However, we've also disabled many of the (small selection of) old awards - primarily, the category named "Blamite Expertise" and the Contest award "Project: Infinity Mapmaking Contest". These were both disabled because, well, it's gonna be a long time before those awards are going to even be relevant. Blamite is years from being of quality (and likely still at least a couple away from actual, proper gameplay), and Project: Infinity is also quite a ways out as a result. They'll be refined and reimplemented when Project: Infinity and Blamite are complete.

Several awards, new and old, are currently pending some new icons. Keep an eye out for those. We won't make an announcement, but you'll see it in a changelog at some point in our Update Notes blog.

Profile Changes

These are the most minor of the changes (besides the minor fixes and edits in the changelog), but still worth mentioning. The old 'PC Specs' field has been disabled and, in its place, a full category called 'System Information' for you to put all your different PC information. CPU, GPU, Operating System, RAM, and so on - each one has its own respective field. And if we've missed one, we've added another field for other system info. If your PC has some special quirks about it, you can share those details in the 'Other PC Info' field. We've also added a new Profile Step for you to quickly and easily put it all in.

Additionally, we've added a few other minor fields for Interests, Discord username, Skype username, and Location. We've also made it where several major fields (Steam, Discord, etc.) show up alongside your forum posts - much like how they do on CU.

Wrapping Up

We've made a few other smaller changes here and there, but they don't really warrant much mention here. If you want to know all the details, check out the full changelog in the latest Update Notes blog entry linked below.

Lastly, if you (or anyone you know) is interested in game design, development, or engine programming, send them our way! We're always looking for new people to introduce to the team - Blamite isn't gonna build itself, y'know.

If you wish to join our team, slam the "Join the Team" button below. Alternatively, if you want to learn more about Blamite, click the 'Blamite' link in the navigation bar.

We'll bid you farewell for now with a few screenshots from me working on text rendering:

Our font system effectively draws text as a series of bitmaps strung together. (we needed a way to draw text independently of dear imgui)

After creating a tool called FontExtractor to export our favorite Fixedsys font into these glyph images, it started to come together. The spacing was due to how FontExtractor exported images, leaving lots of blank space in the resulting image files.

And then this happened. Uncompressed fonts utilize a fontinfo.xml file to determine how glyph images are drawn (including sizes and such) - here, the glyphs were cropped by FontExtractor but the actual size in the XML file wasn't yet updated to reflect that change.

After that was sorted out, we added a WIP font editor dialog to play around with the font properties to get optimal displays. In the future we'd ideally have FontExtractor handle this automatically, but hey - this works for now.

The charspacing property determines how much space is left between characters when drawing. Setting it to negative can be used to draw text backwards. Good to know.

You can alternatively just make it really high and have some   w   i   d   e   l   y     s   p   a   c   e   d     t   e   x   t   .

But, setting everything properly, the end result is nearly identical to the standard text (as seen in the windows in the screenshots). The text in those windows is handled through an entirely different system, and it cannot be (elegantly) used to just draw text at a point on the screen. The font display with our custom setup isn't perfect, but it's very, very close.

Upcoming work includes implementing a proper game tick, doing some reorganizing of the codebase, and then adding the ability to tint/color our text. Following that, we'll start on properly implementing the console. And after that? Who knows? Stay tuned to find out!

Also, if you want more stuff like this, let us know - we'd be happy to do development updates (when there's meaningful progress to share).

Join the Team Learn about Blamite

Hey, folks! Been a while, hasn't it? That seems to be a common thing unfortunately.

Anywho, we've got some new stuff to share with you guys. You may have noticed some of the changes yourself - but we're shaking some stuff around. We've organized them into neat little sections for your convenience.

Website

Let's start with the site changes, shall we?

Themes

You may have noticed a number of adjustments have been made to our default theme - Midnight 7.1. Most of these aren't major changes, but they should no-doubt help make things look a bit nicer. The navigation menu has some new icons, and what used to be darker blues are now brighter and more vibrant. Most elements also now have nice animations to them rather than being static. Along with that, some weird quirks with the theme have been taken care of at last, as well as some remnants of the original Midnight theme. If you prefer the old theme, it's still available as 'Midnight 7'.

