Short little update

Dark Spartan796

I had to post this, I found it about an hour ago.

This Weighted Companion Cube is perfectly normal. It will not stab you, it cannot speak, so feel free to turn your back on it for more than a few seconds. If it you hear noises, then you’ve been doing too much Enrichment Center testing, and should stop running just for a few moments to take a rest.

[h4]P.S. OH GOD WHATEVER YOU DO DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON IT, IT’LL STALK YOU AND FUCKING KILL YOU[/h4]

Friday Foto

Sure we have a feature picture section on the right, but until I figure out how that all works (I’m not a code junkie), I’ll post it here. Cry some more.

I call this type of picture a “Halol,” sort of like a “lolcat,” but with Halo.

Crates should not be used to block grav lifts, especially in Zombie matches.

Always seems to do this

Gmod is a fickle bitch. I caught wind of Spacebuild finally being fixed by another group, and apparently installing all of the new stuff for it broke Gmod. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming.

So now I’ve gotta fix that. Yay.

In other news, Halo 3 owns my soul now. It owned it the moment I beat it on Legendary.

Also, Orange Box comes out on Wednesday. Have you preloaded Episode Two and Portal yet? You should.

Thinking Rock Studio has officially begun pre-pre-pre-production on a new installment in the Is It Insured? series of Halo vehicle tricking videos. Expect it to be on teh Internets whenever it’s done.

Now I’m gonna do drown myself in 2 liters of Diet Coke while I fix my Gmod.

TRS site back online!

Right here.

Everything’s intact, all of the files are still there, everything’s the way it was. Happeh tiems.

Video card still borked, gonna have it looked at over the weekend.

I’m tired. Am I being paid for this? Zzzz.

Computer out of commission

Seems I’m truly getting all the luck this month. This morning, when I booted up my PC, various miscolored pixels found their way across the screen. The Windows XP boot-up finished, and then my screen went black. WTF.

So now I’m writing this blog from school. Whoopee.

Thankfully, we have a backup laptop, maybe I can use that to keep in touch.

Until then, no comics. Sorry.

Three words for my video card: Total write off.

Borked video card?

So I boot up Steam to play Half-Life 2 today, I’m happily killing Combine along Highway 17, I manage to get into Sandtraps, all in the course of about 20 minutes when all of the sudden…

My screen freezes. Sound has stopped. Textures in game are severely discolored with little purple pixels scattered without. My gravity gun has turned brown. Finally, my computer succumbs to the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.

So I reboot and run Half-Life 2 again, this time avoiding the part that caused trouble. I get about five minutes further when my screen freezes again, and my computer crashes once more.

Looking at the BSoD message, it seems my nv4_disp.dll driver was caught in an infinite loop. I have an nVidia GeForce 6800 video card, 256 MB onboard RAM. A nice card for its time, and now it appears to be malfunctioning. Whoopee.

So I talk to my friend n00bguy about the problem. He suggests running HL2 windowed and at the lowest graphics settings possible. I do so, and I manage to get through most of the Sandtraps chapter, at the pain of looking at horribly low-res textures, aliased models, with no neat lighting effects. For the most part, it works, and he says to start maxing one video setting at a time, starting with texture detail. I do so, I make it about 10 minutes more, and then it dies.

After rebooting, he suggests updating my video card’s drivers. Seeing as I haven’t updated since I bought this computer in December 2005, I imagined a little update wouldn’t hurt. I pinpoint the driver installer, download, install, run Half-Life 2, fail, die, anger ensues.

So, a $2000 computer, and I’m pretty sure you can see my frustration with both my sound card and video card not working the way they should. My friend is a tech support guy, so I’ll get him to take a look at it before I send it in for expensive maintenance.

For the time being, this means:

No HL2, Gmod, or games in any way

No comics – Yes, I know I just announced a bi-weekly May onward release yesterday, but this problem came up without warning. I’m sorry to disappoint.

In good news, my new Xbox 360 came today. I can tell it’s new because it doesn’t have my old Gears of War side decals on it. I booted it up and it works fantastic. Time to go play Gears of War to distract me from this dreadful video card shit.

Comics #010-012

UnlivedPhalanx (the guy in the white armor below), is the manager/leader/director/overlord/dictator of the website, and he basically runs everything. He codes the site, pays the bills, publicizes, etc. I just create the content. He’s nice and easy to work with in the real world, so I thought in the comic world, I’d make him a complete tyrant. As you can tell from Comic 11, the comic Dark Spartan doesn’t really take it too well, expressing his frustration in the comics that Phalanx demands (in the comic, Thinking Rock Studio is more of a professional media business (hence the office) that has gone downhill, almost into bankruptcy. Also, Phalanx has apparently expressed such dissatisfaction with DS to go as far as to fire him at least fifteen times. Why he keeps getting hired back is a mystery, maybe because in the post-apocalyptic future comic makers are far and few…such is not the case at PHWOnline.

Since the office that Thinking Rock is housed in is actually a Counter-Strike map (cs_office), they often get pestered by inevitable invading terrorists and counter-terrorists, to the point where they can tune it out and get on with their lives.

