MFGG Monthly News - March/April 2009

You even get it a day earlier than usual



This is MFGG Montly news and it's back

it's been away for a while and now it's back to kick some butt in wild canyon

it shall find all the pieces of the master emerald here

going to get those fools

etc




There was going to be an April Fools spin on last month's MFGG Monthly News but it just wasn't to be. Techokami was going to write it for a change, but I suppose he didn't get round to getting it done (and I do these things last minute so I was no help). Afterwards I kept putting it off/forgetting and as such April went without a monthly news topic. We all fail at life.

SO

IN THE MONTHS THAT WERE MARCH AND APRIL 2009

These months' news topic is brought to you by the number 9:

Any discussion on bans are best handled outside of the main forums. Why do I point this out once more? Because though I admit I've made a few mistakes recently and so has GenMod and a few others, people seem to be quite oblivious to this one and then wonder why their topics disappear. We're not tolerating MFGG moaning topics anymore. For a good year and a half it's been drilled into your heads to contact people outside of the main board. Now we're taking action to make sure this happens, because... it's always good to take action on things that you promise a year and a half ago. And moaning topics suck.

Hate it all you want but this the direction we're taking. For some reason we're still subject to this pointless cycle of complaining and terrible posting and I'm sick of it. In fact, loads of people are. So topics may be split more often or may completely disappear!

You want to talk about MFGG-related problems? PMs. IMs. Keep your MFGG rants off the main forums. The End. FRIGHTENING

Still not happy with the moderation? Then why are you here exactly? MFGG is not changing to suit the benefit of one or two members - it is changing to put itself back on the right track - a track where people are happy, aren't afraid to post and can discuss fun topics in a mature and sensible manner. Coincidentally none of those things occurs in a rant topic.

HERE IS MORE INFORMATION ABOUT SAID TRACK

THIS IS CAMBIOS

OR A TERRIBLE REPRESENTATION OF CAMBIOS

Cambios is an area of South East Northumberland near Blyth. HERE IT IS

SAY HELLO~

It has a beach. I keep spelling the name wrong because it's awkward. It's apparently not a great area to live in. Highlights of Cambios beach include it being open to nudists many years ago, and a goth gathering on 06/06/06 because... the devil lives in that section of the north sea?

dunno

don't really care. In this example it it home to the now defunct Blyth power station, an Oil refinery that I put in for good measure, and a body... dumping ground because... well... there's not much scenery to chose from in Open Transport Tycoon exept rocks and trees. And apparently we're inhumane enough to dump bodies in a ditch.

This is a representation of MFGG as a train which for some reason is stationed in Cambios which has gained a train station for some reason. It has something like five passenger trains and four mail ones. OTT is amazing because it lets you view quantities in SI units.

Living in Cambios... isn't too great. We want to get on the track that takes us to a better standard of living.

the journey is tretcherous

but eventually it will take us to the city of dreams known as coolsville. Coolsville is an excellent place that offers... skyscrapers, and fountains. People are nice in coolsville. They have a better standard of living. I should have really used a Sim City game instead.

people pay good money to get into Coolsville

it's one of those "Sucks -> Work that is not always great -> Doesn't suck" timelines

don't really know where I'm going with this example but I had the images so I thought I might as well use them. It's barely even related to rule 9 so why I even put it in here is a mystery. But hey. Open Transport Tycoon.



Wild Canyon fun I've got to chase a bat huh


I have taken on board a few important points on board though. I don't want to sweep any massive instant changes across MFGG, but it all goes to improve future forum experiences when IPB 1.x inevitably wears out. I've been dabbing in slightly better casual system concepts and other exciting things that may or may not happen!

- Now for something more positive


oh yeah

- April Fools happened and it was one of those "you had to be there" things. Crazy that you can spend an entire month on it and still not get it done, but meh. What's your favourite part of that day? Mine's

Profile

Proffesional Files

get it? Where would you people be without this wit

- Tragic quit. 'Tis a tradgedy.