Navigation

Along with the nice icons we mentioned before, you might also notice that the menu itself has been reorganized a bit. This was done to make it more consistent with the improvements made on Chaotic United's site, which we believe is a significant improvement over the old navigation menu.

Forms

We've moved the Project: Infinity and Blamite team sign-up pages over to our own Forms system. In fact, you might notice that there's only one form now. We've consolidated our standard Staff, Blamite Game Engine, Galactiminer, and Project: Infinity signup forms into a single, nicely laid-out form. The new format also borrows some of the improvements made to CU's Staff Application format recently as well. The other forms from CU (Reports, Ban Appeals, etc) have also been brought over and tweaked as need be.

Along with that, you'll also notice that several subforums now have handy redirect links to their respective forms, to make submitting things nice and easy.

Discord

It's not just our site that got some facelifting, our Discord server also got some renovating done too.

Gitlab Integration

Fun fact - we've had Gitlab notifications on Discord for a long time. They've just been exclusively visible to our team up until now. We figure that, since major announcement-worthy progress updates are so few and far between, it makes sense to at least give you guys a glimpse into what's happening with Blamite and our other projects. Basically, any time a commit, issue, wiki page, or anything of that sort is made to one of our linked repositories, a notification is posted in the #gitlab channel. You won't be able to view the source code of course - but you'll still get an idea of what we're doing behind the scenes.

NSFW Channel

Do I even need to say anything here? Yes, yes I do actually. By default, you won't see the #nsfw channel. We ask that you review the information in #nsfw-info before heading in. It contains some info about how to access the channel, as well as a few rules that apply to the channel. As of the time of writing this, the rules are as follows:

• Shock content will NOT be allowed - We define shock content as things such as 2 girls 1 cup, gore, and anything else that is generally intended to be disturbing. The general rule is: "is this someone would want to see"? If the answer is no, it probably shouldn't be posted.
• Do not post any images, videos, or other content of yourself - We don't want to see your body and chances are, you don't really want to have your naked body floating around the internet either. Post it somewhere else if you really want to, but keep it out of here.
• All images, videos, and other content must be of people 18 or older - This should be pretty self-explanatory. There will be absolutely zero content of minors posted.
• The rest of the community rules apply - You can't break all the other rules just because one of them doesn't apply in this specific channel.

If you're 18 or older and would like to share or view *ahem* mature content , you can do !nsfw in #bot_turing_test. You can hide the channel again at any time by doing !nonsfw. If you know for a fact you never want to see adult content, you're free to hide the #nsfw-info channel and pretend it doesn't exist by doing !nsfw-ignore. You can also restore that channel by doing !nsfw-unignore.

Keep in mind that breaking any of the rules above will result in removal from the channel, or in some cases being banned from the Discord server outright. It's a channel for mature content, please be mature when using it.

Additional #forums-feed Notifications

Previously, only a handful of content sent a notification to Discord. Now, virtually all content appears. The two ones of note are Status Updates and Blog Entries. Neither of these posted on Discord before - and now they do.

The Team, and the Eon Game Engine

You may have noticed mention of a project of ours called the Eon Game Engine. This project was spearheaded exclusively by a former developer of ours, @JTKreates. However, due to him becoming busier with life and other such things, he had to step down. As such, Eon is being shelved for the foreseeable future. We are retaining the source code in the event it could be useful, but our current plans don't really include any 2D-based games - so don't expect anything about it for a while.

Additionally, we'd like to introduce the first of hopefully many new team members for Blamite - @zzVertigo! His previous experience includes mostly networking stuff, including the Halo Online Rewritten project. He's been hard at work getting Blamite's networking foundation added - which has proven fairly easy due to the early stages of the engine. Of course - if you happen to be interested in joining the team, feel free to apply! We are always looking for new team members - so if you think you've got what it takes, don't hesitate!

Join the Team

Upcoming Changes

In the future, we're going to be continuing to refine and restructure the website. The issue trackers are being removed in favor of a unified bug tracker. The Blamite website will, in its entirety, be replaced with a page that is integrated into the Elaztek website itself - rather than acting as a completely isolated website. Its functionality will be replicated as it currently exists, but the design will match the rest of Elaztek. Other old pages too are being sent to the archives that are redundant or otherwise unnecessary.

