Last of my Wicked Courses

I think #8 is the last of them.

2 things made me come to this conclusion:

1. My SAVE LAYOUTS is full


2. My attention has been diverted to City Of Heroes

Heck, I didn't even enter There at all yesterday. The moment I got home I was online in CoH, and didn't get off again till 1am when I went to bed.

Will this be the last entry here? Hopefully not. My membership with There doesn't expire till next March. I hope to come back later, but right now I don't really know.

Well I'll probably get online again tonight to see how things are. Probably.

Another day - another bust!

Yeah, Islandview's not giving me ops again, so I can't lay out my new wicked course #8.

Geesh I really wish There would just go fix the &#%^$# zone!

Loop de Loop!

I was just driving around aimlessly the other day when I came upon the Shootball Court, home of the buggy Sumo Wrestling. So I decided, what the heck, may as well go in since I've not been in there for a month or so.

So I go up the ramp as usual, to get on top of the cage. And, what do I see there? A "loop de loop"!! Memories of childhood flooded back. I remember the old SF's series of Matchbox racing tracks I used to play which had jumps (ramps) and loops.

Now, eversince I've started making race courses I have always wondered about how I could achieve a loop de loop. Now I've found it - in Shop Central.

So I bought it, and immediately went about testing how not to let people cheat on it, ie avoid the loop cos almost nobody's going to be any good in it. Even for me, I fell out of the loop a few times during practice runs. The crux of the problem is the camera view - it takes time to "catch up". Even when you do a spinning jump, your buggy will spin faster than the camera can pan, which usually causes dis-orientation for most people.

What they should have done is to get a loop-de-loop with sides, like the overpass thing. That way all you needed to do was just to hit turbo and accelerate, and not worry about being flung off at the apex of the loop, when you are directly upside-down and the camera hasn't caught up with you yet.

Well I guess I will have to either:

1. Erase an old layout so I can make a new course with this loop
   
2. Modify an existing course and add the loop in somewhere for a new twist
   

I dunno. I want to do this tonight, but City Of Heroes may be arriving tonight and I have to go to Tecdrome tonight and pick it up if it does arrive.

Endurance Rally

I recently took part in Thoreau's Tiki Islands Endurance Rally. Boy, was it a long one! It consist of 4 legs, stretching from the isolated islands up above Motu Motu, all the way down south past Nada to the little speck of land out in the ocean south of Nada.

In total it took me 4 hours and 16 minutes to complete the whole thing. The most difficult part was perhaps leg 3, where I had to look for a checkpoint out in the middle of the ocean. I think I spent like 30 mins looking for it, doubling back a couple of times to the previous checkpoint just to make sure I didn't miss it.

In any case on my 3rd trip out again from the same checkpoint, I found it. I could have gotten a better time, perhaps 3 hours 46 minutes, if I hadn't got lost on this one single checkpoint... oh well!

I gotta remember to tell DarkEmerald about this tonight! I know she'd love to go on this!

Wicked Course #7 - sigh!

I have Wicked Course number 7 all done up, ready and waiting to come home and start making it, and then what do I find?

RIGHT - Island View's acting screwy again :(

Geesh I hope it fixes itself at 9.30 so that I can get cracking and lay it all out.

Oh by the way, DarkEmerald has returned! Her PC was hit by a virus and she had to spend a few days restoring everything after formatting it. Geesh it's almost like last week when I had to do everything from scratch on this new PC...

Too Weird!

Ok, I was online, and I noticed that suddenly I no longer own any clothes except the ones I was wearing. I looked at MY THINGS and every single item was listed as "(not yours)".

So I was thinking, something must be up. Even when I logged in, the usual sequence of messages popping up and warning me about Action Mode did not happen. The There Central page didn't load up.

Then Koga, a friend, IMed me. He was experiencing the same problems too. He asked "Which server are you on?". This is new to me! How can you tell? So Koga says "By the colour of your nametag." So I tell him mine is green. He then says "Therefore you are on the Green server."

Right, that was helpful. No, Koga said. This is exactly what There calls the servers. Green, Yellow, Blue etc servers.

So, now I know. The colour assigned to us is permanent because our user information is kept on a particular server! No wonder we can't change the colours!

