The Tale of a Fraudulent Clusterfuck - Part 5

Previous chapters: part 1, part 2, part 3, Part 4


Part 5 - the morning after

After part 4 was published, several artists came to my defense, they created accounts on RPG-Codex and MMO-Champion to speak-up against James.


James claimed he would post a solid rebuttal, but never did. James has been doing his charade, delusional development for so long, instead of facing the truth, he decided to cancel GM and take down the entire site instead.

http://www.greedmonger.net - now gives you a 404 error.

Q: What half-truths and lies are there?
A: James has pointed-out issues about uLink. James did not dispute facts about part 1, part 2, part 3, and ignorant what his friends are doing.

James has stated he had a team to help him. I could not find their arts or code or music portfolio:
1. Steven Davis doing his usual business of scamming others, as he scammed a week after part IV was published:
at the unity 3D forum.

2. The person doing environment, Paul Hemmings does not have a portfolio. Either I don’t see it or a google search of “Paul Hemmings Portfolio” has 0 results. So you can imagine what kind of Unity environment work he is doing...

3. Aaron Victoria has 0 results for portfolio. He’s very busy in the same vein - asking for free work, claiming he is an artist…

4. Jason Appleton has 0 results for portfolio, a lousy person who uses ELance to hire developers to originally code and give it to James on a silver platter, website and treats others very badly as stated in part 3, and 4.

5. SlyJesse has 0 results for portfolio.
6. MagicRules has 0 results for portfolio.
7. Tyler has 0 results for portfolio.
8. Matt Eichler... no mention of GM on portfolio...
9. David Bennell…  0 portfolio.
10. Cindy ...can't find any info.
11. Patrick Tempond... 0 portfolio
12. Vincent Foster... no mention of any prior games.

13. Joel Hager, Lumpyguy, the artist with nothing on his portfolio.

Lumpyguy claims to do post-production audio. No musical tracks exists, nor is he credited in any album, track or discography. So you can imagine what kind of musician he is...

Joel claims to be part of Boise Pulse Music, the largest music magazine:

Is an empty website...

The original artwork made 5 years ago is similar as what James GM artwork is now today. Nothing much has changed since.

Q: Why did James close down GreedMonger?
A: James could not open-source anything, since his code is less than 1% of the original products he brought and used.

A normal Unity project will have more than 50% as custom-coded, custom-assets. In GM, almost nothing.

James has created a new project, Project Reality, with all store-bought coding. He knows the truth about FPS (Frames-Per-second) issues and bloated terrain. Players will maul him once James makes his game available. 

James probably understands the issues about instanced sessions, mentioned in part 3 and 4, and his inability to pay for high-end expensive servers, which requires Jason Appleton to sponsor servers when more progress is made.

A competent MMO developer would be able to code a server which hosts hundreds of instanced sessions on one server, something for James Proctor to think about, since it is way beyond his skill-level, and all of the known MMO solutions for Unity, including Project Gorgon. Eric, the developer of Project Gorgon knows about this issue plaguing his MMO, since he left Carbine/Wildstar.

You can imagine the hypocrisy. James stating on his FB page that he is not associated with Jason and later, it is found Jason is the original investor.

Advice for James:
- Stop using and relying on store-bought assets. Learn to code your own things. It’s better James deletes everything and start from zero.
- Stop using Unity/Unreal/Cry. It will be good to learn C++ and low-level OpenGL, DirectX, TCP mailboxes, direct database access.
- Stop advertising yet another MMO, since all known MMO solutions for Unity/Unreal/Cry are full of BS and if the developer is not competent, he will buy this, that and turn into yet another GM trainwreck.
- Stop associating with scam-artists. James mentality is same as those scam-artists. Feigning stupidity and claiming to be innocent.
- Get a job. James the burger flipper, delivery guy or cashier can earn more money than James the MMO developer.

As mentioned in part 4, don’t feel sorry for James. If you give money to James, you enable him to call his work a success, without any thought of deliverables or game. James needs to pick-up his life and start from the very beginning - basic coding without asset-store items.

Q: Is Jason Appleton a clueless person?
Jason Appleton is very smart. His Billy Bolts project has beautiful artwork and an impressive website:

See: iTunes.

In a normal game-project, the owner hires artists who drew prior art, developers who made fully-completed, playable games, musicians who have hours of listenable music on their website.

Do not associate with the people involved with GM. They are known to borrow money, extort, post chat-logs against you (as in part II), vilify, entrap, bad-mouth (as in part IV), are n00b artists, n00b modellers, rookie coders who have no game-development experience. They are scammers who want lots of money in exchange for non-existent artwork, horrible models (or just buy something on Asset Store to give to you ;), terrible code and they have nothing art-worthy to show on their non-existent portfolios since 2012 when GM was Kickstarted.