Company Direction

Now, all that stuff is cool, but this announcement isn't just about some site and Discord enhancements. You saw the title - you knew something like this was coming.

We're currently gearing up to start the long journey of putting Elaztek Studios on the map. Here recently, Michael informed me of an independent studio that had only existed for less than a year - they have a functional (still incomplete, but functional) game engine, a team, and are a LOT further along than we are right now.

There's two major reasons that Elaztek is still where it's at currently after over two years: Chaotic United, and my own stubbornness.

There isn't much I can do about the former. Chaotic United is, and always will be my baby. It's a passion project and it continues to exist because I genuinely enjoy doing it. The trouble is, the way I've been going about managing the two has been rather troublesome. I would focus entirely on CU, at which point Elaztek basically goes on hold. After a few months, guilt creeps up and I feel bad for basically ignoring it. At which point I shift gears and go all out on Elaztek. A few months later, guilt creeps up and...I think you see where I'm going with this. I focus on one 100%, then shift gears and focus on the other. I've tried and failed to have a proper balance - what usually happens is that I'm focused on a certain task on one that ends up spanning multiple days, then I keep going and eventually just get too wrapped up in it - then I look and it's been a few months since I've touched the other.

However, there's still something we can and are doing about it. Part of it is something that I'll have to slowly learn and get better at doing, which is managing my time and being able to distribute it effectively between the two. The other part comes to the relationship between the two.

Elaztek Studios and Chaotic United

You see, back when Elaztek first launched in a real, public sense, it was under awful circumstances. Elaztek had existed for over a year prior to it's public launch, and it's history dated even further back if you count Haloman Development. But when it went from being essentially just an idea to being an actual website and entity that existed, it was in response to drama and chaos that had befallen Chaotic United. Back in 2017, a lot of us were still fairly immature - some more than others, but overall it was a chaotic situation that could have, and should have been easily avoided. It was the conclusion of those events that led to Elaztek's launch. Several staff at CU disagreed with my final decision, and nearly left outright - so, I compromised.

Elaztek Studios would become their new home, and they luckily agreed. The person involved would be banned from the start and would have no place in Elaztek. This would be both a safe haven and a new frontier to pursue.

Over time, however, people matured. Time passed, and people came back to CU. Despite this, however, some of our team members were still largely uncomfortable with bridging the gap between CU and Elaztek. A gap that used to be nonexistent, but still remained despite the smoke clearing. Some small baby steps were made (primarily the ability to link your Elaztek and CU forum accounts), but they were overall still kept separate, and that person kept banned.

Today marks the end of that period of time - and with it, a new era for Elaztek Studios. CU and Elaztek will continue - separated, but standing side by side. The two will, moving forward, be partnered with one another. With it, we will be introducing a new Partner program. The details of which are still being ironed out, but the goal is to be able to partner with other relevant communities - big or small. Expect a separate announcement on that once we launch it for real.

The person in question will be allowed into our doors, with welcome arms. The wall that was built up between CU and Elaztek has been torn down, and the two will no longer be kept away from each other, but instead be sisters. There are no immediate plans to make use of this, but expect to see CU get included in some things we do here from time to time - it'll probably be a while before anything happens, but the door is open.

I briefly considered merging the two together once more, however I feel that ultimately, while it would help things in the short term, the two ultimately have too different of goals to sensibly be a single entity. Chaotic United is a gaming community, primarily focused on Minecraft. It briefly dabbled with game development somewhat with Demoria Online, but the project never panned out and was still separate from CU during its development. Elaztek is focused on game and software development. While granted, both do have a lot in common - the relaxed atmosphere with their teams, the same guidelines, similar Discord and Forum structure, among other things - they both are seeking separate objectives. As such, they are going to continue to remain separate entities.

Coming back to the partner program however, our plan is to be more open than we have been to outside communities. Previously I've been fairly squeamish about working with other communities - for fear of losing some of my team to "greener pastures" if you will, or fear that the partnership won't yield any results. These fears are based on virtually nothing - and ultimately, we're at the bottom and we need people to help grow our team and community.

