Despite my complete lack of effort in promoting Coldest so far (I'm not really to that point yet), this site seems to have made it onto the first page of Google's results for "mech combat game" and I've had to ban my first spammers from the forum. Thank you Drupal SEO plugins.:-) Continue reading »

I'm not entirely sure why I keep writing these things since nobody can possibly be reading them right now, but here's an update on the latest changes in Coldest anyway.

The biggest change is that Coldest finally has basic sounds. There's background music from Derek Audette (to which I have made some minor edits which need to be cleared with him), and sound effects for most of the weapons (I haven't been able to find a good free rocket launcher sound - if you know of one please let me know). Continue reading »

Well, Coldest has its own server now. Things were a little rough at first because the VPS that I got for it is perhaps a little underpowered (my old P4 1.6 laptop smokes it in benchmarks), but it's cheap and it gives me a solid (knock on wood) network connection for serving rather than using my not-100% reliable home connection for it. Since I installed the APC PHP extension the site works acceptably fast for me now, so we'll see how it scales (or if it even needs to). Continue reading »

That's a lot of hours of my life that I'll never get back. Given that I'm still kind of pissed off about it I'll save the recriminations for later (suffice it to say that I'm glad I didn't try to go with MinGW in the first place - ancient msvcrt dlls do not play nicely with Coldest). About the only good thing that came of this was that I cleaned up some potential threading problems and got rid of some previously uncaught errors in the code (due to concept checks in STLPort and GCC 4.3) in my attempts to stop the MinGW build from crashing. Continue reading »

So I've been wondering for a while why the Windows build was extremely slow at some things, and since adding proper grass to some of the maps, loading on Windows became an interminable process so something needed to be done. I googled a bit, and what did I find? This. For those of you who didn't immediately click on that link and read it, the short version is that Microsoft's STL implementation in Visual C++ blows. Hard. Continue reading »