haloman30

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.