The Blamite Game Engine will not happen on its own. I can't do it alone. I'm getting better with C++, but I am still ultimately just one man. One man cannot build a game engine on the same scale as Unreal or Unity or Slipspace.

I suppose in a sense you could consider this a sort of relaunch of Elaztek, although it's not so much a relaunch as it is turning a new leaf. Much like CU's nearing 1.14 update, I hope that this is the start point of Elaztek actually making progress. A point where we look back on, where we can say "that's the point where it all began". Whether or not that will happen is yet to be seen.

Some other changes are coming down the pipeline as well. I'm going to be making some much-needed refinements to Elaztek's website and its general direction. Stay tuned.

Hey, folks. For those who haven't been keeping up with our Discord, there's a fairly important announcement we have to make in regards to the Gitlab. Actually, we made it before - but failed to announce it on Discord in a timely fashion.

So, here's the general situation: due to a failure in a backup we made a while back (an error with Gitlab itself unfortunately, not user-error to our knowledge), LFS data was excluded from the backup. It took us a fair bit to realize this fact, but once we did it was already far too late.

All LFS data on the original Elaztek Gitlab is gone. There's nothing we can do to recover it. If you have your local files on hand, we advise making a backup and keeping those files held tight as they are likely the only copy with any LFS files. If your repository doesn't use LFS, you should be in the clear.

We are migrating to a new Gitlab at https://newgitlab.elaztek.com - creative hostname, I know. All data must be manually migrated - this includes wiki pages, tags, branches, issues, milestones, labels, and everything else. We are leaving the old gitlab online until sometime in July to allow users to move over. After the old Gitlab shuts down, the new Gitlab will likely return to the standard gitlab.elaztek.com subdomain to keep things clean and consistent (assuming doing so wouldn't cause a plethora of problems).

The other part of this announcement is in regards to announcements themselves - we've been doing a pretty terrible job at actually announcing things timely. There's been a couple announcements that were late to the party, namely the one where we shut down most of the old gameservers. The Gitlab LFS data one was announced on forums, but never got a proper announcement on Discord until a while later.

This obviously is no way to do things and is something we promise to never repeat.

For slightly more information the LFS incident, check the original topic Michael posted a while back here.

Hey there! Chances are you're reading this because you're interested in playing Project: Infinity when it releases, or maybe you even want to help us make it a reality. Maybe you're curious as to what it is. Whatever boat you fall in, keep reading.

Introduction

Project: Infinity is a fan-made Halo project, focusing on bringing a unique Halo experience to PC. Unlike other Halo fan projects, we aim to offer a complete experience - featuring both a single player Campaign and full multiplayer. We plan to include everything that players expect to see within a Halo game, and more. Along with this, we plan to create our own engine that mimics the Halo engine - the Blamite Game Engine. We want to build a game that is accessible and familiar from players and modders alike.

Our Goals

As mentioned before, we plan to build our own engine from the ground up to mimic the Halo engine. In a more general sense, we want to have the following features available upon the game's completion:

• Campaign
• Multiplayer
• Custom Games
• Forge
• Theater
• Mod Support

We plan to continue utilizing Blamite after Project: Infinity for all future games we produce, retaining most of these same features.

How You Can Help

If you want to help us out with bringing Blamite and Project: Infinity to life, you can apply to join our team. We do ask that you provide examples of your skills. In particular, we are looking for people who can help us in the following areas:

• Blamite Game Engine
  • C++ and C# (some of our toolset utilizes C#, but the core engine is in C++)
  • Experience with DirectX (OpenGL is also good as we plan to add support for it later)
  • If you are a skilled member of the Halo modding community, we'd especially love to have you on board
• Project: Infinity
  • Concept Artists

As we progress, we will also be looking for people in these areas:

• 3D Artists (UNSC, Covenant, Forerunner, Flood, Civilian, Nature)
• 2D Artists (UI/HUD, Medals, etc)
• Sound Designers (Game SFX)
• Voice Actors

While people are free to apply for these positions now, these won't be heavily needed until later.

Apply to the Project: Infinity Team Apply to the Blamite Game Engine Team

Owner

This title is reserved for the Owner of MCCMods and the Owners of the Chaotic United Network.