- Phage quit. 'Tis a virus that infects bacteria which is also a shame.

- SGG is global mod now. 'Tis... a good thing

- The surviving crew of Red Dwarf went back to earth

- I made massive structural changes to MFGG's wiki. It's better than before though it needs your help to actually become USEFUL

- SWINE FLU SWINE FLU

- when i catch here i'ma get her with these tools


what am I writing this evening
-----------
GAME OF THE MONTH™: APRIL 2008

April's Game of the Month™ is:
Galaxy Bros., by DYH
as recommended by, you guessed it, Black Squirrel

Who doesn't like Super Mario Galaxy? (best not to answer that question)

When that game came out people discovered you can play with the forces of gravitation and produce new, weird and wonderful modes of gameplay. Nevermind the fact gravity was messed around in platformers such as Sonic & Knuckles and MegaMan (5 is it? Or is it 4 or 6... one of them); when Super Mario Galaxy came out we just HAD to flip our Marios upside down

But lets be fair, nobody's done this quite perfectly yet. Galaxy Bros. however, is currently in the lead. It doesn't seem to star (hey look a space-like pun) Mario, but rather someone who looks a lot like Mario stomping on lots of Mario enemy lookalikes in a setting clearly based off the first NES Mario classic (that being SMB, not Mario Bros., because the NES port is somewhat gimped, somewhat).

Why has nobody done a decent 2D Super Mario Galaxy? Circles. They're not always nice to work with, and as such, nobody works with them. Flash is good with circles as it's a fan of vectors, but MMF or Game Maker? Ouch.

But DYM managed to do it, and did a fine job too. I could come up with a list of flaws such as the lack of music and the occasional ugly looking sprite, but on a techincal level, it's quite impressive. And it's also not too bad as a game either. This stuff was unimaginable in the fangaming community as little as five years ago.

So, give it a go sometime.
-----------

give up the emeralds or die i don't love you


And this concludes the two months of wait for another MFGG Monthly news topic.

Join us next time when we're down in pumpkin hill finding our lost piece

Good choice for Game of the Month. Maybe it'll get some more attention now and the creator will do a sequel!

took me ages to get the positive joke haha

I got it immediately. I might have dropped Physics at the end of last year but I still retain half of what was in the textbook!

Hahahaha

Great stuff as usual. Sounds like we've got good plans for the future, BS, and it's good humor is up and running as normal too. :P

Awesome topic and news. I don't understand the picture of Knuckles though LOL.

...Phage quit again? :[

Railroad tycoon ftw

And I never had mod problems before

I ran out of time =/

Ah, much better.

Better yet - rather than making it in one of those two programs, DYH made the game using C++. (He said so in a comment on the game.)

Really? that's really cool

Not many people have the guts to stick through making a game maker game, but he did it in C++?

That's awesome; and I think I'll try out the game

Really? That's pretty impressive!

Obviously it's great when a game is done in a "real" programming language

but do remember the Sonic fan games community have been dishing out 360 engines for a good number of years now in all sorts of formats. It's not entirely uncommon to have a fancy engine but 2D Mario Galaxy platformers haven't really arrived yet

360º movement/gravity is easy... collision detection/pushout for it, on the other hand, is a *****; not only that, but running at a minimum two transcendental functions per object per loop is probably something you don't want to do in a slow language; C/C++ really doesn't have this problem (as badly) but try telling more people to actually program in it (seeing as they have to write absolutely everything: runtime engine, events system, object handling, etc)

not only that but it's also harder to design levels based on circles since squares really don't work that well in a polar grid, so you either have to accept the fact your levels won't look all nice, or you have to make a ****load of different object graphics that are meant to be used at certain times in certain places (or use vertex shaders i guess)

How about ones with tile squares since I finally got those working correctly?

This post has been edited by Elyk on May 1 2009, 11:34 PM