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Found 7 results

  1. Hey, everyone! We've officially rolled out a (somewhat) brand new default theme! What started out as me doing some simple theme fixes on some staff-only stuff gradually turned into a full fledged theme upgrade that, while not a groundbreaking upgrade, did change enough that I felt branching it off into a separate theme was appropriate. Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Midnight (and Daylight) 7.2! Let's go over what it has in store. Color Picker First and foremost, the theme introduces a color picker, allowing you to change the accent color to anything you want. Not a fan of the default bright blue? Change it on the fly by clicking the paintbrush icon near the top-right, next to the notification bell. You can change the color back to the default at any time, and your changes are done on a per-browser basis. The All-New Profile Page Once again, this is one of those areas where I got a little carried away. I originally wanted to take the cover photo and make it display in page banner style seen in most other pages. What ended up happening instead is that the entire page got shuffled around. What was formerly in the (often very tall) sidebar has since been moved to a new tab within the profile page, simply called 'Profile'. The sidebar itself was then removed outright - leaving the main profile content to take precedence. And, yes - your cover photo now displays in all its glory in the background of the page, and has a neat little parallax effect as you scroll down. There is one small limitation of this implementation, however, which is that it required that the ability to position the cover photo on this theme be disabled. In other words, if someone is using a different theme, the cover might not be in the ideal position - but for the vast majority of users sticking with the default theme, it'll look just fine. Page Banner Changes Next up, we've done some subtle changes to the page banners that are on most of those pages. First, we introduced support for the inclusion of a page subtitle. This way, if you're viewing a specific topic on forums, or looking at a specific category within the download center, you'll see that reflected in the header in the form of a subtitle. The other slightly less significant change is a change of font. Formerly, we were using a font called QType Pro, which came from Halo 5: Guarians' in-game UI. In the interest of being a bit more distinct, we've changed to a new font called Indoscreen - which is entirely free for personal and commercial use, and happens to still look quite close to the QType Pro font - while still looking a touch fresher. Bugfixes The least interesting part of the theme upgrade, is of course the fixing of several bugs from Midnight 7.1. Most notably, the blue information boxes fit in a bit better with the theme, and header images for clubs are now a bit easier to read. There's been a couple other tiny ones here or there, but those are the main fixes. And, as usual - if you aren't a fan of the new changes, Midnight 7.1 is still available - as with all of our other previous website themes. Just click the Theme menu in the bottom left and choose your desired theme. But... What About Blamite? Now, I know what you must be thinking - that website stuff is cool and all, but what about the game engine? Does it video game yet? Unfortunately, the answer is, and will likely continue to be for some time, no. However, that isn't to say no progress has been made. Guerilla is now fully usable for basic tag editing - including reading, writing, compiling, and decompiling. My hope is that here within a month or two, we'll be able to share a second development update video - and this time not having it be hours long and a big ramble-y mess. Development has been slower for the past month or two, as I've once again had to switch jobs. Additionally, I've been working to try and stop sleeping so long - as this alone is a major contributing factor to why progress slows to a crawl when I'm employed. I was formerly sleeping roughly 12 hours a night. Which of course meant that, if I had work the next few days, I'd be at work for 8-9 hours, plus an hour for transportation, which left me 2 hours left in the day to do something with - usually making dinner and getting ready for bed. This of course is ridiculous and a horrible way to live for a variety of reasons, and it made it so that a work day was just that - a day where I did basically nothing but work and get ready for work the next day. The good news is I've been able to mostly get on an ~8 hour sleep schedule, though I've been a bit groggier and tired than usual. Odds are my body is just so used to 12 hours a night that it's gonna take some time to adjust to losing 1/3rd of that. Another thing I've done recently is set up something called Stratagem - which, if you're familiar with Trello (or other Kanban-style boards), is basically that - except it's self hosted and lives right here within the Elaztek Website. Chaotic United has had one for a while, and it's been pretty great at keeping an ongoing list of stuff that needs to be worked on, rather than relying on people remembering or a crufty to-do list topic somewhere. If you aren't familiar with it, the basic premise is to be a digital version of writing down quick sticky notes and putting them on a wall or board. You can create a card with nothing other than a rough title of what you're wanting to do. Unlike real-world sticky notes, however, you can open up these cards and add additional information to them - including task lists, detailed descriptions, badges, and comments. You can also assign users to them and set due dates for cards as well. Blamite's Stratagem had all of its old Gitlab issues moved over, and a whole bunch of new stuff added - which should help keep things better organized and managed going forward. The effect will be fairly minimal this early on and with such a small team, but even with just myself I find it a big help being able to quickly write down a thought or idea on a card and not have to worry about remembering it days or weeks later. That's all we've got for now, folks - stay tuned, as we hope to share a second development update for Blamite sooner rather than later.
