I am sure everyone knows already, but earlier this week I was finally able to publicly release my Left 4 Dead Steam skin:

Version 1.01 Released

I had it sitting on my computer for half of a year waiting for Valve to decide whether they wanted to pick it up as an official skin, or if they just wanted me to release it on my own. Nevertheless, I got it approved for release, and let my testers have at it for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately we all (myself included) missed the fact that the Support button didn't work, and the compact Friends list (when you turn off avatars) had some usability issues. Earlier today I released version 1.01 to correct those issues, which is why my watchers have seen it come through twice now.

I recently revamped my creative outlet, Ryno Studios. I had it all done and coded, when I decided I should actually turn it into a WordPress theme to help me manage everything. This was my first time doing anything with WordPress, so it took some learning to figure out how to get the information I wanted from WordPress. It wasn't too hard though, as I had it already coded very similar to typical WordPress themes. I started with the default theme, and just went to down recreating it from the ground up. Honestly, I think I keep less than 20 lines of the original theme intact, having to paste over everything else.

I am glad I did it that way, though, as now all I have to do is make new themes for when I get the urge to redesign Ryno Studios. And it means I can start offering WordPress designs to my clients.

The Novint Falcon is awesome. I LOVE Valve games, especially Half-Life 2 and it's subsequent Episodes. But playing them again with the Falcon has been amazing. I love the force feedback! You can not only feel every shot, you also feel the reload actions, including pumping the 12 gauge, and jamming a magazine into the MP7. It definitely requires some getting used to and plenty of fine tuning of the settings, but I think I have it configured almost perfectly for my play style.

My only complaint with it is the severe lack of support. Rather than releasing a generic driver that would allow you to use the Falcon for any game (just replacing the mouse), Novint is making drivers for each specific game so that you can have really good force feedback. While I enjoy the force feedback, I would rather be able to play any shooter game with the pistol grip, even if that meant not having force feedback until Novint added it on a game by game basis. That is supposedly the next big thing they are working on, since they pretty much have the Source engine completely integrated.