Collins’ Onovia

I saw on XFire, and advertisement for a game manager chat for Drift City. I’m a racing game fan. So after checking out some screen shots and seeing that it was a free racing mmo, I had to download the client, and take it for a spin.

Graphics
This is the first cell-shaded racing game I’ve ever seen. The graphics aren’t top notch, but for cell-shading, they are pretty good. There’s plenty of tweeks for people with slow machines, which is a plus.

Controls
The controls in this game are amazing. It’s WASD movement. Seems simple right? Well, you’ve also got the shift key, which will allow you to drift around corners and on-coming traffic. Typically, I stay away from racing games on the computer, for the same reason that I stay away from FPS’s on consoles. The controls are usually hard to master. Steering is easier on an analog pad, for the reason that it’s “pressure sensitive”. Drift City by far has the best controls for any racing game I’ve played on the PC.

Game Play
The cool thing about Drift City is that your not stuck, racing around the same maps over and over again. There’s an entire city that you can explore. Race people, crash it up, hit some jumps, pull off crazy bonuses, get items, and go on vigilante missions to destroy the S.U.V.’s. See, I knew there was a world where Anti-SUV people could unite! All that is just in the open world. There’s also a battle mode, where you can race by teams, or solo. The maps in the battle modes are actually portions of the city, so they are places that you will recognize.

Upgrades
You can upgrade your vehicles by buying or acquiring items. There are 4 basic attributes to upgrade. Speed, Acceleration, Durability, and Booster. Every few levels, you can change out your items for newer things with better bonuses and sell your old items in the auction house.

Final thoughts
If your a racing fanatic like myself, this game is well worth the download. Here’s a quick video I threw together today. Thanks LP for the tune-age.

I spent some time on my site today. I haven’t really sat down and worked on it for along time. The most obvious thing I changed was the layout. The green color was nice and all, but it didn’t reflect my personality. “Lite and pretty” just isn’t me. I chose this dark theme called slate by Dan Cameron.

Once I got the new theme online, I figured that it would be a great idea to update my plug ins too. Spend a little more time, getting everything up to date. Why not? Well crap, it didn’t go as planned. It’s been so long since I’ve tinkered with things, that I forget what files rely on what, where certain things need to do, etc.

Plug ins I Broke:
Ultimate Tag Warrior: I dunno what the hell happened here. It’s working, I can tag posts, but I can’t click on the tags. It comes back with a 404 error.
WebSnapr: This showed a little thumbnail of external websites. More of an accessory than a necessity. This is the last on my list to fix, if even at all.
WP-Cache: This is supposed to speed the website up by creating a static page instead of having to query the database every time a page is loaded. Not happening, Haven’t a clue why.

Everything else running on here upgraded to the latest version just fine. Guess I’ve got more work to do!

Moving on, all the work that I’ve put into UFIGaming.net never ended up paying off. It ended up being more of a learning experience for myself than a business. Poor planning, and lack of help contributed to the failure. Once UFIGaming goes off line, I’ll be posting the source to the back end that synchronized steam id’s from phpBB3 to our CS game server.

I managed to get back into Rappelz again. Once an addict, always one right? This is the 3rd time that I’ve given into the urge. Damn I’m weak. I’ve promised myself however that I’m NOT spending any more money on the game. It’s pointless to spend my real money to get virtual money. Over the years of my MMO gaming, I’ve probably spent well over $1,000. While that doesn’t seem like much, there’s not a thing to show for it.

Enough rambles for now. Goodnight.

In your php file, you will need to run a database query, for example:

Now that you have the required data, you can use the [url=http://area51.phpbb.com/docs/code/phpBB3/_includes---functions_display.php.html#functionget_user_avatar]get_user_avatar[/url] function that’s in includes/functions_display.php

Assign $avatar to a template variable.

And finally, add {USERS_AVATAR} into the template page, where you want it to show.