  2. Hey everyone! We've been doing (more) website updates, and we aren't done just yet! Currently, on our own internal team pages, on the Helpcenter, and on the Forums, you'll notice some nifty new additions at the top of the page in the form of new banner images and titles! It's a small addition, but it's one that really helps to liven up the website. We plan to continue extending this change to the rest of the website in the upcoming days. However, as you've noticed, these images aren't exactly original, all of them being taken from various concept art and ingame screenshots of various official Halo titles. We would like to give credit where it's due and make it explicitly clear that we do not claim these as original by any means. We do plan to replace all of these images with our own work - once we have the art talent necessary. A smaller change involves the pagination on the main website theme. Previously, the current page was the same coloring as the others but with a blue glow around it. For those who never paid attention, it looked like this: The new and improved pagination looks like this: As you can see, the background and text color of the active page are changed instead, as opposed to just an ugly glow. The glow effect is still there, but very very subtle - not as in-your-face as before. Along with these polishes, we did manage to squash a few bugs that were lurking away for some time. You can view the full changelog linked below. Now, I know what you're thinking. What is the actual status on the games? What's the status of Project: Infinity, Raven Runner, or Blamite? What the hell is Eon? What is the actual status of the studio and why is there no apparent progress besides scattered website updates and announcements of new projects? These are all excellent questions, and I think transparency is the key here. Project: Infinity and Blamite are both led by myself, Raven Runner is led mainly by Michael (AwakenedRage), and Eon is led by JTKreates. Let's start in order: What is the status of Project: Infinity and Blamite? Project: Infinity is still at baby stages, as is Blamite. Engines take a long time to develop and up until recently I've been stuck in high school. Once I get a job and proper income, my focus will move a lot more towards Elaztek than it has been for a while, and if finances allow, putting money into getting paid people on the team - or if that isn't doable, just spreading the word and getting dedicated Halo fans to participate in the project. In terms of Blamite, a little bit has been going on that I can go ahead and show off real quick - though it isn't a whole lot. The most recent additions include a crash screen and some improvements to the console. The crash screen was implemented shortly after the Halo 2 Alpha leaked to the public and was made playable over system link thanks to modders. Some screenshots of these can be seen in the spoiler below. What is the status of Raven Runner? For those unaware, Raven Runner was on a temporary development hiatus. That hiatus ended a while ago, but a second, much longer hiatus may be about to hit due to some things that Michael is going through (either he or myself will give more details later, if he wishes for the details to be disclosed - no promises). Even so, I must admit that I myself am very distant from most of what happens with Raven Runner, and most of its team operates separately from the core Elaztek team. This is both due to the fact that the Raven Runner team existed many years prior to Elaztek being something that wasn't just an idea floating about in my brain, going back to 2014 and possibly prior with a project called Demoria Online. Additionally, Michael seems to keep a lot of his stuff secret either on purpose or just due to being busy/not thinking to do it. I don't know what his reasoning is, but I do know that Raven Runner is still currently the most developed project we have at the moment. My hope is for that to change soon - not against Raven Runner of course but because we need more stuff to start happening besides a single mobile-focused game in active development. What is the Eon Game Engine? One of the newest members of our team, JTKreates, is a fairly skilled C++ programmer. He went the route of developing a second engine for Elaztek Studios, known as the Eon Game Engine. I created the logo for it and he's been doing all the coding thus far. The difference between Blamite and Eon is their target game type - Blamite is a 3D-focused engine, whereas Eon is a purely 2D game engine, designed for vastly different purposes. As such, it generally makes more sense to keep them just like that - two separate projects. That may change later on down the road, it may not. Time will tell. Chaotic United A while back, I took down the announcement that was made shortly after Elaztek's launch regarding Chaotic United, without giving a whole ton of clarification on the state of the two beyond just "that old statement doesn't apply anymore". I think it's high time I inform you guys of some of the newer developments regarding the relationship between Elaztek and CU. What the folks on CU have seen slowly happening is a slow carrying-over of various ranks, roles, and site features from Elaztek to CU. Additionally, people have critiqued me for some of these changes/additions as well as my general attitude regarding the management of the two, with people saying things like "CU and Elaztek are not the same", or "they are two completely different entities". While, yes, CU and Elaztek are separate groups, their fundamental values and principles are the same. While one is driven by Minecraft servers and the other by game and software development, the interests, ideas, and so on are the same throughout. However, a decision was made internally not too long ago and that decision was to end the synchronization of the staff team between the two. This had nothing to do with any specific incident but rather just the realization that having the same group of people spread across two organizations is inefficient and isn't the best way to run things. The people currently on both and who hold positions on both will retain those positions, but any future applicants who wish to serve on both will need to apply on both. However, despite these changes, the statement still stands. CU and Elaztek will continue to borrow from each other freely as they are both run by the same people for the most part. They will not share a total team, but they will share ideals, values, principles, and just the general way of running things where applicable. They won't be identical, but the "CU isn't Elaztek" argument is simply not valid. It never was, and it never will be. Conclusion This thing has been getting way too long, so let's wrap it up with some recruitment, eh? We are still looking for people to join the Blamite Game Engine and Project: Infinity development teams! We are especially wanting 3D artists and concept artists so we can stop grabbing screenshots off of Google Images for our new website banners! Additionally, we'd love to have some folks skilled in C++ to hop on board and help us build Blamite (experience with Blam is preferred as well, but not required - just be prepared to learn how it works)! You can apply for a position within the Blamite team here, or for a position within the Project: Infinity team here. That's all for now, folks! Make sure to keep an eye on our Discord for all the latest happenings and so on!