These people don’t understand hardship - where others suffer loss, inconvenience artists who have to redo everything again to fix horrific mess, business owners ruined, constant slander and rumor-mongering from them.
  
A normal artist, would join a design company, a game-studio, work his way up the ladder. In four years’ time, they would be at intermediate level by now, or possibly having their name on the credits-list of several games, plenty of finished projects and lots of original art in their portfolio.

If James doesn’t listen, Karma will remind him. You can imagine how evil he is, to cause so many people to speak-up against him.

Free Game Saturday #5

If you want "in" on the chance to win this brilliant and lovely game, just leave a link to your Steamgifts profile as a comment below.

Also see the previous post.


More next week.

Free Game Saturday #4

If you want "in" on the chance to win the pixel style top-down game, just leave a link to your Steamgifts profile as a comment below.

Also see the previous post.


More next week.

Minced Meat Soup Recipe by Kashim

So my good Steam friend tstki asked me to be a guest on his blog and write *something*. He said, anything would be fine... I still didn't have a clue what to write about.. and then he said he liked cooking. Well, I love cooking, so I decided to share one of my favorite recipes, "Spicy Soup with Minced Meat".

Ingredients:
For 4 persons

• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 500 g minced meat, half pork half beef (I used lean ground beef, not a fan of pork)
• salt and pepper
• 1 onion, chopped (I used 2 shallots instead)
• 1 celery stalk, in slices
• 1 red or green bell pepper, without seeds, in pieces
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
• 400 g canned diced tomatoes
• 3 tbsp tomato paste
• 4.5 dl chicken or beef stock
• 1/8 tsp ground coriander (I used about 1/2 tsp)
• 1/8 tsp ground cumin (I used about 1/2 tsp)
• 1/4 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp chilipowder, or to taste
• chopped fresh coriander or parsley, to garnish
• sour cream

Heat the oil on middle heat in a large pan. Add the minced meat, add salt and pepper, and fry the minced meat. Turn down the heat and add the onions, celery, bell pepper, and garlic.

Put the lid on the pan and let everything stew for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft. Stir once in a while.

Add the diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and stock. After, add the coriander, cumin, oregano, and chili powder. Stir well.

Raise the heat until everything is just about to boil, put the fire on low, put the lid on the pan and let the soup cook slowly for 30-40 minutes until all vegetables are very soft. Taste the soup and season it if necessary with salt and pepper. Add more chili powder if you like spicy.

Ladle the soup into preheated bowls and sprinkle the fresh coriander or parsley over it. Add the sour cream on the side, or scoop a spoonful into each bowl.

Eet smakelijk!

Gaming rig - version 3

It's been a while since the lastest computer related post, with one from 2007 in fact, and this painfully obviously need for an upgrade / replacement back in the way of WoW and raids.

My current PC is apparrently already about 7-8 years old, which is almost ancient over in the lands of PC hardware. To give you an overview, I'm currently running:
- CPU: Intel i7 920 @ 2.67 GHz
- Windows Vista 64 bit from 2007 - Even google chrome is giving me warnings about support for the OS being discontinued soon, and
- 6 GB Ram
- 500 GB Harddisk, which is pretty stuffed to the limit.
- 2 TB external.
- 600W - PSU from 2014 which is already a replacement from the original due to the old one failing to boot the PC any longer. In theory I can upcycle this one into the new PC, which was somewhat the idea back when i bought it


Old PSU @ 360W or so:

New PSU @ 600W, a good bit more than my current pc needs, but that just means it'll run more quiet.

Now, you might go to your local computer store, media market or whatever and just buy an off-the-shelf system,. but to be fair that's what I've been doing forever. Every time some issue or other pops up later and while the system seems fast at first, it just bogs down, and the video performance degrades or just isn't quite "amazing" anymore.

Let's put together a "do it yourself" PC for a change. All loose components ordered from the local store, and online shops, then put together into a super frankenstein of a system. The end result should be better, faster and above all a fucklot cheaper than any HP, Dell or Asus you grab online.

So, the first step becomes:


How much can I recycle?

Generally when you want to upgrade your PC the peripherals can be left alone. Those are the bits n pieces any home owner can (and usually will) replace once every few years, with some exceptions.

Unless you have an old Commodore that still uses PS2 and simply different plugs than your new PC would, you can leave these alone and simply upgrade them when you feel they no longer perform as good as you like:
- PC Speakers - In my case a Logitech X-something 5.1 surround set. It still works, so why bother replacing it?
- Keyboard - I got a G15 keyboard sitting here, that although dirty and dusty still shows the expected letters on the screen when I press them on the board.
- Mouse - I'm itching to get a Proteus Core sometime in the future because the scroll wheel is starting to act up on my current G500, but for now it'll do.

