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Gamma Wave Games News

Gamma Wave Games was originally established in 2006 by Second Life users Suzanna Soyinka (Designer, City of Lost Angels/Angels Respite), and Jora Welesa(LCK Open Source System) to provide an advanced role play combat system for the users of the Second Life grid environment in support of the wildly popular City of Lost Angel's role play gaming community.

The Community Combat System ©2006 - 2014, expanded and refined itself as a project since that time, with the additional help of Second Life user Melanie Milland. And expanded wildly over time until the current day, servicing well over 300 simulators in Second Life and providing a persistent and managed role playing experience for hundreds of thousands of players in Second Life since first being released.

Gamma Wave Games, LLC, is a privately held company and does not accept outside investment or venture capital at this time.


GWG Developers CoLA/CCS Dev Team QA Group Global Community Advisors

Lead Designer
Suzanna Soyinka

Lead Programmer
Melanie Milland

Engine Developer
Jora Welesa

SQL Development
Jora Welesa
Melanie Milland
Czar Sadofsky

PHP/Web Team
Suzanna Soyinka
Jora Welesa
Melanie Milland
Stormy Wilde
Maldoror Bowman

LSL/Mono Team
Jora Welesa
Melanie Milland
Suzanna Soyinka

2D/3D Art Design
Suzanna Soyinka
Stormy Wilde

System Resources
Suzanna Soyinka

External Resources
Sloan McCoy
Eata Kitty

QA Lead
Ashes Arizona

She Juniper
Titlacachaun Zeritonga
Charissa Korvin
Eianna Cale
Sam Troell
Taien Foulon
Scarlet Singer
Castalia Darkstone
Juicy Redstar
Jessicka Graves
Grey Blankes

Community Manager
She Juniper

English Community Advisors
She Juniper
Titlacahuan Zeritonga
Castalia Darkstone
Scarlet Singer

Spanish Community Advisors
Iliana Shabazz
Seb Contepomi
Scarlet Singer

European Community Advisors
Lexou Joubert
Trynity Vuckovic
Cross Voight

Gamma Wave Games NewsHey all, just some updates directly from me to the people that care to bother to read them.

Solutions to the meter communication overflow are still in process. We have isolated the final problem to how the hotkeys communicate to the HUD and then the HUD back to the meter, its in the process of a re-write as of this time and I hope to get a test in process as soon as my schedule allows for it.

I have also introduced a couple of new features to the build we are working on, the first is a First Person Melee toggle that allows you to use melee weapons in first person view for better accuracy and performance. This mode allows you to swap back and forth from 1P to 3P view fluidly and still be able to fight without having to constantly toggle it off and on. The 1P view does not work with guns at this time because guns have their own 1P, so gun based fighters would want to toggle 1P melee on when working in close, and toggle it off when using firearms.

The second added feature is group IFF, which basically allows you to not have harmful AOE affects affect people that have the same active Second Life group as you, and also doesn't allow beneficial effects to affect people that are not in the same active Second Life group as you. This is the most efficient method of allowing for more organized group based combat and it will release in the patch update that we push when we sort out the HUD communication problem.

Anyways as you might notice the months are passing by and the direct reason for that is that I literally do not have the ability to do anything but seek other opportunities in real life right now to ensure that I can continue to live indoors and eat once a day. Its no secret that CCS isn't as big as it used to be, some sim owners have moved on out of Second Life entirely, others have discontinued use of CCS out of boredom with game systems or even more obscure reasons that aren't specifically anything to do with CCS itself. And in all fairness, Second Life isn't as big as it used to be either. This has, over time, cost us a lot of our capability to be financially stable while focusing on Second Life as my primary job. And this applies to Melanie as well. We're both adults with adult responsibilities and we have bills to pay, we have to take care of our families and if SL cannot help us achieve that we have to divide our time to situations that allow us to achieve that.

Over the last three years, all the money I have made in Second Life has been more or less used up attempting to ensure we could continue in Second Life while attempting to maintain service at the level everyone has come to expect from CCS over the last eight years. It has slowly, but surely, put me in a position where I have literally no money in my savings account, I barely have any money in my bank at all. And everything I do make in Second Life is untaxed, and of course April has come and gone and I'm trying to juggle extremely limited finances to ensure I can pay those taxes, keep our servers running, pay my own bills and also continue on in Second Life while attempting to evolve the system we've all enjoyed now for almost a decade.