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Hey everyone! We've been doing (more) website updates, and we aren't done just yet! Currently, on our own internal team pages, on the Helpcenter, and on the Forums, you'll notice some nifty new additions at the top of the page in the form of new banner images and titles! It's a small addition, but it's one that really helps to liven up the website. We plan to continue extending this change to the rest of the website in the upcoming days. However, as you've noticed, these images aren't exactly original, all of them being taken from various concept art and ingame screenshots of various official Halo titles. We would like to give credit where it's due and make it explicitly clear that we do not claim these as original by any means. We do plan to replace all of these images with our own work - once we have the art talent necessary. A smaller change involves the pagination on the main website theme. Previously, the current page was the same coloring as the others but with a blue glow around it. For those who never paid attention, it looked like this: The new and improved pagination looks like this: As you can see, the background and text color of the active page are changed instead, as opposed to just an ugly glow. The glow effect is still there, but very very subtle - not as in-your-face as before. Along with these polishes, we did manage to squash a few bugs that were lurking away for some time. You can view the full changelog linked below. Now, I know what you're thinking. What is the actual status on the games? What's the status of Project: Infinity, Raven Runner, or Blamite? What the hell is Eon? What is the actual status of the studio and why is there no apparent progress besides scattered website updates and announcements of new projects? These are all excellent questions, and I think transparency is the key here. Project: Infinity and Blamite are both led by myself, Raven Runner is led mainly by Michael (AwakenedRage), and Eon is led by JTKreates. Let's start in order: What is the status of Project: Infinity and Blamite? Project: Infinity is still at baby stages, as is Blamite. Engines take a long time to develop and up until recently I've been stuck in high school. Once I get a job and proper income, my focus will move a lot more towards Elaztek than it has been for a while, and if finances allow, putting money into getting paid people on the team - or if that isn't doable, just spreading the word and getting dedicated Halo fans to participate in the project. In terms of Blamite, a little bit has been going on that I can go ahead and show off real quick - though it isn't a whole lot. The most recent additions include a crash screen and some improvements to the console. The crash screen was implemented shortly after the Halo 2 Alpha leaked to the public and was made playable over system link thanks to modders. Some screenshots of these can be seen in the spoiler below. What is the status of Raven Runner? For those unaware, Raven Runner was on a temporary development hiatus. That hiatus ended a while ago, but a second, much longer hiatus may be about to hit due to some things that Michael is going through (either he or myself will give more details later, if he wishes for the details to be disclosed - no promises). Even so, I must admit that I myself am very distant from most of what happens with Raven Runner, and most of its team operates separately from the core Elaztek team. This is both due to the fact that the Raven Runner team existed many years prior to Elaztek being something that wasn't just an idea floating about in my brain, going back to 2014 and possibly prior with a project called Demoria Online. Additionally, Michael seems to keep a lot of his stuff secret either on purpose or just due to being busy/not thinking to do it. I don't know what his reasoning is, but I do know that Raven Runner is still currently the most developed project we have at the moment. My hope is for that to change soon - not against Raven Runner of course but because we need more stuff to start happening besides a single mobile-focused game in active development. What is the Eon Game Engine? One of the newest members of our team, JTKreates, is a fairly skilled C++ programmer. He went the route of developing a second engine for Elaztek Studios, known as the Eon Game Engine. I created the logo for it and he's been doing all the coding thus far. The difference between Blamite and Eon is their target game type - Blamite is a 3D-focused engine, whereas Eon is a purely 2D game engine, designed for vastly different purposes. As such, it generally makes more sense to keep them just like that - two separate projects. That may change later on down the road, it may not. Time will tell. Chaotic United A while back, I took down the announcement that was made shortly after Elaztek's launch regarding Chaotic United, without giving a whole ton of clarification on the state of the two beyond just "that old statement doesn't apply anymore". I think it's high time I inform you guys of some of the newer developments regarding the relationship between Elaztek and CU. What the folks on CU have seen slowly happening is a slow carrying-over of various ranks, roles, and site features from Elaztek to CU. Additionally, people have critiqued me for some of these changes/additions as well as my general attitude regarding the management of the