Manager

These are the people who work on the website and extend its functionality.

Apply

Moderators

These are the people who keep everything in order. They also enforce our community guidelines.

Apply

Mythic

This rank is given to legendary members of the Halo community, as well as members who have made great contibutions to the Halo modding scene.

Veteran

This rank is given to members who have been around for a while, as well as old-time members of CU or Elaztek.

Premium

This rank is given to all members who donate to help us operate the site. Thanks guys!

Donate

Creator

This rank is given to all members who upload a piece of content to our download center.

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The standard rank granted to all MCCMods members.

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Hey there! Are you a fan of Halo? Maybe even a modder? Or maybe you're just interested in game development.

Recently we just cut out a few of our inactive team members (mainly ones who came over from CU) and we're looking to help replace those roles and then some. In either case, we're looking for new people to join our team! The Blamite Game Engine and Project: Infinity won't make themselves - we need a team to help bring them to life.

If you're interested in helping out with Project: Infinity, check out the Project: Infinity signup page. If you're more interested in the engine itself, you can check out the Blamite signup page.

Our requirements aren't too strict, we ask only that you have some level of skill in the area you're looking to apply for, and that you have a good attitude. We tend to be fairly casual in our staff-only chats on Discord and Forums, and we tend to be fairly laid back overall. If that sounds like an environment for you then by all means - apply!

Project: Infinity Team Signup Page Blamite Game Engine Team Signup Page

Hey, everyone! We've got a once again well-after-the-fact announcement for you all.

As you know, last fall we announced the return of Galactiminer in the form of Galactiminer: Evolved, and showcased it appearing to gain a lot more progress than had ever been seen for Project: Infinity. We'd announced a Kickstarter campaign, and after it failed, we went silent.

No word was said regarding any of it since then.

Unfortunately, after the failure of the campaign, I'd been stuck in Walmart - a job very ill-fitting for my abilities on a variety of levels. This job sucked my time away, and I eventually had to drop this job. It was destroying my physically and mentally as I was in constant pain, and I'd been unable to do much of anything. The failure of the Kickstarter campaign marked the point where I'd lost most of my drive for Galactiminer.

That's why it all went quiet. Development went on a bit longer after the end of the failed campaign, but it eventually halted. Afterward, I'd moved on to work on Blamite again - as I found that working on Project: Infinity and Blamite were the two things I had true drive to do.

Galactiminer: Evolved was born out of a desire to avoid working at a job. That's why I started the campaign, and it eventually flopped. That's why after it failed, it all stopped. That's not to say that I don't like the ideas that I'd come up with for the new and improved Galactiminer, but this specific mode of execution wasn't one that lined up with what I would consider the right way to do things. It was a business move - and I'm not one to particularly be fond about the business side of things.

Why is this announcement titled 'History Repeats Itself'? Because for those of you not around back in 2013, when Galactiminer and Infinity were owned by Haloman Development, this is almost exactly what happened. Galactiminer was the original project, which was later shelved in favor of Project: Infinity.

So, what's next?

Project: Infinity will continue to be our primary focus moving forward. Starting first with the engine - Blamite - and then as it starts to progress, the content will start to be developed. We have donations open for anyone who would like to help out financially, and we will be continuing to look for anyone who wants to help work on the project.

We're open to anyone joining the team, whether you're wanting to work on the engine or on actual game content. Just keep in mind that it's going to be a while before we can start to build a cohesive game with our engine - as it can't even render 3D yet.

We have confirmed that the composer we had sought out for Galactiminer, Verblendet, will be sticking with us for Project: Infinity. He's a bit tied up with other stuff currently as he isn't exclusively working with Elaztek, but we'll definitely be sharing music once we have a completed piece to share with you.

What about Galactiminer?

We plan to revisit Galactiminer properly in the future, when we have the people and the funding. Galactiminer is a far too ambitious game for us to realistically accomplish right now. That's not to say it's impossible, but for our relatively small and unknown team, it may as well be. Creating a game engine is also ambitious, yes, but it's not hinging on technology that barely exists.

It's not dead, but it's going to remain on hold until we can do it right. Until then, we're gonna keep working on Project: Infinity and deliver on the promise we made all those years ago.

