Gamer-Universe » Ian's Blog & Outspark News

Erebus is Coming…

Today, I received an email flaunting Outspark’s latest game- Erebus. It looks like a sort of WoW/Warcraft 3/Diablo game, and I am hella-excited!

Story:

Eons ago, the jealous and vengeful god of Chaos, Erebus, nearly destroyed the human race. Led by the beloved King Danaus, humanity fled to the shores of Travia, a lush continent full of magical and ancient beings. The natives of Travia — noble Elves, rugged Dwarves and magnificent Dragons — welcomed the humans with open arms. The first years of coexistence were not easy, as humans came to terms with the reality of starting over in this world of strange creatures and magic. But soon, construction began on a new human home – Andarasa, named for the Goddess of Light, who many humans had turned to as their savior.

Peace would not last long. When the human refugees fled from the terrible forces of Erebus, Erebus himself had stowed away deep inside the young son of King Danaus, Prince Typhram. The God was weak, but by spreading chaos, he could regain his power and manifest in the flesh once more. Using the Prince as his agent, Erebus was able to bring fear and distrust to the human survivors. The Prince proclaimed that only a Human could lead the land of Travia to prosperity. Agents loyal to the Prince took up his new cause, each wearing a red armband to show their allegiance. The “Scarlet Revolution” caught the natives of Travia completely by surprise. Villages were razed, civilians massacred, and, most shocking of all, a band of human militants, armed with new-found Dwarven explosives, destroyed the palace of the Elf Queen. Truly, this was humanity at its worst. Prince Typhram’s sister, Princess Helene watched these events unfold in horror; why would her brother undo everything they’d worked so hard for? As chaos consumed Travia once more, Erebus grew in power. Typhram’s body swelled and warped, exposing him as Erebus reborn. He headed west, towards the desolate wastelands of Deva, leaving death and destruction in his wake. Wherever he went, monsters of old — the Orcs and Ogres, Revenants and Reavers — rallied to their lord and master. Erebus had come to Travia, and chaos followed.

For more information, visit http://erebus.outspark.com today!

Upcoming Updates for Fiesta: Estate System & Secret Unique Update!

Outspark [GM] Silkypico had posted an announcement about introducing the “Estate System” which is the upgraded mini-home. It allows players to decorate, walk around, and socialize with up to 7 other players. Fiesta players can buy warps for their home so that it’s a lot easier to travel to a specific area.

- Furniture will be useable (Chairs, benches, etc.)

- Holds up to 7 players

- The housing feature is free, but a special quest needs to be completed to use the feature

- Furniture/Deco will deteriorate over time, and players can buy repair kits. Furniture bought from the Outspark Store will use premium repair kits.

The secret unique update will later be announced, and will be coming before the housing update. In order for the housing update to become available this February, Silkypico has set a target goal for Fiesta Fans on Facebook: 10,000. To see the status of the fan count, I’ve programmed a fan count tracker image, which is used in my sig.

After Failure Comes Woot-ness!

The Fail:
          My father, brother, and myself went to go see Avatar in 3D this afternoon. We were there 30 minutes early, but it turned out that there were 2 tickets left. Laaaaame!

The Win:
          I ordered CoD: MW2 (Xbox 360) last week, and Amazon told me to expect it the 6th through 10th. Wellp, it came in today. Hooray!

Blackshot Gets Canned by Outspark

It’s a shame that Blackshot had to meet this end, though many saw it coming. I loved the closed beta, and will miss that game very much.

To all the dedicated fans of Blackshot,

We appreciate your membership in our community and dedication to the game through beta testing, ongoing involvement in the forums and other places online. We realize many of you have been waiting to play Blackshot for some time now and we apologize for any inconvenience and frustration the delay may have caused.

After exploring every possibility related to the game’s delivery, we have decided to not move forward as the publisher of Blackshot. All related images and links along with the forum will be removed from our website shortly. While we are unable to discuss particular details of the situation, ultimately Outspark was unable to bring all of you a game that meets our standards. We have decided to move on.

Thank you for your understanding. We look forward to seeing you in one of our other games soon and value your membership in the Outspark community.

-The Outspark Team

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Fiesta Housing System, +10 Shields & Armor to be Released This Month

A news post on Fiesta’s website revealed that the +10 enhancement (already available for weapons) will be available to armor and shields this month. The other major update will be the Housing system, which allows Fiesta citizens to have their own private estate in the game. Players may invite friends to show off their house, which is decoratable with furniture that requires maintenance every now and then.

