» Home / News » The Forums » Downloads » Vista Fixes	Breaking News & Updates! We are Seeking a Pixel Artist September 6, 2010 Hey all, We are seeking a Pixel Artist who would like to commit to our long-term projects (both WinterSun on the Android Platform, and Mirage Realms for PC and MAC). We will be paying (rates negociable) and looking for approximately 250 tiles, varying amounts of sprites, and perhaps other work. If you are interested please leave your MSN as well as examples of previous work. The artist will be expected to work in 32x32 format and meet casual (initially at least) deadlines. If you know someone, point them to us. This is really starting to hold us back! Liam 1 Comment - Leave a Comment Dustmite becomes Mirage Realms September 5, 2010 Afternoon all, I've been making some real progress with the aptly named 'Project Dustmite' over the last couple of days and I thought I'd share it with you. So far this has involved largely a re-write of the Client (aside from the core networking) - namely, switching to MVC (model view controller) so I can handle things better, writing a Menu System, implementing the first game 'states' and getting the networking to talk nicely to my Menu System. Here are some basic shots of the Menu as it stands, excuse the bad GUI I've just recycled a header from an old Mirage Realms GUI and used a main textured background. The Menu Panels themselves are standard Java. Here's the basic Main menu... Connecting.. A Status Panel. An Alert Panel. I've put in some nice Error Handling that allows the Client to evaluate its game state and throw the user back to the Main Menu with one of those alert panels informing them what happened, a status message panel type for when we are busy doing things in the menu, and of course the main and connection menus panels. This leads me nicely into the game... which is a lot more of a re-write than I had hoped. Going to start going over the Server today and hopefully get everything nice and ready for the introduction of the back-end Database, and user-accounts. So much work to do, this is madness. Once the Database is set up, a basic Main Game GUI is put together, and you guys can create accounts and log in - I'll throw up a test Server where you can all try your hardest to make me cry and break everything. Click through to this post to see a shot of a successful user connection and the super-basic in-game UI attached ^^ Till next time, Fox 3 Comments - Leave a Comment Happy Birthday Egon!!! September 4, 2010 He's been with us from the start, And now he's 23 ^.^! Egon is the reason Mirage Realms is here, he's been a driving force behind my motivation for years and has always helped out where he could (be it pixel art, server hosting, mapping, ideas, bug fixes.. you name it). From everyone here at Mirage, all the best mate - have a good one! Liam 4 Comments - Leave a Comment Dustmite churns onwards August 31, 2010 So progress is slowly made, I couldn't find my old Map stuff which was a bit frustrating but I've spent the evening re-writing it, the map is stored as xml and loaded at runtime into Objects which are used in turn to... Draw our first patch of world (click through to the post to see the full image attached if you are viewing from the front-page). This is just client side at the moment and pretty primitive, my first dabbling in 'drawing' anything and it all seems to work which is nice. The plan is to now port the Map Init server side and send the client the bare minimum when it needs it, shouldn't be too difficult (gulp). Progress is progress, happy days ^.^ Fox 7 Comments - Leave a Comment Website Downtime August 31, 2010 Hey all, Sorry for the short downtime over the weekend, was waiting for payday so I could renew the Domain. All is well again :3 I'd put up some kind of Donation initiative so you guys could help keep things online in the future but I'm not really sure what I could offer in return. Perhaps some webspace or something? Let me know what you'd like to see from a donation and we'll see what we can do for you. Liam 9 Comments - Leave a Comment Moderators Needed August 22, 2010 Well chaps, The title pretty much says it all ^^ Despite our complete lack of commitment people seem to still come here and this ship needs moderating so if you would like to be considered for a Moderator position please reply to this post :3 Also, if you think you have what it takes to push our website / forums into the year 2010 and would like to help - let us know. We aren't going anywhere in a hurry! Liam 15 Comments - Leave a Comment Winter Sun July 28, 2010 Hi all, With Dustmite a little stalled and this place going nowhere in a hurry, you might ask what I'm going to be doing next? Well, this is what I'd say. Winter Sun is a 2D Java MMORPG project aimed at mobile devices. It will be distributed via the Android Market for a nominal charge (around £1 or so) and will encapsulate many of the things we see in Mirage Realms today. Watch a video of the Beta The mobile market is gaining ground and we are perfectly positioned to get a foothold in the 2D RPG world on this platform. While development is still in the early