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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! 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.

Meant to be reliable and fast, Eon is made to be easy to use and very simple. Eon has the power to produce very large games and is in no way meant to limit game creativity and size. It's simple which means easy to change and very adaptable. It's geared towards 2d game development and comes with all the features necessary to make awesome 2D games. Eon is made with C++ and SFML (Simple Fast Multimedia Layer) which is a widely used and popular graphics library for C++. This means that there are plenty of tutorials and resources available to learn SFML. Making Eon a good choice for any beginners or experts next project. So check it out, see what's possible when you have Eon in your toolbox!