FiestaOnline.net (OnsOnSOFT’s Fiesta website) states:

You can enter the Mini home only by learning the Mini home skill.
(The Mini Home skill can be obtained by quest or purchased by the skill master.)
In the Mini Home you can design your own interior with many kinds of furnitures. You can fix old furnitures and use them again.
You can port freely to the map you want by purchasing a map gate with fame in Mini Home.
You can enter the Mini Home only in Town.

Screenshots will be posted soon!

Blah.

Boy do I have a lot of work ahead of me. I need to update the code to my server status checkers, my sig designs (Q.Q; Before legel, it was PERFECT!), and work on other ‘projects’.

I also need to get a passport and visa soon as I am planning on visiting a couple buddies of mine in Malaysia for fun as well as business. I am very excited, as I haven’t been outside of the ‘States before, let alone literally halfway across the world.

And GUESS WHAT?
My birthday’s comin’ up. I’ll be 20 then. It’s Dec 11th, but I have to fight my way through 3 other birthdays in my family between now and then, not to forget Christmas 2 weeks after. Hah. I hope I get the new guitar I asked for. I’ll be so stoked! I found my perfect guitar ~ Epiphone Les Paul Standard Plus-Top (Which gives it a flame maple body for more awesomeness in its looks!) with a Cherry Sunburst paint job. *drools* and for my “amp”, a Line6 Pod XT. Here’s a photo of it:

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My next post will have some art, as well as the Fiesta Server Status updates and they should be ready this week. Cya then!

-Ian

Sick

Since about September 21st, I’ve been battling a nasty case of Bronchitis. I’m just about over it now and have returned to my classes, but right now I still have a bit of a cough. I’m able to get back to working Thursday, and boy do I need to.

In other news, I’ve been playing a bit of AION Online, but like every other MMORPG, I’ve never been completely attatched to it. I guess I’ve got some sort of immunity to the “WoWcrack” or “Evercrack” that many have gotten addicted to. That does not mean I don’t enjoy the games; I just can’t find myself playing them constantly.

Project-wise, I’ve been messing around with LightBox, vBulletin, and CSS. CSS has been giving me hell lately, mainly with cross-browser support. IE and Firefox like to fight and process CSS differently when I use a style code such as:

.midBox a:link { color: #000000; text-decoration: none;} <-- This wanted to work fine in IE8, but was ineffective in Firefox for some reason. I had to rewrite it to be:

.midBox > a:link { color: #000000; text-decoration: none;}, which really didn’t make sense to me why the first didn’t want to work. They should both target the link inside the <div> tags.

It could be just me, but I am not sure why that really is happening differently/incorrectly… if you know differently, please comment. I am still a learner!

A friend of mine suggested that I use YUI (Yahoo! UI) “reset.css” which should be able to minimize the differences between Firefox and IE (as well as other mainstream browsers). Unfortunately, with all the CSS I had written, it only made things worse.

In Blackshot news, I had made an attemt to work some new information out of the staff, but there really is no news. Sadly, this game entered Closed Beta testing 1 full year ago. Suprising, isn’t it? Luckily, I have patience and could wait even another year before I give up on the game. I have Counter-Strike: Source to keep me happy.

I also recently uploaded my recording of the Blackshot CBT event: “GMs vs. All” to Youtube, so you can watch it in fairly high quality.

Quick Update on my Server Status

I recently spent a few hours until 3am this morning and adjusted my server status image again to transform it into a bar again and also made it a whole lot more accurate by checking the ability to log in rather than just seeing if the login is online. This was added since the servers come online during maintenance, but users aren’t able to log in until maintenance is over.

This is the barred version of the server status signature image ver. 3(.5 after login update).

Updated Server Status

I recently added Cypion to the server status list as well as made a new sig. My next mini-project will be to make individual status bars for anyone to use.

[Fiesta] New Cypion Server Open!

The new Cypion Server opened just moments ago and it is quite crowded! The server is full of new players reserving names and also competing at the “Race to 105″ event where the first adventurers to reach 105 will receive 1,000,000 sparkcash (Approx. value: 1428.57 USD)! To view more information about Fiesta, visit http://fiesta.outspark.com. Enjoy!

Fiesta's New Server- Cypion