If you want to join the Project: Infinity team, head here.

If you want to join the Blamite Game Engine team, head here.

If you want to hop on our Discord, check it out here.

On 2/12/2019 at 8:44 AM, JTKreates said:

I think we should get a few more folks on the elaztek team before we start any project regardless of size or difficulty. Building games is a team job and right now we don't really have a team.

Well the thing is you have to have a project for people to work on, you can't bring people in and just be like "yea we're gonna do something once we get people".

Plus we already have a few projects in the works already, Project: Infinity, it's engine (Blamite), and Raven Runner. Granted, Raven Runner is mostly separate from the rest of Elaztek, and the other two are sort of reliant on each other, but I do agree that yeah we definitely need to get people involved.

Also I'm gonna fix Discord/forums integration now.

On 2/1/2019 at 11:30 AM, Blizzardbball said:

Are yall still up for this idea? If so what engine do you guys think would be best?

i would vote UE4, though i would think twice about having yet another massive project ongoing at the same time as two other huge projects (infinity and blamite)

Hey everyone! Another announcement so soon? Why, yes. Lots of stuff happening nowadays - isn't it exciting?

First off, we've got the basics of the Galactiminer: Evolved website up! You can check it out live at http://galactiminer.com! There currently isn't a whole lot to it as of yet besides some links and a couple pages - but you can expect to see it continue to grow and evolve as time goes on and Galactiminer continues to make progress.

Speaking of progress, yesterday we introduced a new member to the Elaztek team - @Verblendet! I'll leave it up to him when/if he wants to reveal any information about himself, but here's what I can tell you - he will be the man behind the music of Galactiminer. We hope to have some juicy tunes to fill your ears here relatively soon - but you must not rush the creative process. Music composition is a long and tedious process.

Lastly, we've introduced a cool new feature for those of you who are coming over (or who formerly came over) from Chaotic United - the ability to sign in with your Chaotic United account on Elaztek - and vice versa. You can now sign up, login, and sync information between the two. If you have an account on CU already and want to quickly get signed up here, you can just click 'Sign in with Chaotic United' on the login screen. Alternatively, if you have an account here but not on CU, you can sign into CU with your Elaztek account.

That's all for now, folks! Stay tuned for any upcoming progress and development on Galactiminer! And don't forget to spread our Kickstarter campaign around: kck.st/2N6bpPv

Hey, folks! We're throwing a curveball at you - a development progress update!

"What? You mean to say that you're actually getting tangible work done?" Yes! Yes we are! It's a Christmas miracle!

We've posted this update on our Kickstarter as well, though there's a couple other things we're going to get into here as well, mainly with future plans and such. But enough babble, let's get into what you came here for - to see our progress. Now I know, it doesn't look like much, but do keep in mind that this is all just basic functionality.

First up - blocks. Blocks, blocks, and more blocks. What blocks are available? Let's take a look at each of them.

First up, let's show a total mess of various blocks that was shown on the Kickstarter (and on the homepage image) to give a brief overview.

Now, this gives a good idea of what blocks are in the game, but this doesn't make it entirely clear what these blocks are, does it? Let's remedy that.

For those interested, each and every block (as of the time of making this post) can be found in the spoiler below. We plan to setup a wiki for all of Galactiminer's content, sort of like the Minecraft Wiki - except official and not broken as of recently for unknown reasons. (also the images below will probably look like crap because I was lazy and gyazo'd all of them)

Next up, the inventory. This was a real fight. See, we decided to (kind of) get lazy and actually purchased a resource on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. That resource contained the core block building functionality you see, but we had to modify it a great deal to not suck. There was no inventory system. The hotbar was very weakly coded - it's the kind of programming nightmare you never want to see, several variables all manually bound to the hotbar. There were about 2-3 variables for the hotbar slots. No easy expandability, even the active slot was done by having 9 textures of the hotbar with the slot overlay appearing in different locations. It was pretty crap. The process for adding a block involved making changes in about 30 locations and was in general just really tacky to deal with. All of this - the hotbar, inventory, and blocks were completely restructured to be easily expandable. Adding a basic block takes no more than a couple minutes (minus the whole texturing stuff, but I'm just talking about getting it into the game and usable). So, what does it look like?

