The switch to Steampipe last week went pretty smoothly. Except that the windows dedicated server crashed on startup. And the OSX version crashed on startup. And the Linux DS crashed on startup.

But because Steampipe is so awesome those problems were all fixed within an hour.

The biggest challenge facing people is that it doesn’t always seem to convert automatically. I don’t know whether you need to restart your PC first or something. But verifying it forces the conversion. For some people it doesn’t move it to the Common folder either.. I don’t know why that is but uninstalling and installing again seems to clear it up.

Some people are having problems with CS content being missing too. This is because the CS:S install hasn’t been converted to Steam Pipe. Try running it. If that doesn’t work read more here.

People are also wondering why HL2/EP1/EP2 aren’t mounting. You need to opt into the beta so they will convert to Steam Pipe. This is done in the properties of each of the games

My life is going through some big changes right now.

As many of you probably know Sarah and I are expecting our first baby in September. We found out it’s going to be a boy. Which has left us in the shit because the only names we’ve agreed on are girls names.. so we’re looking for a name. And it’s hard.

So with the baby on the way we realised that the house I bought 3 years ago and then ripped to bits and then rebuilt, isn’t going to be totally suitable for us. The main problem is that the main bedroom (our bedroom) consumes the entire top floor. And the other bedrooms are downstairs. So when the baby is old enough to be in its own room it’s gonna be a bit weird if we’re sleeping on different floors. Plus hopefully this won’t be the only baby we have – so we’re gonna have to move eventually anyway.

I have always wanted a farm. I hate having neighbours. I like the idea of having a house where the neighbours are a mile away. But this scares Sarah. Plus houses like that have terrible internet connection. So that’s out.

But we have been looking at a house. Much bigger than the one we’re in now. And a bit expensive. And needs quite a bit of work. It ticks a lot of boxes – but if we buy it I’d make sure that we move in AFTER ripping it to bits and rebuilding it. Plus it’s got a swimming pool(!)

My old house wouldn’t go to waste. It’s ideal for people without kids. Or with grown up kids. So my ideal plan is for my mom and dad to move into my old house, and live happily ever after from the sale of their old house. My dad complains and wants to leave his house to us kids.. but my opinions is that they worked every day of their lives to pay for that house, they’ve already given us every advantage they could have – so they should use that money to enjoy themselves.

And finally – Facepunch! The guys in the office have been experimenting with game ideas.. and we’re prototyping a game right now. It’s something that I don’t think has ever been done before.. but we haven’t finished prototyping yet so there’s probably a good reason for it.

I’m really happy with how the office is turning out. It’s something we should have had the balls to do earlier. It’s taking the company to a whole other level.. and the fate of the company no longer totally rests on my head.

This post is a massive wall of text. So here’s a drawing our awesome artist Meg made for the Steam Trading Cards stuff.

I’ve been plodding away at the beta over the last few couple of days. I’m hoping to initiate the switch over next week.

People running servers should make themselves familiar with this page.. because once we switch over this will be the only way to update and run dedicated servers.

The Linux version has progressed. I am able to get to the menu now – but it quits when I try to join a game. That might be because I’m running it in a virtual machine though – let me know if you’re having more luck.

The rift support (apparently) doesn’t work at all. I think I need to compile my own rift head tracking dll – because the one Valve provide is (apparently) crashing. They haven’t given me access to the head tracking code – so I don’t know what’s happening there.

It’s been a lot of fun pushing updates out via Steam Pipe. It means I can say to people “hang on – try now” – and they try and stuff is fixed. Instead of “try after the next update in 2 weeks”.

Ok this is gonna get confusing. We converted the GMod beta to use Steampipe. This all went fine. So now we added a beta branch to the normal non beta GMod .

So forget about the GMod Beta. Get rid of it. Uninstall it. We don’t need it anymore. It’s not gonna be updated. On the normal Garry’s Mod you have this option now.

Selecting this branch will convert you current Garry’s Mod to the Steampipe Beta. There’s a couple of reasons you won’t want to opt into the new beta.

• It will convert your install to Steampipe
• Switching back is messy and might not work at all
• You might lose your addons and stuff
• You won’t be able to join non-beta multiplayer servers

There’s a couple of reasons you might want to convert to the new beta

• Updates every hour
• Want to test your mods and addons with the new version
• Like being on the latest version
• Faster load times
• Install on a different drive
• All the lua files are loose and visible instead of being in a gcf
• Rift support
• Experimental Linux client support

To join the new beta you’ll have to guess the beta access code. It’s the same as the secret word in game.

I used to have a problem with my urination technique. The problem was that I always had some left in the tubes when I started putting it away. This would lead to me either peeing myself a little bit or spraying wildly as I struggled to put it back in its cage.

The spray got that wild on a couple of occasions that I ended up with piss on the floor BEHIND me. I still can’t totally figure out how I managed that – but I assume that it flopped around and I peed between my own legs.

So I started to observe other men in public urinals and I think I figured out where I was going wrong. When I’d finished I shook my knob from side to side and up and down. Kind of like casting a fishing rod. A bit of a flicking action.

I noticed other men did more of a masturbation action. Some even opting for over 15 pumps. Pumping it for longer than the urination itself had taken. Which seemed weird to me – but it seems that everyone does it that way.

So I have since adopted this `milking` method and everything has been fine up until now. These are things that you have to figure out for yourselves. No-one tells you the best way to shake your dick after you’ve had a piss. Until now.

Today I had my first lick of the Steam Pipe today.

I managed to convert Garry’s Mod Beta over to the new Steampipe format. It was pretty straight forward. And now with the run of a .bat file I can send an update to Steam and have it live around the world within a couple of minutes!

You can make branches too. This means I can make a special development branch and potentially integrate with our build servers so that the Steampipe version is always using the latest version. This will allow people asking for bug fixes to receive them within 10 minutes of reporting, being able to test and verify the fix – and then have the fix pushed out whenever we think the world is ready.

So if you were lucky enough to have access to the Garry’s Mod Beta back in the day it might be a good idea to reinstall it and check it out

We got our devkit on Thursday.. and spent a lot of Friday in the office finding fun things to do with it.

We found that the reactions are best from people who don’t really play video games, or use computers. The best reaction was from our friend Simon. We decided to play a joke on him. Everyone left the office, and I showed him the mask, and got him to wear it. Then while he had it on everyone came in and stood around him, so that when he took it off he’d be all suprised.

This didn’t really work because he’s kind of slow and hardly realised that 6 people had appeared out of nowhere. And he wasn’t that impressed with the rift because one of the lenses wasn’t in (something he failed to realise/mention).

But then we got him on the rollercoaster demo. And he went insane. Short hard breaths. Repeatedly squatting. Hands shaking uncontrollably. It was both hilarious and scary. Even afterwards, an hour later, he was still shaking.

This probably less of an indication of how real the Rift feels, and more an indication of how badly wired Simon’s brain is.

My personal experience is sickness. I tried it for about 20 minutes and felt very very sick. I think there’s two things that make me feel sick. Firstly and most obviously is movement. If I’m standing still and looking around I’m fine, but any movement is awful for me. Another related thing is how it doesn’t move when you move your head. For example, when moving your head closer to an object. This is probably expected – but it must confuse my brain and make me sick.

The sickness is that bad that even the thought of putting the mask on makes me feel sick. My brain has learned to avoid it. I’ve been told to ease myself in slowly.. but I don’t really know how to do that.

Beyond that I’ve got nothing else to say that hasn’t already been said. The resolution is an issue – but it’s something you can overlook (especially considering it’s a devkit). It gives a spectacular sense of scale. In Half-Life 2 when an NPC looks at me – I feel something deep in my chest that I feel in real life when strangers look at me – that I’ve never felt in a video game before. Like a prompt to react, to smile back or say hello.

This is the future of gaming. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see movies that we can look around in too in the near future.

You know how I’ve been going on for months about switching Garry’s Mod over to the Steam Pipe. Well, that is about to become a reality. This week I merged with Valve’s latest code. There’s still a few issues to overcome – but I’m hoping that we’ll make the switch in the next couple of weeks.

This is going to present some issues for dedicated server hosting. It’s my understanding that it uses a completely different system to download and install the dedicated server. This is something that you might want to look at now if you run a server, but we’ll try to get an in depth guide on the wiki before release.

GMod Linux is kind of working. I have been told by people that they have got it working with a bit of fudging around. One of the few things I like about the Linux community is that they will go ahead and figure out stuff like this for themselves (the downside being that a lot of the time you’re kind of expected to). I’m not going to release a version before the Steam Pipe update – because that will fix a lot of Linux issues. Plus I’ll be able to iterate more quickly when we’re on the pipe.

We haven’t really decided what we’re going to use the downstairs of the office for. But we know we want to use it for something. Whether that’s throwing desks down here. Or dividing it into offices. Or just leaving the pool table here for people to shoot the shit around.

We decided we didn’t want to go crazy with it. So didn’t have the walls plastered, or have fancy new radiators. But we built big green columns to hide the wires and pipes. Just to tidy it up.

Old and newz:

I made my first wordpress plugin today. It makes it so you can upload unity3d files to wordpress and and embed them in your posts!

It solves a lot of problems that seem to exist in current plugins. One of the issues was that they all kind of wanted you to upload your unity3d files via ftp to get them to work. That is terrible. So I made it so you can upload them via the media player, and insert them via the media player.. and it just works.

They play together nice too. So when you play one, it stops the others. I’ll probably make that optional though.. cuz there’s nothing stopping multiple unity players playing at the same time.

Another thing is a lot of web servers can’t serve unity3d files.. because they don’t have the mime type and permissions set. So when you upload a unity3d file it just adds .zip to the end. The unity player can still play it – and you don’t have to mess with your config. All good!

I’m gonna play around with it and clean it up then I’ll see about getting it in the searchable wordpress plugin install thing.