two, with people saying things like "CU and Elaztek are not the same", or "they are two completely different entities". While, yes, CU and Elaztek are separate groups, their fundamental values and principles are the same. While one is driven by Minecraft servers and the other by game and software development, the interests, ideas, and so on are the same throughout. However, a decision was made internally not too long ago and that decision was to end the synchronization of the staff team between the two. This had nothing to do with any specific incident but rather just the realization that having the same group of people spread across two organizations is inefficient and isn't the best way to run things. The people currently on both and who hold positions on both will retain those positions, but any future applicants who wish to serve on both will need to apply on both. However, despite these changes, the statement still stands. CU and Elaztek will continue to borrow from each other freely as they are both run by the same people for the most part. They will not share a total team, but they will share ideals, values, principles, and just the general way of running things where applicable. They won't be identical, but the "CU isn't Elaztek" argument is simply not valid. It never was, and it never will be. Conclusion This thing has been getting way too long, so let's wrap it up with some recruitment, eh? We are still looking for people to join the Blamite Game Engine and Project: Infinity development teams! We are especially wanting 3D artists and concept artists so we can stop grabbing screenshots off of Google Images for our new website banners! Additionally, we'd love to have some folks skilled in C++ to hop on board and help us build Blamite (experience with Blam is preferred as well, but not required - just be prepared to learn how it works)! You can apply for a position within the Blamite team here, or for a position within the Project: Infinity team here. That's all for now, folks! Make sure to keep an eye on our Discord for all the latest happenings and so on!
  6. Hey, everyone! It's been a bit, hasn't it? While the public side of Elaztek has been rather quiet, our team has still been hard at work on both our games and the website. Our frontpage is no longer just a lazy placeholder thing, and now actually features stuff like upcoming events, the latest announcement, and still contains all the content you've grown used to seeing on the homepage. Unfortunately, the shoutbox is not added to the homepage (yet) due to some weird bugs with how it retrieves chat messages - and as such we've elected to hold off on its implementation for the time being. Additionally, we have a brand new theme - Midnight 7. I'll give you 3 guesses where the theme comes from. Our main page is currently only compatible with the new theme, but as time goes on we will be making sure to get it looking decent on all the different themes we have, old and new. For those of you who hate this new website design, you are free to revert back to the original 'Midnight' theme by scrolling to the bottom of the page, clicking the Theme menu, and picking the theme. Additionally, we are introducing our Helpcenter, albeit in a beta stage. Some topics are still a work-in-progress, and absolutely all content within it is subject to change. Take anything you read in there with a grain of salt for right now, you will see something like this at the top of each article: This article is not yet finished and may contain inaccurate information. If you don't see this banner on the top of the article, then it's most likely good to go. In either case, what do you think of our new site? Vote with your reputation on here or the reacts on our Discord announcement!
  7. Hey, everyone! It's been a bit, hasn't it? While the public side of Elaztek has been rather quiet, our team has still been hard at work on both our games and the website. Our frontpage is no longer just a lazy placeholder thing, and now actually features stuff like upcoming events, the latest announcement, and still contains all the content you've grown used to seeing on the homepage. Unfortunately, the shoutbox is not added to the homepage (yet) due to some weird bugs with how it retrieves chat messages - and as such we've elected to hold off on its implementation for the time being. Additionally, we have a brand new theme - Midnight 7. I'll give you 3 guesses where the theme comes from. Our main page is currently only compatible with the new theme, but as time goes on we will be making sure to get it looking decent on all the different themes we have, old and new. For those of you who hate this new website design, you are free to revert back to the original 'Midnight' theme by scrolling to the bottom of the page, clicking the Theme menu, and picking the theme. Additionally, we are introducing our Helpcenter, albeit in a beta stage. Some topics are still a work-in-progress, and absolutely all content within it is subject to change. Take anything you read in there with a grain of salt for right now, you will see something like this at the top of each article: This article is not yet finished and may contain inaccurate information. If you don't see this banner on the top of the article, then it's most likely good to go. In either case, what do you think of our new site? Vote with your reputation on here or the reacts on our Discord announcement!