Like this:

Don't mind some of those broken-seeming textures and other weirdness - those are, as I said, textures. The block building system doesn't do a cool 3D render in the slot like Minecraft would, but instead uses a 2D texture - this includes those ones that look like cubes. So, we just threw on some leftover textures from Project: Infinity that were already in the project temporarily.

Also, tooltips!

As you can see, they aren't your typical generic tooltip of just the item name. The tooltip shows the block slot texture, the name, and the item classification. That and the blue background color will change depending on what item/block it is. Weapons would be, well, weapons. Stone, Grass, and Dirt (and related) will be Natural Materials, ores and crystals will be Minerals, and so on. Also, notice the additional space that just says Debug Item Details. That would show other stats dependent on the block or item as well. Weapons would show stuff like accuracy, rate of fire, damage, and so on. Blocks would show the minimum tool required to break it as well as the time to break, and anything else noteworthy about it. We will likely add a setting to show the debug details for you nerds out there. Maybe we'll even have an option for more simplistic tooltips, because why not?

Anyways, that's about all we've got for now! Just a few clarifications before we go:

You may have noticed the Halo-esque HUD, as well as the fact that most of the inventory stuff looks very much like that of Minecraft. Both of these elements will be changing as we get further in. The Halo HUD is stuff that we were testing for Project: Infinity from back when we were going to develop that in Unreal Engine, most of which is pulled from Halo 3. Except that weird motion tracker placeholder, that was a weird thing I made a while back. As for the Minecraft-looking inventory and hotbar, you can expect that to change and evolve as we go on. We are mainly focused on functionality, and I think most of you can get that but some people like to critique early alpha concepts  And, remember - Project: Infinity is not cancelled - nor is Blamite. We will be keeping the applications for both of those open so that, if there are people willing and able to develop them (mainly Blamite since Project: Infinity is dependent on Blamite being complete), we can effectively develop both. If we do get enough people for Blamite to be developed alongside Galactiminer, we'll be sure to announce it. As for those looking to join Galactiminer's team, we will have applications open soon - so be on the lookout for that.

Well, that's the past week or two of progress since our announcement. We hope to get these going semi-regularly as progress happens and the game continues to grow and evolve. Don't forget, we still are running a Kickstarter campaign and we have 21 more days to go - let's make it count, folks! You can check out the Kickstarter page for Galactiminer here.

Hey, everyone! We've got some exciting news! There is unfortunately some bad news, but it's not that bad.

First off: the bad news - Project: Infinity and the Blamite Game Engine have been put on temporary hold - kind of - for a while. I say kind of because there will likely be some limited development on my end here and there, however neither of these will be our main focus for the time being. The reason for this is to introduce a new project. Ladies and gentlemen, Elaztek Studios is proud to announce the initiation of a new project:

Some of you just might recognize this name, if you've been around since the Haloman Development days (or more likely, went around our website and found any of the old HMD stuff laying around). The original idea behind Galactiminer wasn't a whole lot beyond a clone of Murder Miners - but different. That was the idea my 13-year-old self had. Just a year later, the project was cancelled because my child self couldn't make games at all (shocking, I know). Long before that though, it was put on hold merely 12 days later. Yet again a week later, it was resumed again. From there, it continued to make no progress until Project: Infinity was announced - and since then, Galactiminer has sat, quietly untouched in the shadow of Project: Infinity. Until now. So what changed? What suddenly caused Project: Infinity and Blamite to be put on a sort-of hold in favor of Galactiminer?

Entering the Workforce - A Mixed Bag

The answer will likely come as a surprise as it's not something I ever talk about in relation to Elaztek or Chaotic United - income.

As those of you on CU know, I recently (on August 23, 2018) started a job at Walmart. The work itself isn't too hard - however it does give me unbearable leg and foot pain by the end of the day every single day. But the pain isn't the main issue here - it's the time.

