Man, drama at this site in the past week has rekindled old un-fond memories of delving into the social world of the internet. Of course the internet is a sort of anti-reality and thus leading anti-social types, like myself, to dwell among it.

Now theres nothing wrong with being anti-social, society has been coming up short when it comes to people being intelligent and/or decent.

One thing that hasn't changed is that the biggest annoyances as far as hackers and the likes are concerned, tend to be mentally or physically teenaged. Yet people get discouraged or heart broken(depending on your views) and fits are thrown.

As for those who are leaving, I don't blame them. I've had to slip out of social networks that had become overridden by parasitic bastards who just ruin everyone's good time. I'd hate to see this site go, its very well designed and packs some great potential if only some changes could be made.

Competitions are a good start, its what makes gaming communities more fun. Years ago when I was on the VERGE scene I enjoyed the challanges of making a game in a set number of days. But now I don't have time for time based competitions, which kind of sucks.

Anyways, I've updated The Crawl, but never got around to posting it here. It even got updated again so there's three files to download, I need to package them better me thinks.

6.36mb engine file

4.92mb graphics file

2.8mb upgrade file

I've made some good changes to the editor and main engine.

Eliminated the load-all-at-once for the engine, now it will load tons faster without eatting up your system for breakfast. Also fps caps were removed and movement and time speed controled by a simple var/(fps/30).

Also the texture indexing has been made dynamic, which I'm sure most people didn't know that you can only have a maximum of 50 textures in your list or you'd get some serious issues…now you can have as many as U3d will support. Also the amount of tiles/objects/lights and the time of day is displayed in the engine.

Hot keys have been added to the editor, glitches fixed, and the ability to toggle off the lights and objects from the display. They even got themselves some nifty little flags on the screen to show you if they're on or not.

F2 will toggle object showing and F3 will toggle light showing.

And fun with colorable tiles.