I'm making this public because to be fair, you all deserve to know the status of things. I am fairly sure that almost anyone else in the situation I am in would have shut down and disappeared long before now. But I felt it was my ethical duty to use the small amount of saved money I had to keep this afloat to the very last dollar and I am well beyond that last dollar and am literally taking money out of my own pocket to keep both CoLA and CCS going.

I routinely get messages asking if CCS is dying or if it is going to be abandoned, I can assure you if either was true, it would have already happened.

So what I am asking for is your understanding and perhaps your support to help me get through this rough patch and continue to provide service to SL until SL2 comes....which is what I would really like to achieve.

If you are wondering what you can do to help there are several ways.

1.) Please ensure you aren't attempting to use an 8xp license that is issued to another sim owner on your sim simply because the sim owner is allowing you to do so by pretending they're actually involved with your community. There are some people that have done this in the past. And we've honored these requests but we do know that the people re-registering their licenses are barely ever at the sims the licenses are being utilized at. Late last year a sim owner came clean to me on this issue and in apology, bought their own license...and I have an immense amount of respect for them for doing so. The licensures for 8xp are literally part in parcel of what allows us to actually have safety net money to fall back on when times get tough...so if you are dishonestly utilizing a license you did not actually purchase and the person that is allowing you to use it actually isn't materially involved with your sim or sim community at all, please consider getting your own license to help support CCS.

2.) Double XP - Double XP was always a hot button issue but again, it was a major way to help reward the player community and attract it to your sims, while also helping CCS have the money to stay fiscally healthy and allow it to be the primary focus for both Melanie and me. CCS went from 0.4.8 - 1.0.4 over a period where we had strong financial support and Second Life could be our primary focus the slow down between 1.0.4 and 1.0.5 and the current slow development pace on 1.0.5 and the 3.0 API implementation is directly reflective of our inability to meet our financial responsibilities without having to take other employment opportunities outside of SL entirely. Double XP may be expensive and I realize a lot of people only did it because they could make 3 times what they spent by selling region access to these events, but...all I am asking is that you consider scheduling maybe one event a month for your community, perhaps by asking your community to pitch in for the costs. And that way no one is really overly taxed for the expense of it and everyone benefits from it, the players, the sim community hosting it and of course...CCS itself.

3.) Another way to help directly is to donate for a custom title, or to just donate in general without any requirement for recompense. Custom Titles can be set up by me, and if you contact me to get one I will have it addressed as soon as I can reach a computer where I can access the SSH console for our servers. There is also the tip jar on the bar in The Zodiac Lounge in CoLA which goes directly to me and accepts whatever you want to throw into it that is Linden Dollar shaped. If using L$ is inconvenient for you, you can also donate whatever amount you like by accessing our system payments page here: System Payments Page and choosing the Community Donation Form which donates directly to Paypal in whatever currency you wish to submit.

4.) If you can do none of the above, thats fine as well, but your patience and understanding in this matter would be highly appreciated. If you cannot find it in yourself to understand that I have literally spent every feasible dollar I have to continue doing this because this is what I really want to be doing, and this idea that I vomited out of my head back in 2006 is still important to me, important enough for me to have literally gone nearly bankrupt to keep it going, then I am sorry you cannot understand that and I will respect your decision to do whatever you wish to do.

In the end, I could use your help to achieve the goals we've set out to achieve. I will continue to attempt to achieve them regardless of whether the community chooses to help us or not, all I can say is that the speed of achieving our development goals is going to be heavily affected by how much time Melanie and I are having to devote to other projects simply to keep the lights on over here.

Overall we've had a great eight year run, its had its bumps and bruises along the way, but I wouldn't trade it for anything, and I am literally paying money out of my own pocket now to provide those of you that still enjoy this game and experience, with the ability to continue to play it for free. I don't expect it to rain money because of this post, in fact I don't expect anything, but I am asking for your help.

We all want CCS 1.0.5 to work for large scale combat, we all want the new API and above all, I definitely want to look forward to SL2 and get a good running start at it with CCS2 and one of the greatest role play gaming communities the SL Grid has ever had the honor of hosting. And I will achieve all of that as best I can, its just getting really hard to get that done when I'm having to transition into an 80 hour a week real life job simply to ensure that I can meet the financial demands of those goals.