- Monitor - As peripherals go, this is usually one of the more expensive bits. If you're going to be gaming in high-res then you'll obviously want that video card to be able to display everything perfectly right? And do you stick to a single monitor, or go dual, or even more screens? In which case you'll need fixtures or legs for those things. For myself, the UHD with HDMI Dell monitor that I've got is still alive - and as long as it is, it'll save me an extra 200-300 euro price tag.
- Mousepad and printer if you have/use one. Webcam, microphone, cable management systems, extention cords. Heck, even your desk and chair might be considered part of your gaming setup.


What is your budget?

An important question obviously, since this will determine the hardware you can put together. Do you want to go modern but cheap, or all out?
Since we'll mostly be looking at the PC itself and skipping out on upgrading peripherals we'll go for a budget of 1500,- euros. Now, you don't HAVE to use the entire budget, but you should definitely not go over it. Otherwise, what's the point of having a budget in the first place after all?

When setting your budget ask yourself:
- How long do you intend to use the PC? Two years or five years before upgrading again?
- What performance do I hope to get out of it?
- Which components could I upgrade in the future to squeeze out an extra year or two?
- What are the important parts? Sound? Video? Storage?

So, you have thought of a budget? What category does it fall into?
- 500-999: Budget gaming PC, good for older games. Should last you 3 or so years.
- 1000-1500: Average gaming PC, good for most modern games but won't run 4K+ on high FPS.
- 1501-2500: Beast mode, double or triple video card, water cooling, the works.

I've settled for a budget of about 1500 myself. I want to use the PC for games, have a decent bit of storage, but don't care to run the most modern games on max FPS but stil be "oculus ready" just in case. Aside fan noise, heat, power usage the PC's location in your home will matter. Also, mine's in the living room so a few quiet fans would be nice.


What do you need for a functional system?

If you've never put together a PC, then this is obviously going to be the tricky bit, as well as a large part why most people will just prefer to walk into a store and ask the clerk to point them at a good system.
Most stores will try to sell you fairly average systems, use big words and make you feel insecure so you'll just agree with whatever they way. If you decide you don't want to invest the extra time to put together the system you want, with Grade-A components, and feel fine buying a closed box of surprises with mixed grade components then by all means go and do that. From my experience any store bought PC is going to show issues in less than 2 years.

You'll especially want to avoid low budget cases and supermarket deals when it comes to buying a computer. Support is zero, and the quality even worse. Don't do it. Get a Dell if anything, at least you'll get some support if stuff breaks down.

The basics:
- Case. How your PC will look from the outside, how much will fit. You could custom build it from LEGO which is awesome, but I'd still recommend using plain steel.
- Motherboard. Comes with onboard sound and network functions nowadays which are more than adequate for most users.
- CPU. Most will come with a stock cooler, but for a tiny amount you can get a generally much bigger & less noisy fan. Make sure it's not too heavy though, or you'll break your motherboard.
- Power Supply.  Because your system need juice to run!
- Hard disk(s). For storage obviously.
- Video card (yes it's optional, but HIGHLY recommended)
- Extra memory - Ram
- DVD player, and / or card reader. (Optional)
- Operating System. While not a physical component it "is" sort of important.

You can gather bits n pieces from NewEgg, Tweakers.net, Tom's Hardware and even Amazon if you're in the USA. I'll use Tweakers.net since it's well, local, for me.

So far I've got the following setup planned:

I can cannibalize the PSU from my current PC, so that'll cut the price down by about 70,- and I can scrape another 115,- off the price by getting a OEM Windows key from Kinguin instead of using a closed box retailer.

So the total on that would end up at around: € 1050,16 (note: excluding shipping)
Plenty of space to still add that mouse replacement, and well within the set budget. Still room for an additional video card if desired,. or upgrading the hard disks.

More later. I may tweak the setup a bit more and proceed to ordering, then I'll have some images to post about the build.

Free Game Saturday #3

If you want "in" on the chance to win 1-3 of the below games, just leave a link to your Steamgifts profile as a comment below.

Also see the previous post.


Some more from a recent Humble Weekly bundle, or indiegala bundle.
At least one has cards, all have a positive review rating, and don't look too bad.





Three games on the third week.
Don't get any ideas about the next week though.

More next week,. I still got a backlog that's, just big really.

Free Game Saturday #2

6 entries on the last one so that was 1/6 chance to win - thats almost 17% win chance!

If you want "in" on the chance to win, just leave a link to your Steamgifts profile as a comment below.

Also see the previous post.

Nuclear dawn was part of a recent Humble Weekly bundle.
It's got cards, a positive review rating, and doesn't look too bad. All n all it should be a decent game to get for free, right?