I’ve almost finished with the major site updates. There are still some things like the footer that need fixing, but that can wait until tomorrow or until I get back from holidays in a month.
I have a few more things I want to add but I need some time to put them together so they definitely won’t happen before I go.

I’ve finally got around to doing something about the site design and pages over the last couple of days, its by no means finished but its getting there. I’ve decided to cull a lot of the old content, for instance on the games page only a few of the games will have local versions, the rest will be linked to their newgrounds pages. I decided that I don’t really need to have the old games local since their not very good anyway.

I haven’t finished the games page yet though so if you want to see all our games look at them on newgrounds (Smith, Calrk). I’m thinking my new ’stuff’ page will have a lot less stuff on it now, maybe just a link to a folder full of all our random bits of animation and some other stuff like the newgrounds search plugin for the google toolbar. I think I’ll scrap the downloads page, most of the stuff on it was shit anway.

And finally I’ve got a few new ideas that might be good to give their own page, but we will have to wait and see what happens with that.

I’ll be away for a month starting Monday, I’ll try to finnish getting the site looking okay before then.

I started updating the site design yesterday to one I made in media this year. It needs to be completely reworked though so its not finished yet. Also I’ve switched from blogger to wordpress  so there is more controle over the blog settings now but I’m still deciding how I’m going to Implement the other pages. Pages like games and stuff are not linked to atm.

I’ll probably sort this out over the next week or so and finish the design in the next few days. Stay tuned… a lot of new stuff will be coming this year…hopefully

:p

I’m so sick of my new isp TPG, i keep getting dropouts and the inability to load some sites (mostly Digg). over the past week and a half I have been looking up ways to solve the problems I’ve been having, and hearing about the problems others have been having with TPG’s “transperant” proxy. The main thing I was having problems with was digg and my torrent trackers, digg only loads once in a blue moon and my trackers are quite often unable to connect. If it wasn’t for DHT I wouldn’t be downloading torrents at all.

Today was different thought. I woke up to find that i could not connect to any websites, I could get pings from them but couldn’t connect through a web browser, timeouts was all I could get. My torrents were not connecting at all. The only thing showing any sign of life was MSN and Google talk. With no web browsing ability there was no way for me to google the problem…

I quickly decided to call up TPG and see if i could get them to give me a fix. My first call from my mobile resulted in the tech on the other end not being able to hear me. My second call, this time from a landline, resulted in the phone being picked up but no one was on the other end. i could hear other peoples calls being answered witch was funny but i was stuck in limbo. I didn’t want to wait on hold again but my current situation didn’t seem much better so I called a third time. This time I got through. The first few things the guy got me to try were no brainer shit that i had already ruled out but I played along, he wasn’t to know he dealing with a 1337 h4k3r. finally he told be to try removing ‘@tpg.com.au’ from my username on my modem. THAT FIXED IT WTF, so for a week and a half my Internet connection has worked (badly) with the @tpg but today it decides to refuse the fucking thing, not completly mind you I was still being told by my modem that my connection was UP and I could ping like i said before. Stupid tpg bullshit.

I just got myself a laptop, a little Asus Eee, first impression…awesome…it cost me $300 and its the smallest laptop I’ve seen, I think the Sony VAIOs come close but they are a lot more expensive, but at the same time a lot more powerful. Anyway I start playing with it expecting something to go wrong because something always does and it has wireless and I always have trouble with wireless, the exceptions being my ps3 and psp, they always work fine. So sure enough i have trouble connecting to my home wireless connection…great…play around for a bit, figure out it’s the encryption its having the problems with, turn of my WPA and it works fine unencrypted. Yay at least i can use my laptop wirelessly at home. By this point I’m getting pissed off with the version of Linux that comes with the laptop and go to bed as I had work the next day at 9am.

I get home from work and turn on the laptop, last nights frustrations behind me. Decide to update some of the software to see if it helps with the encryption issue, no luck, the built in update manager is useless. I knew that because it was Linux there would be some decent customization tips on the net, had a look around and found eeeuser.com. Excellent now were getting somewhere.

Turns out synaptic, an awesome package manager for Linux is under the hood i just needed to run it from the terminal. not only that but with a few quick steps you can get a real KDE desktop environment. got that happening, feeling good, decide i need to get some music happening since I’m on slow net and downloading OpenArena was not an option. I connected to my PC’s shared music folder, start playing some Coldplay, browsed through a few more albums, then as if deciding that I had been having to much of a good time, a password dialog appears. I need to log into the file share that I have already been browsing for the past 5 minutes. Not only that but the music is still streaming in the background from the share, pseudo-security or what. Alright I’ll bite, I tried to login with my windows login then my Linux and then any other random concoction i can think of, but no, windows file share has decided it doesn’t want me looking at my music.

and so final thoughts, why do computer have to be so temperamental and complicated! Why
couldn’t they have made an open standard wireless network adapter when they made the open standard wireless protocol, one with open source drivers so my network adapter would work on any bloody OS and I didn’t have to even think about driver troubles and incompatibility. why does everything have to be so complicated…and why is my god dam quota only 12GB i want 100s dam it.

okay I’m done

After a lot of messing around I’ve just finished setting up a high score database for our games. I set it up using a (very) slightly modified version of Neave’s high score code he uses for all his games. the only real difference is in the way I got mine to render the results in the flash for easier implementation in future games.

The only game that I’ve added it to so far is Paper Asteroids, I’ll add it to more games soon but for the time being go play and get some high score goodness.

and better than ever, well just as good as ever at least. After 2 weeks of struggle to get our domain back from the old host that went bust and getting new hosting (webcity was really helpful thank god) we are finally back in action. I wanted to move our domain over to webcity as well but couldn’t without paying for it twice, I only found this out after i payed webcity for a transfer so they let me register another domain to park on the site, 3menwise.com should be working by Monday hopefully.

In other news Calrk and I made a game for this years ACMI Screen It!, we are finalists and will find out if we won in Feb. Last year we won with Treasure Trawler (aka sub game).

I’ve only got one week of holidays left so I think i should try and make a game in the time I’ve got left or at least get some more of TK2 done. Regarding Tk2 I’m looking for Flash Artists to help with the graphics, none of us are that good at drawing and animating and I want it to look really good. Iv put a demo of the engine up so have a look and if you think you could replace the stick figures with some wicked ass bad guys email me at Smith@threemenwise.com

Hi everyone who reads this (if u do leave a comment) iv finished our new site design and its looking really kick ass. it uses CSS which makes it look really nice and the pattern on the background is cool too. You may have noticed that there is a page of the bible on the front page and in the header, i made a logo using it last year for some wallpapers and liked it so I’ve decided to use it for the header as well, its the only page in the bible to mention wise men so thats why its there.

Now that I’ve made the new design it will be allot easier to update. I haven’t quite finished everything yet, i still have to put up the maps page and the links on the Stuff page, ill be adding more games and more junk in the stuff section. so keep visiting.

Hey everyone (there must be at least 1 person some were who reads this blog) Clark and I yesterday won the ACMI Screen it award for best game years 7-12 for our entry Treasure Trawler. it was so cool to see other people play our game after the award ceremony, its on display to be played at the games lab in ACMI. We will probably enter again this year if we can, and this time we’ll try allocating more than a week to make it. In other news I’m redesigning the site which is why the blog looks half finished (the blog is the page I’m testing it on).