For years, I had the assumption that a full-time job would take up roughly the same amount of time as a typical school day. This simply isn't the case. Combined with actually requiring a full night's sleep, an hour lunch built into the workday, and so on - and as a result, I have next to no time to myself during work days. As such, I'm making a dramatic shift that will prioritize income generation in a way that hasn't been done so before. Our focus will still be on making great games, of course, but we won't be ignoring the element of making money any longer.

Crowdfunding

We've actually launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund Galactiminer: Evolved's development and help accelerate it into the world. You may be wondering, accelerate it how? What's the benefit? Aren't your team members volunteers? Yes, yes they are. However, a Kickstarter campaign would change that. There would be both paid and volunteer employees - unless funds prove to be insufficient. The most important thing that the funds would do is allow me to quit my job and work on Galactiminer full time. A chance to truly learn more about what I want to do and how to do it better, and a chance to build a game without school or work or anything else interfering. A chance to truly bring Galactiminer to life, and to launch Elaztek for real.

So, why the subtitle? Why is it called Galactiminer: Evolved, and not just Galactiminer? Well, there are two main reasons that both go hand in hand. First off, there's stuff from various corners of the Elaztek, Haloman Development, and other websites that describe Galactiminer in the context of the original idea. Which leads into the other main reason - this Galactiminer is drastically different from the Galactiminer idea as it was in 2013. I won't guarantee that the subtitle won't be dropped later, but for the time being - we're going to be sticking with the subtitle (even though you'll still probably see me and others refer to it as just Galactiminer).

The Future of Project: Infinity and the Blamite Game Engine

So, what of Blamite and Project: Infinity? Will they fall to the shadows, never to be touched again? Will they never see the light of day?

Absolutely not - we have no plans to abandon either of these projects. It will take time, but when we make a promise - we keep it. We will be temporarily departing from Blamite and Infinity for a bit, but when the time is right, Blamite will come to life. It will be used to power all games under Elaztek once it's capable of making quality games. However, we want to develop a product that can actually be sold before that point first.

What if the Kickstarter doesn't get funded?

We've got some ideas, but we're going to wait and see how the Kickstarter goes before we announce any other plans.

Wrap-Up

If you have any questions regarding all things Galactiminer - be it joining our team, what the gameplay will be like, or even suggestions for anything along the road, or anything else - feel free to ask away on this topic!

If you wish to help ensure this project comes to life, support and/or share our Kickstarter campaign: http://kck.st/2N6bpPv

To visit the Galactiminer: Evolved website: <TBA>

To read the Galactiminer FAQ: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2002163451/galactiminer-evolved/faqs

This is a change that actually happened a while back, but apparently everybody just plain forgot to announce it to the public. Better late than never, though, right?

So, we don't have any gameservers anymore. Just Cause 2, Ark, Don't Starve Together, CSGO, and Unturned servers are now offline. All their files have been copied over to Chaotic United's dedicated server, so that should we want they can be reintroduced.

Michael wrote a "Closing FAQ" a while back, to attach to the official announcement. That FAQ is at the bottom of this announcement in the spoiler. Most of that pertains to Raven Runner, however, so allow me to go into more details on the non-Raven Runer side of things.

First of all, if these servers ever come back, you will find them over on Chaotic United. Here at Elaztek, we make games - and the only reason these servers were ever branded as Elaztek is a result of some of our team being unhappy with the direction of Chaotic United at that point in time. People didn't want to be involved in CU anymore, and thus the servers were kept up under the Elaztek name. As time passed, things changed at CU and the feelings of the people here did as well - hence why the files for these servers are back in CU's hands.

Any effort that was formerly put into maintaining these servers is now going to be put towards the primary goal of Elaztek Studios: game and software development. If you do wish for these servers to return, you'll have to ask over on Chaotic United. The server IP's have been removed from the services block on forums page, and all the subforums have been archived.

On an unrelated note, incase you didn't see the previous announcement addendum, we updated all the banners of our own screenshots - with the exception of a select few. Despite the joking blurb on that announcement, these screenshots are entirely allowed under the Microsoft Game Content Usage Rules.

We hope to have more to share soon! @JTKreates has been making some good progress with the Eon Game Engine - it's not quite ready to show off publicly yet, but it's coming along nicely.

That's a wrap on today's announcement, keep an eye out for more down the road!

Closing FAQ by Michael: