Darkstars

Due to unforeseen circumstances, Argh has fallen on bad times. He has started a thread on the spring forums explaining his troubles and asking for advice. Since he now needs to find a new job he has temporarily stopped working on P.U.R.E and has released his current version for all to see!

In conjunction with the P.U.R.E release, a wip trailer has been uploaded! I have taken the liberty of uploading the video to youtube for all to see (and for those who cant use the wmv format):

Visit Arghs P.U.R.E thread here
Help Argh with his predicament here
Download the original movie in full quality here

I’ve given guessmyname web space, and he’s now set up his own blog!

Visit his site here!
http://www.guessmyname.darkstars.co.uk/blog/

Visit guessmynames DeviantArt page

Things have been rolling along over at CA like a tank on a sugar rush. Amidst all that sherbet saktoth and his brother have done some concept art.

There’s also the usual array of artwork for the CA logo and it’s many combinations.

See more concept art here
Visit the CA Trac site here

Having the ugly distorted spring logo on my desktop for a while next to the pretty AFLobby and Spring Lobby icons, I knew I needed to do something about it. So I redid the spring icon, and Satirik adopted the icon, and made a new splash screen to suite.

This is all fine and dandy untill you realise that not all is good and fine:

1. There’s already a project called ‘Spring Lobby’ which you can visit here.
2. The icon is identical to that of spring.exe.
3. It encourages the confusion of new users who can’t distinguish between tasclient and spring itself.
4. It doesn’t give satirik and betalord due credit (a side effect of the above item) as new users immediately assume the spring developers made the program, and not that the program is a project in it’s own right.
5. It isn’t exactly original.

So I set out to remedy this as shown below:

And the accompanying icon as shown here:

These are unofficial at the moment, and I hope satirik likes them enough to use them in his next version ^_^. There’s a second icon available that’s similar, but in my opinion it’s not as good, but I put it in, just in case someone disagrees.

Get TASClient images and icons here

UPDATE!

I made a few modifications to the 16×16 version of the icons to make them prettier after some feedback from betalord :

Get TASClient Images and Icons v2 here

For a while now I’ve been saying we need custom explosion generators attached to projectiles, and just when I stop saying it for a while somebody goes and makes a patch all on their own and people start making pretty things!

Some of these effects are pure gold, they blow awy all the effects that came before them as shown quite clearly by this impressive image of the PURE mod by Argh:

Since this image was made public, other modders have been conjuring up new effects with great effect. The XTA team have improved the vast majority of their own projectiles where possible, and theyre gone wild with this latest opportunity as shown below.

The image above taken in XTA 9.2 will require spring 0.76b1 or later (at time of writting this means svn) to make use of the new effects. Below is an image showing a particle based lighting effect.

Other improvements can be seen in the Eye Sex thread in the spring forums.

The XTA team have a youtube video showcasing their new effects here.