I've heard it said over the years from various detractors that "Suz only cares about money"...and to be honest, no, I didn't really, because we always had just enough money to keep development moving and to ensure SL was my primary focus and as long as that was the case...I didn't care if we made a lot, or a little, as long as it was enough.

These days, yes, I care about money...but I'm still not selling levels, or XP, or charging people for meters, overpowering and undercutting our third party devs with my own weapon line, or anything else I could potentially exploit to make money. I hope that my ethics count for something with those of you that still enjoy what we do.

Thats my piece, I would prefer that people heard it directly from the horses mouth rather than people wandering around in SL designing their own verisons of what they think is going on. The short version is...we need your help, but if we don't get it, we will do our best to try to meet the goals we have set out....it is just going to be slower, and a lot more stressful.

If you read the entire post, thank you for taking the time. As always, I remain committed to our affiliate sim owners and our player base.
Gamma Wave Games NewsHey all, been awhile since I did any news so I thought I'd do a few updates to let people know where things stand.

First of all Melanie has CCS 1.0.5 just about fully encrypted, we should have a testing prototype done soon and the next and hopefully final beta should be issued to the beta group within the week barring any major problems.

Secondly, through the process of encryption there has been a lot of script level refinement. CCS should drop to around 1k script memory in total for script and HUD at final release. Which is about 20 times less script memory than CCS 1.0.4 currently uses. Also a lot of how CCS functions has been streamlined and improved, this should help with performance in high volume situations.

In CoLA related news, Chaoss has informed me that they do not wish to invest the time that the CoLA rebuild would take them. They have given me all the resources they've authored in the time we've been working together so I have the resources but the CoLA rebuild is pretty much all on me now so a lot of my time has been taken up with working in 3DSMax and creating new 2D resources for the build in Substance Designer 3. Regardless of the bad news, the rebuild will still be done, its just going to take me a bit of time to do it all myself. Unlike many in the Second Life RP development arena, I can back up everything I do with a certain amount of skill in all the required areas of development (though I do not claim to be an expert at any of them, which is why I like to work with people more talented than I am if I can), just doing this rebuild in mesh alone means its going to take more time...I won't claim to be half as skilled as Chaoss in regards to 3D asset creation for Second Life, but I have no intention to let this bump in the road stop me either. If someone wishes to help they're welcome to contact me, but as I've already committed a fair amount of money behind Chaoss on this rebuild I'm afraid I don't have the money to properly hire on any extra help, and I'd feel a little wrong asking people to do this kind of work for free.....its not exactly simple stuff after all. And it is a lot of the reason why my grid time has dropped severely, I'm having to kick everything up a notch to get up to speed to deliver on what I've promised and SL and 3DSMax don't play very nicely running at the same time. (One of these days I'll get a second computer when I can afford it.)

Regardless of that we all know SL is in a bit of a weird place right now. Despite Rod Humble's optimistic interviews about the state of the grid, you don't have to be a rocket scientist or a psychic to realize that all is not well with Linden Labs at this time. I am hoping for the best but I'm not going to be surprised if we see some major turnovers at Linden Labs soon, or some majorly problematic changes that make the grid we currently know into something a little different. Regardless of that....should the worst scenario come to pass...we do have Avination and Melanie behind us should we need to find a lifeboat in the scenario that the good ship "Second Life" actually scuttles itself and sinks. So...don't worry too much, even though I'm not all that thrilled with the thought of the Second Life having run itself into the ground and I hope that it does not...we do have appropriate back up for our community should it happen to do so...and if we need to use that option...we will. For now though...we're kind of holding our breath along with everyone else that has a vested interest in the health of the Second Life grid...and hoping that everything works out all right.

Please don't take this as any kind of declaration of no confidence in Linden Lab. I have a lot of confidence in Linden Lab and I like a lot of the people that still work there (though admittedly, there are quite a few people that no longer work there that I think probably still should). And I believe that they have a lot of good minds behind the project still and they will find a solution to the issues they are facing. Just like any good company does. All I'm saying is we will have options should the worst come to pass.

In closing, I have been doing a lot of external work as well on a project that probably won't be grid based, but is designed as another path for me to take should everything go banana shaped....I gotta have a hobby after all right? This has always been my dream and I'm not going to let go of it just because things are getting complicated.

So overall, chins up and lets have fun. One way or the other, we will continue to support our community and our users and deliver the best options we can for you all.
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