stages, enjoy some badly taken images of where we are right now :3 If you are interested in the project, we are actively seeking to commission a pixel artist to renew our tilesheet - please get in touch. It is currently available for download on the Android Market for free and you can apply for a Beta Testing pass there, search WinterSun! Liam Update: Registered a domain and put a pretty placeholder image up so google can start finding it. www.wintersun-online.com. 27 Comments - Leave a Comment Incoming Changes July 7, 2010 Hi all, As it stands we are currently supporting three different projects here: 1. The Mirage Realms VB6 Engine (Jacob's baby) 2. The Mirage Realms Game (Egon's baby) 3. Project Dustmite (My baby) I fear as the site is being pulled in three different directions the community has suffered as a result. The site is really quite general, anyone outside of our little circle at first glance wouldn't know what the moose was going on. That is why I am going to split Mirage-Realms.com into two sites (the game and the Engine - the game should stand on its own two feet), and purchase another domain for Project Dustmite (even if it hasn't been named yet). I'm not sure when you will see these changes come into affect, but if there is something you would like to see come out of this please let me know. I am also going to start offering hosted website services to games running and promoting the Mirage Realms engine, you'll get a yourgame.mirage-realms.com webspace as well as a yourgamename @ mirage-realms.com email forwarder. As part of the package forums and a nice website template and structure will be included, obviously I can't make everyone an individual template so I'll try and make it quite generic and easily customisable with .psd files. That's all for now! Liam 10 Comments - Leave a Comment Dustmite and where we stand June 25, 2010 Morning all, My rents' stepped in at the last minute and gave me a roof for the time being (woo), and now things are settling a bit I'm at a loss with what to do in my spare time... back to Dustmite I guess! A work colleague of mine's 8800GTX melted my computer just before recent events unfolded so I've been a bit screwed as far as getting online or being productive outside of work hours goes, however I'm hopefully building a new PC out of donated bits so I'll be able to get up and running by next week. As I see it the next stage in Dustmite's development is back-end storage (the database), and a layer of persistence that enables me to manage Objects nicely when it comes to reading / writing back. My current thought is to use MySQL as its what I (sort of) know and what I've worked with for the last few years, firstly in Support and now as a Developer. Anyone have any other ideas? Anything you'd like to see as far as storage and ease of use when persisting Objects to and from the Database? I think I'm going to read a bit into Hibernate as this seems to be the industry API of choice these days, I've got a feeling this'll be something I just get on with but its healthy to hear what you guys think. Any questions, ideas, whatever, fire away :3 Liam 10 Comments - Leave a Comment Lifes little problems... June 14, 2010 Sigh, If any of you are annoyed or worried about anything at the mo' I challenge you to top this (lol). Biggest thing that's ever gone down in my life happened this week, properly epic, I'm guessing things won't settle for months and even then... urgh. Basically, I've had financial difficulties as you know, aspirations to join the forces and all that jazz, relationship problems have been drifting back and forth from the past to come and kick my ass and throughout this I met a lad where I work who had up until very recently become my best friend. Best mate I've had in a very long time. Anyway, he lived with his lass and his mum in a town a way from mine and offered me a cheap room to rent and lots of hospitality to boot. Not believing my luck I took it, and through it met loads of ace people, got very drunk a lot, and really enjoyed myself. This is in the past tense, because shit went down. I've always got on well with both him and his lass and unfortunately they've been going through problems, I've chatted to both of them about it and where I could tried to steer them in the right direction. Unfortunately when it came down to it, they made the decision to split up, and holy crap did they split up fast... I think it was maybe 2 days until she was moved out, shock and awe tactics I guess - crazy stuff. Now this in itself should be a huge problem, my best mate is now in pieces and I live in the same house so surely I should be consoling him? Well, sort of, I've had shit going down elsewhere but that seems somewhat irrelevant in context so I keep it to myself and try and do what mates do and cheer him up.. I'm pretty rubbish at it lol. Now I guess here's the real, super huge, massive epic problem that's pretty much blew my life into little pieces. You see, for some fucked up reason I've developed feelings of my own for his lass over time but I'm fine with that, I can keep them squished, they'll go away, its not important, that shit just doesn't happen and can't happen, so I won't let it. Nothing major, she's the first lass I've really had proper feelings for like this in years but its unimportant - my loyalty to my best mate cancels that out 10000x, and it did, and everything was fine. Then I realised I was going to hang out with her for a coffee and such when I was hanging out with him, meeting up with her with another friend of ours just to chill - I guessed this was fine and normal since I was good friends with both of them so that's alright, everythings in control, nothing to worry about right? wrong. Shit basically hit the fan out of nowhere less than a week after they split, call it a momentary lapse of reason, call it what you want, but it effectively was the quickest and easiest way anyone could ever conceive of fucking my life sideways. I can't remember what day it was now, two nights on the street and sitting in bed staring into space for 2 or is it 3 days have sorta fucked with my time perception a little... I was out on the town with her and some randoms I've not met before going to a live acoustic night at a pub (which really interests me since I love acoustic guitar and watching people play it well just blows my mind) and all was well, sat down and started watching people play. Couple of beers... couple more.. some more beers... I was a bit... 'tipsy' (hmm...), and I guess so was she, I went up and played my fave song called Wish you Were here by pink Floyd (you may know it) and to my surprise got some claps and such, never been so nervous in my life but meh, went and sat back down, had a drink, turned her and out of nowhere we kissed. Not a second later was I sitting facing forwards thinking 'oh shit' when out of nowhere he comes bursting into the pub shouting 'WHAT THE FUCK' at the top of his lungs, shaking with rage. At this point you can probably imagine things weren't exactly about to go right for me. Anyway since I'm using this post selfishly as a way of telling you guys what happened since I need to tell SOMEONE unbiased as pretty much every friend I had now wants to kick my face in, I'll try and wrap this up quickly. As you probably have guessed he pushed me about a bit, I got booted from his place and spent a lovely few days on the street (I left my wallet inside and he took my key so I was pretty much fucked), got some lovely messages from work colleagues on my phone telling me I'm the biggest tosser that's ever lived, managed to get in with her key and get some of my things, get a bus back to my old flat, get told by my old landlord I had to leave in a few days, get told his mum has rang her mum and told her I'm untrustworthy and not worth anyones time (which is a bit of salt in the wound really... didn't see that coming), realise I have very little money and still owe some people money, lose all of my friends I've made since I've met him as obviously he now thinks I had some massive plan to break them up or whatever and won't listen to a word I say so he'll seek solace from his friends who don't really know me and collectively I'm sure the hate will just brew and argh. What a massive mess, a huge mess, a googol of a mess, I'm not sure karma could of annihilated my life to within an inch of itself with more precision if it tried. So, to summarise, lost all my friends (including the lass), have nowhere to live as of wednesday, no money, got work in 9 hours and everyone there as probably already heard something from someone and also thinks I'm the biggest backstabbing asshole ever to exist, and nowhere really to turn. Not sure I want to turn anywhere, don't know what I want to do, had a horrible butterfly feeling and complete lack of motivation to sorta.. think or analyze what's happened since it did. Literally just lay in bed for 3 days just mindblown, staring into space, couldn't like.. process what's happening. Just now having to deal with stuff as I guess I have work tomorrow and I guess I need to try and find somewhere to live... its just so horrible beyond anything that's happened to me before. Don't really know why I'm writing this, brought up some horrible feelings I've pushed away for a few days now... I guess it made me feel better to write it? Meh. I guess the moral of the story is just to stay single and not let anyone into your life or this shit happens. I'm sure I'll find the answer at the bottom of a bottle... or a can... or something.. lol. Fuck. Thanks for reading if you did, I guess I'm just mindblown by the scale of things. Time to build 300ft walls around my character retract into a corner somewhere. The only thing that's hurting me, the thing that's clawing its way inside me, is that he got hurt so bad from this. Wrong place, wrong time, whatever, his perspective and perception of things is just so... horrible, someone who has done so much for me - thinks I'd do that to them, is just really, well and in the truest sense of the word, horrible. This entire thing is nasty beyond comprehension and I'm sorta floating off to the side looking at whats happening and falling to pieces. For the first time ever, i truly feel lost. Liam 20 Comments - Leave a Comment Read Past News