Well, you live and learn...

Got WinXP set up!

I haven't been online much lately 'cos I put a new PC together. As of this writing I'm still slowly installing all the software that USED to be on the old PC. I tell ya, WinXP is &#%^$# hard to install! Yes yes, it's "user-friendly". I'm not a "user". I'm a techy geeky fiddler and I do not want to see a colourful icon that says "Click here if you want to change the look of Windows". What I want is an icon that looks like a monitor that says "DISPLAY". Geeesh!!

In any case, There was among the first few things I installed, right after the firewall and the anti-virus stuff. I logged on to take a look see around There and to find out what, if any, I might have forgotten to copy off the old PC from the There directory.

It appears that I forgot about my Wicked Course layouts - I left them all in the old PC and had to connect the old HD up again to the new one so I could get them all back. I'd hate to have to rebuild all the Wicked Courses...

In the meantime I've been having fun tearing around racecourses in my very own buggy, the Foxwagen R2004. So far, I'm the only one that has this. I put 4 more up for sale though, but no one else has bought it yet. Maybe because of the pricetag - 25,000T. Hell, it's a very limited edition buggy!

I'll submit another one for general sale soon.. probably going to price that one about 5,800T to about 6,200T. Depends on what the market situation is then, I guess.

My Buggies Have Arrived!!

WooHooo!!!

I logged in earlier and was just talking to SumGuy about his new buggy. He said he just got his a couple of days ago, and he submitted his on 14th April 2004.

So I told him that I submitted mine in May and was probably going to take another 2 weeks for There to clear the backlogged buggies. To my surprise, when I took a look at my inventory I realised both my buggies have been approved and they are now sitting right there in MY THINGS!

Here are the pictures of them in-world:

Foxwagen R2004 Limited Edition - my very own buggy!

Custom-made buggy for DarkEmerald

I hope DarkEmerald gets in-world soon so I can give this to her!

YAHOOOO!!!!

My 5th Racecourse

I did it! YAY! Island View hasn't been behaving weird too much recently and I have been able to lay out my 5th racecourse layout. It isn't as tough as the previous ones but it does sport 2 tricky parts. Total length is 1254.2 metres (1 kilometre, 254.2 metres)

I saw that DarkEmerald did come in the night before but since then I have not been able to catch her online. She did a pretty good time - 1.22, but unfortunately due to me laying out the new racecourse, her time was wiped.

I hope the zone continues to behave properly so that I can lay out course number 6 sometime soon.

Oh by the way, my buggies haven't made it in-world yet :( Geesh this waiting is killing me!!

Very Quiet lately

I don't know if it's just me, or does it seem like everything's getting quieter lately in There?

For example. bugged as Island View is, normally there'd be like at least 8 people coming in to run laps from 7pm to 12 midnight, yet the past few days saw no more than 2 or 3. It's not as if they're not coming due to the bug in the zone - they wouldn't even know about it. Only Zone Ops know.

If you walk around the world, you won't see alot of people around. Heck even teleporting to Karuna Plaza isn't laggy anymore, and that's saying a LOT!

Where did everyone go?

Zone Seems Fixed Now

It seems Island View may be fixed for now. It properly does not show the extended menus today after the event ended, and I got an "End Of Event" email with a number other than 0 of people attending it :)

Let's hope this keeps up and we can use the zone normally from now on.

Oh yeah, we (DarkEmerald and I) left There early and went into Project Entropia and had a blast. Met a new guy there too and we kinda hit it off.

Who knows, I may start a blog on Project Entropia too :) Let's see if the PE bug hits me enough to do so. Anyway I couldn't get PE to recognise my credit card info. I'll try again tomorrow and see how it goes.

Bought A New Buggy!

I bought a new buggy yesterday. God knows why, but I did. oKeno was selling them for only 4K each, and it's such a bargain at the price... I couldn't resist!

Here's a pic of my buggies:

My 2 buggies, new one on the left

I'm still expecting my 2 other buggies which I've designed to come in either this Friday or next Tuesday. DarkEmerald is also, understandably, as anxious as I am because the purple one is made specially for her. It's a one-of-a-kind.