Another neat little special to take a look at is my new announcement comic, finally ending my inactivity in comic making over the past few months (all of these comics are from September-November 2006), you can check it out here.

In the new announcement, you’ll notice DS looking a little different than his shabby self. A few days ago, I finally decided that he needed a new look, and so made him a new skin. My friend n00bguy was kind enough to hex it (make the skin have its own model) for me. He’s also doing one for my friend Rockman, which was also made by me.

Comics #007-009

Sorry I didn’t do it on Thursday or whenever I was supposed to. I just forgot about it. Don’t kill me.

So the comics don’t overlap with the sidebar, I’ll use this space to explain them.

Comic #009 -

You’ll probably notice this one is extra long. Well, at the time, I wanted to wrap up this arc and get right into the main story line, which is surprisingly more like a squiggly line than a straight one. In Gmod 9, spawning a large amount of explosive barrels, such as how many Mingebag here spawned, and then blowing them up, will crash the game, due to all the gibs and parts that come off the barrels, calculating the physics for those gibs, as well as rendering the explosion. I used the ingame “Bloom” tool to brighten up that frame so the explosion would take on a more nuke-like appearance, something big enough to destroy a server…which it did.

In all honesty, the frame with the explosion didn’t have enough barrels to crash the game, or else I couldn’t get a screenshot. However, I did detonate the pile he was standing on (I had removed some later to get a picture of the explosion) so I could get a screenshot of the crash message following spamming too many objects in Gmod. This bug has pretty much been eliminated in Gmod 10. I’ve tried, and it’s extremely difficult in single player and on hosted servers (but not impossible, because the host’s computer might be worse than yours, and might not be able to handle it, and might crash anyway, timing everyone else out), and pretty much impossible on dedicated servers. That’s not to say it hasn’t been replaced with other methods Minges can use to crash servers.

Comics #004-006

As promised, here they are. I’m gonna keep this post short, I’m reeling from a 70-question standardized exit-level math test the entire junior student body had to take today. No wonder they call them NUMBers.

So apparently if I post these comics too far up in the blog post they overlap with the links and shit along the side. Damn sidebars. So, I think I’ll waste some space.

The TRS site is still down…and still doesn’t call us. Even an email would satisfy us, Christ.

If you haven’t already seen, Bungie put out two new maps for Halo 2, that you can take a look at here.

Oh! I forgot to tell everyone. Over the weekend, my 360 died. Three red lights of death. Hardware failure. Crap.

Thankfully, I was still under warranty, and so Microsoft sends you a prepaid box that you can put your 360 in and mail back to them (prepaid shipping sticker included), and within a few days, you’ll get either your old box back, or a new one, for free. At least they make up for shoddy equipment (it was less than a year old), by having a nice recompense policy.

Now, before I get carried away with durable/hard Wii jokes, here are the comics.

So, I never really described that “The Build” story arc is. Lemme do that now.

It’s supposed to portray the stereotypical Gmod server, players happily building or doing whatever until some Mingebag (the Gmod term for a noob that comes in and screws everything up) arrives, wreaking havoc on the players’ hard work. Thankfully, some players are more resourceful than others, and have anti-Minge plans ready, in case such a Source-powered holocaust were to occur.

Thinking Rock Studio site gone?! OH SHI–

Yeah, it’s true. One day the site was there, all happy and showing our content. Then the next day, it left for college and doesn’t call anymore. What a dick.

But seriously, you’ll notice that the TRS site no longer houses…well…TRS. When Jake (UnlivedPhalanx) found out about this, he was PISSED. And so was I. From what he said, the provider for our hosting, Honest Networks, “sold it out from under us.” Honest Networks my ass.

So he emailed them and asked them “WTF.” They’ve traded a few emails back and forth, and we still don’t have a definitive account of what happened. If you’ll look at the site, apparently it was sold to some squatter or third-party group, which is bullshit because our plan wasn’t even half-expired yet.

So until that issue is resolved, you’ll not be able to read the comics, and you’ll have to go to YouTube yourself to find the videos. Don’t worry, nothing’s new. Nothing has been since October.

However, I’m gonna make it up to you guys. Since I’m such a nice guy, and I appreciate people saying they like the comics, I’ll post three per day until it reaches current, and then they’ll be released whenever they’re done. The best part being, you can see them in nice full resolution as opposed to being crammed into a PDF file, since I’m messing around with the size and format of the comic for later strips so it’s less boring.

Without further ado, the first three strips of Thinking Rock Theatre:

And since I’m even a nicer guy, I’ll even give you a little backstory:

I got my inspiration from a little webcomic over here called Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman. It entails a naive fellow blundering his way through the world of Half-Life 2, in the form of slapstick, satires from the game itself, and even more slapstick. It’s where I got the inspiration for the first strip of TRT. Concerned has since completed its run, but you can read back into the archives and read the whole thing through, all 205 strips of it.

As for strips #002 and #003, that was a little story arc I made so that I could get into the hang of comic making and stuff before I did the actual storyline (note: since I’m saying this after that arc is completed, I could’ve pulled that out of my ass at any time), as you can tell from the amateur Photoshop effects.

So yeah. That’s my story.

My arm’s getting tired from patting myself on the back so much. Stay tuned tomorrow for comics #004-006.